Please check the Assignments page, where you’ll find the new MS Word exercises to practice for the test.

Although Microsoft tells us that any video format which Windows Media Player can handle will play in PowerPoint, experience tells us differently. The best format is WMV files. The problem is, it is hard to find a good free program that does everything you want.

The best I could find is called Any Video Converter: Free Version. It is a type of software often called “crippleware,” in that it does not work completely–some features have been turned off and won’t work unless you buy the paid version. However, this software will do what you need for the PowerPoint project in this class.

What the program does: you can convert any video file into a WMV file which PowerPoint (hopefully!) can play. The program also downloads video directly from YouTube. Here’s how it works:

Download the software and install it, then open it. You will see a window, and there are four buttons in a toolbar near the top: Add Video, Convert, Stop, and YouTube. If you already have a video file on your computer but PowerPoint cannot play it, then click “Add Video.” The video will be added to a list of files in the main part of the window.

However, if you want to download the video from YouTube, you should first find the video on YouTube using a browser and copy the URL for the video. Then, in “Any Video Converter,” click the “YouTube” button. It asks for a YouTube URL; paste what you copied.

Again, you will see the video file in the list–but this time it will be red, and will say, “Ready for download.” You must right-click on it and select “Download selected online FLV.”

It will download the video.

Next, you Convert: check the box at the left for any “Added Video” or “YouTube” video, then click the “Convert Button.” It’ll take a short while, but at the end, it will have saved your video as a WMV file. Usually it saves everything in a special folder in “My Documents” in another folder called “Any Video Converter Professional.”

You can move these videos to your PowerPoint project folder, then add them to your presentation.

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In PowerPoint, you can change the start time and end times for the video. For example, let’s say you have a 2-minute video, but you only want the small part from 16 seconds until 24 seconds. In PowerPoint, open the “Custom Animation” pane, then select your video in the animations list. Click on the little-arrow menu, and choose “Effect Options.”

In that dialog box, under the “Effect” tab, you’ll see an option for “Start playing.” Enter the time that you want the video to start. When you give the slide show, the movie will start playing when you set it to.

In PowerPoint, you can set the start time for a movie or song, but you cannot set an end time; to end at a special time, just set the movie to end when clicked, and then, when presenting, click when you want the movie to end.

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If anyone finds a good, free video editing and conversion program, please share it with me so I can tell everyone!

As I mentioned in Section 1 today, there is a site which offers the ability to take your handwriting sample and change it into a font. When I found it, around February, it was free; however, sometime around April, they started charging money for it.

You can still get the font created for $8.50, but not for free. My apologies if I got your hopes up.

To make up for that, here are some good font sites:

TypeNow has TV, Movie, Rock Band, and Video Game-themed fonts for free. Use the Navigation pull-down menu for more fonts, but stay away from the commercial ones.

More fonts easy to review; ignore the $2.77 charge for all of them, just click on the fonts you want and they download for free.

FontSpace looks good, too.

Here’s a free font that looks very similar to “Gotham,” Obama’s font. This font is about as close to Optima as you’ll find in a free font.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

There is a scheduling change: because the midterm exam will be NEXT WEEK on WEDNESDAY (June 17), we cannot have the PowerPoint test at that time.

Instead, the PowerPoint test will be moved up to THIS WEEK FRIDAY (June 12).

Please make a note of it!

I am very sorry to have to move the test up; the midterm exams are scheduled for earlier and earlier each semester (they used to be in week 9!) and this one sneaked up on me.

Please note that ALL SIX Powerpoint exercises are now available on the Assignments page, with all of the sample PowerPoint slide shows and their associated files. Please download these and try them out! It is not required, but it will help a lot for when you take the PowerPoint exam. Let’s see an average score above 90% this time!!!

For those of you who use Vista, check your upgrade status–Vista SP2 has been released.

As a way of distributing information, the Internet can be very useful. Almost any kind of information you want or need is probably out there. For example, if you want any information about any U.S. movie or TV show, any actor or director, just got to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com). All the information about any American movie or personality (and many non-American ones as well) can be found there. In addition to full cast and crew, there is every other piece of information about movies–how much money it made, when it was (or will be) released, what awards it won, etc. Perhaps the most popular information is the “Trivia,” interesting information about the movie and it’s production (did you know that Star Wars was based on the Japanese film Kakushi Toride no San-akunin by Akira Kurosawa?).

But there are many other great sources of information about movies–sometimes unusual information. Have you even watched a movie, but in the middle, you have to go to the bathroom? Usually, you have to make the decision: should I hold it in and be uncomfortable, or miss several minutes of the movie? Probably many of us try to guess when a good time would be to go. Others simply don’t drink anything before or during the movie to avoid this problem.

Solution from the Internet: RunPee.com. A web site that tells you good times to run to the bathroom. Select the movie you want to see, and you will find one or more suggested times where the movie slows down and nothing important happens. The web site tells you when the bathroom-time happens, what to look for as a cue, and how long you have before you should return. The site can also tell you what happened during the boring bit, and even tells you what happened just after in case you took too long.

