We have faculty who, quite reasonably, don’t see why they cannot play DVDs in the DVD drives of their computers.  Easy to explain, not easy for logical people to understand: they have the hardware but they don’t have the software for it.

Oh, sure, we have Windows Media Player included in Windows….

However, Windows Media Player (WMP) does not come with a decoder, so it cannot play DVDs.  Microsoft will tell you this.  They link to vendors who will sell you a decoder program, of course.

Some of the freeware I’ve used in the past require you to dig into the DVD and select a specific file to play.  That may or may not start where you want, and it’s not what most users want.  Or, you can go find a codec for free that will enable WMP to handle DVDs, and use a little program to tell WMP where you put the codec file.  All techy-type stuff most people don’t want to mess with, and who can blame them?

So, I went searching again, since we’re getting a lot of DVD-R format discs from DVD vendors (example: Films for the Humanities), and I wanted something simple for faculty to use, and for our IT staff to install quickly.  And frankly, I’m a little nervous about things like iTunes and Quicktime as malware attack vectors.

I found one called MPlayer which sends you to SourceForge to download it with a GUI front end called SMPlayer, which only requires you to specify the DVD drive to use — and it has a button to let it go test for the proper drive itself.

So far, it’s the simplest freeware answer (I don’t do payware answers because I’m not paid to buy software — and that is not a solicitation).

Any other extremely simple (as in “for people who don’t understand computers”) software that is suggested, I am open to take a look.

So, I was asked to get some videos online for everyone, including the public, to be able to access and view, for our campus chapter of the American Democracy Project.  We had an interview and a two-part video of the first Citizenship Awards ceremony.

I had DVDs that had been recorded by our people with permissions, so copyright was not an issue.

What to do next?

I checked my own blog Computer Helpers for video editing freeware.  Ended up with a freeware program called SUPER which stands for Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer (got to love that acronym).

SUPER looks a bit intimidating, but a lot is just finding the information to adjust the settings.  I found that the software that came with my DVD drive just played the audio, not the video, of the recorded DVDs.  Apparently, this is not unusual for a lot of the DVDs that are copied rather than commercially created (including the copies vendors make of them).  So, I switched to my usual DVD software, Media Player Classic.

In Media Player Classic, I selected a VOB format file to open, and then right-clicked on the video and selected Properties.  The Details tab gave me:

Video: MPEG2 Video 720×480 (16:9) 29.97fps 9500Kbps [Video]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 384Kbps [Audio]
Subtitle: DVD Subpicture [Subtitle]

So, that covered most of the settings I needed to select the check boxes.  I decided to convert to avi format which should play readily on most PCs.

I set for the best possible conditions, as the interview was in a not-too-bright room, with older people whose voices might require the best possible sound.  The ceremony was in a large public room, with the platform at a distance, so I wanted the best resolution on that.  All this, I knew, would make for larger files and a longer download time.

Then I did a click-and-drag from the VOB format files into SUPER.  I found it went a bit faster if I copied the files from the DVD to my hard drive first, and then dragged from there.

I right-clicked on the file name and set the Output Location.

I clicked on the Encode (Active Files) bar and up popped a box to select a “rendered file optimizer”.  I left it with the default (DX50).

And away it went:

After I finished, I had avi versions of the files, which I then renamed appropriately but kept the avi extension.

Now — where to host them?

Turns out that most hosts restrict you to 100MB or 10 minutes maximum.  One allowed up to 5GB but only in 100MB files.

The smallest file was just over 10 minutes, the ceremony files were longer and larger.  Free hosting for that didn’t seem available (at least on any site I could find that looked stable enough to stay up for a while, although I might have been over-cautious).

BTW: it would save a lot of time if hosting sites would post their maximums out front, instead of requiring you to register before letting you down with their list of limitations — but then, they wouldn’t get your email address, would they?  They would have fewer inactive members, as well.

Fortunately, our III catalog allows avi format video attachments to records, so I created records and attached them.

