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.