Technology

Two new and very different purchases arrived in the mail today.

The first was the book, “The Sources of Catholic Dogma” by Denzinger. This is a classic resource of theology, so classic in fact that Vatican documents, including papal encyclicals reference it as a source and have done so for 150 years. It is also known by its Latin name, the “Enchiridion Symbolorum”. The book catalogs all the creeds and articles of the Catholic faith and every dogmatic definition, every magisterial decree, every papal bull, every major pronouncement of the Vatican up to 1957 when this particular edition was issued.

This is an indispensable work of theology, which should sit on the shelf next to the Bible and the Catechism. Which is why it surprises me it took so long to get one, although I do have other less authoritative, but no less valuable compendiums of Catholic doctrine, such as Ludwig Ott’s tome. So when I saw a tweet from Aquinas and More recently about having the book at a reasonable price, I decided it was time to complete my theological library.

The other purchase couldn’t be more different. It’s the Gorillapod Mobile by Joby. Joby makes a kind of articulated, grippy tripod of all shapes and sizes that attach to just about anything. The legs are made up of a series of connected spheres, each with an equator of a rubber-like grippy material. This combination allows you to place the Gorillapod in every conceivable place. Not only can you just stand it on a table, you can wrap the legs around anything whose diameter isn’t larger than the length of the legs.

This particular verison comes with an iPhone case, a screw mount for a camera (although only a point and shoot is small enough not to tip over this model), and a couple of adhesive backs for other random items. I plan to use it on my desk as an iPhone stand, but also in the summer to attach to the handle of my lawnmower as well as the baby stroller. I think I may also use it when I donate blood platelets to watch movies on my iPhone. Right now my free arm gets mighty tired holding the phone up the whole time.

The Gorillapod is very versatile and I look forward to finding many uses for it.

There you go. An eclectic duo of items whose only connection is that they both arrived at my house today.

Last week,I wrote about an experiment in new media we were working on at the Archdicoese of Boston. My colleague, George Martell, a photojournalist, traveled to Washington, DC, with a group of Boston pilgrims for the 37th March for Life. He took along his usual panoply of gear, plus two new bits: an Eye-fi card for his camera that transmits photos to the Internet as they are taken and a MiFi, a portable wireless modem that connects to the Internet over mobile phone networks.

So how did it go? You can see for yourself at www.facebook.com/BostonCatholic or www.flickr.com/BostonCatholic. We got lots of photos of the three-day journey and, for the most part, they wereo nline and available for friends and family back home to follow along within a minute or two of the shutter closing.

I say, “for the most part” because we did have one glitch at the worst possible time. We only got a relative handful photos of the actual March for Life because the particular Eye-Fi card we’re using isn’t compatible with RAW format photos. (Tangent: RAW photos are the complete image files recorded by the camera’s sensor. Most point-and-shoot cameras do a lot of image-processing and compressing to make your photos look nice and make them small as they go, but serious photographers like RAW files because it lets them do all the manipulating and processing after the fact. The trade-off is that the files can be huge; an a professional SLR, they can be 25MB each or more.)

Unfortunately, during the Prayer Vigil for Life at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception the night before the March, George accidentally switched the camera to RAW mode while adjusting his white balance. The next day, he spent most of the March trying to figure out why the camera wasn’t transmitting his photos. By the time he realized his error, there wasn’t a lot of March left for him to photograph.

But no matter. We got lots of great photos of the pilgrims throughout the three-day trip and the many, many people who followed along were very happy with the results. Rest assured, we’re hoping to do a lot more of this type of thing and since we learn by doing, it will only get better.

(Photo credit: George Martell/The Catholic Foundation) May not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved.

Over the next few days, if you go to www.facebook.com/BostonCatholic or www.flickr.com/BostonCatholic or www.twitter.com/BostonCatholic, you can follow along in real-time with the pilgrimage from the Archdiocese of Boston of the Office for the New Evangelization of Youth and Young Adults (ONE) to the March for Life in Washington, DC. The pilgrims left by bus this morning at 6am and will return on Saturday, and will take part in tomorrow’s march.