They play on campus, but the download from off-campus may be too slow for many people to use, especially for these large files.

Links are here at our American Democracy Project blog.

Pardon a gripe, but this was just too real to pass up.

The Sunday version of the comic strip “Baby Blues” had this one on Nov. 29.

To recap: Grade school classroom.

Teacher asks “Okay … does everyone understand this chapter?”  Class answers YES!

Teacher asks “Have you all finished the sample problems?”  Class answers YES!

Teacher asks “Are there any questions about the homework”  Class answers NO!

Father at home asks “What’s this chapter about?”

Child answers “How am I supposed to know??”

Now, forward that child about a dozen years, change the father to a librarian… and you’ll have a picture of what far too many of our library sessions are like with college students who need our help.  And you now know why those particular students need help.  <sigh!>

More on the website revision, in part to remind myself what I did and why, and perhaps something here will be of use to others.

So, I’ve been converting our Innovative Interfaces catalog pages on our libcat server to a format as close to the new library.uafortsmith.edu server pages as possible.

I’ve wanted all along to make the transition as seamless as possible — ideally (IMHO) most users won’t realize they’re moving back and forth from one server to another.

Due to the wiki template set up on the campus website (and therefore the old library pages), however, we elected not to do that and allowed variation on the catalog pages.  Now, with the new server, I’m striving for identical looks.

Little things crop up in the process, of course.

Date Script

JavaScript for date in the header is one I borrowed some years back for use in the catalog.  We are finally able to use it on the regular home page now that we are on a server that allows it.  I like it because it specifically states what today is (day of the week and date) and the hours today only.  There is also now a link to all our hours on a separate page.

When we’re closed, it says so for that day, but I wanted the ‘closed’ message to remind people that online services are still available: “Closed Today (Online Services Still Available)”.  The catch was, I had that message on one line replacing the ‘hours’ text for that day, and it’s a much longer piece of text.  It threw everything off in the header — kicked everything right off that over and some of it wrapped onto additional lines, which looked terrible.  So, I broke the text display for the ‘closed’ message into two lines and it works neatly now: “Closed Today<br />Online Services Still Available”.

III uses “tokens” which are shortcuts to scripts in their system that handle certain tasks.  These work somewhat like SSI (Server Side Includes).

For example, for much of the top header in catalog pages, I can use “toplogo” which calls up a separate HTML partial file to fill in a stock header.  Same for “botlogo” which fills in a stock footer section.  Very handy.

So, I linked the toplogo section in the catalog to run the same JavaScript for the date/hours info from the library server, so I only have to change it one place to update it (changes in hours, holidays, etc.).  Very handy.

Advanced Searching

The catch to the above is, the header in ‘toplogo’ included the same catalog search box that is on all the pages.  The Advanced Searching page in the catalog, however, is one page that uses not an HTML form, but a token which calls up a form, since it’s more complex (combines terms, searches several indexes, etc.).

That called form assumes it’s the only one on the page, which conflicts with the one in the stock header.  Normally, you avoid this by giving specific names to the forms and referring to those, but when using the token to call up the form, I didn’t have the option to change the token-called script.

Trying to use Advanced Search in the proper box resulted in the form trying to get information from the box in the header search box instead (since that was the first form encountered on the page), and then telling me I needed to enter something there.

Answer: I entered the toplogo completely in normal HTML on this one Advanced Search page, instead of calling it with the ‘toplogo’ token.  That way, I could comment out the search box in the header so only this page is without that search box in the header.  Now the only working search was the one called by the Advanced Search token script.  Conflict eliminated.

If I change the header, I’ll have to remember to change this page as well.  However, the date script still works as usual, so no extra concerns on that.

CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are multiplying in the catalog.  III includes one of their own (untouchable since it operates some of their specialized functions), and we can override aspects of that and augment it with another, which we do. Now I added the one for the new style pages.

That meant that I had to make sure that adding the style sheet Joni created wouldn’t conflict with any names in the other style sheets.  Then I added that to the list of style sheets to check when a browser creates a page on the screen.

