Big IDEA

Jaiku beats Twitter for communicating

I've been experimenting with microblogging services Twitter and Jaiku for a couple of weeks now. While Twitter has a huge user base, I prefer Jaiku for a few extra features it has. Jaiku has a more convenient system for posting comments or replies. I noticed in Twitter that if you try ...

Splitting and joining files on a Mac

Hoosgot a free file archiver/splitter for Mac? I couldn't find one so I'm resorting to the command line to split and join big files. Splitting a file You can use the 'split' command to chop up a file into parts. If you have multiple files or want to split a directory, archive ...

Motivation and persistence: Praise effort, not talent

Here I try to summarize Carol Dweck's research on motivation, touching on perceptions of intelligence and goal orientation. I am interested in Dweck's research on motivation for a very personal reason: I have two young girls. If you have children you will want to check out her work for ideas ...

Does podcasting add a personal touch to online courses?

The last few quarters I've been working on a project with a couple of faculty to integrate weekly podcasts into their courses. I didn't want to force faculty to start recording hour-long lectures, so I approached them with making brief (five minutes or less) weekly audio recordings. Rather than mini-lectures, ...

Looking for jaiku invite

Can anybody offer me an invitation to Jaiku? I don't have any invites to offer in return, just my thanks. :( Update: I received an invite. Catch me at dontodd.jaiku.com. [tags]jaiku, invite[/tags]

Always-on-top windows for Mac

Afloat brings this capability, though it doesn't seem to work on all windows. It's nice to have for IRC and IM, though. A semi-cool feature I can't decide if I like is that when you set a window to float and you have another window under it, the top ...

Close families yield independent young adults

This isn't surprising at all, but I am surprised by the number of parents I see trying to force their kids to be independent at a young age. This suggests that distancing yourself from your kids to foster independence is not the way to go. While a close relationship is often ...

Screencast: Prism for desktopping your web apps

If you're like me and you live in web apps for mail, calendar, and office, you might want to give Prism a try. What this does is allow you to enter a URL and Prism creates a shortcut to the site on your desktop ...

Education: Only for the talented and gifted

Alfie Kohn tells us to blame standardized tests if kids are reading less for fun these days. Based on recent personal experience, I couldn't agree more. My 8-year old daughter was recently tested for TAG and scored high enough to be placed in an all-day pull out program once a ...

A different way to look at files: Nemo

Nemo is a new application that's a cross between a calendar and file manager. It uses Tracker to gather information about files, and displays a calendar highlighting files you've worked on by date. You can filter files by ...

Fight death by PowerPoint

OK, I think presenting to students in a classroom is different from presenting to colleagues at a conference or giving a sales pitch, but this is spot on....

Serial Podcaster code now available

Updated and complete with installation instructions, grab it at the serial podcaster page.

League CIT 2007 links

From my presentation, Is this going to be on the test? The page for the serial podcasting scripts is http://ceitl.zanestate.edu/blog/serialpodcaster. The blog post and comment for creating an installer for Audacity that includes the LAME mp3 encoder can be found here.

Fall foliage; flip video test

I recently picked up a flip video camera. The quality isn't spectacular, but for an hour of recording time at 640x480 @ $150, it ain't bad.

More on serial podcasting

I'm presenting my serial podcasting system at a conference in November, so I decided to create a static page for it. You will recall that serial podcasting is republishing content in a particular order with a given update interval so that episodes get released, say, weekly. You can find the new ...

I likey Jing! (screencasting for Mac & linux)

Since switching to Mac, I've been wondering what I'm going to use for recording screencasts. Thanks to Alec Couros I learned about the Jing project, a TechSmith app that does screencasting for both Windows and Mac. And, since I'm running linux via VMWare fusion, I can even record ...

On “educational” toys

Roger Schank: Your child does not need to go to preschool unless you need the day care. And he does not need these silly toys at all. A child needs a safe environment, loving parents, and a world that stimulates him and allows him to practice skills he needs. What ...

Do your .docx (Word 2007) files get renamed to .zip?

When you try to download .docx (Word 2007) files from the Internet, does Internet Explorer want to rename them to .zip files? If you're looking for an easy fix, stop banging your head against the wall, it's not you. It's the server. You should contact the webmaster and ask him ...

video test

The Derek Trucks Band Key to the Highway

Testing pictures.

These are the huevos rancheros my wife made me for father's day. This is a buckeye.

Blog workshop links

Blogs: http://del.icio.us/dontodd/blog http://del.icio.us/dontodd/blogroll Search: http://del.icio.us/dontodd/search+blogs Tracking: http://del.icio.us/dontodd/aggregator Writing: http://del.icio.us/dontodd/blogging+diy http://del.icio.us/dontodd/blogging+hosted Tools: http://del.icio.us/dontodd/blogging+tool

Updating internal WordPress links after a domain name change

This blog used to live at idea.zanestate.edu, but the center changed names and now it lives at ceitl.zanestate.edu/blog/. It's easy enough to move the blog, but WordPress doesn't move all the old links and image references from the old posts for you. This is a relatively easy fix that involves ...

I got a MacBook Pro; now what?

When Apple talks about switching, it's usually about people switching from Windows to OS X. I use Windows (some) at work because I have to, but I'm primarily a linux (Mandrake, now Ubuntu) user. I am really happy to be able to use bash and run the scripts I wrote ...

Claiming blog with new URL

Technorati Profile

Ron Paul supporters: Case study in media literacy

The past few days I've been learning about republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul. The mainstream media calls him a dark horse Internet candidate. If you watch the YouTube videos made by his supporters, it's amazing to see how they contrast the way he is covered in the news with reality. ...

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