What is a pixel?

A pixel is a small square of a single color that makes up rasterized digital image. The word pixel is a combination of the two words: picture and element. They are the smallest visual unit on any device that shows digital imagery. It takes hundreds of thousands of pixels to make a standard resolution digital image. Written by:Luis Acosta Blk 1A

Technology Writing Response

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

- Arthur C. Clarke

In this writing assignment, you are to respond to the above quote, by  Arthur C. Clarke. The assignment should be at least 150 words.
Arthur C. Clarke is one of the most famous science fiction writers of the 21st century books such as: The Sentinel, Voices from the Sky ,  Report on Planet Three and Childhood's End.

Film director Stanley Kubrick directed the film 2001: A Space Odyssey based on one of his stories.

The Three Aspects of Color

• Hue: is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically, as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow,".

• Saturation:  is used to describe the intensity of color in the image. A saturated image has overly bright colors. Using a graphics editing program you can increase saturation on under-exposed images, or vise versa.

• Value: refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a certain area. Value can be used for emphasis.

Stereo vs. Mono sound

Monophonic (mono) sound is a audio file that contains only a signal track that plays all the audio signals mixed together. Stereophonic (stereo) sound contains two audio tracks that creates an illusion of directionality and audible perspective.In other words it gives an immersive audio experience.

Moore's Law

Moore’s Law, developed by Gordon Moore the co-founder of Intel, states that  the number of transistors on a computer microchip doubles about every two years. This process causes the size of computers to shrink exponentially. Experts believe that this growth will continue for the next few decades.

The computer industry uses this principle to plan for their future technological output. 

ENIAC I

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is considered tp be the first fully functioned computer. It was capable of reprogramming itself to solve different types of computing problems. ENIAC was developed in 1946 by John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army. The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, covered 1800 square feet, weighted 30 tons and used 160 kilowatts of electrical power.

The vacuum tubes were used for binary on and off determinations and have now been replaced by, solid-state devices such as transistors and semiconductors.

Binary Code

A Binary Code is the language that computers speak. It is a series of on/off determinations represented by the numbers 1 and 0. A single on/off determination is called a bit.

8 Bits make up a byte which is able to represent a single character on a computer screen (letter, number, etc..).

A thousand bytes is a kilobyte, and a thousand kilobytes is a megabyte. Continuing in this x1000 pattern with Gigabytes, Terabytes, Petabytes, and so on...

Here is a link that gives examples of how much information that these orders of magnitude of memory can store.
http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/how-big.htm

"This Sentence is Not True."

The first assingment for Mr. Teheran's class this year was to write a response to this statement: "This sentence is not true."

This assingment was not only designed to mess with our minds, but also to illustrate the concept of paradox.
Your response should be kept in your notebook/sketchpad.

Three Act Structure

Here is the link to the Three Act Structure.

The Monomyth: The Hero's Journey

Here is the wiki link to information on the hero's journey.

Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a)

A firewire 400 cable is a digital data cable that is fast enough to pull video data off of a external hard drive and be used live in final cut pro. It is faster then a USB1 cable but not as fast as a USB2 cable or a firewire 800 cable.




A 6 pin to 4 pin firewire 400 cable is often used in our classroom to connect digital video cameras and decks to our computers.

Here is a link for more information:

Firewire @ answers.com

USB Cables

A USB(Universal Serial Bus) cable is a digital data cable that connects to most computers and computer peripherals.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard developed in the mid-1990s that defines the cables, connectors and communications protocols used in a bus for connection, communication and power supply between computers and electronic devices.

USB was designed to standardize the connection of computer peripherals, such as keyboards, pointing devices, digital cameras, printers, portable media players, disk drives and network adapters to personal computers, both to communicate and to supply electric power. It has become commonplace on other devices, such as smartphones, PDAs and video game consoles. USB has effectively replaced a variety of earlier interfaces, such as serial and parallel ports, as well as separate power chargers for portable devices.

As of 2008[update], approximately 6 billion USB devices had been sold in total, and about 2 billion were being sold each year.

More on USB cables here

Know Your Cables!

The following posts detail the variety of cables that we will use in the class.