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carl & jerry

Remote Lecturing with Skype and Mikogo

Jan 10th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

First on my do-it list this morning was to deliver a lecture at Miami University at Middletown, Ohio. I’m still here in Colorado (though, alas, Carol is in Chicago again and I’m batching it until the 26th) but it worked out well, and the lecture was my first “production” use of Skype and the Mikogo plug-in for Skype for remote presentation.

Jay Slough K4ZLE of the Southwest Ohio Digital and Technical Symposium asked me to do an hour-long presentation on Carl & Jerry well over a year ago, but our schedules didn’t mesh in January 2008, and we had to wait a year for another chance. In a way that was good, because in my view, Mikogo plows NetMeeting (which we had intended to use last year) right into the soil.

Mikogo adds presentation capability to any participant in a Skype conference call running the plug-in. Whatever is displayed on the screen of the chat participant deemed the presenter is echoed on all other participant screens. The presenter can change at any point, so people can take turns presenting to the group. Mikogo defaults to screen echo only, but it has an option for remote control, a la VNC. Mikogo also allows the presenter to draw nondestructively on the echoed screen, whiteboard-style, though I didn’t need this feature for today’s session.

I’m a seasoned lecturer and have done presentations to groups as large as a thousand people, but there was a critical difference this time: I couldn’t see the audience, and could hear them only faintly. The other end of the Skype/Mikogo connection was Jay’s laptop driving a big-screen VGA projector in a university classroom, with Jay at the controls wearing a headset. I sat here in my chair in front of the screen in my office, talking into my headset between Powerpoint slide changes and trying to remember not to wave my hands. I missed not being able to play off the audience, and couldn’t tell if they were laughing at my jokes. During the Q&A in the last five minutes, Jay had to relay all questions to me, which was awkward even if necessary.

Technologically it went well, though it took a couple of minutes longer than we planned to get the two systems talking to each other. During the presentation, Thunderbird popped up an email notifier box in the lower right corner of the screen, and until I could shoot the box it became part of the screen echo. The symposium gang out in Ohio apparently loved it, and it was a great opportunity to popularize Carl & Jerry to people I would probably never have connected with otherwise.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I’d like to add some refinements, which I think Skype could support:

  • I want a cam aimed at the audience, with a mic that will pick up general sound from the same direction. Video from the cam would have to go on a second display, but displays are cheap. Audience feedback is important, whether you’re a stand-up geek comedian like me or not.
  • Less necessary, but it might help the general tenor of the presentation: Somehow display a borderless video window in the lower left corner of the presentation screen, so that the audience can see me. (I’d leave a hole in my slides sized to match the video window.) How well this would work is obscure but readily testable. My webcam is four years old and I probably should get a new one. Logitech sells high-res units that automatically integrate with Skype.

Other applications of this system suggest themselves: Real-time manuscript workshopping, with workshop participants taking turns echoing their screens while displaying their manuscripts. Tech support. And (as Pete Albrecht and I intend to try in the next few days) remote control of his big Meade telescope and imager.

Skype is a fine thing. Pete is in a Skype window right now, telling me about the new Skype competitor, Oovoo, which adds session recording to videoconferencing. Skype lacks that feature, and it would be handy for people (like me!) who couldn’t make it all the way to Ohio for the Symposium. More when (or if) I try it.

More on John T. Frye

Sep 20th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

I just uploaded a new version of my Carl & Jerry index, including an expanded bio of John T. Frye. We know a lot more about him than we did a couple of months ago, and almost all of the new material came to me from Lisa Enfinger, whose parents were close friends of Frye’s for many years. I’ll summarize here:

