I have been helping out with the Wine2030 BlueSky summit and would like any of my readers who are interested in the Australian wine industry to join me either online or possibly in person next Tuesday. Here’s the deal – if you have ideas on how academic research in any discipline could possibly enhance any aspect of the wine industry and would like to spend a day working hard with a bunch of very smart people with a view to sharing those ideas then please get in touch with me.

Over the past few weeks I have been re-mixing some key messages from organisers of the event with highlights from some of last year’s presentations and an interview or two with some invited speakers for this year. They are all shorter than 10mins and are designed to give you some insight into why this event is a great catalyst for innovation – giving rise to several successful funding bids and collaborations.

Have a listen to:

• Call for participants (give an idea of the type of people we are seeking)
• Photonics talk (quite technical but lead to successful funding and potentially great outcomes)
• Andrew Jefford (keynote presenter sneak preview)
• Marketing talk (fascinating stuff which also lead to further research)
• Visual technologies (behind scenes ‘look’ at surveillance cameras and emerging video technology)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

But the real blog action is over at http://mseyfang.edublogs.org

Ever wanted to make an autoplaying, looping DVD that looks good on a widescreen 16:9 display from a powerpoint presentation slide deck?

Here is a  process in which you can start with powerpoint on a Mac or PC (Office 2007 on Vista PC used for this example)

PowerPoint (Mac or PC):

Design->Page Setup->Custom 27.09cm x 15.24 cm Just like (THIS presentation available from slideshare)

Make your slides (with bugger all text boys and girls)

Save As (Other Formats) jpeg (exports each and every slide to a .jpg image of 1024x576 pixels precisely)

Quicktime player (pro) (Mac or PC):

file open image sequence, pick first file in numbered series from the folder created by powerpoint save as

allow 10sec per frame

save as quicktime .mov movie (will use apple jpeg codec by default) expect about 4mb per 100 slides.

iDVD (Mac only):

iDvd new project, 16x9 PAL (Professional Quality)

Drag your .mov to autoplay area in the 'map' view

Select that movie and choose options -> loop

Burn to DVD.

All will be good.

converting powerpoint presentation to widescreen DVD format using mixture of windows XP vista 2000 office machines and only one Apple mac OSX with iLife06 or better.

1024x576 DVD PAL

Dude,

Add this feed to yer phone:

http://tr.im/mandyflickr

[copy n paste]

Phew, what a week (or three) the Seyfang household have had!!! This post is being written from my work computer late on a Friday arvo after my first decent day back in the office all week. Turns out that both kids are down with suspected swine flu and Mandy has just had another nasty reaction to laser eye surgery. That leaves me the only member of my household not bed-ridden.

On top of that, dear old mum had to have a kidney removed and while she is recovering well we all need to stay away till this flu stuff passes.

Anyhoow, it seems we are now turning a corner and things should be on the up and up, hopefully.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Those of you who know me well will know that poor old Hope, my mum has never enjoyed the best of health, particularly in the past year or two.

It turns out that the remnants of an old kidney operation have been causing internal grief, requiring an operation to remove the nasty bits earlier this week. This has been done, she is now out of intensive care but not feeling flash in the horse-pittle. So best to keep visits and phone calls to a minimum till she feels a bit better. Hopefully then she will be up for calls n visits and will get to enjoy a good few years in the sun.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Unfortunately I will be be away when this excellent event is on in Adelaide. (Will be relying on y'all twittering, blogging, flickring with #sastories tag). Let me know if you spot a podcast or .mp3 download.

Presenter: Dr Genevieve Bell

Topic: Black Spots, Backhoes and Broadband

There’s more to connecting South Australia than rolling out a cable!

Date: Thursday 2 July 2009

Time: 6 pm

Where: Hilton Adelaide Ballroom, Victoria Square, Adelaide

Bookings: http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/invitation/

From the AdelaideThinkers website:

http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/invitation/images/GB_invitation_02.gif

This series of images were taken on my Nikon D80 DSLR using a remote time borrowed from Wayne.

I set the camera to shoot basic JPG and copied each set of images to a folder on my Mac. I then used a little automator script to work thru selected items in Finder and resize images to 1920x1080 (HD frame size). I then opened image sequence in QuickTime player and saved as 24fps .mov using Apple Jpeg codec. I then did the tricky edits of still frames using FinalCut Express (a sequence of 1080i50). Teaching myself how to navigate individual frames (arrow keys) Ctrl+V to cut at a frame, Apple-J to set speed (1% or so on an individual frame with frame smoothing creates the ghostly fade). Then I pressed my son jamie to the task of recording the acoustic guitar (after replacing strings he broke) using RodeNT2 and Shure SM57 in Logic Express. Additional sound effects courtesy of iLife 09 Garage Band Sound Effects folder on my mac (spotlight for sound effects and there they were).

Enjoy.

Yep, my work computer now has vista AND I have elevated rights to install such devious software as liveWriter.

Once I figured out the proxy address it was all systems go.

Note to self - it is:

www-proxy.adelaide.edu.au port number 8080

Fang - Mike Seyfang

• More upcoming gigs from AdelaideGeezers