TeleKast Open Source Teleprompter Software

In a former life I directed and produced television commercials. I quit and then edited news for a while as I tried to figure out how to get the media monkey off my back. Now I teach guitar for a living and while I’m much happier, I still have the urge to produce consumable media once in a while. I also have a great fondness for open source software.

One of the things that helps me scratch both itches is a program called TeleKast. It’s an open-source teleprompter software. For those of you not familiar with teleprompters, they’re devices used to make TV hosts, newscasters and politicians seem as though they’re looking right at you as they speak, when in reality they’re reading from scripts rolling up on screens, right underneath the camera’s lens.

TeleKast lets me do the same job at a fraction (as in 0%) of the cost of a professional teleprompter package. TeleKast provides a Script Editor window to type in my script. Another window called Segments allows me to organize my script into scenes. While I’m working on a script, I can see it in the upper-right hand Segment Preview window. I can also add cues for camera, audio, video, talent and one for other.

When I’m ready to roll, there’s a pop-up window that scrolls up my text to read while I record my on-camera or voice-over work. I can adjust the text size and scroll speed and the text background and cue colors. I can start and stop scrolling with the space bar. It’s simple, flexible, powerful.

It pretty much keeps me from sounding stupid when I have to do a read of some sort. While reading my lines on my monitor, I can look directly at my webcam and appear to not in fact be reading my lines, just as the transparent screen of a teleprompter allows speakers to look at an audience and appear as though they're not in fact reading from notes -- even though they are. It's very useful for webcasts. It looks like the software has been in an alpha state for a while, but I’ve been using it for more than a year and like it very much. Works with Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista and Linux.

Here's a video of my review.  I'm using TeleKast for the read.

Available from SourceForge

Ground Control to Space Ship One

I've always thought that a robust (read: well funded) national space program was the one of the best ideas that our public servants ever had.  I thought that President Bush's proposal to return the US to the moon and then go on to Mars was one of the best things about his administration.  After all, who else but Uncle Big Bucks Sam could afford to do something that big, that so few private individuals had any interest in?

Well those days have changed and it's probably about time that my thinking changed with them.  Although I was initially very disappointed, President Obama's new budget for NASA is apparently designed to encourage the private sector to take over the heavy lifting, while NASA continues working on more far reaching projects.  Esther Dyson, one of the people whose work and thinking I most admire, has authored an article in next month's Foreign Policy magazine that agrees with this approach.

Tell me what you think.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/08/prepare_for_liftoff

Management is Dead

So many people enjoy bashing the Grateful Dead and their followers that they ignore any of the good that they have done.  They have offered their support to organizations such as Seva, (a nonprofit that brings eye operations to impoverished people), Riverkeeper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wharf Rats (a group that help fans become and stay sober), among others.  The Dead have taken their social and community responsibilities very seriously.

Few also realize that for quite a while there has been serious academic study of the Dead, their business organization and their fans.

The March issue of the Atlantic offers an excellent article on the Grateful Dead Archive scheduled to open soon at UC Santa Cruz.  One of the most interesting aspects, to me, will be the insights offered into the Dead's business philosophy.  As the article states, the Dead were visionary" in the way that they created customer value, promoted social networking and did strategic business planning."

The Dead incorporated in the mid-70's, established a board of directors, founded a profitable merchandising wing (named Grateful Dead Merchandising, oddly enough) and even though they allowed taping at their concerts and encouraged tape trading, they did not hesitate to prosecute copyright violators.  They weren't greedy and adapted well.  Who can say that about many companies today?  Wall Street could certainly take a lesson.

Not bad for a bunch of dirty, lazy hippies.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/grateful-dead-archives

What Did You Just Say?!?

And to round out my entries on language, I thought I'd just add one more useful link.  There are many online translation sites on the web, but after you know what to say, just how do you say it?

Forvo is a site with over half a million words, almost as many pronunciations and 231 languages represented.  The recordings are all pronounced by native speakers.

Want to know how to correctly greet visitors in Telugu?  Toast someone from Wallonia in Walloon.  Curse in Klingon?  It's all here and so much more.  Qapla'.   *walks away*

http://www.forvo.com/

Your Brain On Language(s)

And while I'm thinking about language, did you know that speaking more than one language can make you smarter and more creative? I wish I'd known that back in high school. I probably would have learned more than a smattering of words in different languages.

Here's a link to a study that shows that mastering a second language makes your brain processes information in both languages.  Oh and the study also shows that you are more flexible and adaptive in your thinking process.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2009/vanassche.cfm

65,000 Year Old Language Silenced

The last member of the Bo tribe, Boa Sr, died last week making another ancient people extinct. When a people go, their language and culture go with them. With rapid globalization many would ask, "So what?" Estimates of future language loss range from half of more than 6000 currently spoken languages being lost in the next 200 years, to 90% by the year 2050. No matter how you count it, that's a lot of ideas and culture gone forever.

As author and anthropologist Wade Davis puts it, language extinction effectively reduces the "entire range of the human imagination... to a more narrow modality of thought" and thus privileges the ways of knowing in dominant (and overwhelmingly Western) languages such as English. Foucauldian ideas of power and knowledge, as both inseparable and symbiotic, are implicated in the universalizing of Western knowledge as truth, and the rendering of other forms as less valid or false: mere superstition, folklore, or mythology. In the case of language extinction, those "voices which are deemed to be inferior or secondary by colonizing, globalizing, or developing forces are literally silenced."

Davis also says, "Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnicide, the destruction of a people’s way of life is not only not condemned, it’s universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy."

Every time we lose a language we, as a world, are further impoverished. Below is a video of Boa Sr singing and speaking in the Bo language. Listen and weep for her and for us.

The 10,000 Year Clock

In my last two posts I've referenced The Long Now Foundation.  I thought it was about time that I introduced you to it.  Time is what the foundation is all about.  They are dedicated to elongating the attention span of the human race.

Few would argue that many of the problems we face today do not stem from short term thinking to long term problems.  Long Now is trying hard to fix that.

Below is a five minute video that was done for CBS's Sunday Morning program a while back.  Blow that is a link to The Long Now Foundation's website.




http://www.longnow.org/

Aluna

As a member of the The Long Now Foundation and supporter of the ten thousand year clock they are building, I have long been interested in any project that gives humans a greater sense of the scale of time.

Contemporary culture encourages us to think in ever smaller scales of time; a year, a quarter, a month, day, hour, minute, second.  At this rate we'll soon have no sense of the future or the past.  In fact I believe many of us have lost that ability already and it is evident in the way we frame our ideas of how things are going and how they proceed.  We now want instant solutions; instant economic recoveries, instant health care and an instant end to our problems.

The Aluna project is another antidote to the irrational short term thinking of our time. Larger than Stonehenge, Aluna is will be the world’s first tidal powered moon clock. It will change the way we consider time and our understanding of our planet.

Things take time.  Have a look at the video.



http:///www.alunatime.org/

Things Fall Apart or Entropy 101

I often tickle my students imaginations by asking them how we'd know if there had been an advanced civilization say, 50 thousand years or so ago.  Their first answer is usually, "By the stuff they leave behind."  I counter with, "Probably not."

Covering 500 years in your neighborhood, this two minute animated video from The Long Now Foundation, of which I am a member, illustrates the point well.

New Album, Old Review

I just finished up producing a new album for classical guitarist Scott Schwertfeger.  Eleven tracks of beautiful solo nylon string guitar music. It should be available in about two months.

Also my review of the Arturia Moog Modular V has been picked up by BoingBoing.  If you want to read it again (and some dumb and some clever comments), here's the link.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/moog-modular-a-synth.html