  • John Frye was stricken by polio as an infant, and he could not walk at all, throughout his entire life.
  • That said, he was not immobile: He had hand controls installed on all of his cars, and traveled extensively throughout the United States. He owned a 1963 Olds Dynamic 88, but no word on whether he ever had a Buick. (Legend holds that he was a Buick man, but no one can tell me why that should be so.)
  • Remarkably enough, he never attended Purdue University, but instead studied at the University of Indiana, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. Lisa did not know if he ever received a degree.
  • More remarkably, he never studied engineering, but preferred English, journalism, history, and psychology.
  • Her parents both attended Purdue in the 1940s while earning their degrees in chemistry, and John visited them there. He probably knew other people at Purdue, and it was not a long drive to Layafette from Logansport in any event.
  • He is credited with close to 600 short articles, including Carl & Jerry and Mac’s Service Shop. His first publication was supposedly in Hugo Gernsback’s Radio Craft in the early 1930s.
  • Her great uncle Gene Buntain was Frye’s close high school friend in Logansport, and the two of them discovered electronics and ham radio together. (Could Gene Buntain have been the inspiration for Carl?)
  • John Frye lived much or most of his life at 1810 Spear St. in Logansport, one block south of US 24. It was a little weird to dive down from orbit on Google Earth and be staring at the roof of Frye’s old house. One wonders what the man himself would have thought of it.

I dug through my smallish collection of really old radio magazines (including a few Radio Craft) and did not see him there, but if any of you guys can find any of his early articles, I would like citations.

Needless to say, I’m still looking for details on John Frye’s life, especially concerning where he learned radio and TV servicing and where he practiced it. Lisa said she never heard of him owning his own shop nor even working for a shop in town, so that would be a question worth answering.

Finally, I had written to Frye’s younger brother Bailey Frye late last year, but he was evidently too ill to respond, and I found today that he passed away at the end of April, at age 90.

Many thanks to Lisa Enfinger for taking the time to send me all the information, including the scan of a newspaper article from 1962 that I first lined to a couple of weeks ago, including a picture of Frye at that time, when he was 42.

Carl & Jerry Volume 5 Is Out!

Feb 7th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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This one took a lot longer than I had hoped—and certainly longer than the seething two weeks I spent on Volume 4—but the fifth and final volume of Carl & Jerry: Their Complete Adventures is now complete, uploaded, and available on Lulu.com. This has been my major spare-time project for well over a year, and I scratched my head now and then as to why it was taking so much time and energy. Well, here's why: It required 989 pages in five separate books to print the 263,232 words and 311 illustrations in the 119 stories. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot.

But it's done. I'm extremely happy with the way it all turned out, and the fan mail has been very encouraging. The only complaint I've seen is one chap moaning that, “You mean, there's only 119 stories?” Yup. I wish there were more too; Carl & Jerry are sui generis. The only thing even remotely similar is Bertrand Brimley's Mad Scientists Club, all books of which (fortunately) are still in print, in nice new editions with all the original Charles Geer pencil sketches and watercolors. Somewhere further on the fringes are Tom Swift, Jr and the Danny Dunn books, but the fact remains that Carl & Jerry were talking about real technology, not Repelatrons and antigravity paint. Read the stories and you will learn a few things, albeit things that were first-run between 1954 and 1964.

I added a few things to Volume 5. One is a schematic published a few months after the story of Carl & Jerry's primordial beambot, “The Lightning Bug,” from a Popular Electronics reader who built his own Lightning Bug. That's one of my top 5 all-time favorite Carl & Jerry yarns, and I've posted a free PDF containing it. It's unusual in that if you want to build your own, the circuit is right there and ready to go.

One thing that added some time to the task was a topic index that ran to 19 pages. People have written me to ask, “What was the Carl & Jerry story where the crook was getting away in an iceboat?” All they remembered was the iceboat. That's just the way human memory works; quirky is too kind a word for it. So I went through all 119 stories and built an alphabetical topic index, including any memory tag I could think of for each story. If you want to look up all the stories about Carl's dog Bosco, it's there. If you want to know which story saw the boys build a proton precession magnetometer, it's there. Skunks figured significantly in two stories, so flip to “Skunk” and there they are. Ditto Norma, Mr. Gruber, radio-controlled models, sonar, fishing, smoke signals, Morse code, car thieves, and on and on. Dare you not to find a story you remember there.