Really, you can find almost anything on a web site nowadays. When you do your Week 3 blog assignment–”Introduce 3 good web sites”–try to find unusual, interesting web sites like that.

A computer news story out today points to a new DVD technology that could create 12 TB (terabyte) DVDs. For scale, a CD is 700 MB; a standard DVD is 4.7 GB, almost 7x more than a CD; a standard Blu-Ray disc is 25 GB, about 35x more than a CD and more than 5x bigger than a regular DVD. 12 TB is 480x more capacity than a Blu-ray, 2500x more than a regular DVD, and 17,000x more than a CD.

One kilobyte (KB) is 1,000 bytes, or 1,000 letters/numbers, about 250 words.
One megabyte (MB) is 1,000 KB, about the same as a 625-page (about 5 cm thick) paperback book.
One gigabyte (GB) is 1,000 MB, or 1,000,000 KB, equal to a thousand 625-page books.
One terabyte (TB) is 1,000 GB, or 1,000,000 MB, or 1,000,000,000 KB.
12 TB could hold about 12,000,000 thick paperback books.

This sounds very impressive. There’s a problem, however: this is technology in development. Not ready for sale, not even close. You see stories like this all the time–and rarely see any of them actually come to the point where they are sold in stores. This is the typical “5 years away” technology. I call it that because whenever someone asks, “when will this technology be ready for sale?” the answer is usually, “5 years.” In technology-speak, that means “probably never.” After 5 years, no one remembers stories like these about upcoming super-technologies.

What happens to technology like this? Why does it rarely see the shelf of a computer store? Probably because the technology has flaws which make it difficult to manufacture, or it is too expensive, the company developing it decides to give up on it, or there are some other problems which cannot be predicted ahead of time.

When looking for stories of future technology, pay attention to when it will be released. If a company says they have firm plans to sell the technology in 8-10 months, for example, that’s a good sign it is really coming.

Of course, a 12 TB DVD is not impossible–in fact, I am sure that it will come. Sometime.

Look at this ad from around 1980:

I think that this ad refers to megabytes (MB), not megabits (usually notated as Mb as in the ad above). 18 megabits would equal 2.25 megabytes. But let’s assume that was a mistake, and it was in fact 18 MB.

At that time, an 18 MB hard disk drive was a big thing! A standard desktop computer today, 30 years later, has a 500 GB hard disk, almost 28,000 times bigger. Storage capacities increase rather quickly in the computer world. It is reasonable to assume that a 12 TB DVD could be ready for sale in, perhaps, ten years or so.

Already, stores are selling terabyte hard disk drives (I bought one for about ¥11,000 at Yamada Denki). It was not too long ago–what, fifteen years ago?–when I bought a large, heavy 105 MB hard drive for about $350. Today, a 2 GB USB flash drive costs ¥680.

After terabytes, we get petabytes (PB) and exabytes (EB). Don’t be surprised when your child, on their way to college, asks you for the latest touchpad PC with 100-exabyte storage. They’ll need it, too, for those super-duper-high-vision 4-D video files they download.

There’s a new search engine using a different paradigm than Google or the other traditional search engines: Wolfram Alpha. This search engine is more like a dynamic encyclopedia; enter a search term and it gives you something like an information sheet on the topic. If you use it for academic purposes, make sure to pay attention to the “Source Information” link at the bottom of the results. One problem with the search engine is that most things you type in, it won’t find (you get the message, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”), as it is still not very complete. But it is an interesting new angle on search engines. Give it a try.

550 students at Aoyama Gakuin received free iPhones from their school. Since calls between Softbank users is free until 9:00 pm, that could be a good deal. Certainly it sounds cool, except that it’s not as good as it sounds. While the school pays for the basic charges, the phones come free with the basic account–so it’s not really a big cost for the school. Also, the data package is apparently not fully covered by the school. If students exceed a certain download limit (easy to do on the iPhone), they have to pay the fees.

Even more problematic is that the iPhones will be set up so that the school can check attendance via the phones’ GPS. Apparently some students cheat on attendance, and the phones will act to prove their location. (I don’t see why a student could not simply give their friend their phone, however.) Some would call this “big brother,” an invasion of privacy.

On the good side, the iPhones will be useful in classes; lectures will be podcast so students can review the lectures on their phones, and some tests can also be taken with the phones.

When you make your blog, you will have a choice of which blog host to use. Blogger and Wordpress tend to be the most popular. Whatever software you use, it must have the following features:

• Must be able to add images
• Must be able to add links
• Must be able to create styled text
• Must have an RSS feed available

If you don’t know what some of the above points are, be sure to ask me when we have a conference and discuss your blog.

Make sure that your blog operates in English.

Here is a blog post by someone who lists 40 different blog hosts.