We (the team here) have been struggling with the color on Logitech C920 and C922 webcams recently. We’re preparing for a big international conference in November when the cameras will be in around-the-clock use. Initially each camera had a nice color balance, but after a couple of weeks each of them acquired an “underwater” blueish cast, and things that should have appeared white in the picture turned a spooky underwater blue!

Some of the blueness is due to where we have located our webcams — they’re in rooms with good outdoor light, but no direct sunlight, so the ambient lighting is saturated with blue skylight. But, beyond that, the cameras over-emphasized the blue. They were trying to auto-correct, but slewed way too far blue. Instead of compensating for our blue light, they were over-emphasizing it. Today we solved the problem!

The Camera Settings App

Logitech provides a Camera Settings app (for Mac OS in our case) that you can install to modify the way the camera sees things. (Download from > logitech.com/support/C930c ) Download it and install it on the computer, then connect your camera and fix its settings.

The app exposes five settings under its Advanced tab (see screenshot). The adjustment we needed was to Auto white balance. Turning it off (the little toggle switch), and then adjusting the color temperature (the xxxxK value) fixed our cameras so they produce a pleasing color output under various light conditions. That’s pretty much it.

In our case, I had to turn it all the way to 6500K to get a pleasing effect in daytime lighting conditions. At night, with incandescent (or LED adjusted to incandescent color temperatures) we have to modify it, but honestly it’s so easy to use the Camera Settings app that we can set it once for each online session and let it run.

The other adjustments do what you’d expect, and we have not needed to fiddle with them, as our problem was just the blueish cast — which is now gone!

C920 users

This worked for both our Logitech C920 and our C930 cameras, even though the C920 support page doesn’t give you a path to download this software, and even though Logitech does not list the C920 as a supported camera for this app. So if you’re using a C920, be sure to go to the support page for the C930 to download this software. It won’t let you pan or zoom (features of the C930), but you can fix the color.)

Logitech Brio

Postscript (Dec 7, 2020): We eventually ended up with a Logitech Brio webcam that has maintained its (proper) color balance for weeks. It can also be configured by the Camera Settings app, but it’s a far better camera in the first place.

The post Got the Logitech C920/C922 blues? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Tom’s journey from writer at Financial Times to blogger, to publisher is an interesting one. There are some parallels I’d like to call out.

[Tom’s photo here is by JD Lasica taken during Traveling Geeks 2009] [short interview]

Tom started writing for The Financial Times, then quit to become a blogger and thus one of the disruptors of journalism as it had existed until then. I was reflecting the other day and thinking that in 1970 we could and should have predicted that computers would eventually disrupt our lives. And also caught myself thinking well “how would we know the degree to which they’d be disruptive?” In those days I was thinking I’d get a job in research at IBM, or Kodak, or SRI, or be a university professor (which I was) and just keep doing that, and computers would play an increasingly important role in my life and the world. But, you know, I was pushing the disruptive edge too, without really thinking about it that much. Disruption wasn’t a word we used very often. More on disruption next time.

The post Self-promotion and disruption appeared first on Sky's Blog.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Instead, I discovered that the googlebot may still spot the site and then put up a message saying that the site exists but is not indexed. i.e. the Googlebot still publicizes the existence of the site. It makes Google look like the good guys and us look like the bad guys for putting up a robots.txt. Yay for Google liberating all online information! Boo for us trying to keep our site un-indexed until we’re ready to make it public.I suppose if the site is public, they reason it’s OK to mention its existence. However, most of us did not intend for any results whatsoever to show up in Google, so having it say “the site exists but I can’t index it” is a big of a revelation! Beware of this if you are creating a pre-production test site — your site may still show up in Google searches. Instead, turn on some other protection — like the “Maintenance mode” plug-in for WordPress, so that not only sites but humans can’t use the site. Here’s kind what the Google result looks like:

Mork-A-Bork » Uncategorized
mork-a-bork.info/

A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt — learn more

The post Even Robots.txt won’t keep the googlebot away appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

The post Hello, Are you still blogging? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Here’s what I experienced with respect to the Traveling Geeks crew.

[youtube rA8VHC_EtiA]

[1] My advice to clients is “Go where your clients and prospects are.” So if you’re a tech writer, and all your clients are spending their time on Facebook, you must be on Facebook. And if they’re tweeting about you, you’d better be on Twitter.

