Enjoying the internet…
Archive for July, 2010
How to create tutorial videos?
3The problem
You need to make tutorial videos to teach your new colleagues how to work with a certain application. Now you could create training documents and have some long or boring training session to teach them stuff they often don’t get after the training anyways.
The other option would be to just record step-by-step tutorials of your application. Your new colleagues would just copy over some training videos and watch them to see how to use that new software right.
The solution
Exactly for this reason, and probably because of my lazyness, I found a very nice free application called “Wink” coded by Debugmode.
Here’s the description from the official Wink website:
| Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. | ||
That sounds great, right? It is! You can just download it, install it (Windows or Linux with GTK 2.4 or higher) and create great looking flash videos of how you perform a certain action you want to show to your friends or colleagues. The tool itself has a pretty straight forward user interface which allows you to create a professional looking tutorial video. Either you capture your whole screen, a predefined area or a custom area of your screen.
But you can do much more than just record your desktop. You can add a voice recording to your video, add text comments, draw shapes, add weblinks links, etc. This tool is really advanced when it comes down to features. Also, editing your recording frame by frame can by done easily.
You can download this piece of software goodness by clicking on the Wink logo:
I really hope you’ll enjoy this tool as much as I did 
WikiLeaks publishes more than 90,000 reports of the Afghanistan war
1
Whistleblower website WikiLeaks published an enormous amount of secret documents about the Afghanistan war. The documents reveal detailed reports of almost every aspect like politics, intelligence operations, deals and casualties in the time frame between 2004 until 2010.
This event is said to be somewhat comparable to the release of the Pentagon Papers which were first published by the New York Times in 1971.
Although WikiLeaks tried to hide the source of the leak, the U.S. military already has Bradley Manning (22) under custody. So far there’s no evidence seen for or against any connection between the Afghan War Diary and Manning.
To read more about this topic please refer to the article at mashable.com
—
See the live blog about the Afghan War Diaries on the Guardians website:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks
How to use a BlackBerry Curve 8900 without BIS/BES?
2My first BlackBerry phone
To start off, this is the first BlackBerry phone I ever owned. My girlfriend bought a used Curve 8900 for me and I didn’t know what to expect from it.
I got it and was immediately very pleased with its looks. It is not too chunky and the hardware keyboard is also pretty nice to write SMS. So far so good.
At this point I wasn’t aware that a BlackBerry device is pretty useless without having a BlackBerry data plan. The only things I could do with it was calling people, writing and receiving SMS messages and taking photos. I wasn’t very excited anymore because I could do the exact same things with my old Nokia phone.
There has to be a way…
So I started to do some research.
The problem is that the complete management of network related communications on BlackBerry devices is usually done by the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). As I don’t have a BlackBerry contract I needed to find another solution.
1. Plain GPRS internet access
The first thing you have to do is to make sure that applications can access the internet via GPRS (can’t help with 3G as the Curve 8900 doesn’t have 3G!). To be able to do so you first have to configure the APN settings. You can find them via Options -> Advanced Options -> TCP/IP. Enter the APN name and if needed the user name and password for the APN. You can get the settings by searching Google.
If the APN has been configured correctly you’ll see “gprs” in small letters in the upper right corner of the device’s display.
So far so good. Now the unit is able to communicate with the APN but by default the unit tries to route all traffic via the BIS service of your mobile provider. This is the time where you need to do some stuff to your “Service Book”.
You can access the Service Book list via Options -> Advanced Options -> Service Book.
Go to this website and follow the instructions update your Service Book:
http://bb.anworm.com/enable-blackberry-browser-without-bisbes-2/
After you have done this your BlackBerry webbrowser will work via GPRS and WiFi!
2. Browsing the web
The built-in BlackBerry browser is ok but it tends to be very slow and sometimes it won’t load a certain website at all. So the solution for that is to download and get Opera Mini. It’s nice to use, pretty fast even via GPRS and free.
You can download Opera Mini via this address:
http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/blackberry/
3. Using Twitter
Unfortunately the original Twitter client is strictly bound to the BIS. So there’s no way to use it (correct me if I’m wrong!).
I’m using the free Twitter client “Seesmic”. It supports posting pictures to TwitPic, location data and you can shorten URLs. Basically that’s everything I expect from a Twitter client.
To download and install it, point your BlackBerry webbrowser to www.seesmic.com (I don’t think it works with Opera Mini but I’m not sure…).
4. Facebook?
The newest Facebook application for BlackBerry devices is also restricted to only work with BIS. In my opinion the only reason to use the Facebook application is to be able to post pictures. For just status updates and so on, you can simply access the Facebook site via Opera Mini.
If you really want to use the Facebook app, you need to find the version 1.6. The best way to get it is via searching the forum on Crackberry.com
5. Email and PIM syncing
Now the last and probably most important part.
As there’s no hack to be able to use the built-in email application (btw, the instant messanger doesn’t work as well without BIS!) you need to use Funambol. Funambol is a open source synchronisation server which allows you to sync your contacts, get push email from IMAP or POP3 servers and other PIM related objects like notes, tasks, etc.
The quickest way to get started is to create a free account on my.funambol.com. Be aware that the account is only active for 90 days. You can only extend the period by contributing on the Funambol project. The other possibility is to setup an own Funambol server but the how to for that will be an article on its own.
