Karmic Koala

A long time since my last post but I explained the reasons in my other blog. Like many other early adopters, I've had a rough time with Ubuntu's new 9.10 distribution: Karmic Koala. Initially I only succeeded in booting via the Gnome Failsafe mode with no Internet connectivity and the graphic display stuck on a 4:3 aspect ratio, not much good for my widescreen monitor. After a while, I got it to boot via Gnome but the graphics are still faulty and the connection to the Internet just doesn't want to work. I should have waited I know and I promise I will next time. I've put the PC away now and returned to my trusty laptop running Windows Vista. I once thought that Ubuntu might challenge Microsoft but then Apple took off and Microsoft seems to have redeemed itself with Windows 7. I don't think Ubuntu will ever challenge the big players for desktop supremacy but maybe Google's Chrome, running on a Linux base, will have some chance. I just can't be bothered wasting as much time as I used to on solving Ubuntu problems. Like most users, I just want things to work and currently this is not the case.

Firefox and other matters

I finally got fed up with the fans in my Acer PC working overtime as I merely browsed pages on the Internet. I only had open TweetDeck and Firefox but it was the latter that seemed to be the cause of the CPU overload. Maybe I have too many plugins installed. I'll have to investigate the matter later but for the time being I've switched to the Ephiphany browser and everything is wonderfully quiet. It really was driving me to distraction. I can't believe I've put up with it for so long when there was such an easy solution at hand.

It's probably about time that I did start getting a little "pedagogical" and start organizing my thoughts a little. I recently came across a free graph-generating program for Windows called f(x)-Viewer. It's a 569Kb download and I have it running in WINE. I've given a brief test drive and it seems quite adequate. I've used Graphmatica in the past and I guess there are lot of graph-generating programs out there. Another free program that I've played around with is Foto-Mosaik-Edda that generates a photograph made up of smaller photographs (thousands of them if you want). I want to use it to generate a 90cm x 60cm photograph that I'll get printed out before I leave for Shanghai. I've been told that the printing cost will be around Rp120,000.

I guess I'll be expected to have an opinion on the possible implementation of Windows 7 in the school environment and it certainly seems a good idea. The fact that Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise will offer legacy compatibility via Virtual Windows XP makes it even more attractive. Release date is said to be October 22nd 2009.
Of course, Google Chrome OS is due for release next year and it will be interesting to see how that fares. All that's in the future however, and what I want to do here is review the tools that I've already used and find some new tools that I'd like to use. Some interesting sites that I've marked in Delicious are:

• best of history web sites described as "an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1000 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more".
  
  
• educational software listings at gizmo's freeware contains links to several interesting sites. Apart from the previously mentioned history site, there are links to best PC freeware, 50 places for free books online, and ACADEMIC EARTH featuring videos lectures from some of the top universities in the USA.
  
  
• Gutenkarte "is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map".
  
  
• Groupsite.com is a free social collaboration building site similar it would seem to Ning.

That's probably enough for now.

My new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

I wasn't expecting to acquire a new handphone any time soon but suddenly I did and with a little encouragement from Desy I took the plunge and so far I've been pleasantly surprised. Initially I was only wanting a phone with WiFi but in addition to this, the phone has 3.5G HSPDA, touch screen, TV-out and GPS. The camera and video capabilities are impressive. Essentially, it offers iPhone performance at a much lower price.

As the name suggests it's music oriented and music sounds wonderful through my earphones which fortunately can be connected with the standard jack unlike my previous Nokia N73. I was surprised to find the MobiPocket Reader doesn't currently support the phone properly but after some searching I came across a product here that does the job so I'm off and reading now. This beginner's guide to the Nokia 5800 has also proved very helpful.

The new phone should prove its worth in Shanghai because I can now connect to the Internet at WiFi hotspots and via HSPDA once I find a provider in that city. I can also tether it perhaps to my laptop if there is some delay in having ADSL connected in my apartment. In short it dramatically improves my options for Internet connectivity while allowing me read ebooks, take good quality photos and videos, listen to music and even watch video clips downloaded from YouTube. I can even make and receive phone calls with it.!

Posterous

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to test out posterous and I'm putting it to the test by posting to my Pedogogical Posturing blog from Gmail. I succeeded in posting from Gmail to Twitter earlier. What happens is that the subject line of the email appears in Twitter followed by a link to posterous containing what was in the body of the email. Clearly, it's important to make good use of the subject line when using Gmail to post to Twitter via posterous. These indirect ways of posting to sites as Twitter can be useful if a country suddenly bans Twitter. This site allows simultaneous posting to all linked sites which in my case (so far) are Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and my two blogs in Blogger. However, there is the choice to post to none or only some of the linked sites. For this test, I've attached an image so it will interesting to see how posterous handles that in combination with this text. Here goes.