Finally, I added two new stories, written today in 2008 and not forty-five years ago. One is by George Ewing WA8WTE, who actually built the gadget in the story he wrote, way long ago at Michigan Tech, about the same time that Carl & Jerry were at fictional Parvoo University. It's basically about building a seismometer from a broken pinball machine, and it's beautifully done. The other story is my own, and I borrowed a gimmick from Arthur C. Clarke as way to explain how reflecting telescopes work. Both are tall tales, but that's what John T. Frye was offering back in the 60s, and both stories are authentically tall, done very much in Frye's own style.

And so it's done. Here's the link to my Lulu storefront where all five books may be purchased. Many thanks to Michael Covington, for putting the bug in my ear back in August 2006, and to Pete Albrecht, who taught me how to un-halftone the illos. (He also did quite a few of them for me.) Also, thanks to Doug Faunt N6TQS who sent me the last few issues that I didn't have and somehow just couldn't nail on eBay.

And now it's on to other things. Writing, of course, and putting together the two collections of my short SF that I've been promising for years. And FreePascal from Square One. Plenty to do here; all I need now is the time to do it.

My 2008 Publishing Plan File

Jan 24th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

This oral surgery business has set me back on a number of projects (no, scratch that; all of them!) but things get a little better every day and I'm hard at work again on several fronts. The fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry is getting close to finished. I'm now doing the topic index, which is an interesting concept. I regularly get messages from guys who ask me, “Hey, Jeff, what was the Carl and Jerry story where they set up a talking skull for a haunted house?” That's all they remember: The talking skull. So there will be an index entry like the following:

Skull
November 1959: V11 #5 Book 3 p.81 “The Ghost Talks”
On Halloween, Selsyn motors and a glowing skull haunt a house for Norma's sorority.

The topic index will have entries like Iceboat, Dogs, Kidnapers, Bootleggers, Capacity-operated relays, RC models, Telemetry, Tesla coil, Norma, Mr. Gruber, Theremin, Ultrasonics, and so on. I already have a complete chronological index on the Web here, but I wanted to make the search possible by topic, and if all you remember is that the boys were fooling with a police speed radar unit, you can look up Radar and see both stories (there were two) in which police speed radar figures significantly. After the index is done, I have two “new” Carl and Jerry stories to typeset and then it should be finished. I'm hoping to have it available by February 10.

With Carl and Jerry in the can, my next major push will be to get two anthologies of my own SF out there on Lulu and as ebooks. The two volumes will be:

  • Souls in Silicon, including all my SF featuring any sort of artificial intelligence, plus a significant excerpt from The Cunning Blood; and
  • Firejammer!, which will contain all the rest of my published SF plus the title novella, which has never seen print and, given its 27,000-word length, is unlikely to in traditional markets.

Unlike my earlier Lulu publications, these two will get ISBNs and be available on Amazon. I also intend to make them available on the Kindle. Most of the material has already been typeset, and a lot of the remaining effort will go into things like finding art for the covers. I'm hoping to get these both out by midyear; Souls in Silicon may happen sooner.

In loose moments I've been recasting the 1993 print edition of Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal, and will release an initial volume as a free ebook sometime in late summer. As FreePascal was designed to be compatible with Borland Pascal 7, this should work. The ebook will be free, but I will offer an inexpensive printed edition with a color cover on Lulu. The first volume will cover the basic concepts of programming, installation of FreePascal on several platforms, the use of the console window IDE, and the core Pascal language. Much of the book is now obsolete, and it doesn't really cover OOP beyond the basic idea, so if additional volumes happen they'll take a fair bit of work and won't be out until 2009. I'm also considering adapting my portions of The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer for Lazarus, but that won't likely be this year either.

Toward the end of the year I may release a third Old Catholic history title, which will be a compendium of several shorter items from journals published between 1875 and 1900.

Note well that this is a publishing plan file; I still intend to do a fair bit of writing and will continue to shop my material to traditional markets. I hope to finish Old Catholics and make some headway on The Molten Flesh—and if I can't get traction there, I will go back to Ten Gentle Opportunities. Shorter items may pop up at any time; writing is a messy business. But you knew that. I hope.