Then there was minor tweaking to get the CSS to work within our catalog server.  This included some little spacing things to allow for (as usual) Internet Explorer not working to the same standards as other browsers, but that worked out.

I commented a lot in the catalog version of the CSS file as to what I did to make it different from the version in the home version.  I may need to know all that some day.

Testing Browsers

I’m testing with Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (although 8 is not approved on our campus at this time as it won’t work properly with our version of some instructional software elsewhere on campus), as well as the current Windows version of Safari (since I don’t have a Mac to test) and current Google Chrome.

Progress is being made!

After some minor complications, the new library website is up at library.uafortsmith.edu although it’s not “official” as yet.

We tried to have it hosted off-campus, but it kept having trojans added to the javascript files (host security was not under our control), so we had it moved to an on-campus server.

Joni Stine gets credit for about 99.75% of it, and I tried to keep to her templates for the basic design on the pages I’ve been adding or updating.

Joni, incidently, had to move so she (reluctantly) left and went to a new job elsewhere in Arkansas.  We’re preparing to interview candidates for her position in January.  She did leave us with almost all of the site just about ready to go, and I did a few additional tweaks and then began converting pages and links.  Thanks, Joni!

Server Side Includes (SSI) have one little quirk — you can’t use them in the home (index) page.  So, we have some stuff we have to code on the index page, which can just go into a file and be called by the other .shtml pages.

We’ve got the day/date/today’s hours script working at the top with a little JavaScript I borrowed a while back.  The left side (on most pages) and the footer are SSI files (except on the home page).

Joni found a neat little script that gives an elegant rotating image so we can do pictures without taking up a huge amount of bandwidth.

I’ve tested it out in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (on Windows only) and will see about trying it on a widescreen laptop ASAP.

Custom Search

I wanted to use a custom Google Search Engine.  Supposedly, according to instructions, Google allows you to submit a txt file with your pages to get them indexed quickly.  Supposedly.

After being looped around and around from an instruction page to a page without the links mentioned in the instructions, I gave up and just copy and pasted the links into the box provided for simpletons, since apparently somebody didn’t make the procedure simple enough to work the way Google claimed it should.  At least, not today.  Ah, well.  The indexing took place, so we can work with that for a while.

Now We Try It Out

Now, we try it out.  If all goes well enough, we have the campus pages changed to link to it, and introduce it at the start of the spring semester.

Crossing my fingers….

One of the more popular type of posts on this blog, I note by my stats, are those dealing with the practical use of printers.

So, let it be known that today I completed the manual and installation of a new printer at our primary Circulation workstation.

We’d been using a Star SP542 dot-matrix receipt printer, as at the time we needed to get one, we were hoping to eventually get permission to print money receipts for fines (instead of expensive 19th century receipt books).  State auditors insist on sequentially-numbered receipts (it’s a rule, period, no debate permitted, so no use telling me reasons not to do it).  Thermal printing doesn’t hold up over time, so we needed receipts that would last if we did them for fines, etc.

Frankly, we’ve found the dot matrix to have cleaning problems — lots of cut paper scraps get into the works, and you have to remove the ribbon, then remove a plate and vacuum it out weekly to keep it from jamming up.

Anyway, since the money receipt printing has fallen through (don’t ask), we don’t need long-term printing.  We switched to a Star TSP650 (aka 654 the cutter model) printer, which uses only thermal paper, no ribbon.

The manual is at http://libcat.uafortsmith.edu/screens/man_starTSP650printer.html and it covers the setup for use with Millennium Circulation.

Now, the printer driver either lets you do very short slips with no graphics, or — as we selected — 200mm long slips with a big logo at the top, that are actually easier for everyone to handle.  Also, if somebody sticks them in the book pocket, it makes them easy to fish out.

Using 8 point font for legibility means the last digit of the year is cut off on each line.  A smaller font becomes too hard to read.  The actual date is printed in full at the top just under the logo, anyway, so the year should be obvious.

