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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

If you follow my Instagram or my Flickr photos, you'll know that I have a lot of old equipment along with some new stuff. I talked about both of those types of equipment and also about how we are setting up behind the scenes recording "Heritage and Stories" with the Tipperary libraries. This is important because I'm hoping that some of the people who join us--young kids on the youth media team and the librarians that are part of the staff--might listen to this Topgold Audio Clip and learn what's happening behind the scenes.

[Using Rode Wireless II as Laptop Mic]

Wireless Rig Number One

We're trying to put mics onto the lapels or onto the collars of people who want to share stories about heritage points around Clonmel. We're using square Rode Wireless Go II microphones. They can send audio hundred of metres away to a receiver that is wired into my Android handset. I call this setup "Rig Number One". I can make this rig work with an iPhone as well.

On Android, I use HiQ MP3. On iOS I use Voice Record Pro. As soon as a clip is recorded, it goes up to a Google Drive location where someone can edit the file or catalogue it with the name of the file, the date the people talking on it, and anything else that provides context.

So Rig Number One was just using the wireless mics clipped onto the lapels of the people and then the receiver for the wireless mic is cabled into the bottom of either an iPhone or an Android phone. The cabling and the 3.5 mm jacks make this setup work. We use a cable with two 3.5 mm pins on each end. We need a 3.5 millimetre pin to plug into the Rode Wireless Go receiver. We need another 3.5 mm pin to plug into the phone. Because iPhones don't have the 3.5 millimetre hole, we use a lightning-to-3.5 mm adapter cable.

This cabling can confuse people. And cables can get lost. They can break. Or fittings might become loose. Fortunately, the Rode Wireless Go receiver shows the signal strength. You can see a blue light on the transmitter that appears when the unit is communicating. The Rode Wireless Go Receiver shows green and yellow moving lines when it receives a good audio signal. And the recording app on the handset displays lights or levels.

Rig Number Two

We use a Zoom H6 field recorder with a X-Y module on the top of it that accepts the cables from the Rode Wireless Go II receiver. In my experience, it is easier to record with traditional gear such as Zoom recorders. You just push cables into fittings, press the record button, and monitor the recording as it's underway. We have cables and mics for two other positions when using the Zoom H6. This means we can record two people with the Rode mics, and two more people with the mics stored in the field case with the Zoom H6.

You can hear how all of this sounds by following Tipperary Heritage and Stories wherever you listen to fine audio.

Listen to "Lessons In Wireless Recording E605" on Spreaker.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus.]

edtech

Reposted from Dan York;s Disruptive Conversations

“How do I choose which Mastodon server to join? It’s SO CONFUSING! I just want to sign up to ‘Mastodon’!”

This seems to be a common refrain from some people exploring Mastodon as part of the Twitter migration/exodus.

The reality is that the Mastodon server you join is most important in the beginning when you are trying to discover new users. Over time, and as you follow more and more people, the server you are on becomes less important.

via www.disruptiveconversations.com

Find Bernie @topgold@micro.blog or follow me at https://topgold.micro.blog/subscribe/

The comfort of a crisp pie crust and warm gooey filling has a comforting combination. I have previously shared my Snyder Family Pie Crust Recipe, but this post is about how to make a simple pie crust that works for...

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Photo by Daniel Oberhaus. Insights by Fintan O'Toole.

I'M ADDING CONTENT from today's Irish Times opinion column because the commentary by Fintan O'Toole helps explain the demise of Twitter, a social networking site I've used since 2006.

Irish Times Opinion by Fintan O'Toole Musk's tantrum capitalism explodes myth of bucaneering liberarianism.

It used to be cocaine that was, as Robin Williams had it, God’s way of telling you that you have too much money. Now it’s buying Twitter for $44 billion and setting fire to it.

But perhaps there is some continuity here. Both drugs heighten the sense of invincibility you feel while you are making a complete fool of yourself.

Elon Musk has made himself the idiot savant of our times, half genius, all man-child. Yet he has, in the process, illuminated two important truths about contemporary culture.

The first is that there really is such a thing as having too much money. Right-wing economics is based on the belief that the super-rich will ultimately use their vast wealth for the common good. Musk seems to have set out to disprove this thesis by a spectacular demonstration of the wanton wastefulness of excessive riches.

We’re living in an age of grotesque inequality in which a tiny number of people have cornered a vast share of the wealth. We’re no longer even talking about the top 1 per cent, or the top 0.1 per cent. Or even the top 0.01 per cent.

Musk belongs, rather, to the top 0.001 per cent in the United States. That’s 2,400 people who had (in 2016, the latest year for which there are such detailed calculations) $1,631,821,000 between them.

The theory is that these are the “wealth-creators” whose accumulation of such astronomical riches somehow benefits all of humanity. They are the Medicis or the Carnegies of our time.

Agent Musk has set out, presumably on behalf of the worldwide communist conspiracy, to explode such notions. For he has shown – like a global version of our own Seán Quinn – that there is a level of accumulation beyond which “wealth-creators” become wealth-destroyers.

It may well be true that, up to a point, the profit motive drives innovation. But profit gets boring. Too much of it leads to satiety and saturation.

A much more potent and primitive force takes over: megalomania. Beyond the satisfaction of basic needs, beyond security and comfort, there is the search for status, the need to be number one.

And this drive is unbounded. The manic ego knows no limits. Its hunger for domination is insatiable. It eventually takes the shape of an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail.

It becomes, even by the very narrow measure of money, destructive. Musk has managed, not just to incinerate his own investment in Twitter, but has seen the value of its main enterprise, Tesla fall by half.

