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Web414, BCMKE3, Teecycle

The Web414 July 2008 Meeting will be held on Tuesday July 8th, 2008 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The June meeting was at MSOE due to the water damage sustained at Bucketworks. For those of you who have not been to Bucketworks since the incident, you’ll get to see the damage, and hopefully that won’t distract us too much from the Web414 meeting.

We’ll start some of the planning for BarCampMilwaukee3 which is set for the first weekend of October. Hopefully by then Bucketworks will be fully operational. While we will discuss BarCampMilwaukee3, the real planning will start to happen at dedicated meetings yet to be scheduled. As always, anyone interested in helping out is welcome to participate. We’re open like that.

Oh, we have one more thing in store for the Web414 meeting. Teecycle is this neat idea involving selling used shirts online. Here’s how they describe it:

Cool pre-loved vintage T-shirts for cheap. It’s like adopting a cute rescue puppy from an animal shelter, except a Teecycle shirt won’t ruin your furniture, terrorize your cat and crap all over your carpet.

Your purchase also supports the River Revitalization Foundation. $1 of each sale is donated to restore urban river trails and waterways in the Milwaukee area.

I think it’s cool that they are using the web to do this. Tim from Teecycle has asked if anyone from Web414 wants to help him out and model some shirts. If you are interested, stick around after the meeting and get your photo taken. Also, if you have any old shirts you want to donate to Teecycle, bring them to the meeting.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Tags barcamp, barcampmilwaukee, barcampmilwaukee3, bcmke, bcmke3, bucketworks, teecycle, web414

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Video Installation

So we’re working on a video installation and we’re planning on putting up a big LCD TV, and want to be able to show photo slide shows and video on it.

Our first thought was, get a DVD player and connect it to the TV (behind the wall as the TV will be mounted flat or recessed to the wall) and we would then author DVDs and play as needed. This could work, but we’re then looking at the DVDs being standard definition versus high definition. So while this option is cheap, and somewhat easy, the quality would be low. (And burning HD or Blu-ray DVDs is not something we are currently doing.)

We also thought about connecting an old G4 to the TV. We currently have a G3 connected to an LCD monitor doing the photo slide show thing, and connecting a G4 might work, but we need to deal with actually connecting it to a TV, which would probably have HDMI but not VGA, and VGA would probably look like crap.

So, I’m starting to think an AppleTV, at $229 is the best option. It’s pretty much built to do what we want. We could manage the content through iTunes and the AppleTV interface, and make playlists that could loop, and… am I missing anything?

Update: It seem you can’t make playlists that loop on the AppleTV, which is a “WTF!?” type moment when people hear that…

Update See Video Installation (Part II)

Tags mac, tv, video, z2

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Canon Mini-DV Camera & Firewire Bug

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2008-06-22
1 Comment on Canon Mini-DV Camera & Firewire Bug

I spent way more time than I should have trying to figure out why my Canon ZR800 wasn’t being seen by my Mac. I tested the Firewire cable, I rebooted, I re-installed QuickTime. The Sony PD150 worked fine, but the Canon was a no-show.

Canon ZR800

Finally I dug up this Camcorder HQ post by Doug Van Doren

Actually, there’s one HUGE caveat with that: the new Canon ZR’s 800-850 will NOT work with a Mac that has another FireWire device plugged into it. If you have an external hard drive, your iPod or anything plugged into one of the other FireWire ports on the computer and then you plug in a Canon ZR800 series camcorder and launch iMovie or FCP or FCE, it will crash and freeze the Mac OS.

This is a huge bug I recently discovered when I bought a new Canon ZR-800 and ended up crashing all three of my Macs (I tried it on them all just to make sure).

It was a nightmare. Here’s the technical article from Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61603

It does not mention the ZR800’s specifically, but trust me, it applies to them as well.

If there’s nothing else plugged into the other FireWire ports, it works fine. The only trouble with that is that most people like to use an external firewire drive to put their digitized footage on. This is a big problem if that’s what you’re trying to do.

Luckily I did not experience any real crashes, just the fact that iMovie and Final Cut sort of ‘stuck’ while the camera was turned on, and then resumed when turned off. The System Profiler also failed to show any Firewire device when the camera was on. Everything is fine when no other Firewire devices are connected, so there is a workaround… Still, it’s an annoying bug I hope can be fixed in the future.

Tags apple, bugs, cameras, canon, firewire, osx, zr800

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Bucketworks Needs You!

Folks, we need to put a drop in the bucket… and no, I’m not talking about water… we got plenty of that!

During the storm, things got a little crazy (see Flickr) and there is water everywhere. It ain’t pretty. If at all possible, can you put a drop in the bucket? If you’ve ever attended a Web414 or a MilwaukeeDevHouse, it would be cool if you could chip in a few bucks to help our little clubhouse make it through this disaster. Bucketworks has been a gracious host to us, and it’s a time of need for them, so put a drop in the bucket and let’s hope it adds up enough to get everything back to normal.

Right now Bucketworks is closed. Until the damage is assessed, they can’t open again. What does that mean for the June 2008 Web414 Meeting? We’re not sure yet… we may have to move it, as well as other events scheduled there in the near future. Like I said, there’s a lot of water…

Jenn has a post on bucketworks.org that tells more, so please go there and see what is up…

And seriously, go pitch in some money! So far it’s just Gabe and I that have done so, and that’s pretty sad. I know there are others out there who can help, even if it’s just $5 or $10.

(Update: Wow! The total is going up! Thanks people, let’s keep it going…)