Tagging along is my colleague, George Martell, a photographer who will be documenting the pilgrimage the whole time. The best part is that he and I have put together some technology that allows him to have the photos available online within one minute of taking them. This allows those of us who couldn’t go—as well as the families of those who are taking part—to travel along virtually, seeing everything they see almost instantaneously. This is unprecedented, I think. I don’t know of any media organization, never mind diocese, that is

How did we do this? We put together two pieces of technology that allow us to take the photos from George’s camera and transmit them wirelessly over the Internet from any location that has a cellphone signal.

The first piece of tech we’re using is the Eye-Fi memory card. This is just the standard SD memory storage card that’s probably in your own digital camera except that these geniuses at Eye-Fi have figured out a way to cram a WiFi wireless access card in there too! (That’s what allows your laptop computer to connect to the Internet without a network cable.) The Eye-Fi card also has the smarts to upload certain photos that you choose whenever it’s near an Internet wireless hotspot and to upload them to whatever service you want: email, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube (if you’re taking video), and more.

That’s great if you know you’re going to be near a publicly accessible wireless hotspot, like a cafe or library, but that won’t give us the near real-time photos we’re looking for. You never know when you’re going to find a hotspot.

That where the second piece of tech comes in: the Verizon MiFi. This nifty gadget is about the size of an iPod nano and can fit in your shirt pocket. What it does is acts like a mobile wireless hotspot. Up to five computers or other Wifi devices can connect through it to the Internet using Verizon’s data network, the same network that allows smartphone like the Motorola Droid to be little Internet-connected computers.

So, as George walks down the streets of Washington, DC, with the MiFi in his pocket and Eye-Fi in his camera, his photos will upload to the Internet automatically and be posted to www.flickr.com/BostonCatholic within a minute. Once it’s there, I will put on proper titles and a caption, tag it, and drop it in a set. Over at www.facebook.com/BostonCatholic, that page is automatically grabbing the photos, butI will also be sending out manual updates to fans, alerting them of new, interesting photos. And we’ll also use Twitter as a means of providing even more updates.

Like I said, I don’t think anyone is doing anything like this and I’m very excited to be part of this. I’m also looking forward to other applications of this technology in the future.

Ten years ago, my brother John lead a pilgrimage from Boston to World Youth Day 2000 in Rome and on that trip we were also on the cutting edge of technology, taking photos each day, rushing back to the hotel at night, creating web pages by hand and uploading photos so the families back home could follow along. This is the natural extension of that project, except now there are tools in place to take a lot of the extra work and hassle out of it, while also making the whole enterprise nearly instantaneous. I love living in the future.

Caption: Pilgrims waiting for their buses this morning to take them to the March for Life.
Photo copyright by George Martell, The Catholic Foundation. Used with permission. flic.kr/p/7xhED2

Melanie and I are the very picture of the modern web-connected family. We both have blogs (hers and mine), Twitter accounts (hers and mine), and Facebook pages (hers and mine). To those social-media outlets, we post photos from Flickr (hers and mine) as well as videos from our YouTube and Vimeo accounts. And to create all this content, we use our digital point-and-shoot, our Flip Video cam, and my iPhone. That’s a lot of stuff to manage.

In the past, when she was using my old broken-down iBook, Melanie had to rely on me to download photos and videos and then upload them so that she could post them on her blog or Facebook or Twitter, which didn’t always work out so well. Too often she had to remind me a time or two or three. Now that she has a newer MacBook she can edit movies if she wants and manipulate photos with ease. She’s even started using my old iPod touch.

We haven’t solved the entire problem (we’re still doing the memory card dance: “Did you download all the pictures from this memory card so I can delete everything?” “I’m not sure. Leave it on my desk so I can check.”), but a few rough edges of the annoyance of having to manage all this content have been sanded off. Part of the solution is a web-based application called Dropbox.

The folder/directory that follows you around

Dropbox is an amazing tool that I use nearly every day. If you ever have to work on more than one computer or if you ever share files with other people, then Dropbox is for you. Here’s a short video that explains in plain language how Dropbox works.