The post Blogger Ghost Town appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Recently I became my own private OpenID provider. I did this using phpMyID (see below). I created a private page that sits on my personal web site, and when I’m at a site that uses OpenID I supply the URL of this private page, type my name and password, and bingo I’m logged in at the third-party site. I used phpmyID, which is listed in the OpenID directory.

On the utilization side, when DiSo Project created an OpenID plugin for WordPress, I immediately installed it on my blog. And it works. Lets you log in at my blog using your Yahoo or gmail (or other OpenID provider)^{[3] [4]} information without creating a new account.

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust.  At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to.  And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

[2] AOL, Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, Blogger, Flickr, LiveDoor, LiveJournal, Orange, SmugMug, Technorati, Vox, WordPress.com … and probably some others. See the OpenID site for a current list.

[3] Do you know your gmail Google OpenID? You can find it with just a few clicks.

[4] If you have a WordPress.com blog, (like let’s say you have a blog called myblogname.wordpress.com) you use the URL http://myblogname.wordpress.com/ as your OpenID. You will have to log in at WordPress.com in order to validate your password, but once you’ve done that, you can log in using this URL.

The post Use OpenID on your WordPress blog! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s message to journalism school (j-school) graduates at UC Berekeley on May 16 2009

Yeah, I guess that’s the case if you’re looking for a secure job in the newsroom of the 1950s, but I would actually encourage j-school graduates to look at this as an opportunity. In fact, I would encourage college Freshmen to consider specializing in journalism! Why?Getting a degree in journalism, currently and in my opinion only, is the equivalent of going for a degree in something like English or psychology when I was in college. It can be a general all-purpose, get a good education and most of all learn how to investigate, clarify and express yourself kind of degree. It’s a degree in critical thinking and in communication. In the past it may have been viewed as a professional degree, but everyone’s right, there aren’t many professional journalism jobs any more.

But you can make of it what you want. You can go look for a secure job or you can take up a cause and dive into it regardless of whether it is a well-funded endeavor.

Ehrenreich spends considerable time on the (valid) point that journalists get paid lots less than during the heydays, and that they’re now working-class stiffs.

And she completes her address to the UC Berkeley graduating class with these two paragraphs:

As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won’t stop us. A dying industry won’t stop us. Even poverty won’t stop us, because we are all on a mission here. That’s the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight.

In the ’70s, it was gonzo journalism. For us right now, it’s guerrilla journalism, and we will not be stopped.

Right on!

I was a student at Northwestern University, and our Medill School of Journalism was and is a model for journalism education. Medill students were dedicated, and aside from us engineers and computer science geeks, Medill students were often among the geekiest you could find on campus. I had friends who wrote for the daily newspaper, interned at the large dailies in Chicago, ran the university radio station, and reported on all sorts of goings on. I respected what they were doing and their dedication. They were for the most part smart and broad-minded in their interests. I was, I guess, a kindred spirit, since I published a short-lived monthly humor magazine myself while I was there. For today’s Medill viewpoint, you can watch David Standish, a faculty member at Medill, deliver a  message similar to Ehrenreich’s. Everyone has to be thinking and talking about this today.

I saw how tight a profession this is, at least in the television area, at the Northern California Regional Emmy Awards last month. The nominees and their supporters were all decked out in their best clothes (black tie), had a really nice dinner together, joked, chatted, applauded, basked in the glory of the awards, and this was certainly a profession where people know each other and respect each others’ work. The equivalent of this kind of professional comraderie, for the online world, will certainly be created over time.

Interestingly, all of the comments (on Ehrenreich’s speech) at SFGate (where it was originally posted online) say essentially “good riddance” to writers and reports. Apparently there’s some built-up hostility here?

The post Barbara Ehrenreich’s message to journalism grads appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

The post Twitter made me (not) do it appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Automattic released their WordPress app for the iPhone this week. Since I’m fairly mobile, I wanted to try it out.

For offline blogging from a laptop computer, I already use Ecto, which gives me substantial freedom in that I can create new posts even when not connected to the net. Having the ability to write on the iPhone whether online or off might be fun.

My first impression is that this tool will work fine as long as you don’t want to include any fotmatting, because it’s really a pain, on the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard to get to the < and > characters – it requires several taps for each. So it’s probably only viable for text with a photo or two interspersed. For many people that’ll be OK, but it’ll be somewhat limiting for me.

I am, however, finding that a one-finger typing method while allowing the phone to correct the typos really is quite excellent! And the “fatter” I make each tap on the screen, the more accurate the algorithm seems to be.

