The Educated Kiwi
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Unlock Moodle Potential
Jun 17th
One of the effects of the latest flu pandemic is that a school can be shut down at anytime. Our particular school policy states that we will provide materials online while students are away so that they may continue with their studies. Unfortunately in a practical based subject that is a little difficult and rather than reinvent the wheel I went trolling for links to existing material. I have to say that Workshop Technology is not well represented online in New Zealand, something I would like to rectify given the time. What I did find were these videos showing the potential of moodle in secondary education – check out these great videos by MoodleFairy.
Everlong
Jun 16th
I downloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now. It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”. It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.
I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped. Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour. Even my wife said it sounded good.
I picked up a couple of key points from the video. Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier. Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets. Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.
I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this. Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.
iPhone Heaven
Apr 6th
I am the last one on the team to get the iPhone and I am very pleased with it. I have been using the iPod touch for a few months but feel like I have been missing out on 3G data and GPS goodness. Of course my Nokia N95 did both of those things but the GPS would take up to 10 minutes to get a lock and using a browser is useless with the numeric keypad on the N95. As for camera – although the N95 has a 5 MP camera taking a picture was never instant and I get 10 times better from my pocket size Canon Ixus. In short after 12 months with the N95 (which has now developed a number of faults) I am relieved to be on the iPhone.
iMac 17inch hdd install made easy with youtube
Dec 8th
So after we upgraded our home iMac we passed our old one on to Natalies parents which after six months required a rebuild as the drive was corrupted. I should have know the death bell was ringing but reformatted and reinstalled instead.
Then as I leave for Australia Nat rings saying it’s died again and they need it for the NCEA exam timetable that my Mother in law supervises. Bugger. So with fear in my head I thought here is a dead logic board but being well out of warranty I decided little was to be lost from replacing the internal hard drive.
The photo below shows the innards on the dining room table as I followed this video on you tube. Great after five minutes it was apart. Then off to the shop for a new 250gb SATA drive for $150 and put it in, reversed the process and began reinstalling the OS. Now all thats required is to see what I can rescue with disk warrior on the old drive. But once the iMac is out of warranty it certainly makes this an easy option for schools with these machines, especially for media where a 1tb drive could go nicely.
Mobilising TEK
Nov 23rd
Since I went crazy and brought an iPhone last week I though it was time to Mobilise TEK for Opera Mini, Windows mobile and safari mobile, This was a crazy easy task which consisted of downloading mobilepress. Unzipping then uploading the folder to the plugins folder and ticking a couple of boxes and bingo mobile TEK. It has been amazing how much I have used mobile Safari and now see what Mark was talking about with the iPod touch. It is great to have a mobile device that is easily useable rather than the clunky interface with my Nokia N73, which was actually a more expensive phone.
Google Gems
Nov 22nd
If Google are trying to take over the world they are not doing a bad job. They have just added video and audio chat to their gmail interface. Now they have my face and voice information along with my videos (youtube), family pics (picassa), email (gmail), business plan (google docs) and a detailed profile of my search information. Does that worry me? A little, but not enough to make me stop, and the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that “Do no evil”, the company motto, was a well thought out statement to put us all at ease while they quietly gather information about us.
The up side to this is that google do try and use that information for good. Not only do they provide excellent services but they also help humanity. Google can now predict, with reasonable accuracy, where flu breakouts will occur 2 weeks ahead of the Centre for Disease Control using search results. Link to NY Times article.
Speaking of excellent services, Google has just released Sketchup 7 3D modelling software. Sketchup is available in free and paid versions for OSX and Windows and is by far the best beginners 3D software.
Finally for the more geeky of you out there, Google labs have developed a tool for more controls over IMAP mail. I use three devices for checking mail, desktop, laptop and iPod Touch and IMAP is the most convenient method. However each time I check my mail, using Apple mail.app, it would spend a good few minutes downloading spam from the server to my computer. Now you can choose which folders get downloaded and which stay on the server, ideal if you are using iPhone 3G to cut down data transfer over 3G connection. Check out the Lifehacker article.
Making the TEK irpen for wiiboard
Nov 3rd
Here is a quick 3x speed video of Mark making an irpen. Feel free to comment and ask questions if you need any further help making your own. Or you can buy one by clicking on the link on this blog. If you need to see it in higher quality follow the link to you tube where there is the option of HQ.
Use N95 3G data with iPod Touch
Sep 22nd
I have been trying to figure this out for a while to connect my laptop to my phones 3G connection. The tethered solutions seemed overly complicated requiring the installation of multiple applications, Kelvin had managed to get it working on his N95 but it was a pretty painful process.
Then I remembered hearing about turning your phone into a wireless hotspot on a podcast and sure enough this free app from Joiku does just that.
Start the application and your phone becomes a wireless router which you can connect any of your devices to. Joiku is kind enough to display the usage so that I can use Vodafone NZs 10MB for $1 data connection without running up any massive data bills. Unfortunately the free version is not secure so anyone can connect but if you are only using it for brief periods then I can’t see a problem, although the premium version does offer more security.
You do need a 3G phone with wifi and no doubt it will drain the batteries in my N95 in no time but if you are stuck in a hotel with no internet a powerpoint will not be too far away. I look forward to trying this out at the TRCC conference in Wellington in October.
