At Millikin Elementary there is an Dukane Compact 3200 Series Intercom system.  This system has worked well for many years but recently started having trouble switching from Talk to Listen on the control panel.  After looking at the unit it appeared that only the button itself had failed and the the wires connecting this button to the main board needed to be punched down (punch down 110 tool).

A little closer

As you can see from the Photos this is not an entirely new unit,  in fact is quite old.  So old in fact that repairing this unit become a little tricky because finding parts for this unit is hard.

The unit’s failed green button has a serial number and some small text saying “made in France by Interswitch”.   Interswitch no longer exists and Dukane has stopped making, supporting, or even acknowledging the existence of this intercom unit about 12 years ago.  With new Intercom systems running in the multiple thousands of dollars it made since to simply fix the broken switch but to do so in such a way as not to limit the functionality of the machine.  At first I simply installed a generic switch as temp fix while I searched for the original part. At a nearby Radioshack I simply put in a dumb switch that worked somewhat- problem being it was not mounted correctly and I did not want to physically install a bracket since I felt I could eventually locate the correct part.  This replacement switch was also hard to use in terms of switching from talk to listen quickly.

After too much time spent searching online I finally found two leads, an ebay store selling old Dukane equipment that was broken and a part supplier in Oklahoma that used to sell the equipment 10 years ago.  The Ebay option turned out to be a bust since he wanted 1200$ for all the parts – all I really need is a button.  The part supplier in Oklahoma came through having two green buttons left in stock (no red) and that was it.  http://www.coxsystech.com/index_files/Page509.htm (Company Website).  Although their website does not list them having any parts for this unit anymore, after I was transferred to the warehouse manager it turns out he had two buttons and that was it (green).

Broken Button

New Button

I decided to buy both just in case the other button fails on this unit and 26$ later the machine back and working as new (yes 26$ for two buttons that probably cost 1$).  Thanks to the power of the internet it looks like this old unit will have a few more years service left before becoming completely obosolete.

Boxee is probably the best application that is able to convert your computer into a hybrid cable TV media player device.  Recently Boxee has released a new beta version with a much better user interface.  Although Boxee is designed for home entertainment it also contains thousands of video feeds to educational resources.  With the easy to use interface this program works nicely on projector/touch screen setups and could easily be used in a classroom setting.

You can download Boxee from here.  You will need to sign up for a free account.   http://www.boxee.tv/

You can watch a short Podcast on using Boxee (very quickly) on a Mac below:

Here is a quick podcast on a method of importing Appleworks Drawing Documents into Microsoft Word.  Although Pages and Numbers are good at opening and converting most of the older Appleworks wordprocessing and spreadsheet formats, Appleworks Drawing documents are not easily imported into Word.  Although they can be if you copy and paste from Appleworks Drawing Document  into a new Appleworks wordprocessing document – then open with Pages 09 – then export To Word.

Video Podcast

Have you ever come across a tune or audio file on the internet that has a noticeable hum throughout the entire track.  In the past expensive audio software tools were needed to remove such sounds and improve overall quality but today this can be done easily with Audacity.  The following is a quick podcast I created on using Audacity to remove background noise.

Overall Audacity is an excellent sound recorder/editor that should be installed on anyone system.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Here is a the LAME MP3 encoder as well (Mac Version)

libmp3lame.dylib MAC OSX universal

Thanks to a comment below from Jeorg – I am updating this post with their suggestion of simply visiting http://www.youtube-mp3.org/ . One step – works well Thanks for the tip.

Read Below for a longer more complicated method

Recently a teacher brought to me a You-tube video and wanted to extract just the audio track.   This is pretty easy to do using keepvid.com (or video download helper plugin for firefox) and Apple’s Garageband.

Here is a 10 Step Tutorial below or you can Watch my quick Podcast on the process:

1.  Find the Youtube Video

2.  Copy the URL for the youtube video that you want the audio for.

3.  Go to http://www.keepvid.com

4.  Paste the YouTube Url into the URL spot on the keepvid’s webpage.  Looks like this below.

5.  Look at the the download links and if possible select the MP4 version.

6.  With the file saved on somewhere (Desktop is a good spot)  – now open Garageband.

7.  Create a new Garageband Vocal project and then drag the video MP4 file into Garaband.  It will create a new track that looks like this.

8.  Now simply highlight the audio track in Garageband and then select EDIT | COPY.

9  Click on FILE | NEW PROJECT and again select VOCALS. (Don’t need to save old project)

10.  On the New Project click EDIT | PASTE.  You will see only the audio appears.  Now turn off any effects over on the right hand side then click on SHARE | EXPORT song and you are done -

I recommend Exporting the song as a MP3 for the greatest compatibility among other programs and players.

Change to MP3 where it says Compress using