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On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Swapping Out Gear

When you’re troubleshooting, a lot of people start by swapping out gear. If that’s the problem, it might immediately solve it, but if it isn’t, you’ve just wasted time, effort, and potentially money with a replacement you didn’t need.

If you’re troubleshooting, swapping out gear doesn’t always work. So keep these things in mind:Click To Tweet

Sometimes, it isn’t one piece of gear that’s causing a problem, but the combination of pieces. Imagine that a camera sends out a signal that’s just a little weak and a distribution amplifier doesn’t amplify as well as it should. Taken in isolation, these things might not be noticeable, but taken together, they might feed off each other.

Always replicate failures to make sure that the piece you suspect is the problem, actually is. If a DA isn’t working, it shouldn’t work no matter the installation.

Remember that cables tend to fail at their termination points, so an intermittent short could make you believe a piece of gear is to blame because unplugging it shows a fault one moment and then it works when you plug it into the new piece.

Watch the video for more tips.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

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http://TrinityDigitalMedia.com/church-tech

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On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting techniques: Divide and Conquer

When you’re troubleshooting, sometimes the problem may be in one of several identical cables, or plugins, etc. You could remove them one at a time, but instead, try this technique.

If you have a long list of supposed causes to a problem, you could remove them one at a time, or you could do this and save a bunch of time:Click To Tweet

My father told me a story about a blacksmith that would always offer this clients a deal. He’d charge them one penny for the first nail and double the cost for each additional nail. It doesn’t sound like much, but if there are 6 nails per shoe and 4 shoes per horse, it quickly adds up to a bill of $167,772.16. That’s the power of doubling.

In reverse, you can do a lot by halving. Imagine that you have 40 cables and you know that one of them is causing a problem, but you’re not sure which. You could unplug one, test it, and continue on, but all things being equal, it’s not likely to be one of the first ones.

Instead, you can test them all by unplugging half. Did the problem go away? If so, it’s one of the first 20. If not, it’s the other 20. Now, take half of the ones that have the problem cable in the group. That narrows it down to 10. Now do half again. That’s 5. Now do 3. Now do 2 and 1. In 6 steps, you’ve narrowed down 40 possible problems to 1. That’s efficient.

The larger the numbers, the better this technique works. Are there 400 possible problems? Test 200, 100, 50, 25, 13, 7, 4, 2, 1. So, in 9 steps you’ve found the problem.

I’ve used this technique in software, too. If the problem is a group of plugins, I test half and then half and so on until I find the solution.

If you have two problems, this won’t work, but if there’s one, it will solve the problem quickly, every time.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

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Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Asking “What changed?”

When you run into a problem, it’s always valuable to ask, “what changed?” There’s a risk there, too. It’s easy to blame recent additions that have nothing to do with the core problem.

When you’re troubleshooting, this is a valuable question to ask, but don’t be a slave to it: Click To Tweet

I’m working on some software (check back because I’m getting close). I recently added a feature that I’d wanted, but in doing so, something else broke.

Now, I could say that all I need to do is remove the new feature. The problem is I like it. So, how do I fix the old feature without removing the new one? I look for where the problem actually is.

In this case, I had a dialog that was on the page, but I wanted it to be a pop up. In doing so, I removed another dialog, planning on adding it later.

As it turns out, the old feature was dependent on that information, so it wasn’t that I’d added the new feature as much as that I’d removed something that I thought was extra.

This is a great point about this question. In my undergrad days, in logic class, we learned that correlation isn’t causation. In other words, just because two things happen at the same time or nearly the same time, doesn’t mean that one caused the other.

Back to this software. I added a popup box and then on old feature quit working. It could be that the popup somehow broke the old feature, but it was actually that I’d done something else in addition. So it wasn’t the cause. When I added the dialog I’d removed altogether, that fixed the problem and I had both features again.

For more information on this technique, watch today’s show.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

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On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Short-leash it

Do you suspect that the problem is either a piece of gear or a cable, but you’re not sure which? Try the short-leash test.

Do you suspect that the problem is either a piece of gear or a cable, but you’re not sure which? Try the short-leash test: Click To Tweet

When you have a source, a cable, and a destination, and the signal isn’t getting all the way from the source to the destination, there are three possible points of failure: the source, the cable, and the destination. All things being equal, the failure will tend to be in the cable. It will also tend to be on one end or the other.

So, to test to see which it is, try the short leash test. Basically, take a short, known-good cable and connect the two ends of the chain, bypassing the current cabling. If its starts working, you know it’s a cabling problem and you can address it. If it doesn’t, you know it’s either the source or destination and you can troubleshoot further.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

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* RSS feed

* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

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On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Simple it down

Let’s say you’re checking the video system at your church. The computer is on and looks like it’s outputting video. The screen is on and should be showing it. It’s not. How do you troubleshoot?

When a complex system breaks, this is the first thing I’d do to try and narrow down the problem:Click To Tweet

I make sure everything is on and then I “simple it down.” I try and make the minimum system I can. This usually means bypassing a lot of extras to see if the basic components work. If they do, I start adding things back in one at a time until you find the failure.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

* Subscribe on YouTube

* RSS feed

* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

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For more questions, comments, or snide remarks, comment below or contact me at:

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Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

On today’s Tech, No Babel: How and why to troubleshoot

Is something not working in your church tech set-up? Learn why you should troubleshoot before you send it out to be repaired here:

Is something not working in your church tech set-up? Learn why you should troubleshoot here:Click To Tweet

When something is wrong, you might think “I’ll just get a new one or send this one off to get fixed.” That’s fine, if you know what it is. If you don’t do at least some basic troubleshooting, you could be wasting time and money.