I’ve had the app just quit out from under me several times, but I haven’t lost any data, so it’s inconvenient but not fatal. And I know it will get better with the next version.

This app looks like a keeper.

The post WordPress app for iPhone appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me is the number of countries that block bloggers or Flickr. (You can check this yourself by going to their site and clicking the pushpins on their Google map.) ·Opennet.net also tracks blocking/filtering worldwide. They look at the reasons given for filtering and compile maps tracking four different types of filtering.

• Political content (illustrated at right) – Content that expresses views in opposition to those of the current government, or is related to human rights, freedom of expression, minority rights, and religious movements.
• Social content – Content related to sexuality, gambling, and illegal drugs and alcohol, as well as other topics that may be socially sensitive or perceived as offensive.
• Conflict/security – Content related to armed conflicts, border disputes, separatist movements, and militant groups.
• Internet Tools – Web sites that provide e-mail, Internet hosting, search, translation, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, and circumvention methods.

The post Access Denied – Which Countries Filter and Why? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Most particularly, the data show that Wikipedia rose from zero to “Daily Traffic Rank” of about “10” in about four years, and YouTube rose to “10” in about a year and a half. (Making them among the top sites on the web.)

You’d have to attribute this to the fact that these sites are created by, or at least “formed” in some way by, their users. That belies the suspicion that people are couch potatoes and won’t lift a finger to create their own media entertainment, other than to channel-surf. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of channel-surfing going on at YouTube, but there’s also lots of participation, even if 90% of it is deadheaded talking-head responses. And Wikipedia is certainly a creation of its readers (even though there’s a core group that does a huge percentage of the heavy lifting).

So, I want to know if this phenomenon only gives “voice” to those with broad Internet connections, or whether it can be used by those with only occasional access to the net. Can conversation take place offline and then be put online in the form of blog postings, or wikipedia entries or online video?

The proof so far – and I’d say it’s working – is that it may actually work. Our friends – teen-age Tibetan refugees living in India – have now made a dozen video segments and posted them online – and my gosh all we had to do was provide them with a digital video camera and some online time. They do their video work offline, produce a great little movie, and upload it for all of us to see. In Nigeria, our friends have far less Internet connectivity, and yet they have made movies to share with us, and have made more which are being burned to CD to be physically shipped to us!

I’m making a trip, next month, with a group of bloggers, to the Middle East. My formal role is to “blog the bloggers” – there will be a dozen or so prominent bloggers going on that trip – and I will mostly be attending to the process they use and how their perceptions and interactions develop over time. But – we are going to visit with a number of people who are using technology for social good – and I will track and write about all of that so you can share in the information. You will have a chance to feed me (and the group) some questions you’d like to ask – and I will soon give you the info on how you can ask your own questions.

I think this phenomenon of using digital media to spark two-way conversations is really going to take off. Everywhere! This is more than just a YouTube thing. It’s true two-way storytelling and conversation. And 2008 is the year when it will really bloom.

The post On “The Power of the Personal – Voice?” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

For example, one tale from this article… “As Chinese citizens become aware that their most potent advantage over censorship is their sheer numbers, more and more grievances are aired online — sometimes with significant consequences. The first cyber-rebellion to have a major political impact took place in 2003. Sun Zhigang, a young migrant worker in Guangzhou, died in police detention after failing to produce identity documents during a street check. Sun’s friends protested his death on discussion boards, and soon other sites picked up a campaign demanding police accountability and reform of the laws affecting migrant workers. Before the unprepared system monitors could react, an avalanche was in motion. …”

“Of course, China is hardly a Jeffersonian paradise. Thousands languish in prison because of harmless online activities. A recent example is Zhang Jianhong — blogging as Li Hong — who was sentenced to six years for posting political essays. Cases like his justify strong criticism of China. But they don’t prove that its monitoring system is successful on a national scale. …”

The post China’s Golden Shield (The Great Firewall of China) – How long can it stand? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

It turns out that it’s easy enough these days to have a blog “automatically” translated into a reasonable number of languages. I use WordPress software to support my blog, and there’s some real choice in terms of how to get your site translated.

The plug-in that fits my needs best was initially a bit rough around the edges — it didn’t work at all at first — but I tuned it over the course of a few hours, including some PHP finagling, and it works quite well now. It’s the Google-Translate plug-in by John Pozadzies. (I’ve sent a note to John with some suggested “fixes.”) The little flags in the banner at the top of this page can be clicked if you’d like to see how it works. If you only read English, make sure you come back here when you’re done experimenting!