Well it did work out after a couple of tries. It didn't using the following email addresses:

• http://voodoo-guru.blogspot.com
• voodoo-guru.blogspot.com

However, it accepted www.voodoo-guru.blogspot.com oddly enough. The font however, is the default one that I don't use and the text is also left justified instead of the full justification that I use. What it means is that there is a little editing to do afterwards but all in all it works quite well.

Posted via email from seanreeves's posterous

thismoment

I've been experimenting with a site called thismoment and finding it quite appealing. The central idea is that you capture significant moments of your life on a timeline and describe them using text, photos, videos and links. You can draw on photos that you have on Flickr and Picasa and can post to Facebook and Twitter. Friends can be nominated so that they too can add content to the various moments.

Educationally, it has possibilities because it could allow students to document the development of a project. Your typical blog provides this facility too but the interface of thismoment makes navigation and collaboration a lot easier. The site clearly has bugs. For example, my entry of June 27th still remains in the future on the timeline, even though it's now June 28th. Another problem is that even though you can specify your location, the site remains insensitive to that and regards now as being now somewhere in the United States.

Furthermore, by use of custom labels, you can use an existing account to view only those moments that have been given a certain label. Students working on a project could simply use the label "project" when making contributions (moments). They can still create other moments but when the filter "projects is chosen then only those moments with that label will appear on the timeline. I'm currently investigating another site called posterous and will report on that shortly.

Portable Ubuntu

Today I succeeded in downloading Portable Ubuntu and installing it on my new Toshiba 4GB stick drive that I bought for US$15 yesterday. However, I first had to get rid of the GRUB boot loader from my laptop and that was far from easy. No matter what I did by way of formatting the drive, it always came back asking me whether I wanted to boot to Ubuntu or Windows. In the end it was as simple as typing Bootrec.exe/FixMbr after the command prompt during system recovery. The method is described here.

So now all trace of Ubuntu is gone from my laptop and I've reclaimed the 37GB of space that had previously been alloted to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. The same version however, is now back on my stick drive and this is a far happier arrangement. I have the latest version of Ubuntu on my PC (dedicated to Ubuntu only) anyway. Currently I'm downloading the latest updates for Hardy Heron and later I'll download other programs. AbiWord word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet were there but not Open Office or GIMP. Plenty of time to play around with things.

Virtual Computers

I've decided to reformat the hard drive on my Toshiba laptop after 2.5 years of use. Initially I used Microsoft's Virtual PC software to install a virtual Ubuntu machine that turned out to have some virtual hardware issues. Later, I used VMWare's software to create another, rather more successful, virtual Ubuntu machine. Finally, I installed a dual boot system so that I could boot to either Ubuntu or Windows Vista. All of these installations consumed hard disk space, of which there was still plenty, but things were obviously messy and so this is an attempt to tidy things up. I intend to run Portable Unbuntu for Windows (link) which allows you to use Ubuntu from within Windows.

POSTSCRIPT: a day later I'm still trying to download the 439 MB file. Every attempt yesterday failed because the download just hung or because it was impossibly slow. The download today seems to be going better predicting 3 to 4 hours rather than 3 to 4 days! Fingers crossed.

Overview and Blog Reboot

Over a month since my last post to this blog but my excuse is that I was exceedingly busy toward the end of the school year with little time to comment on technological or educational matters. Of course that's all changed now. I have the freedom to explore whatever catches my fancy. Despite being busy, I've remained active microblogging via Twitter and that is interesting in itself. There is something daunting about a full-blown blog post when you're under work-imposed pressure. You tend to procrastinate about it whereas you don't think twice about firing off 140 characters. I guess traditional blog posts, mine at least, tend to be overblown and needlessly wordy. Tweets on the other hand are immediate, spontaneous and necessarily pithy.

I don't intend to stop blogging however, and the key question in this current post is what technological matters should I explore in the abundant free time that I have available to me. Of immediate concern to me are netbooks and e-book readers because I will probably purchase both of these items in the near future. I've learnt from my mistake with the BenQ P50 PDA to avoid impulse buying and any electronic purchases that I now make must to be more considered. I've already carried out research on both topics but haven't reached any firm decisions. That's what I need to do over the next week before I head off to Singapore where I may well end up purchasing one or both of these two products.