Since it doesn’t completely cut (“partial cut” meaning one little bit in the middle is left, so one tug will free it), the paper doesn’t leave little scraps, which should avoid a lot of cleaning problems.  No ribbon.

The “receipt” selection (instead of 200mm length) just runs out paper forever, until you turn it off.  Since the 200mm works well for us, we’ll stick with that for the time being.

Okay, this post probably qualifies as controversial.  It’s just a little observation I’m making, and is not intended as criticism of anyone.

I think many, perhaps most, current computer users are handicapped by the mouse.

That’s it.  That’s the opinion, and it’s mine.

Therefore, I propose a new computer term: “mouse-dicapped.”  (With no apologies to the Disney people at all.)

Not “mouse-challenged” which implies inability to use the mouse, or “keyboard-challenged” since people still use keyboards for typing text.

Mouse-dicapped.  (Okay, it sounds like a mouse lost it’s head, but bear with me.)

Lemme ’splain that:

I started out way back when computing meant connecting a dumb terminal to a mainframe (hey, I even trained a little in library school using punch cards!).  No GUI (Graphic User Interface).  Just type.  You know, with a keyboard?  The same thing we still have attached to the computer (or phone, or whatever) in some form, or showing up on the screen, or appearing on buttons?  That thing.

Today, I still have the ability to swiftly do things like hold down two keys at once to copy (CTRL-C), and to paste (CTRL-V) and stuff like that.  I do that, and it’s finished before mouse users can right-click to open up the edit menu, select copy or paste, and do it.  In fact, I can copy AND paste before they get through with the copy using the mouse, a lot of the time.

This is not rocket surgery or brain science, it’s just being able to remember a few basic key combinations that let you do certain frequent actions easily and quickly, but I keep seeing people who cannot handle anything that does not offer a menu they can use with a mouse.  I step through the two-key combination, and they admire it, and seem to understand the concept behind it — but they’d rather not use it.  They want to stick with their mouse and the drop-down menus and the slower step-by-step.

This is not an “age” thing, as I see older people than myself still dependent on the mouse.  It’s more of a “who started out with a GUI and a mouse, and who started out with just a keyboard” thing.

It seems to be the fault of learning one way to do things, and sticking to that even when a more efficient method is available (and yes, I most certainly can use a mouse to copy and paste — I demonstrate it sometimes for the mouse-dicapped users here).  I just find it faster to use the two-key combos, when I have a choice.

Now, if an ergonomic keyboard throws somebody, or they have trouble with a trackball, I can empathize (I use a split-arranged ergonomic keyboard myself, but find a trackball’s learning curve steeper than I want to climb).  Sometimes it can be hard to adapt to different interfaces.

But if you know how to use a keyboard, and you know how to use a mouse, why use the less efficient one to accomplish a simple task?

Apparently, because it doesn’t involve remembering a two-key combination.

This, even from a generation that can remember to write “c u l8r” because it is a faster way to type “see you later” by 6 characters.

It seems that it’s just what we originally started with in a given bit of technology.  There seems to be no better reason that I can discern.  And it’s not a big deal — I just point it out as a limitation in human thinking that might explain why some technical developments are accepted, especially in human interfaces, and others are not.

Maybe we’re all mouse-dicapped with something or other, myself included.  And having said that, I now have to look around and see what I’m doing less efficiently than I could.

What’s your mouse-dicap?

Disclaimer: what I write here is NOT in any way intended to endorse, advertise, promote, or put down any commercial or other products. Anything which might be construed as critical may be based on situations and circumstances which do not apply to anything or anyone else, so please don’t feel maligned or assume I’m looking for a fight. Opinions are mine alone and may be under/mis-informed, just like everyone else’s opinions, which is why I’m writing this on my blog and not the Computer Helpers blog.

This series is the result of a search for a Vista-based laptop in April and May of 2008 and what transpires after that. All this information is subject to being outdated, limited, or highly debatable.

