Sitapati geeking out on technology and communication

Last night's presentation was a blast. The Sunday Feast crowd was the biggest it's been for some time, with a lot of university students. I'd estimate the numbers at around 80 - 100 people.

The technology worked for me perfectly, which is always a really pleasant surprise.

I used:
For visuals: A Nokia E61i cellphone using bluetooth to control an eeePC 901 running Openoffice.org Impress. BenQ 1024x768 projector

For sound: Wireless Shure / Countryman E6 earset mic, line out from eeePC to PA for the sound from the videos.

My eeePC with Ubuntu performed flawlessly, picking up the projector on the external monitor port.

The eeePC is a low cost ultraportable "netbook" made by Asus. It has no moving parts in it except for a fan. It uses solid state memory instead of a hard drive, and has a low power Intel Atom CPU (4w vs 10w for a standard CPU).

I bought the 20GB Linux version from Hong Kong via eBay a couple of weeks before they were available locally in Australia. It came with Xandros installed, but I replaced that with a new version of Ubuntu Linux specially modified for the eeePC.

The advantages of the eeePC are that it is tiny, about the size of a hardback Science of Self Realization, and that it has a four hour battery life.

I don't have an SSR here at work to show you, but I have a hardback Gita. The eeePC is wider, but shallower than the BG.

One disadvantage is that while the eeePC 901's very bright and clear 9" internal laptop panel has a resolution of 1024x600, when I set the projector to 1024x768 the internal screen went to 800x600. What I usually do is set the laptop up facing me so that I can see what's on the screen without having to look around. That way I stay facing the audience the whole time. At Northpoint and other cutting edge churches in the States (and I'm sure here in Australia too) they have large screens on the stage out of the line-of-sight of the audience for the presenter to see what's on the audience's overhead screens.

My Dell XPS 1530M is great for this - the 15" wide screen is clear and easy to see. With the eeePC's 9" laptop monitor at 800x600 I can't see the whole slide. It's not such a big deal because I can still tell that the slide has changed and which slide we're on, and there are only one or two slides which require me to say something exactly as it appears on the slide. I use words on slides only for verses and short quotes. As one person put it: "when you're presenting you're meant to be doing the talking. If your slides are doing the talking what are you doing - interpretative dance?"

Slides are supportive visuals, to activate the brains of the audience, to reinforce your message, and to make it more memorable. As a side note to this, I had to turn the lights back up again. Well meaning devotees turned them down - after all, don't you watch movies in the dark? However, as I put it to Vrajadhama, who videoed the presentation - "I'm the main show - the slides are the support act".

Anyway, until we have a fixed facility with all this kind of stuff set up in it, we have to set up and break down each week, so I'm going with the portable option. The small "feedback" or monitor screen is the trade off.

My cellphone worked perfectly to control the slide show via the open source amora (A Mobile Remote Assistant). This program runs as a server on a bluetooth capable computer and as a small applet on the phone. The phone scans for available servers and allows you to connect to them and control them remotely via bluetooth. My cellphone, a Nokia e61i, is bigger and more bulky than the small remote control that came with my Dell XPS M1530, but it works with my eeePC, which is the main thing. It kinda looks cool when I "dial up" the projector with my cell phone too.

I had to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to the development stream of 8.10 to get amora to work with my phone. There is some instability with 8.10, but it works for what I need it to. (update: I see a note on the amora front page today explaining the problem with 8.04, aka Hardy Heron)

The main disadvantage with my Dell XPS machine, and the reason I got the eeePC, is the size of the Dell. I use it at work as my primary machine and I use it to play my way through the single player mode of games like Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2, and Medal of Honor Airborne. It rocks out for that, and for building presentations, but it's no good for carrying around.

For the program last night I took my eeePC, my Shure wireless mic kit, my Countryman earset mic, a mrdanga, and a change of clothes. Oh, and my son Prahlad too. Having a small machine is priceless when you have to carry and look after so much gear.

The earset mic worked perfectly as well. In the beginning there was some low level booming, but Vrajadhama adjusted the EQ and it went away. I got the E6 mic because it is very inconspicuous and it is great for speech. We have other headset mics that are fine for singing, but not so good for speech. We have other mics, like the SM58, that are great for speech but are very imposing - you have to either hold them in one hand and stick them in front of your mouth, or else stand in one place behind a mic stand. I prefer to present standing up so the audience can see me, and to move around to keep the energy up. And I like to have as little as possible between me and the audience. Technology should be utilized and it should be transparent - people should focus on the message and not the medium (hey, and that includes the presenter). Just like when you go into a movie - you forget about the delivery mechanism and become engrossed in the story. That's the power of technology when it is correctly used - it can create a powerful immersive experience.

I embedded some videos that I downloaded from youtube using keepvid.com. With Keepvid.com you enter the url of the youtube video and it gives you a link to download a high quality .mp4 version for viewing offline. I used two videos, one a personal testimony by a self-confessed internet addict, and a one minute CBS newsitem on internet addiction. The eeePC played them both flawlessly and the sound to the PA worked fine.

I'm really blown away by the fact that so many pieces of technology all fell together seamlessly and allowed me to present the material with no problems. Last time I presented at the Sunday Feast I was struggling with getting the Dell (which runs Fedora 9) to connect to the projector all through the kirtan. I finally exported my presentation to a pdf file, and rebooted into Vista to get it all to work.

The Dell has an nvidia graphics card, which is great for 3D gaming, but the eeePC has an Intel graphics chipset with an open specification, which is better for open source software support.

Oh, one thing did fail. My iRiver E100 was plugged into the line out on the PA doing a line-in recording. At some point during the presentation it bricked. I thought the battery had run out (which was funny because I just recharged it during the day), but it won't start no matter what I do. I'll take it back to JB HiFi at lunchtime.

I have an iPod touch, which is awesome for listening to things, but useless for creating content to share with others. The iPod touch starts in less than a second. The iRiver takes a couple of minutes. I don't have minutes to waste like that, so the iRiver is a fail for a listening device for me. However, while the iPod is great for that, it has no way to do a recording.

I was doing the line-out recording to allow Vrajadhama to make another video / slide show mashup of the presentation. Even without the line-out recording we can still do it - Vraj has the sound recording from the microphone on his camera.

It's taken me a few years of working to assemble this equipment, but these are the tools of the trade for a 21st century presenter.

I'm going to shoot for one presentation like this per week. Next week I'll present at the Saturday night Krishnafest at Atma on "The Three Things that are Necessary and Sufficient for Liberation".

Anyway, enough geeking out on technology and communication. But man, people get really engaged with the message when you put energy into it like this. Spread the word!