The IFC Media Project came to town today, to hold a panel discussion at the MIT Museum. They brought in more equipment than we’ve ever had anyone bring in. We had to run an auxiliary 60 Amp power drop for their cameras, lights, and recording studio. 

The panel discussion was about crime reporting in various media outlets, primarily print, radio, and TV. Tucker Carlson, Juan Williams, Martin Baron, Candy Altman, and Josh Silver were on the panel. 

There’s not too much of a technology angle to this event, other than that it’s nice to have people come in who know what they are doing. They brought in all their own equipment and a huge staff. Setup started yesterday, went into the wee hours of the night, and resumed again at 5AM this morning. 

The event was held in our Innovation Gallery, where exhibits are meant to come and go. Right now there’s relatively plenty of floor space but we’re going to be putting in a few new exhibits soon so things are going to get tighter again.

Rumors about the death of the Mac Mini and now, the rebirth of the Mac Mini prompted me to post my own personal wish that the Mac Mini retain many of its current characteristics. At the MIT Museum, we use Mac Minis whenever we can. They are insanely reliable and are easy to place in just about any situation. Here are four different setups we are currently running on the first floor.

This one is hung in a box near the ceiling. It’s been running for over a year. We set them all to reboot after a power loss, so we almost never need access. When I do need to do anything to it, I grab a ladder and plug in a keyboard & mouse.

This one has also been running for about a year. Prior to that it was sitting in a server room for about two years. The enclosure gets a bit warm. We used to have a Shuttle XPC inside but it failed after about 4 months. I think it was the heat.

We have two display tables with baskets attached underneath. The Mini fits in the basket. We used to have two additional setups just like this. This photo is of the CityCar interactive exhibit. There’s another Mini at the other end of the floor in the MIT & the Sea interactive exhibit (below the Mini-in-a-box pictured above).

The latest one to be put into service is a Mini that we strapped to the top of a monster Panasonic projector. The Mini drives the smaller projector to the left in the photo. This Mini is running Vine Server so I can access it remotely. Once we’re done tweaking it, I’ll probably shut off the Vine access.

Our Admissions Desk also uses two Minis, one for the staff to access various admin tools, mail, etc. The other to drive a sign displaying admissions prices, welcoming groups, etc.

In January we’re going to be installing an exhibit developed by the Sociable Media Group at the Media Lab. So far it will have seven Mac Minis in it, as well as an iMac. There will also be a couple of Dells so I guess we’ll see how they hold up in comparison.

My wishlist for the Mini: Keep being ultra-stable, don’t get too heat sensitive. Faster graphics would be nice, but not at the expense of being more finicky.

PS – I have one in my basement at home as well, it’s running this blog, among other things. I think it’s about 3 years old. I have it on a small UPS to deal with short power outages, connected to the web via Verizon FiOS (also very reliable!).

At the museum, we’re setting up a kiosk to let people browse our online collections database. We’re very much in the mode of trying things out using a simple setup and then when we see how that works, we can tweak it as needed.

The basic requirements were to let visitors browse a single website (http://webmuseum.mit.edu) but not to be able to follow any of the outgoing links. Additionally, the visitors should not be able to leave the web browser and start mucking about with the underlying computer.

Even though our old PowerMac G4’s are dropping like flies with broken power supply units, we have two left in the “good enough to reuse” bin. So I set one up with Mac OS X 10.5. Using MacPorts, I installed Squid and set up the network to use that squid as a proxy. Squid lets you configure which URLs it will go out and get, and which ones it will return an error on. I set it up to only return pages in the webmuseum.mit.edu site, and whenever a link outside that site is requested, it returns the toplevel page at http://webmuseum.mit.edu.

So far so good. The next thing I needed was a browser that won’t let visitors do too much other than browse. Luckily last week I bumped into Plainview. Plainview is a webkit based browser with no chrome. It also happens to have a kiosk mode that requires a password to get out of.

Then I set up a user account with Parental Controls, and only allow it to run the Plainview app and nothing else. I have the Mac boot up with that user login coming up automatically, and Plainview starts as a login application. Presto, a nice web kiosk. If users break out of Plainview, they can’t do anything else but log out of the system. We’ll see how long that takes…

One minor hitch in the entire setup – I don’t know whether it’s possible to set up Plainview to go directly into kiosk mode. Right now you have to type ⌘-/ and enter an administrator password to start kiosk mode.

One of the challenges of our Museum Without Walls project is how to gather, a critical mass of location-based multimedia material that’s worth seeing.

MIT has its own video gateway site that links to three major MIT video repositories: TechTV, where the community can upload videos; MITWorld, videos of lectures and events at MIT; and MITOpenCourseWare, videos of classroom lectures.

But the fact remains that someone has to produce the videos. So far, iMovie and its cousins have done a lot to bring video production to a huge base of people, but I would wager that a large percentage of the storytelling being done with those tools is from the point of view of a single voice.

However, Wikimedia and Kaltura have teamed up to start a site where multiple people can collaborate on video production. (Seen at boingboing). Overall, a very cool idea with a lot of promise!

One thing I didn’t buy yesterday was a MacBook Air. I went to the Chestnut Hill Mall Apple store to see what it looked like but they didn’t have any to show. The store won’t have any to look at for two more weeks.

Instead I ordered a MacBook from the Apple Education for MIT site (they are about $100 less there, and there’s a savings on AppleCare). When it gets here in a few days, I’ll clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to the MacBook and send the MBP to my son. They only thing I’ll miss, I suspect is the lighted keyboard, something I’ve come to like a lot. I ordered the 250GB drive and I’ll shop around for a RAM upgrade.

Then, with the savings, I’m thinking pretty seriously about an iPhone, something that would be fun to play with for the Museum Without Walls.

The iPhones I looked at at the Apple store had the new location detection firmware. The store is here but the phone indicated it was a good 1000′ southeast of the store, south of what’s labeled Holyhood Cemetery. That’s not exactly pinpoint accuracy. But the Skyhook wifi database may not have included the mall, and thus the iPhone was probably using the Google cell-tower locations to find itself. Skyhook claims 10-20m accuracy in urban areas. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So I’m going to blame my recent lack of postings on my blog to the fact that, like Hobu, I was finding that a Plone-based blog was not so easy to deal with. I decided to jump into the blogging mainstream with WordPress, so here we go.

Along with the switch to WordPress, I’m going to expand from mostly geo-related topics to things I’m dealing with at MIT as well. So for those of you who want exclusively geo-news, link to the geo category and the geo feed in Atom, RSS, or RSS2.

I still have to switch over the Feedburner feeds and tweak a few more bits and pieces, but overall the new version is ready to go.

As I mention in the About page, I’ve kept the old blog intact so that all the permalinks still work.