==========================================

Another update to this series, just in case anyone is following:

USB HUB

As mentioned earlier, I got a USB hub to plug into my router.  This is a wired hub, so it has to be connected with wires to the printers, but I go through the wireless router for laptop access and wired access to the router for desktop access.  It’s a Belkin F5L009 (which may or may not be available now but still has drivers and such for it available on the Belkin site).

I’ve switched my freeware firewall from Comodo to Zone Alarm on the laptop.  While both of them allow for adding the hub’s address to automatically allow it, the performance is more erratic in permitting access to it with Comodo.  It’s not quite perfect on Zone Alarm (especially after a reboot) but it seems to work more often.

I’ve been able to use it with Canon printers and a Seiko label maker, on Vista 64-bit (laptop) and Windows XP (desktop).

Readerware

One of the few pieces of software that I’ve paid for on my laptop is Readerware, which allows you to catalog your books/audio/video (any or all, depending on the modules you buy.

This is an easy way to catalog your collection, and you can just use the ISBN or click-and-drag from a number of sites into Readerware and it copies all the data in.  Covers, songs listed for CDs, other information.  Very handy and in my case, worth the price.

The latest update had a problem with Vista 64-bit , as it didn’t let me drag a link from a resource such as Amazon into the product.  I got a quick response from the vendor, and installed the 32-bit version instead.  Apparently, the 64-bit version chokes on administrator privileges for your browser (if you’re not running your browser as an administrator — which I normally don’t, since it’s not as safe — you can’t drag the link from it).  So, the 32-bit version is a work-around until this is solved.  I’m back to using the program again.

Windows 7 upgrade?

Now that Windows 7 is out, I’m asking myself, do I want to upgrade to that on my laptop?  Some nice features are touted on 7, but how vital would they be now that I have Vista running decently?  7 is supposed to be faster, of course, which might be a reason in itself.

7 also has XP mode in the more expensive versions, but only if you have the proper type of CPU (which my laptop does not).  That means that I’d have to upgrade my CPU (which is possible in this laptop) to take advantage of that.

I may wait for at least the first service pack for 7 before thinking too hard about that.

So, the campus is getting the print control system that the Library staff have wanted for so long.  Yay!

Thanks to the preparation, however, it’s being done up in a major way, by replacing all the i.d. cards with new ones, and a system to have the cards act like on-campus credit cards — pay for printing, meals, bookstore, and a growing range of things.  It’s a lot of work for our campus IT people to help the contractor set up, but it looks like it’s going to be a great system.  21st century tech stuff.

The contractor is Blackboard (that is a statement, not an endorsement or criticism), another branch of the company that does the campus learning software system.

Of course, that means that the Library (like many other places on campus) needed to have Printer Release Stations for each printer location.

The subcontractor for this is Pharos (that is a statement, not an endorsement or criticism).  You hit print at a computer, you get a popup option to password-protect it, and the job goes to the Printer Release Station.  If you show up within 2 hours (before the job automatically deletes), you can enter your password (if you used one) and print the job.  That alone will save paper, as we have a lot of waste just from jobs sent to the printer that aren’t ever picked up.

If you notice that you forgot a footnote just after you printed, then you can print again, but only release the last version.  That saves printing a version you don’t want.  More saving paper and toner, not to mention wear and tear on the printers.  Looks greener all the time.

We do have students who bring their own laptops.  That’s a little more complicated.  We have Windows 32-bit systems, Windows 64-bit systems, and Macs among students.

Windows 32-bit systems are usually 2GB of RAM or less (XP and older Windows don’t handle RAM larger than that very well).

64-bit systems (3GB or more of RAM) are usually Vista, and soon Windows 7.  It seems that when Vista proved to be slow on some new computers, vendors went to the slightly faster 64-bit version of Vista to make performance look better… but 64-bit systems have more compatibility problems, including with printer drivers.

