I got the following note from my friend, Marlo Schuldt, this morning. It seems that they are having a holiday family reunion this evening, and Marlo is determined to involve his daughter and her family, who are away at medical school in Buffalo, New York. So he’s planning to involve them using his computer, television, and some high-tech tinkering… I’ll do an update later in the week on how this works out for him…
All our kids will be here with the exception of daughter number 2, her husband and four children. They are far away in Buffalo New York attending medical school. At this time of year that’s hard on us since we can’t all be together as in years past. Kind of tugs at the old heart strings of this grandpa just a bit since they will be missin’ an important family event.
Here’s my plan which will push the bounds of technology just a little. However, that seems to have been the trend of my whole life so what’s new!
I’m currently doing a crash push to make a slide show in Heritage Collector. Leanna created a script and I recorded her yesterday and edited the sound files this morning. I’m now busily importing photos and associating each sound file with the image in the slide show. This part is relatively easily and I even learned how to use Audacity to filter out the loud fan noise from the notebook fan I accidentally recorded since the notebook was too close to Leanna which I didn’t notice until very early this morning. No time to do it again.
Here my plan to use technology to make the kids in New York a part of our annual Christmas party even though they are for away in Buffalo.
1. Connect my notebook to the big screen (HD) TV for the family to see and hear the presentation here.
2. Test to see if internal mic on the notebook will pick up the sound. If not I will attach an external mic and put the mic near one of the speakers.
3. Fire up Skype and do a video call to the kids in New York.
4. Use the “Share Desktop” option in Skype allowing them to see whatever comes up on my notebook screen. This will be Heritage Collector running the slide show. This should give much better image quality than facing the notebook to the TV using the video camera. The microphone should pick up the sound.In theory this should all work.
They have DSL with can be a bit flaky at times but should work.
I’m taking one other precaution. I’m going to attach the notebook to our network using the network cable so I should get a better stream than using the wireless connection in the notebook. I’m also going to shut down all the other computers on the network so I will have the best bandwidth possible on this end which should make the stream a little better.
I will give all of you a report later in the week of what happened so you can do the same thing with your family
Mister Wizard (in training)
Marlo