One of the best features of Dropbox is the shared folder. This is a folder within your Dropbox that you explicitly make available to certain people. If they are Dropbox users it shows up in the Dropbox folder on their computers. If they’re not a Dropbox user, they can signup for a free account. (And if they sign up, you get some extra storage space for inviting them.) Basic free accounts start with 2GB of storage. Not bad.

I set up a shared folder with Melanie called “Dom+Melanie” and we use that to share photos and videos and other files. I recently listened to an episode of the public radio show “This American Life” that had a segment I thought Melanie would like so I cut out that portion of of the show and saved it as an MP3 audio file in our shared folder for her to listen to. The best part is that all she has to do is open the folder to get the file; Dropbox automatically synchronizes the folders behind the scenes.

Dropbox also makes me look good at work. My boss was giving a presentation and as we were getting ready to go to the conference room, I dropped a copy of the presentation in my Dropbox folder, along with other important files. When we got to the room, my boss realized he hadn’t put the presentation on a thumb drive to load it on the computer used for projecting the presentation. No problem, I said. I logged in to my Dropbox account via the web browser on the presentation computer and downloaded the file right there. Problem solved. Hero for a day.

The iPhone app

Here’s where it gets really good. Dropbox now has a free iPhone app. Now you can access the contents of the Dropbox from anywhere, not just when you’re at a computer. You can open several common file types, including PDF, text, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, MP3, video, and more. (You can’t edit them. It’s read only.) Remember that show segment from “This American Life” that I’d saved for Melanie to listen to later? She hadn’t got around to it by Saturday, so while we were driving on a family outing we listened to it, streaming from the Dropbox on my iPhone, which was connected to the car’s audio system. How cool is that? usually you’d have to futz around with putting the file in iTunes and synchronizing it to the phone (and remembering to synchronize the phone before you left), but here it was, available at the spur of the moment.

Going back to the beginning of this blog entry, the iPhone app also helps with the photo problem. When I see a good picture, maybe a cute photo of one of the kids, there isn’t time to run and get the camera. The moment will have passed by then. But I almost always have my iPhone on me. So I whip it out and snap the picture. Great! Now I have to rmember to synchronize the phone with my computer, download the photos to iPhoto, and then email them to Melanie. Not anymore! See that camera icon in this Dropbox app? Click on it and it will offer to take a photo or use one that’s already on the phone and upload it to your Dropbox. So now, I can snap a picture and drop it right in our “Dom+Melanie” shared folder where Melanie can grab it and upload it immediately to her blog. Or Melanie can take photos at home and drop them in the folder so I can see them right away at work, without having to wait until I get home.

Why not just use email?, some will ask. Because email is unpredictable. Sometimes a message gets to your recipient immediately, but the vagaries of the Internet can delay it for hours. In addiiton, most mailboxes have size limits, so sending multiple files or anything over about 5 MB is problematic. And let’s not forget the propensity of spam-filtering software to put important messages in your junk-mail folder.

What else can it do?

The potential uses for Dropbox and its iPhone app are limited only by your imagination. I can see myself at the store wondering if a particular product is the one Melanie wants. So I take a photo, put in Dropbox, and call her. She can look at it right away and steer me in the right direction. (Now, if only I could get Melanie on an iPhone, it could go both ways. Hmmm.) Another way I use it right now is to back-up our kitchen computer. We have an old iMac mounted on the wall in the kitchen that we use for recipes and to keep shopping lists. The only important data on it is the recipe database so I keep that in the Dropbox folder, which is backed up whenever I back up my MacBook Pro. Since every computer sees it as just another folder on the computer, it gets backed up by my backup software. I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it there.

If at the end of this, you’re saying to yourself, “I need me some Dropbox!”, then I offer you this link. If you sign up at my referral link, not only do I get more storage space for free, so do you! And if you find that 2GB is just not enough storage space, they offer reasonable paid accounts starting at 50GB at $10 per month. (They really should have a 20GB/$5 per month level, but that’s a little quibble. It’s definitely worth it.)