John Jonas Blog» Technology

How to record a webinar using Camtasia Studio

John — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:19:44 +0000

I know this is a bit off topic from my usual, but I’ve talked to so many people about this and nobody seems to have a good solution.

Here are the steps I use to get PERFECT video AND AUDIO gotowebinar or gotomeeting recordings using Camtasia.

Get Virtual Audio Cable.
You have to use the full version because the demo version won’t let you create enough audio repeaters.
You have to use this so you can record the webinar sound.
Set up Virtual Audio Cable like this:

You’re really just setting up 4 “audio repeaters.”
Open “Audio Repeater” windows
You need to open up 4 “Audio Repeater” windows from the Virtual Audio Cable menu
Set up the “Audio Repeater’s” like this:

What you’re doing with this is redirecting the different sounds from your computer so it can be recorded with camtasia. You now have your microphone’s input and Virtual Cable 2 going to “Virtual Cable 3.”
Redirect GoToWebinar/GoToMeeting to Virtual Cable 2.
Click on “File” -> “Preferences” -> “Audio”
Leave your microphone selected for the microphone, but change the “Speakers Setup” to send sound to “Virtual Cable 2.”
Modify Camtasia Studio audio recording settings
Open up Camtasia Recorder. Click on “Tools” -> “Options” -> “Audio”
Then change the Audio device to be “Virtual Cable 3″ like this:
Start all of the Audio Repeaters
You’ll need to plug in a headset.
If you use speakers for your sound, the audio from the webinar will play through your mic and you’ll get an echo
Start or join a webinar or meeting on GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
Hit record on Camtasia

With this setup you should get a fantastic recording of both your voice (straight from your microphone) and the voice of anyone else participating in the webinar (straight from GTW/GTM).

My Remote Control Toilet Seat

John — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:26:37 +0000

Get Flash to see this player.

Since I was on a roll with my blog, I thought I’d also talk about the most recent technology that changed my life.

Night light…
Heated Seat…
Heated Water…
Pressure Control…
Heated Air (For after…)
Settings for Him, Settings for Her…

It’s Perfect!

We were playing Apples to Apples the other night and the green card “Perfect” came up. My wife, knowing my experience with my new toilet seat, put down the card “My Bathroom” and I instantly declared her the winner.

You can see more here:
Swash Intro
and
This one’s really funny (warning…you’ll see some bum’s)
I bought mine here (It’s significantly cheaper than anywhere else online).

Enjoy!

Update: After posting this I got an email from Brondell who said that my story is the reason they started the company. So they could help people like me!

The Unthinkable Just Happened – 6 Years Of Digital Pictures…Gone!

John — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:44:02 +0000

Get Flash to see this player.

Fortunately, I had about 16 different backups of them…so it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

But, what if that just happened to you?

What if your hard drive failed?
What if Windows just went crazy and won’t boot?
What if your computer just failed and you can’t turn it on?
What if you got a virus that wiped out your data?

Would you lose all the digital pictures of your kids? Would you lose years of work? Home movies? Contacts? Excel Docs? Bookmarks? Emails?

My hard drive that just failed was less than 6 months old.

This was probably the 8th hard drive I’ve had fail in the past 8 years.

HARD DRIVES FAIL!!! It’s only a matter of time…PERIOD. Every hard drive WILL fail.

This post is about being prepared for that.

If you’re not making regular backups of your computer, you are literally playing Russian roulette.

So, let me tell you the things I do, the things you can do right now to take care of this so you can sleep better at night:

1. Use Mozy. It costs $5/month for unlimited automatic backups. You set it up initially (which, shouldn’t take you very long because it will automatically backup lots of documents for you) and then it goes to work. Every day it backs up the stuff that has changed on your computer since the last time it made a backup.
You MUST do off-site backups! Mozy accomplishes this for you automatically. You never have to think about it again.

2. Buy a 500GB external hard drive like this:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/857763
or even:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/856410
(**Note**: Both of those links go to fatwallet.com where people have found a great deal on something.)
Most large external hard drives will make automatic backups of your computer for you. They come with software for it.

Now, you have an automatic backup that happens every day that’s attached to your computer. If your computer fails, you can immediately restore your data.
If your house burns down, or floods, or your computer gets Kool-aid spilt on it, you also have a backup online that you can download (mozy).

Doing both of these things will take you less than 1 hour, and you will be protected against data loss.

3. Now, how about your website? Do you back that up too?

Oh, your hosting company makes backups for you?

WRONG!!!

