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Making Sense of the Google Chromebook (September 3rd in Ewing)

Presenting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Presenting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

“Making Sense of the Google Chromebook” Free Computer Program September 3

20110805
Color study (Photo credit: lemasney)

Ewing, NJ:   “Why would I want a laptop that only runs a browser?”  This is the critical question New Jersey technology consultant and graphic designer John LeMasney will explore when he presents The Computer Learning Center’s newest, free Computer Tips and Tricks program on Tuesday, September 3.   “Making Sense of the Google Chromebook” will begin at 2 p.m. in the Ewing Senior and Community Center at 999 Lower Ferry Road. It will be preceded at 1:30 p.m. by a question and answer session during which the audience can direct computer questions to the CLC’s all-volunteer faculty.  Both programs are free and no prior registration is required.
            “Come learn why I stopped carrying around my MacBook Pro and exchanged it for a Chromebook, Google’s low-cost laptop that runs just one application,” says LeMasney. “Chrome begins to make a lot of sense when you look at several converging factors, namely, the increasing availability of high-speed connectivity, the emergence of applications and cloud-based services for real-world functionality, and the ability to stay connected in rather light ways.  I plan to look at both why the Chromebook works for me and the incredible power of this platform, but also why keeping a MacBook around still makes sense for some things.”
              John LeMasney describes himself as an artist, designer, technologist, and consultant whose passion is to help people use technology in sensible ways to enhance their work and life.   His career most recently included work as Manager of Technology Training at Rider University where he assisted faculty, staff and students in integrating technology into their work, classroom, and extracurricular activities.  A Fine Arts graduate of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership with distinction from Rider University, as well as LPI Level One Certification in Linux Administration.
       The non-profit Computer Learning Center at Ewing, which sponsors the Computer Tips and Tricks programs as a public service, also offers a variety of PC and iPad computer skills courses for adults in central New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.  For further information about the September 3 program, courses or directions, call 609-882-5086, 609-883-1776, Ext. 6205 or visit the CLC website at www.clcewing.org.

[flexiblemap address=”999 Lower Ferry Road, Ewing, NJ”]

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Teaching Scratch Training: Getting started with Block Programming

design hashtag
design hashtag

On Teaching Scratch Training

This afternoon, I taught some young, bright people how to get started with Scratch, MIT’s block programming application, at Princeton Public Library. Scratch training is a regular offering there. Block programming is a ‘lego-style’ approach to programming where you drag and drop functions from a predetermined set to develop a program. For example, you can have a character, called a sprite, dance back and forth on a canvas, jump when you hit a key on your keyboard, and flip when it touches another character.

Scratch Training (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Scratch Training (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over a few weeks, I’m going to introduce the basics of Scratch, using their own great tutorial resources. My focus was their Scratch Cards, simple tutorials that allow beginners to quickly gain an understanding of things that you can do. http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Scratch_Cards

Richard Stallman
Cover of Richard Stallma

I was particularly excited to share the easy way in which you can look at other Scratch projects that other scratchers have shared. You can visit those projects and play them as they were programmed, but you can also open them up in the editor, save a local copy to your own projects (called remixing) and begin making improvements of your own. I do this all the time in order to build upon the work of others, perhaps the key benefit of open source software, a key idea celebrated by Scratch. It makes sense that MIT manages this project, as Free Software and the idea of openness and transparency in software was born with MIT’s own Richard Stallman.

Next week, we’ll be coming back to share the projects that we came up with to explore how we can each use Scratch to scratch our own itch. Can’t wait!

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An introduction to Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and open source hardware.

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)

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyp...
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. In other words you can build all kinds of cool shit with it. And yes, you can program it with Python 🙂 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (Photo credit: tkramm)

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.

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Google Analytics and targeted campaigns.

open_waveform by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
open_waveform by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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 v2.0
Google Analytics v2.0 (Photo credit: vrypan)

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.

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Tonight at PPL: Food Blogging, or sharing your passion for rations.

David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)

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!

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Recent design work and upcoming projects

K2 Capital Advisors logo (lemasney consulting)
K2 Capital Advisors logo (lemasney consulting)

Two recent projects have been keeping me busy, and now that they are complete I wanted to share some of the effort, thought, and outcomes of the projects.

First, I was lucky enough to do some work for AirTight (a popular retail wifi management and security solutions company) on an infographic explaining some reasons to consider products like theirs if you are a retail wifi outlet like JCPenney or Panera. This was a great project with a few twists and turns, lots of collaboration, and joy in the design of the visual iconography. Here’s a portion of the work as it was in progress, before we readjusted for layout, lead-in, and other tweaks:

Airtight Infographic: 8 ways to secure retail wifi (lemasney)
Airtight Infographic: 8 ways to secure retail wifi (lemasney)

Another project was a branding project for a long-time friend and colleague, Adnan Shamsi, who was looking to define the look, feel, and ideology behind his new capital advising firm, K2. We made a design that used the palette, emotional reinforcement, and spirit of the amazing K2 range, a lovely story telling analogy for financial awareness and guidance.

K2 Capital Advisors logo (lemasney consulting)
K2 Capital Advisors logo (lemasney consulting)

What’s next for LeMasney Consulting? I’m going to be continuing the technology classes at Princeton Public Library in July, August and next semester. I’m excited to be talking about food blogging, Scratch, Android, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and lots of other interesting topics. Also, I will be teaching at Rider University and Princeton Adult School in the Fall! More info as I have it to give. Thanks as always for your support.

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