Quick story. Right after college, I bought a 1995 Chevy Camaro. It was the first car I’d ever owned with a manual transmission and I always feared that the clutch would go out.

One day, I was driving home and I thought it had. After calling my room mate, I decided to try one more thing before I had it towed. I put gas in the tank. Turns out, that was the problem all along. I’d jumped to a conclusion that something worse had happened, when it just needed gas.

That’s the way life is sometimes. If you don’t troubleshoot, you might think a piece is broken when it just needs new consumables or to be plugged in.

That’s why we’re starting a series on troubleshooting, so that you can do a better job and save yourself some headaches.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

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* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

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Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

On today’s Tech, No Babel: Video Preflight Checklists

When you do video, there are some things you do every time. Don’t skip this :Click To Tweet

What do airplane pilots, NASA, and great videographers have in common? The preflight checklist.

Unless you have a simple task, that has only a single step, or a task that’s impossible to miss, you should have it in your preflight checklist.

Avoid adding things into your checklist that you won’t be able to see when you need to do it. For example, having an item in your checklist for camera people to do while they’re using their hands and eyes isn’t helpful to them.

Avoid things that should be on a post-mortem checklist. Try and keep it helpful.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

* Subscribe on YouTube

* RSS feed

* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

*

For more questions, comments, or snide remarks, comment below or contact me at:

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More video can be found on YouTube.com

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Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

On today’s Tech, No Babel: Live-Streaming: Mixing audio prefade or postfade

You know (if you’ve been watching long), that I really think that audio for your live-stream should be mixed by a dedicated individual in an isolated room. Not every church can do that.

So the next best option is mixing with an aux. The question is whether you should mix prefade or post fade.

That’s a good question.

When you’re mixing live-streaming audio, should you mix prefade or post fade? It depends:Click To Tweet

With prefade, you have more control and you acn affect the live mix without affecting the house (in the case of something you don’t want in the house).

The downside is that it’s more work and easier to forget.

With post fade, it’s easier. Hard to forget.

The con to this that you have less control and could end up with a mix that just doesn’t sound as good.

So, what do you think? Which would you prefer?

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

* Subscribe on YouTube

* RSS feed

* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

*

For more questions, comments, or snide remarks, comment below or contact me at:

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More video can be found on YouTube.com

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Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

On today’s Tech, No Babel: Software review: Disk Drill Pro

Think that the disk utilities on Mac need additional features? I think I might have found the software for you. Take a look at my review of Disk Drill Pro.

Think that the disk utilities on Mac need additional features? I think I might have found the software for you.Click To Tweet

Disk utility is fine for what it does, but if you want to undelete some stuff you accidentally deleted and check the health of an HD, you might want something else.

That’s where Disk Drill Pro comes in. It’s software that fills in the gaps between disk utility and time machine. Additionally, indicators for every internal drive sit in the status bar with temperature always listed.

Since it’s not a matter of if a hard drive fails, but when, Disk Drill Pro will help you see when things are starting to fail, so you can take steps to fix it.

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

* Subscribe on YouTube

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* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

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On today’s Tech, No Babel:

Live-streaming: Encoding without a computer

Most churches think that you can encode your video for live-streaming using an older computer and free software. In this video, learn why that won’t work and a hardware alternative that might be a better value.

Most churches start by using an old computer with free software, but it causes problems. Here’s how to fix those:Click To Tweet

The problem with the old computer/free software idea is that live-encoding is a beefy process, meaning it either takes efficient software (which isn’t free) or a fast processor (which you don’t find in an old computer).

So, you can start with a $500-600 computer and add $500 software or you can start with $1000 computer and use free software. Either way, you’ll also need a capture card, raising the price further.

A better choice is to get an encoding device. Last week, I did a review of the Boxcaster by Boxcast. At $500, it’s a great option in you know you’ll stick with their service.

If you think you might switch back and forth, consider the Vidiu by Teredek or the Vidiu mini which sell for $700 and $500 respectively and work on nearly any live-streaming host.

There are more expensive options as well which provide more features, but if you’re just getting started, I’d look at these options first.

They provide a key advantage over the software based live-streaming encoders: no one will update the OS or download software that causes conflicts onto them.

For more about these hardware boxes, watch the video above:

If you’d like to chip in a few bucks, anything you do is appreciated. Just click this link to donate.

About this show:

Tech, No Babel is a weekly podcast premiering every Thursday at 11a eastern (-4 UTC), 8a pacific on http://churchtechcast.com. Watch it and join the chat then.

But, if you miss the live show, I’ll put up the edited show later (usually on the same day) right here.

If you do video or graphic design to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

How to Subscribe to the show (for free):

* Subscribe on YouTube

* RSS feed

* iTunes one-click subscription and don’t forget to rate the show there as well.

*

For more questions, comments, or snide remarks, comment below or contact me at:

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More video can be found on YouTube.com

Also check out my Google+ page