The top 10 investors in Tesla have alone lost $133 billion since Twitter’s board accepted Musk’s buyout in April. It must surely be dawning on them by now that, even for lovers of buccaneering capitalism, the madness induced by excessive wealth corrodes the very thing it seeks.

We also have to thank Musk for exposing the myth of libertarian devotion to free speech. His fairytale transformations from self-declared “free speech absolutist” to whiny little snowflake to authoritarian censor is this season’s premature Christmas panto in which the whole Twitter sphere gets to call out: “Oh no he isn’t.”

It has long been obvious that the libertarian commitment to free expression is mostly one-sided: I have absolute freedom to say what I like but if you answer back, you are oppressing me. For the over-privileged (and yes they are still nearly all rich white men) “free speech” really means “Shut up and listen to me.”

Yet no one has managed to make this point so clearly and memorably as Agent Musk. What he got for his $44 billion is a big red card to wave at his enemies and rivals and send them off the pitch.

Presumably he got jealous of Antonio Mateu Lahoz, the referee who issued 15 yellow cards in the Argentina-Netherlands match at the World Cup. Musk needed to prove he could be an even more ridiculous martinet. It does not seem to have occurred to him that if he keeps sending people off there will be no one left to play the game.

Musk banned an account that uses public information to track his private jet and those of Russian oligarchs. Then he banned journalists, some (like Donie O’Sullivan) more or less randomly, some (like Linette Lopez) because they have been reporting critically on his business practices. Then he banned links to the rival social media platform Mastodon.

This is tantrum capitalism. Any notion of making Twitter a profitable business comes a very distant second to the instant self-gratification of banishing the insolent and the impertinent from the perfect realm of Musk’s digital Freedonia.

Rampant egomania is not creation. It is not even, in the jargon of neoliberalism, creative destruction. It is merely destruction.

The (not unreasonable) criticism of Twitter used to be that it is an echo chamber. Yet, in the Greek myth, Echo was ultimately destroyed by Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. At the end of the story, the echo and the narcissist both withered away and died.

Musk has provided 21st-century feral capitalism with its own moral tale of self-destruction. The narcissism that springs from excess wealth kills the thing it loves most: itself.

[Opinion column written by Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, December 20, 2022. Links inserted by Bernie Goldbach to aid in classroom discussion with a class of students studying digital transformation. Paper copies of this opinion piece have been archived in the Clonmel library of the Technological University of the Shannon.]

becoming

By Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

WE WERE A CAMPING family several years before COVID and as a teen, I spent several weekends in a snow-covered campsite. I'm thinking about these passages of time as I head to the annual Media Literacy Ireland conference where I will learn about programmes to alert people to the importance of fact-checking things such as the challenges of winter weather.

The current Irish winter has been very challenging. I've slipped twice on black ice. On Irish social media there's a story going around about a young girl who died in a tent in Dublin. The story is plausible. During COVID, two homeless people were found dead in Dublin and the current winter weather is a lot worse than in 2020.

Although the temperatures can be fact-checked, the story of the young girl passing away in a tent cannot be confirmed. And yet several far-right groups and conspiracy theorists have lionised the imaginary woman to buttress their anti-immigration agendas.

Throughout 2023, Media Literacy Ireland will be publicising campaigns that encourage people to look at the sources of information around them. During the next semester, I'm guiding 40 people through a series of topics related to digital transformation and emerging trends. Those students will see first hand how they can filter information to offset the powerful effects of algorithms that promote content merely because many people have read it or upvoted it.

We need to be more responsible with information we see online, perhaps by cross-checking its sources before we share it or electronically indicate we like it.

Bernie Goldbach teaches digital transformation on the Clonmel Digital Campus.

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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

MY MOST VALUABLE tool for creating and curating content is the Microsoft Surface Book. I cannot overstate its value.

DISCLOSURE: Unconstrained and Open Tech

My year-long use of the Microsoft Surface Book comes with an important user notice. Unlike all other devices on my university campus, my Surface Book is not locked down. I have full Admin privileges on it and that alone saves me countless hours. I can set up and run programs without queuing for tech support. This streamlined access has allowed me to test and tweak dozens of applications before setting them up for use by my students in higher education lab sessions.

[Walking around classroom with Surface Camera] Beauty of Windows Hello

I'm up and running with my laptop without having to type in a user name and password. The Windows Hello service authenticates me locally. If I need cloud access, I get that through the MSFT Authenticator on my Samsung phone. I've set up several user accounts on the Surface Book so Windows Hello also works with my teenaged daughter.

Unfinished Business

As I approach the end of another academic year, I need to cross-check how the Surface Book has been automatically uploading content into my personal OneDrive and into the campus SharePoint services. There are gems inside specific folders that I will be able to revise and reuse as I prepare coursework for another cohort of students.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus.]

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I WANT TO recap 2022--an important year because we finally restored face-to-face communities--before the end of the month so I'm making a public proclamation of my intentions. Starting with me acknowledging that I need to change some of my underlying processes. More on that later.

My Reading List

I want to share what's on my bookshelves because I've discovered some of the titles I enjoy also resonate well with my daughters and with my father-in-law.

Things that made my year

I want to list 10 things that made 2022 special for me. My reference point is where I'm spending most of my time and if those things count, I have to ensure the Surface Book, my Samsung Note 9, Obsidian, Stoop inbox, Top Drawer Journalism, YouTube, Readwise, Moodle, and Flickr get mentioned.

Big accomplishment using OneNote

Secret Sentences

I inscribe a sentence in the front of all my Moleskines and my Leuchtturm journals. I should share them with readers when I publish my end-of-year post.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches digital transformation on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Technological University of the Shannon.]

Each year, I share some of the brilliant things we’ve purchased that calendar year as well as things that will be under our Christmas tree. You can see those older posts under my Gift Ideas category. Today, I am sharing...

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