Swinging with David in the sunshine - lemasney.com
Swinging with David in the sunshine – lemasney.com
DATE/TIME: Aug 7 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm
LOCATION: Technology Center
Spread the joy of your summer vacation by sharing memorable moments with family and friends. Technology Instructor John LeMasney will cover how to upload, organize, and edit your digital photos using Google’s Picasa. Learn how to resize, tag, add captions, create collages, and add special effects. We recommend that students bring a flash drive containing digital photos for use in class. Skill Level: Intermediate
quoted from which you can visit to sign up for this free session.
On June 26th, 2012, John LeMasney will be speaking to the Princeton PC Users Group (PPCUG) about two open source media management tools, Miro, and VLC, and their related projects, VLC editor and Miro Video Transcoder.
With these free (free as in freedom as well as free as in free pizza) tools, you’ll be able to manage, enjoy, and share the media free of proprietary restrictions you might find in other media managers and players.
John will also talk about online media managers, including Google music and Spotify.
John LeMasney is a father who lives and works in and around central New Jersey. He is the Manager of Educational Technology Training and Outreach at Princeton University since 2011. He had worked from 1998-2011 at Rider University as the Manager of Technology Training. He was recently awarded a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership with honors from Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture with honors from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
He is a designer, artist, writer, poet, technologist, consultant, open web advocate and open source evangelist. He is most interested in helping people to use technology to make their lives, work, and world better.
Urban Empire by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #stormtrooper #starwars
Select a livelihood that reflects your ethics by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
Tonight, I returned to the BCUG Graphics focused sub-group, for maybe the 4th time. I always enjoy the professionalism, humor, and attentiveness of this very special group and its memorable members. In the past, I’ve talked about open source concepts, Picasa, Sketchup, Inkscape, and other technologies.
In this visit, I came to talk about two great open source video projects, VideoLan Client (VLC) and Miro Media Player. VLC is a swiss army knife of video tools. You can play almost any codec out of the box, transcode videos from one format to another, clip portions of videos to new files, create playlists, stream video to others on your network and elsewhere, and all in a simple, configurable interface. I described VLC as being for geeks and tweakers, but it would also be apropos to say that it is a video geek’s heaven. I demonstrated a few of its more useful features, and also introduced VLC’s side project, a video editor (VLC Movie Maker) which by their own admission is pre-alpha, and not highly usable yet, but the work that they’ve done so far is amazing and delicious. I can not wait until this tool is more well-developed, so I can stop using WIndows Media and Quicktime based tools. VideoLAN is an amazing project, and I love what they do.
I also demonstrated Miro. Miro is a video player too, but a whole lot more than that. Miro is based on VLC, and so it has all of those features and then some. With Miro, you have a built in torrenting client, podcatcher, RSS manager, auto-transcoder, music cataloging, video cataloging, and video search with configurable search engines. When you do a search, you have the ability to save the search as a podcast, e.g. auto-downloaded video set. Miro also has a side project that I showed called Miro Video Transcoder. This tool is a simple one window interface that allows you to drag a pile of files onto it, and have it save them all in a format that you choose. The list of available formats is long and it does quick work.
I hope that my sharing has helped the folks at BCUG Graphics workshop to enjoy their video half as much as I enjoyed myself tonight.
I had the honor of speaking at a retreat for the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS) at Princeton University on the topic of using social media to better communicate with students and potential students. It was a lively discussion on assumptions, practices, standards, authority, authenticity, and locality. Here is my minimalist slide deck for the 2 hour-long talk.
When in doubt, visit your library, by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
I was given a great opportunity to teach people how to create great presentations.
TIMES: Jun 11 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm Jun 18 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm Jun 25 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm
LOCATION: Technology Center
Part 1 – Monday, June 11, 6:30 – 8:30 PM – Design Elements. In this session, we discussed the elements of design, bringing together color, inspiration, fonts, message, and more to create interesting, eye-catching visuals. The presentation I used is here:
Part 2 – Monday, June 18, 6:30 – 8:30 PM – A Focus on PowerPoint
Part 3 – Monday, June 25, 6:30 – 8:30 PM -Exploring Prezi & Google Docs Presentations
Learn how to incorporate design elements to create captivating, memorable, and effective slide presentations. In this three-part series, technology instructor John LeMasney will cover a variety of presentation tools and techniques, including images, colors, fonts, readability, and movement. Skill Level: Intermediate.
Taken from Designing Presentations: Beyond the Basics (A 3-Part Series) | Princeton Public Library at
On June 4th, 2012, I gave a long session on using Inkscape in-depth to the Long Island Library Regional Consortium. We discussed bitmap versus vector images, and introduced all of Inkscape’s main tools, then ran through recreating an illustration. Some feedback I got after the session included:
Speaker has extraordinary knowledge
Instructor was very open to answering questions and going over things multiple times
Overall, very well done
Very knowledgeable
Hands-on with excellent answers to our (millions) of questions
Very detailed instructor
Excellent intro to new capabilities
The instructional concept in using inkscape/graphic design (was a strength)