Don’t ever trust your hosting company to make backups for you. They don’t do them as often as they say they do, their backups are rarely complete, and I’ve seen them screw up backups multiple times.

I use rsync to make backups of my web hosting accounts.

I use RIBS to manage what rsync does (rsync is an exceptionally complicated program. RIBS is a php script that will run rsync for you and gives you ton’s of options). This is something that would be a perfect task to give to one of the guys you hire in the Philippines to have them implement for you (or maybe someone on elance?).

I set up RIBS on a $6/month hosting account, and it backs up all my other hosting accounts. I set it up to back them up every 8 hours.

4. Do you backup your cell phone? Why not?
Look at this:
http://lifehacker.com/software/cell-phones/backup-your-cell-phone-data-with-bitpim-174785.php
Here’s how I do it on my blackberry. I use Funambol to sync my contacts to ScheduleWorld. I do this because it can happen over the air, so I don’t have to plug in my blackberry in order to back it up.

5. I use Flickr.com to do another backup of my digital pictures and videos. It’s $25/year for an unlimited account, it’s a great backup of my pictures and it puts my pictures online for easy sharing, and they have good tools for easy uploading.

There are 3 keys to remember in setting up these backups:
1. It has to be automated. If you have to do it yourself, it won’t get done.
2. It has to be reliable. Make sure you have multiple backups.
3. It has to be regular. Don’t make backups once a month. Imaging losing a whole month’s work.

Opening and Managing 2 Google Accounts in the Same Browser

John — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:20:49 +0000

This is a follow-up to my post about why IE sucks so much.

I figured out how to not use IE, and still be able to open multiple google (or gmail) accounts in Firefox at the same time.

I had two different people tell me to use FF and Safari, which Apple just released for windows.

I figured out how to do it in Firefox using profiles, along with a short hack.

Normally, when you open up multiple Firefox windows, they share the same cookie data. If you’re logged in to one account on a website, and you open up another browser, you are automatically logged into that same account on that same website automatically. This is designed behavior in Firefox.

To set this up to work first you need to create 2 profiles.

Close all your firefox windows
do Start -> Run and then run this command: “c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox” -ProfileManager
Create another profile using the profile manager
Create a shortcut to user your second profile (you need to know what you named it, and it is case sensitive)
Right click on the firefox icon on your desktop and select “create shortcut”
Right click on the new icon and select properties
The target field in the new window is something like: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”. Change it to be: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -P “YourProfileName” (where YourProfileName is the name of the new profile you just created)

You’re now done creating the profiles.

Now, you need to do the small hack.

Go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables -> System Variables -> New

In the 2 boxes, put MOZ_NO_REMOTE and 1 (so you are setting the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1) and click ok, ok, ok.

That’s it. When you open firefox normally (with the normal icon) it will open your default profile.
When you click on the second shortcut (the one you just made), it will open your second profile.

The two magically don’t share cookies, and now you can login to 2 gmail accounts at the same time, without using IE.

This will also work with any other site (not just gmail and google accounts) that requires you to login.

[tags]open two google accounts,open two gmail accounts, manage multiple accounts[/tags]

Why does Internet Explorer suck so much?

John — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:21:36 +0000

Can someone please tell me?

I mean, this is ridiculous.

I have quite a few google accounts that I spend a significant amount of time in.

I hate logging in and out of each of them, so I open up different browser windows that allow different cookie sessions and I don’t have to log out of one to log into another.

By default I use Firefox.

But, when I need another google account open, I have to open IE because it doesn’t share cookies.

However, IE always crashes!

It just freezes my computer. The mouse works fine, but nothing else responds (not even ctrl-alt-del).

Recently I’ve been able to track this problem specifically to IE causing the problem.

So, here’s my question (I actually have 2 questions):

Why can’t a piece of software that you’ve been working on for 89 years and that is an “integral” part of your operating system, just work?

Seriously, why can’t it just be a nice, functioning, leave my computer alone and don’t crash, piece of software?

My second question: Can someone help me with a different solution?

Browsing an S3 account

John — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:15:07 +0000

A little bit ago I wrote a php program to backup the data on my linux computer (I know, I know…all the linux geeks are swearing at me for how stupid I am…I just don’t care).

I hooked it into S3 when that came out so I could have reliable remote backups. The only problem was that I couldn’t find a good application to manage my s3 account without writing one myself.

I tried an ajax approach, but I couldn’t get it to work (too hot).

I tried ficillio.us but it didn’t work how I wanted (too cold).

Finally, I found a firefox extension for s3 (just right!).

