I'm testing out (behind the goddam Great Wall) post.ly that's owned by Posterous and being promoted as a dead simple way to post to Twitter.

Posted via web from seanreeves's posterous

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.