Video conversion with DownloadHelper
Sep 12th
Please be aware that with the updates of downloadhelper you now have the ability to convert as well as download. Follow the link below for further instructions.
DownloadHelper’s primary job is to retrieve to your disk the videos that are playing in Web pages, in their original format.
Unfortunately, the native format generally FLV is often not very convenient when it comes to playing back the videos, on either your home computer or a hand held device, burning them to a DVD or reworking the movie.
With the new DownloadHelper’s Video Conversion feature, you can very easily select one or more videos that lie on your disk and choose a pre-defined output format. The program will process the movies in background.
Even better: you can setup the extension to automatically convert the videos as soon as they are saved by DownloadHelper. You can even specify conversion rules which site, which original media format to be processed with a given set of parameters.
Video conversion is available on DownloadHelper 3.1 or later.
Zen and the art of the Virtualisation
Aug 17th
Well Xen anyway!!…..One for the System Admins or anybody else who has overall responsibility for the systems at a workplace/school.
I love it when a plan comes together!!!. A few months ago Arron from Totali convinced me to throw caution to the wind and virtualise a number of our servers into one ‘box’. Lots has been said re the advantages of doing this
- Limiting your power usage and therefore carbon footprint
- Less ‘black boxes’ to replace
- Lower overall cost of ownership etc
But for me the big advantage was the idea that I could ‘export’ each machine and import them onto another in case of hardware failure (We have kept many of our services on Mac servers as this can be done easily with them). I was not convinced this would work!!!
So on Friday I bought a cheap ‘box’ with the following specifications for a cost of well less than $1000NZ with the following specs:
Intel® Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz 6MB Cache 1333MHz FSB 45nm #E8500
Asus P5KPL-CM Mainboard
2 x A-Data 2GB DDR-2 800 Memory totalling 4GB’s
Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATAII NCQ
Asus DRW-2014 DVD Writer
It took less than 15mins to load Xen server by Citrix and install a working copy of our Active Directory from an image…..Pure magic….especially as presently we are running the free version on XenServer only. This is the sorts of things that makes me as System Admin with a Technical staff of 1 and 400+ machines to maintain, sleep a lot more soundly.
A truly Zen Like moment!
Use Quicktime Pro to rotate Movies
Aug 6th
This falls into the “wish I knew this earlier folder” By opening a movie in Quicktime Pro and selecting view movie properties you can easily rotate a film taken incorrectly with your digital camera. I have done this a couple of times when I have been taking photos and then decided to get a short bit of film.
NZQA to Moodle
Jul 22nd
Up until today I have been getting achievement and unit standards from the NZQA website as individual files. I download them to my computer then I put them up on Moodle as individual files; a time consuming process. Then I discovered that it doesnt have to be so hard- follow the steps below.
Search for your files on NZQA
Download all as a zip file
I only just noticed this option today although it could have been there for years.
Upload as a zip file
When you want to upload your files to Moodle choose the .zip file
Unzip in Moodle
Choose the unzip option and Moodle will expand the folder and you can navigate to the files you want.
You can use this method to upload multiple files of any type in Moodle, both Windows and OS X come with compression utilities, tools which I have overlooked until now when I find myself uploading to the cloud more and more.
What is your data worth?
Jul 6th
We have just had the Sunday morning skype session with both sets of grandparents in the UK. After doing some morning chores I came back to find a spinning beach ball. I tried to force quit Safari without success so I did what anyone would do and held down the power button until it turned off then turned it back on again. Unfortunately my 6 month old iMac wouldn’t boot, just the grey screen of death and a suspicious ticking noise of a disk not reading properly.
I tried reseting the VRAM,didn’t work so I plugged my macbook in with the iMac as the target drive. I could read some of the disk but none of my documents were available. I chucked in the tech tools disk that came with Apple Care but that wouldn’t start either. A quick search of the internet and I still wasn’t enlightened so I rang Rich to see if he had come across the problem before and he had.
Holding down the option button whilst starting with the OS disk in the drive allowed me to force boot from the disk. I then used the disk utility to erase the partition which was so quick I wasn’t sure if it had done it. I then chose the option to restore from time machine, connected up my Time Capsule via ethernet and connected to the appropriate backup.
An hour later and it was still calculating the space needed, a quick search of the net and sure enough a common issue. Solution – install Leopard and then do the restore.
All this started at about 9am this morning. It is now close to 5pm, all my documents, settings, and applications are restored as of 12pm yesterday, all that remains is a restart after downloading 10.5.4 and other updates from 10.5.0 (about 700mb altogether).
Although my Time Capsule has been a little eratic with connections (iChat seems to drop out occasionally) it has now proved its worth. 8 months of baby photo’s and videos have been backed up daily without me lifting a finger and all I have lost is a couple of hours on a pretty chilly Sunday.
Using TeX notation in Moodle
Jun 30th
Choose the application
Click on The Notation Button which will open a java window (another box)
Editing and creating the equations
Have a look at the options and drag and drop to create your equation
Last step
Then click on the export button close the java window and paste into whichever text box you wish. And that should be it.
Swiss Army Codecs
May 27th
Ever had trouble playing video in Quicktime, can’t watch those Xvids of Desperate Housewives you got from the bloke down the pub. Try Perian, a single installation puts all those desirable codecs into your Quicktime library so that you can watch Dr. Who before it is even on the telly in your country.
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