These are groups, organizations and projects with which LeMasney Consulting is proudly affiliated with through work or other connections. We stand for the same things as the organizations featured in these posts.
This is the 2013 series premiere of Technology and the Arts, a webcast exploring the connections between technology and art. Co-hosts Brian Kelley and John LeMasney discuss Arduino, Raspberry Pi and a study on how technology can be used to teach young people about creating art. For more information, visit http://technologyandthearts.com.
At 7 pm, on Monday August 5th, 2013, I’ll be at Princeton Public Library, I’m going to be giving an introductory overview of open source hardware, the Make movement, and the ideology of openness. In particular, I’ll be talking about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and related hardware projects.
(post event note: Thanks to everyone who came out, and here is the link to the presentation)
The Arduino is an electronics learning platform. The instructions for how to make one from scratch are freely available, which is why it is considered open source hardware, though many people find it far easier and supportive to the platform to just buy one. You can get them at your local Radio Shack. Once you have it connected to a computer, you can begin to program it or run programs that others have made for it, called sketches. The key idea with Arduino is that you program it to accept input from sensors or scripts, and to produce output in the form of light, sound, and other signals. With this basic idea, you can use the Arduino to solve little problems like knowing when the Dryer has stopped, feeding your animals reasonably while you are away, or making sophisticated environment based games.
The Raspberry Pi is perhaps a simpler idea for the uninitiated: a computer capable of doing most anything your laptop, desktop, tablet or phone can do (given the monitor, keyboard and mouse) available for $25-$35 dollars, depending on model. Because of the incredibly low price but relatively strong computing power, you can use the Pi to do all kinds of interesting things that you would not consider doing with your desktop or laptop machine. Running home automation, media servers, dedicated graphics workstations, an email terminal, a streaming media interface for your TV, and much more.
Hi, all! This week, I have some interesting projects going on, and I wanted to share them with you and invite you to join me.
On Monday, July 22nd (and 29th), 2013, I’ll be starting a two part class on Google Analytics at Princeton Public Library. This is my first opportunity to talk publicly about the power of GA, and I’m really excited. This series will be focused on getting started for beginners, but if you are like me you know that even seasoned experts learn something new in a beginner’s class, so please come out and join us from 7-8:30 in the Tech Center at PPL.
Google Analytics is an insight engine. By adding a little bit of javascript to each of your pages in your site, you tell Google to track activity on your site that can lead to insights about your content. Because you can learn where your audience is viewing your content from, you can tell if you need to focus more on local content or remote content. Because you can tell what your most popular content is, you can focus on the issues that matter to your audience most. Because you can track which pages are being visited specifically, you can learn how effective a particular link or advertisement is or not. These are just a few of the things that you can do with Analytics, but over the next two weeks we will learn many more.
I’m using Analytics in work with a client right now in order to tell if a particular ad campaign is effective or not so that they can focus their money and energy in the most productive way. If we are using two different methods or advertising channels to get people to take the same action, let’s say to click a link or watch a video, we can tell easily after a week of clicks which method was more effective and by how much. We could also look at visits in two comparative time periods to see if one method was more or less effective than another during a particular month or season. Outdoor advertising might not work as well as other methods during a very cold winter month, for example. With Analytics, we don’t have to guess or assume that to be true, we could deduct that from the data.
If this is interesting to you, please consider yourself invited! If you’d like to see what other classes and content I like to teach, or if you’d like to have me come to your organization to speak or consult, please visit the Presentations and Topics page.
Hi, everyone! Tonight at 7pm at Princeton Public Library, I’ll be explaining the who, what, when, why, where, and how of food blogging. I’ll be talking about best practices, tools, reasoning, methods, and more. Please join us in the chilly technology center at PPL!
Saturday, June 15, 2013
7:30pm until 8:15pm
In this session, local graphic designer and technology consultant John LeMasney will demonstrate how to get started with digital graphic design using free (open source) software, and will introduce the concepts of color choice, font choice, visual inspiration, best practices, and resources. If you ever find yourself tasked with putting words and images on a page in an interesting way, but have never had any training in how to do that effectively, this class is for you!
May 14, 2013 – 7:00pm -8:30pm
Interested in creating your own blog? In this two-part course, social media and technology expert, John LeMasney will teach how to start and manage a blog for free through WordPress. Prior web design experience is not needed. Session 2 will be held on Tuesday, May 21.
Skill Level: Basic
No registration necessary
We’re back…August 5!
PiCast Offers Chromecast Functionality for Raspberry Pi
Getting Started with Nodebots
Google Analytics: Free or Premium?
The Graphic Design Experience Every Student Needs to Succeed
Blogging platform WordPress celebrates 10th birthday
