Tag Archives: Tech Tuesday with BenSpark

Grab Bag

Tech Tuesday with BenSpark #18

This was originally posted on FuelMyBlog’s Blog by me.

Not my best one though. If you have a tech question that you’d like me to tackle for next week’s Tech Tuesday post, let me know in the comments section.

Each week I look at the technical things that I have around the house and what sort of projects I am working on with my blog and try to determine what I should talk about on a Tech Tuesday post.

One thing that I really enjoy is my iPod. Last week I talked about having an iPod and a Zune. I meant to do a comparison test on battery life but it looks to me like iPod is going to trash the Zune on that one. Makes sense, bigger screen needs more power, less battery life. At least that is how I see it. I would like to say that I rigged up a way to make sure that my Photo-A-Day photos are always synchronized to both my Zune and my iPod.

I moved all of my media off of my computer onto and external hard drive. And I synced the media folders with both Zune and iPod. It worked pretty well. Last week I synced the whole Photo-A-Day folder with both devices and that wasn’t as great as I expected. You see, I am a very organized person. I make sure that each and everything that I do online has a redundancy to make sure I have copies of things. This is especially important with my Photo-A-Day project.

My process starts like this. I go out, I take my photos. In the field I will most likely shoot 200 photos in a session. I will probably erase about 15-20 on the camera. I then go back to my computer. I load up the photos and pull up windows Preview. You put your mouse over the file and right click and choose Preview or scroll down to Open With and choose Windows picture and Fax Viewer. This will give you a large image to look at. I go from image to image and when I get to one I want to edit I right click it and choose Open with PhotoShop Elements (You can use whatever image editor you want, elements works well for me). Usually I get about 30-40 images I want to work with. Then I get them into Photoshop Elements and I work with The Quick Fix first. I wrote all about that in Tech Tuesday #8. You can refresh your knowledge of that by reading the previous post.

The important thing here is the way that I do my saving. I make all my edits to the file and the last thing I do is crop. So I crop my image to 450px X 350px, It is a size I choose long ago and have been happy to use. No idea where it first originated from though. Then I choose save as. You may be tempted to save for web and that would strip the image of essential EXIF data. By saving as you retain that data. I save a copy first to a folder called iPod_Zune_PAD. Then I save the image again in the Photo-A-Day folder. But I want an original size image in case I do something with that image later. I choose to go to Edit and then undo crop, crop was the last thing I did in the edit process for this precise reason. I then save the original in a folder called 2007 originals and in 2008 I will make it a 2008 originals folder.

I like to name my images so they can be easily identified. Each day I name with the month, the day, the year and underscore and then the number of the PAD image. So they all look like this. 091807_893.jpg. If I do more than one PAD, my PAD bonus images then I add a letter suffix to the image. For example, 091807_893b.jpg. So at any time I know if I am missing any of my PAD images. I have a laptop and a desktop and edit photos on the road, they don’t always get transfered to the external hard drive right away.

At the end of each year I make a new folder that say the year and PAD, so at the end of this year a folder called 2007_PAD will be created, I will move the 2007 Originals folder into that folder and then also all the PAD images from 2007 into that folder. This way I have all my images exactly where I want them to be.

I seem to have not really given you much of a technical tip but rather a look into my anal retentive overly organized mind. That may be good advice for some and bad advice for others. As always I welcome your ideas for Tech Tuesdays topics in the future.

When I started this I wanted to talk about Blog Rush. But like all of my writing I got stream of consciousness and end up taking all sorts of twists and turns before getting to the point sometimes. If you haven’t seen this new tool for increasing your blog’s presence on the web then you might want to check it out.

Basically Blog Rush breaks down like this. You get a widget to put on your blog. The number of visits you get on your blog counts as impressions that you can have of your posts on someone else’s Blog Rush widget. So if you have 100 visitors in a day you can get 100 impressions of your posts on other blogs that are in your category. But you can also get other bloggers signed up with your own referral code. My code is attached to the Blog Rush links. I am disclosing this to you so that if you want to sign up and not be a referral of mine just type in http://www.blogrush.com. I would not want to trick anyone into becoming one of my referrals. What happens with the blogs that you refer is that you also get credits for the page impressions on their blogs. So if you refer 2 bloggers and they each get 100 visitors a day you get 300 impressions of your posts on other blogs.

The people that you refer also get impressions from the people that join under their referral code. The cycle continues. You get credit up to 0 levels below your blog. So potentially you could have 1000 page impressions of your blog posts each and every day across the web. So far it is a pretty decent program and I have had two referrals. The program is in beta and is for English blogs only. It will probably eventually be for all blogs once the beta is over. It is free to join and I sent an invite to Kevin to see about adding it to fuel.

I would also like to point out that today I found a great photographer and kayaker through Blog Rush. His post was on my blog The BenSpark and I clicked through to learn more about the site. And his name is PhotoKayaker, how appropriate. It wasn’t until I went to his site and left a comment that I found out that a week ago he had linked to my blog The Wired Kayaker. Small World Wide Web.