Now we’ve got a 32-bit Windows driver and a separate 64-bit Windows driver, and we have a handout explaining how to get the right one.  That is, provided the student knows the difference, which many don’t — they just bought what was on sale.  So, we’ll need to help them with that from time to time.  I think the instructions I did up will cover most cases.

Then we have students-+ with Macs.  The catch is, we are a primarily Windows campus.  (Please, no judgements or advice or proselytizing — I don’t make the decisions, I just try to deal with them.  Besides, I do Windows.)  I don’t have a Mac to experiment with, or save screen shots on, and neither do the tech people, so at this point, Mac users will just have to save their files off in .rtf format and bring them up on a Windows computer to print.

The printer drivers are “universal” drivers for HP printers.  That means that the handful of other printers on the network may choke, but that’s not a big factor.

Now, aside from paying the Cashier, there are going to be two quick ways to put money in your account — online using a credit card, and through a special station on campus using money or a credit card.  Of course, that device is not cheap, and since non-students will need it to pay for printing/copies at the Library, we ended up hosting the single PHIL for the entire campus.

PHIL stands for Payment Headquarters In Location.  Personally, I think of it as Payment Headquarters in Library, but I’m admittedly biased on the acronym.

PHIL is a metal box, which we mounted on the supplied metal stand.  It won’t have much money from cash; most people will use credit cards to top up their accounts, we expect.  Public users will be able to purchase cards, and then put money on them to pay for printing, which is likely to stay down to a couple of bucks at a time.  Screen in front will show you your balance, let you deposit money in your account, or buy a card.  Pretty simple.  Basic black and fairly discreet.

Naturally, some people will not be entirely content with having to pay when they’ve printed for free all this time (except for our color printing service, which at this point is still not on the card system yet).  But, everyone else is charging — often more than we will — including the public library.  And students will get some free credit on their cards each semester to start with.  It should make them more aware of the cost of things, and that’s something they need to learn before they go out in the big wide world where everyone else expects payment.

TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.  (Anyone remember their Heinlein?)

[updated 2009.9.10 see at bottom]

The drawback to upgrades is that you may improve one thing while breaking another.

Case in point: going from Firefox 3 to 3.5, I lost the BookBurro addon.

Now, BookBurro is a really nifty (and judging from posts, popular) addon for Firefox, which looks on pages for ISBNs and when you visit a page with one present, it offers a small block which you can click on to dropdown (or delete if you don’t need it).

The dropdown will show you a number of vendors and their pricing, to compare to whatever you’re looking at.  Example: I could look at something on a particular online store, it would give me prices at Amazon, Alibris, Half.com, Barnes & Noble, and several other online stores that can be selected in the options.

It also allows you to check WorldCat and a number of library OPACs which are searchable by ISBN.

There are links to the relevant pages on those sites.

Obviously, invaluable for librarians and other booklovers, especially those of us doing the ordering.

And it hasn’t been updated — despite a personal unanswered email request from me to the author, and a number of forum posts and tweets from others — for Firefox 3.5 as of Sept. 9, 2009.  It’s a freebie, after all, and perhaps the talented and clever author Jesse Andrews (stroke, stroke) just hasn’t had a spare moment to get back to it.

HOWEVER — there’s a (slightly) risky workaround hack for this.  Basically, it consists of turning off the compatibility check in 3.5 for addons.  Lifehacker provided it in one of their posts which was originally intended for Firefox 3 Beta, but works for 3.5.

This means that you can now install addons which may or may not work reliably with 3.5, without warning, and some things on BookBurro may not work completely or properly, but that’s the price of the hack.  So far, I think it’s worth it.

I dropped a strong hint to an Alibris rep today that they look at it, and encourage the author to update it.  Alibris isn’t working perfectly now anyway, as they have multiple (used and new) prices, so they need two lines or something arranged.  Any other reps that anybody sees, please suggest they ask/help to pay for this to be upgraded.

[update 2009.9.10]

Jesse Andrews kindly DID respond to my email just after I posted this, and commented to it as well.  Check his comment.  Looks good for an update!  I’m glad to hear it!