It’s just like an ftp program, except it works in firefox. It also works very well on linux.

Perfect!

Berry411 for Blackberry: Awesome

John — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:15:40 +0000

I just downloaded and started using Berry411 on my blackberry.

It is SOOOO well done.

Previously I always used google maps mobile to do any 411 lookups I needed but from now on, it’s Berry411.

The 10 searches I’ve done so far have given me

better results than google maps
faster results than google maps
more options than google maps
more information than google maps

It remembers your addresses and automatically searches for things near them.

It has a database of words so when I typed in “pan” it gave me “panda express” as an option of what I wanted to search for.

It lets me search yellow pages, white pages, google, weather, shopping, movies, sports, all with one click!

Not to mention the (currently) 95 plugins for it that make searching all kinds of stuff easier.

Definitely a must have for a blackberry.

[tags]blackberry, blackberry applications, berry411[/tags]

Amazon EC2 – Scalable Servers On Demand

John — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:36:25 +0000

I heard about this about a month ago but wasn’t sure when they would release it.

Last night I got an email from Amazon announcing the beta release of EC2.

Similar to S3, which allows scalable data storage on demand, EC2 allows scalable computing power on demand.

As a web service!

It basically allows you to set up a server server (1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth) on the fly and then to use that server as you need it. When you don’t need it, release it.

You only pay for the time you’re using it.

$0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
$0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
$0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Sweet!

So, how will this affect the internet?

I don’t think it will really affect hosting companies. They don’t deal with large scale computing very often. They deal with people who don’t want to touch a server.

It’s probably most likely to affect colocation facilities where people store servers. Now, people don’t need to necessarily store servers because they can store the data on S3 and use EC2 for scalable computing power.

Don’t get me wrong, this certainly won’t eliminate the need for small businesses to buy or lease servers and have them in colo facilities, but it will allow them to scale their applications without having to buy a bunch of servers up front to make sure they have capacity for when they get ‘digged’ or ‘slashdotted’.

It will also be great for companies who have super intense calculations to perform every so often. Instead of getting huge servers and having them sit idle for most of the time, use EC2 when you need it.

Unfortunately, it won’t be very useful to small businesses that just run a normal website that one server can handle.

Roy said what I was thinking about mysql. S3 and EC2 would really benefit greatly if there was a service like this that allowed mysql usage. That’s the biggest problem I see with this right now. You can’t put a database onto S3, and if you’re going to have heavy computing, you’re most likely going to need a database to crunch on. With EC2 the database is a long way away from the machine doing the computing, which will cause quite a bit of network latency.

[tags]EC2, Amazon EC2, web services, scalable computing, S3, Amazon S3[/tags]

Free Services Online

John — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 04:19:10 +0000

To add some of my favorites to Blake Snows list of free (I’m adding some almost free) services online:

Google products: Gmail, spreadsheets, calendar, maps for mobile devices
Amazon S3 – Super cheap online storage.
Free Tracks Hosting – online todo list the way todo lists should be. There’s also backpackit and rtm. Both very well done and more than just todo lists.
Overture keyword lookup
Send large files where email doesn’t work
Fatwallet topic alerts – get stuff unbelievably cheap, if you’re patient.
flickr – great free photo storage/display/backup

More to come.

[tags]free online services[/tags]

Questionable program + Idiot = Sypware

John — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:55:15 +0000

Ok, today I’m going to admit it.

I AM AN IDIOT.

2 days ago I got some software that I thought was questionable. I’m not going to say what it was other than that I wasn’t sure if I should run it because I thought it might install spyware on my computer.

I was right.

It DID install spyware.

And now I can’t get rid of it.

I’ve run ad-aware and spybot s&d about 15 times each.
I’ve been into safe mode with hijackthis and I can’t even tell you how many other tools.
I’ve been all through the c:\WINDOWS and c:\WINDOWS\system32 folders deleting all kinds of crap.
I’ve been through about 7 different programs that are designed to remove specific instances of spyware like smitfraud, ishost, and virtumundo.
I finally resorted to other programs like ewido and stopzilla.

Historically I have never done anything to stop spyware other than ad-aware because I have been smart enough to avoid it. I don’t just download and run anything. I’m usually pretty careful. (not to mention that I only use windows for programs that I can’t run on linux)

This time I was an idiot.

Now I have a roar that goes off every time I start my computer. I have to put up with it until I’m confident enough that the spyware is gone.

I can’t print anymore because in my efforts to try to remove all the spyware (which is self replicating) I deleted something that has to do with my printer.

Idiot!