Speaking of a small world wide web the Blog World Expo is coming in November and FuelMyBlog and blog World Expo will be giving away a free two day pass to the event. You can enter the competition. I’m already going but wanted to raise some noise about the completion on my blog Flatwater Tech. I said I wanted to meet Matt Mullenweg, well I just got a comment from Dave Taylor that said that he’d introduce me to whoever I wanted to meet. That Dave is a nice guy. I look forward to meeting him and also to meeting as many FuelMyBlog bloggers that are going to Blog World Expo.

BenSpark Writes four blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker.

Benspark is also a contributing writer for blogs such as Photowalking.org, The Blogging Den and most recently Blue Ribbon Bloggers. He is also expecting his first child in October and never sleeps and will somehow sleep even less in a month.

Grab Bag

Tech Tuesdays With BenSpark #17

This was posted by me on FuelMyBlog’s Blog. Reposted here for my reader.

In Tech Tuesday post #15 I wrote about hosting contests on your blog to drive traffic. Well, since that time I have won another contest. No, I am not going to the Super Bowl taping and no I didn’t win the Postie Battle Royal for a Roomba. I won a Zune from I Rate My Day. This was a totally random win and it surprised the heck out of me. I wanted Microsoft’s version of an iPod for some time but opted to purchase and iPod instead. So, now that I have both devices I thought I would compare them a bit and talk about MP3 players.

I have to tell you I have had my iPod for a much longer time and I love all aspects of it. I love how easy it is to find podcasts that interest me. If you would like a Tech Tuesday about that in the future please let me know I would be happy to talk about the ones I watch and listen to. And how to find ones that interest you, for free. I also like that I have my entire collection of music on my iPod. Something I finally figured out how to do because I didn’t do it the first time I started iTunes and was lost. The iPod has been my companion on long flights, waiting rooms at doctor’s offices and I use it to listen to music at night.

I wanted the Zune because it was a Microsoft Product. Yeah, I am part of that camp. Despite the love of PhotoShop and photography I am firmly entrenched in the Microsoft world. So when I heard about the Zune I was thrilled. It had many things that the iPod did not. there was the wireless connection, the radio tuner included and the larger screen. Sign me up. Then I started looking at stats. A Zune was only 30GB. I could get an iPod that was 80GB for $100 more. For 50 more GB that was a no brainer for me. As Tim the ToolMan Taylor used to say, “More power! Arrh Arrh Arrh!” And in the world of gadgets, more memory means more power. So I bought the iPod.

I was still interested in the Zune however and it made a tiny ripple in the world of MP3 players or rather media players as the Zune can play music, video, show photos and allow you to listen to the radio. So far the Zune has delivered on that promise. And with a much larger screen. But after using the click wheel of the iPod I was taken aback by the clunkiness of having to actually push down on the buttons rather than run my fingers lightly over them in a circular motion. No worries, simply a learning curve.

A little background on my media storage setup. I have moved all of my media off the computer and onto an external hard drive. My music and a backup of all my images. Images are backed up in three places because I am that dang paranoid of losing them. So because of that I pointed my Zune to my external drive to get all the files that were contained there. Then I freaked because I have so many GB worth of data and my Zune only has 30GB of space. I thought all that data would automatically try and stuff itself onto the Zune. No, that isn’t how it works. The music automatically gets added but the photos and videos can be pulled onto the Zune manually.

First thing I did was get rid of all the “way too hip for me” stuff like the DJ photos and videos. Those were tossed. I kept the music and will give that a listen. I’m sure I could get the videos and photos back if I really wanted to. Anyway those went right out. My music came off my external hard drive and I should have the same music on both my iPod and my Zune now. What I like about the Zune is that I can set where I want the computer to automatically look for files to add to the libraries. That can be found under Options> Sync> More Options. Then choose Library > Monitor Folders. Zune is a Microsoft product and assumes that all your files are in the “My” Folders however you can stop the Zune from monitoring those folders and only monitor the ones you want. Here is an example of that that screen would look like.

TT091107_1

See that I have set my Zune to monitor my :S Drive. I probably should have just made it monitor :S but I also had it monitor the music folder there too. So that is redundant since it found everything in :S. And because I also point my iTunes to My :S drive in the sync, Zune found all my podcasts.

You can set your iTunes to store media to a specific drive by going to Edit > Preferences > Advanced. There you can change the folder location for your iTunes music. I did this because my hard drive was getting completely full of podcasts and video podcasts. I wanted to get them off the hard drive and onto the external drive.

TT091107_2

So now I have two media players that can sync up the same media and play it back on each device. While the iPod automatically adds the podcasts to itself I can decide which ones I want to convert for use with the Zune. But I like that I can easily drag those videos onto my Zune and have then convert and sync. I also like that I can pull on all the photos that I want to have on my Zune by browsing through the library and dragging and dropping them. Adding photos to my iPod did not seem as simple. So I never did it.

I do need to explore both media players more and will keep you apprised of any tips or tricks I learn along the way. I hope that you can see that both the Zune and the iPod can live in harmony. I have yet to pick my favorite but as children I will most likely love them both in their own ways.

Photo-A-Day #885 09/10/07

BenSpark Writes four blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker.

Benspark is also a contributing writer for blogs such as Photowalking.org, The Blogging Den and most recently Blue Ribbon Bloggers. He is also expecting his first child in October and never sleeps and will somehow sleep even less in a month.