April 3, 2013

This morning I read with kindergarteners but I didn't have my second grade reading group because I think they were on a field trip. I would be lying if I said I missed them. Before I found out my second grade group wasn't happening I went up to help in the sixth grade room. They were working on making stop-motion movies in Windows Movie Maker. I may have accidentally opened that program once but I don't really have any experience with it. So I just wandered around. I ended up being able to help several groups to import their pictures faster because they were going to the import menu every time and importing one picture at a time. I showed them how to just open the folder with their pictures in it, click on all the ones they wanted, and then drag them all at once into the Movie Maker. I also showed one group how to rotate their pictures faster. So I wasn't completely useless.

I ended up having a lot of downtime once again today and toward the end of the day I started drawing a pixel art flower in Excel. This is way more challenging and time consuming than turning on the grid in Paint and zooming all the way in. But I had a lot of time to kill. The main benefit to using Excel over Paint, other than the time-wasting factor, is that you can make the “pixels” bigger. In Paint you can only zoom in so far and the “pixels” are still pretty small.

After school I spoke with the mom who was in charge of doing the yearbook last year. Just to touch base on what I had been doing so far and what else needed to be done. The receptionist had made the mom out to be a horrible dictator but she is actually pretty nice. One of her sons is in the kindergarten room I help out in a lot. So I don't think it will be a big deal. We'll see if the receptionist still talks to me after she sees me cavorting with the enemy.

Tonight was Chipotle night and the burrito was good but not great. I've had better.

The rest of my night was spent looking at capture card stuff. AverMedia has a new one coming out that is small like the Elgato HD that I have, but it can also capture PC gameplay. I play games a lot more often on my PC and being able to capture that gameplay is enticing. But I've always thought the Elgato HD should be able to do that. When I first got it and managed some really weird workaround and was able to capture some PC gameplay but it was incredibly laggy. I did a lot of looking around on the internet tonight and found a way that might actually work but I need more cables to do it. I currently have two monitors and I believe my graphics card supports a third but I have to use the mini display port to connect it, not the HDMI port, which would have been convenient. The idea behind this new workaround for the Elgato HD is that you plug it in as another monitor and then you duplicate the display with another monitor. So everything that appears on that display appears on the Elgato HD “monitor”. 

Without the mini display port cable I would be down to only one monitor because the second one would have to be disabled in order for the Elgato HD to act as a display. And it would be a pain in the butt to start recording, then get into a game, and then back out again to stop recording. It would be much easier if my second monitor could also be up and running so I could have the Elgato HD capture software on it and I could monitor the playback to make sure everything was going smoothly. For it to work on my computer I ended up ordering an active mini display port to DVI cable, and a DVI-to-HDMI cable (because the Elgato HD uses HDMI and it looked like mini DP-to-HDMI doesn't work for a three monitor setup). I hope my theory is correct and that when the cables get here everything will run smoothly. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like getting the AverMedia device would lead to the same three-monitor problem. So if the Elagato HD solution doesn't work, then I don't think the AverMedia would work either. But I don't know. We'll see in a few days.