iPad is the preferred tools for trial lawyers. It can also be used for the whole process of practicing law, from initial intake to trial. The article from Illinois State Bar Association website has more details.
If you are interested and want to talk more about iPads and its various apps, come and talk to Don.
Adding live stream twitter feeds to webpage has been made easy with the new widget function in Twitter.
Two steps:
First, log into your twitter account and under settings, choose Create Widget. There are four options: specific user, etc… For an event, the search option is the best. Define a hashtag, or the hashtag you will define for a certain event, and then create the widget. Once the widget is created, copy the html code.
The second step: embed that code into a webpage.
That is all there is. Make sure to keep the widget under your twitter account.
You can have your mobile devices automatically connected to the UST network.
For your smartphones, first, obtain the phone’s mac address. The instruction is here.
After you get the mac address, come here to fill out the form.
For tablets, find your mac address first. The instruction is here.
After you get the mac address, come here to fill out the form.
If you encounter any problems, please contact Kelly or Don.
When we mass email a message to groups of people, if we do not do anything with the email addresses, the email addresses will be available for every recipient to see. It may not be a bad thing for a lot of people, but I prefer to hide the emails of the groups of people who receive my messages. To do that, we simply use the bcc field in Outlook: put the groups of email addresses in the bcc field. Then put your email in the To: field. Now their emails are hidden from the recipients.
Just worked with a student in a panic. He used the Outlook Web App to read an email with an attachment, clicked on the attachment and then saved the changes, thinking all the while that the edits were saved. He closed the document, and now when he needed to print it out, opened the attachment again. The edits were gone, horrifyingly. OWA does not save any edits. But frustratingly, Word did not throw any error messages!
But the puzzle is that when you hit the save button, it has to be saved somewhere, right? But I could not find the saved file, either in the temporary file folder, internet temporary file, or downloads folder. And even amazingly maddening, the recent files did not contain any entry for the saved file. So it is sort of saved, but not saved. It is like the computer played a trick.
So my advice to the students or anybody using OWA: always use “save as” before working on the attached file!
We are a small IT unit and we do whatever we can to cope with demands. For instance, when we receive a request to record a talk or interview given the next morning and we do not have the recording facility in the classroom, we can think of a number of ways to cope with.
One, we can use iPhoto on MacBook to record. iPhoto will record it in .mov format which can easily be moved around and edited, copied or uploaded. We actually are using this method to record our Trial Advocacy classes. Students love it.
Two, we can also use a camcorder that our library has. It can record 1 hour 24 minutes video on its hard drive and it is in HD. The trouble with this Sony camcorder is that it is recorded in AVCHD format. Unfortunately, windows movie maker does not import this .mts format. But luckily, iMovie on my MacBook does. And the steps are very easy to perform.
I first uploaded the recording from the camcorder to my PC, moving the whole AVCHD folder. Then I copied that folder onto my jump drive. Now I started my iMovie on my MacBook, and then plugged in the jump drive. iMove automatically recognized the jump drive. The only thing left for me to do was to click the “Important All” button on the lower right. The clip is now in iMovie and I can create a project and export the project to the format we can use.
The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instructions has published a series of law related eBooks,for free. Some of them might be quite useful and convenient for our students, for instance, U.S. Bankruptcy Code and Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure (FRBP), Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and so on. If you are interested in downloading the eBooks, click here.
Occasionally we want to embed an image into the body of the email, not as an attachment, so how do you accomplish it?
Easy. But first, you have to have a html file which contains the image you want to embed.
Open your Outlook 2010 and choose Insert, find the file you want to insert into the message, but before you hit the Insert, click on the arrow next to the Insert, and now choose the Insert as Text. Your image will be inserted into the body of the email.
A recent incident prompted me to ponder what kind of due diligence that IT department of the law school or any school should perform in recommending solutions to faculty computing needs. One faculty member wanted to use equations in Word. It is part of the Word, and we showed the faculty member how to enter and edit the equations.
But soon after that, disaster hit. After the equations were embedded into the document and a few days of work later, the document after saved, could not be opened by Word, with the terrifying error message: the content of the document can not be opened due to: /word/document.xml line 2 column: 0 errors.
So what is going on? It turned out that the document.xml file has a bug. A search in Google will show that this problem occurred before. Some site even provided solutions. However, the errors in the xml document vary. In our case, it definitely is the equation bug, but no ready solution could be found, unless you can go into the document.xml file and find line 2 and column 0 to decipher the problem.
My detective side kicked in. I found that you can rename a Word document into a zip file. This sounds quite familiar, as I know that epub format for ebooks is also a zipped format. I renamed the file docs into zip file and gleefully clicked past the warning messages about format changes, and I had now a zipped file. Then I extracted the zip file into a folder of its own and now I see I have a Word folder among a lot of other unzipped files. In the Word folder, I found the document.xml file. I was happy because finally I could get to the root of the problem.
I used Dreamweaver to open the document.xml file, but to my surprise, line 2 of the document.xml is a long uninterrupted blob of words, and no column could be found. After looking for a while, I gave up. Though I felt that I was close to finding the problem, I had to give up standing at the very gate of solutions, simply because I could not find the culprit among the mess of codes.
I am left with the question: should I have done this kind of investigation before recommending to our faculty member the use of equations in Word document? I believe the answer from most IT department is no. When we use a software program, we are depending on the software program to work as it is supposed to work. However, on the other hand, we all know that computer programs contain bugs. And when the bugs spring, it will wreck our faculty members’ research and some of them work under tight deadline. It is a dilemma which defies solution, at least to me.
Sometimes we have a PDF that is over 100 MB. We could have a PDF of this large size from either creating one from images, or from programs such as Apple’s iPhoto, or other programs. We can easily reduce the size of the PDf by using Adobe Acrobat 11. Here are the steps:
1. Open the PDF;
2. Choose Save As… under file;
3. There are not several options for the save as: you can save as an Optimzed PDF, or reduced sized pdf, and a bunch of other options. Either the optimized or reduced sized pdf option will reduce the size of over 100 MB pdf to about 3 or 4 MB. That is a significant reduction!
Life at UST Law
