Audacity Woes

On a couple of occasions, I've had students come to the desk saying that Audacity no longer will let them delete tracks. Finding this very odd, I went to the Almighty Google for answers!!! But, none were to be found.

I suggested to the user that we save their work on the desktop and then restart Audacity to see if that would solve the problem. But long and behold, the Save AND Export Option were disabled as well! Oh no!

Nonetheless, I would not be defeated by Audacity and switched my Thinking Cap to Turbo Boost! To make a long story short, it turns out if you try to exit out of Audacity, it will prompt you if you want to save your work before closing. Obviously, you should choose "Yes" and save it where you wish. Then after Audacity is restarted, it should work out fine.

The New Flickr

If you haven't heard, yesterday Yahoo made some major changes to Flickr, the photo and video sharing site they acquired back in 2005.  The change that is getting the most news is free accounts on Flickr now give you 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of space to store your photos and videos.  They are doing away with the "pro" account at $25/year and now have three tiers. Here are more specs from the flickr FAQs on the tiers:
Free:

• 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage
• Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo
• Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
• Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
• Upload and download in full original quality

Ad Free:

• $49.99 per year
• All the benefits of a free account
• No ads in your browsing experience

Doublr:

• $499.99 per year
• 2 Terabytes of photo and video space
• All the benefits of a free account

I am very interested by the upload and download in "full original quality" statement.  I can't think of another free service that lets you do that for photos and video.  They also did a big re-design of the site.  It looks like Google+ mixed with Tumblr now.  An individual photo's EXIF data is a little harder to find, but there seems to be more of it once you do find it.  To get the EXIF data, just append "meta" to the end of the url for an individual photo like this:
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/2ghouls/6922735110/
EXIF data: http://www.flickr.com/photos/2ghouls/6922735110/meta

Also, the advanced search is still there for now, but also hard to find.

Will you use the new flickr?

Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create an 8-Bit Pixel Character

Today, Nadine mentioned she wanted to learn more about Illustrator. Looking through Blog.SpoonGraphics, I found a cool tutorial to create 8-bit pixel characters. As the post says, people will often associate Photoshop with pixels, but unlike Photoshop, Illustrator is 100% vector, allowing you to scale your pixels to any size while keeping the blocky aesthetic. This tutorial is pretty basic and not too complicated for those of us who aren't very familiar with Illustrator.

Basically, what you're doing when you're creating pixel characters in Illustrator is using the grid tool to make it look like a pixelized person. Make sure Snap to Grid is turned on under the View menu option. Use the grid tool to make different sized squares and rectangles, change the fill colors, and move blocks from front to back. When it's all finished, turn off the grid and see your finished character!

Check out the full tutorial for details!

A little warning about Scrap Paper

Hey Guys,

So as the semester closes, people might be a little desperate for some scrap paper. We have had several people ask at the desk and even a few attempting to take the paper from the machine. This is not allowed for they could potential damage the center's equipment. If people ask at the desk for scrap paper, the best response is simply to dirrect them to the recycling bins near the copy machines or the large bin by the printer. Its a little grimy, but its the best we can do. Hope this helps!

Best,
Taylor

31 animated GIFs for when you graduate

Check out 31 animated GIFs for all the graduates.    31 GIFs

Tips for Dreamweaver

This week I had to help a student working with Dreamweaver to edit his website, although I was a little rusty I was able fix his problems. The student had trouble centering an image on his site, which can only by done by casing the image with <center> </center>  (I thought I could simply use the align in the image, but I was wrong). I felt I needed to gain more knowledge of Dreamweaver. In order to gain more knowledge of Dreamweaver I searched online until I found this website that has some interesting tutorials describing both the basic and other elements of Dreamweaver.  Hopefully the link below can help anyone that needs help learning Dreamweaver or is simply a refresher for those who have used it before! Also if you ever need help with html code try searching online to find the correct syntax.

http://www.entheosweb.com/dreamweaver/default.asp

WebP: a new image format we may be encountering

WebP (pronounced "weppy") is a new image format developed by Google that employs both lossy and lossless compression.  Facebook embraced the new format but many users didn't know what to do with the files they downloaded.  The CNET article notes "When people upload JPEG photos, the social-networking juggernaut converts them into the WebP format. And now it also apparently has begun delivering those images to people with browsers that can handle them, which today means Chrome and Opera."

Since "Windows, OS X, Photoshop, and most other software can't handle WebP" one may ask, "Will this cause us grief in the Student Multimedia Center?"  For those who can't handle the new format, one workaround is to log into Facebook using Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox.  As these browsers don't support the new format, users will download a JPEG file instead.  And (for now) may be much happier.