But I also like the N2H (Nothing2Hide) plug-in and have it on my site, and I’ll say more about that later on.

Here’s why I feature John’s plug-in at the top of my site — well, really there’s only one reason — I want it to be clear to readers that they’re reading an automated translation. Otherwise they may think that I only know how to write truly terrible French (and Chinese, and so forth). John’s plug-in opens a separate Google window that contains a header indicating that the site is being “automatically” (by software) translated. And that’s the deciding factor! The reader then clicks around the web site, staying within a Google-branded “windowframe” — all the time understanding that he/she’s reading a machine translation.

In addition, it’s a minimalist’s plug-in. It didn’t require further tweaking of my WordPress site and I didn’t have to turn on WordPress URL-rewriting rules (which had not been working for me anyway).

But I also implemented the Nothing2Hide Global Translator plug-in. And I don’t want to short-change them here, because it’s a really sophisticated piece of work. It took considerable time to debug because it turns out that I had put the Bad Behavior plug-in on my blog earlier and it caused WordPress redirects to stop working — and they are required for N2H to work. But once it was functional, I essentially had a whole bunch of parallel web sites, each one in a different language.  All done thru the magic of redirects and this plug-in which shuffles the page out to Google and then delivers the translated version to my visitor!

For those who want more, here are some places to explore:

• Lorelle’s post on translation plugins and widgets, which mentions a number of plug-ins that handle whole-site translation as well as helping solve the problem of posting pages that contain multiple languages. This is where I started — and it led to two full days of both enjoyable and frustrating PHP-twiddling (I always like learning new things, but I dislike beating my head against the wall trying to fix bugs);
• Nothing2Hide WordPress “Global” translator which uuses redirects and “stays within your site.” I also got this plug-in functioning, and I like the way it works (once I got redirects working — the Bad_Behavior plug-in was causing them to fail), but site visitors don’t have any warning that they’re viewing a machine translation and I think that’s not quite fair;
• One Man’s Blog Google-translate [John Pozadzies – goes off to a Google page and lets you browse the site there – easy to implement];
  
• Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress [$30 license per site] also uses redirects and makes the translated pages appear to be within your own site. I didn’t even test this one because I support over 20 WordPress sites right now and it wouldn’t be affordable. It probably offers a few features over the Nothing2Hide plug-in, which is free, but I didn’t need them.

WordPress.org (the web site) contains surprisingly little information on translator plugins. I’d recommend that you conduct your own search if you want to investigate more translator plugins.

And my experience is that the Google translations are pretty literal. For instance, my name “Sky” is translated literally as “the sky” and not capitalized, in the translations I am able to understand. And my tagline “…spreading the word in a networked world” comes out more or less as “…splitting the words in a networked world” — so machine translation (after 40 years of trying) still has quite a ways to go. (I even took a swing at natural-language software when I was in graduate school, and it is very tough.)

If you’re a native or skilled reader of one of the languages, I’d really appreciate your comments on how good or bad the Google translations are. My guess is that one can “puzzle out” what each sentence means in most cases, and in a few cases entire sentences actually look surprisingly good. And I’d love to know whether you prefer to have the Google-framed look or prefer to just see the translated site without the Google wrapper.

Oh, did I make it clear that in all cases the translations are done by Google or Babelfish? Not by the translator plug-in itself? The plug-in is only an interface to the more robust translation service. And in some cases the plug-in caches the results to improve performance greatly.

To facilitate this comparison, I’ve also put the Nothing2Hide (N2H) in-place translator below each post (see the flags below) and the Google-framed translator up on the main banner where it will certainly remain. (If you don’t see flags below, it means that I’ve removed the plug-in, having decided against it…)

The post Building Readership in more Languages appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I use WordPress and I run it on my own servers, as well as running it for a dozen or so clients. Gives me a lot of control, and more features than I would have if I used wordpress.com as a host.

But I get asked all of the time where one can find a good (and free) blog-hosting site.

So, Mashable has their 40+ answers to the question.

The post Free blog hosting appeared first on Sky's Blog.

One that really does sound useful is the Instant-upgrade plug-in, that permits you to perform a WP upgrade automatically with a single click. WP upgrades generally take me around 5 minutes per site to perform and I do about 20 of them each time WP clicks over to the next version, so this could save me a couple of hours here and there! (It requires careful setup by a server admin, but looks like it probably does things correctly.)

The post Making WordPress administration easier appeared first on Sky's Blog.