Well, so much for doing this weekly. But here’s another go at it!

For making some pretty snazy presentations, or graphical representations of data, you can use http://prezi.com/ From their site: “With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.” I imagine this being very useful for historians as a way to visualize their narrative. Move from quote to image to video to audio. You could take a book and condense it down into a 10 minute presentation, using appropriate quotes, some images, and movies if you got em. A good way to introduce a topic, I would think. Perhaps I’ll throw together something and post it back later.

Quietube – send links to youtube, but without all of the comments, ads, and other videos to clutter and distract. When you visit a youtube video, just click the quietube link you previously added to your bookmarks folder. All of the distractions vanish!

An interesting way to let others know where you are in a book, and which books you are reading. You can use it for yourself too, if you don’t have one of those old fashioned paper book marks.From their site: “bkkeepr lets you track your reading and bookmark on the go, via the web and SMS. Want to remember what you read? Want to share your dog-eared pages, and see what everyone else dog-eared? Love LibraryThing, but are always forgetting to add your books? bkkeepr helps you do it, wherever you are.” So, basically, a way to let a website keep track of what books you’re reading and where you are in the books, made simple by sending a quick SMS.

This week is much more historical…

Goodies #1: Traveler IQ Challenge – Test your knowledge of geography as it is today not 100 years ago (there’s the history tie-in). I’m not so good. I can’t get past the 6 level…

Goodies #2: New York Divided – This one is all about history. It’s even from the History Channel. It’s an amazingly beautiful animation about New York’s ties with slavery. Very well done.

Goodies #3: Randomwocky – You’ve all heard the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, and know of the many made up words. I thought it would be fun to re-create the poem using randomly generated consonant-vowel-consonant groupings. It makes the poem even more nonsensical in places, but some of the ‘new’ words are funny!

I almost forgot for this week, but found some stuff today, so here goes….

And a small disclaimer, or explanation first. Instead of just making this a list of cool stuff out there, I’m going to try to tie it into the field of history or academia. That will get me to think a bit more and hopefully stay true to my desires to have this blog about history and new media.

So… First off we have a couple of gadgets, of the software kind:

Gadget #1: Paintbrush. [Mac only] Have you ever wanted to just make a quick drawing or picture in Mac. It’s not that easy without Paintbrush. It gives Mac users a semblance of Microsoft Paint. Now, what’s the application to history, et al.? Ummm… I don’t know either. I’ll get a strike for this one…

Gadget #2: Skitch.com This is a new service that allows you to quickly take an image and annotate, draw, and share. You can grab photos from your iPhoto library, take screen shots, or import images. When you’re done drawing and such, you can upload it to your own account on skitch.com and share your photos. Check out my test photo at http://skitch.com/mossiso/ This might come in handy as another way for historians to share photos and their ideas. A teacher could upload some images and draw specific things… yeah, it’s a stretch too.

Tip #1: US National Archives Research Online and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. OK, OK, here’s a real tip for the historians. I’ve been looking for some information on the “Quarz” project started by the Nazis in late 1944. There is supposedly some photos at the National Archives, but I haven’t found them yet. I was tipped off to this topic by a friend and co-PhD student at GMU who works at USHMM. She knew of some nice had drawn maps that relate to project Quarz. So I took some digital copies of these maps, and want to use them in a project this semester. The above linked resources help in searching for documents, images, etc.

Well, the tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies were a bit lacking this week. Enjoy what you can of it.

So, here it is. The second week of TTGG. I found a bunch of things this week. Enjoy!

Goodies #1: There’s a lot of hype lately about Twitter. Don’t understand it? Here’s a video that explains it in plain English. [Google Video] It still seems a little tooooo much for me. I don’t want to know what someone is doing every minute of the day, and I don’t want to have to update my info all of the time too. I’m an old fashioned tech-noob.

Goodies #2: We’ve got no T.V. at home. It’s a conscious and wise decision. It means more time to spend with each other, reading books etc. But we get the hankerin’ for some media entertainment every once in a while. I looked on pbs.org last night and found a cool show with good quality video feeds: Wired Science. The best were the “What’s Inside” segments featuring Chris Hardwick. He’s a pretty funny guy.

Gadgets #1: http://www.scribd.com/ This is a cool project for getting your documents in a viewable format without having to worry about programs. It will take a pdf, word document, power point, and anything from OpenOffice or the OpenDocument format, and display it in your web browser (using Flash and JavaScript). I’m thinking this will be ideal for letting people view research papers and such on a digital historians site. It would be cool to see this in JStor as well. Their current interface is a little clunky (one page at a time, slow loads, no text copy, etc). It would probably be even easier for them to get content on their site. Come to think of it, this would be great for any online journal.

They call it iPaper (everybody’s on this “i” bandwagon), and have a platform version available for you to embed the service on your own website. Look for it here one of these days.

Tip #1: Change your Leopard Dock even more using the LeopardDocks App from LeopardDocks.com I like the jet black look.

Trick #1: (not really sure what the difference between a tip and a trick is, but it allowed alliteration and acronyms to work) Take a quick snapshot of your screen in Mac OS X. Hit the Command-Shift-4 keys at the same time, and your mouse becomes a cross hair. Click some where, drag the box, and bing-o! a picture on your desktop appears. Quick and easy!

TipTrick #2: Get different languages in your Mac OSX dictionary. It makes looking up words in other languages easy. And, for the second part of this tiptrick, some people use QuickSilver for fast application launching and fancy program work. I haven’t had the time to figure it out, but stumbled upon an easy built in tool that works similar: SpotLight. Hit Command-SpaceBar and start typing. Type “Firef” and Firefox is your first result, hit enter and it opens the application right up! You can change the preferences as to what shows up first, and what shows at all. Type in a word, and SpotLight will give you a definition. Nice! Now the fingers seldom leave the keyboard!

I think I’ll try and start a weekly tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies post. It will cover the neat-o things in the tech world that I come across during the week that don’t have a whole lot to do with history, but are fun nay-the-less.

Tip #1: Custom Leopard stacks and drawer images
Tutorial for customizing your stacks icons.

make a new folder, name it “0000″ for sorting by name, or “touch -mt 2020010101 foldername” for sorting by date added.
copy the image from Get Info, paste int onto the Get Info for the new folder.

Add your own image to your drawer using the steps shown here at usingmac.com.

And you get something like above.

Goody #1: Geotag your photos
Check out the Geotag application which is helpful for spatially locating your great photographs when your camera has no GPS built in.