Flash Problem Resolved

I finally got motivated enough to search for a solution to the loss of audio when playing flash videos and animations. I found it here and it was as simple as typing sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio && killall -0 pulseaudio in a terminal window. This is more or less a repetition of the problems that I had when I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and the "pulseaudio" solution is the same. The Wi-

Fi router problem turned out to be caused by the cable from the ADSL modem being plugged into the wrong socket. How that happened I don't know but now that too is working well.

Jaunty Jackalope: The Aftermath

Having installed Ubuntu 9.04, I now have to face the aftermath. As I discovered with the last upgrade, there are consequences and the first one that I've discovered this time around is that there is no sound when I play flash games or flash videos. However, there is sound for music and movies etc. Why this should be, I've no idea but my six year old granddaughter was not amused when she couldn't hear any sounds while playing her favourite Yahoo flash game this afternoon. I'm now under pressure to come up with a solution. I did reinstall some drivers that had been disabled by the installation and had been warned beforehand that "some 3rd party entries in your sources list were disabled. Reenable with 'software properties' tool or your package manager" (which I did). Maybe when I restart the PC tomorrow, all will be well. I doubt it however, and will probably have to begin the inevitable quest for answers. 

This little problem has been coupled with the failure of my laptop to connect to the home Wi-Fi router. It connects at school without any problem but not at home. For some weeks now it has been slow to connect when brought home from school. Initially, it would not recognise that a network was present but after five minutes or so it would and then the connection would remain stable. This latest trouble seems to be an escalation of these earlier difficulties. So far I can't see any obvious differences between 9.04 and the earlier version but I've really not had a chance to look around much. I'd also like to try to run a portable version of Ubuntu within Windows as outlined on this site. The download is 438Mb. so I might try it next weekend. I really do need to clean up the hard drive on my laptop. As well as having a dual boot system (Windows and Ubuntu 8.04), I also have two virtual PCs set up within Vista using Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare. I should just reinstall Vista and start afresh, after all the laptop is now two and half years old and it is full of all sorts of rubbish that I've experimented with briefly and discarded.

Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope

I've taken the plunge again and begun installing Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. I'd never heard of a Jackalope but apparently it's a portmanteau of jackrabbit and antelope, an imaginary creature that nonetheless makes regular appearances in popular culture (see Wikipedia article). Even though it's just been released, the OS is getting favourable reviews so it will be interesting to test it out.

Recently I have been experiencing some strange problems with video downloads from YouTube. The downloads would play in Ubuntu but not in Windows. This occurred using both DownloadHelper and FlashGot plugins for the latest release of 3.0.9 release of Firefox. Needless to say this is frustrating given that I often download videos on my Ubuntu PC and then play them at school on Windows-based machines. I haven't done any research into the problem but I'll see if it recurs with the new release.

Beginning Again

I've decided to move my technological blog on Edublogs (see addendum at bottom of this post) to Blogger partly for improved centralisation and partly because of the lousy 20Mb of storage space that is allocated (this has now changed, see addendum). For 2009 that is a ridiculously tiny amount of space. I exported the blog as a XML file and tried to import into Blogger but failed. I suspect the problem is at the Edublogs end. For the time being, I've just included a link to my old posts until I can work out a way to move them all across. Goodbye Edublogs. A lot of my activity lately has been with ebooks, ebook formats and ebook readers, of both the software and hardware varieties. 

I'm happy that I've solved a problem that had been bugging me on my Nokia N73. It was difficult to read PDF files using the Adobe Reader program that came with the phone. The text could be viewed but it was awkward to read and in the end I gave up. I had Mobipocket Reader installed on the phone and it possibly might have read the PDF files if it had picked them up during its scan of the memory card but it didn't. Any time I clicked on the PDF file, the dreaded Adobe Reader would open. In the Symbian OS, I wasn't able to disassociate the file from the program. Just another reason to dislike Adobe and the Symbian OS. 

With Mobipocket's Creator, only available for Windows not Linux, I was able to convert my PDF version of Osho's "Book of Wisdom" to PRC format which is now eminently readable using my Mobipocket Reader. There is also a program called "calibre" which works on Windows and Linux that will do the same job. It converts the PDF into a MOBI file which is readable as well but there are glitches in the spacing between words and there are odd hyphenations. I've only tested this on one file so I need to experiment further. However, I'm making use of my mobile phone once again for reading ebooks and getting through them far quicker than when I could only view them on the computer.

ADDENDUM: October 8th 2020

The blog posts on Edublogs are still there and date back to September 30th 2007 when made my first post about Animoto and FileFlash.

As for the meagre 20MB of storage, this was increased to 1GB per blog in 2017. See this Edublog post about the increased storage and other features.