Archive for March, 2005
Yahoo is back on the Christmas Card list.
Yahoo’s big news is that they have unveiled Yahoo! 360°, sort of like My Yahoo for the Read/Write generation. Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny, I got an invite to check it out. He’s passing them out but he’s getting totally swamped. However, it looks as though people who are in the beta have 100 invites to pass around, so if you want an invite just leave me a comment or drop me an email at teach42@gmail.com.
I’ve started tinkering around with it a bit. It’s basically an overglorified home page. It has easy ways to integrate in Yahoo Photos, to add new information (through a blog), to post lists you’ve made, link to reviews you’ve added to Yahoo Local, to list what Yahoo Groups you’re in, and so on. The more you use the various parts of Yahoo, the more information you have for your 360 homepage already.
The blog engine is simple, but simplies an RSS 2.0 feed which is nice. It has a simple WYSIWYG editor for posting. You have the ability to create a blogroll, but there’s no way to import anything in. To be honest, it’s not really a blogroll, it’s simply a list of links that you can have in a sidebar. It would be nice if it grabbed the sites you subscribe to in My Yahoo and automatically created a blog roll for them. They do have a way to blog on the road though which is nice. You get an email address to send blog entries to from your mobile phone if you want. You can also upload photos to Yahoo Photos and create a moblog that way. I really wish that they had avoided the word ‘blog’ though. I mean, yes it is a blog, but considering that it’s just one small piece of the entire 360 package, I think they would have been better off coming up with a more user friendly name for it. Something that people could immediately associate with that aren’t already members of the blogosphere but do use things like My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.
Speaking of Yahoo Mail, we come to my first major issue with Yahoo 360. I don’t use my Yahoo Mail account. Well, i do use it, but just for spam and junk. When I want to get a free T shirt at a cubs game by signing up for a credit card, I use my Yahoo email address. However, many people use Yahoo mail as their primary email account. Instead of linking to a person’s current Yahoo email account, Yahoo 360 has a mailbox that only works with other 360 members!! So despite the fact that one of the primary navigation links is “Mailbox”, the only person I can send messages to is Jeremy Zawodny. This makes the mailbox completely useless to me. The last thing I want is another mailbox to check.
Security was obviously a major concern to Yahoo because for every publishable item, you can specify who has permission to see it. Choices range from yourself, to friends, to friends of friends to everyone. The Yahoo photos integration is simple, but pleasant. However, all it really did was make me long for the power that Flickr offers you over your digital photos. It’s such a far superior site for photo sharing, I sincerely hope they integrate it in.
On the whole, I think they’ve done a decent job of making a simple interface for people to create a dynamic home page. It definitely seems like its target audience is people who are online, but aren’t exactly ‘geeks’. Any person who has any technology proficiency is going to be frustrated with how little control you have over the site, but I worry that people who aren’t proficient are going to be confused by some of the terminology and layout. There definitely needs to be significantly more explanations for people who don’t understand the concepts. However, I do have to say that it’s probalby the best way to get started, especially if people are already comfortable with Yahoo.
If you want to give it a whirl, let me know!
Flickr from A-Z
Found this one through Alan, Spell with flickr is a site where you can type in a word and have it spelled out in alphabet letters pulled from Flickr. I love sites like this. Perhaps it’s time to pull all the Flickr hacks together into a single post. There’s just so many neat things you can do with it!
How fun would this be for Kindergarteners to use to create their own alphabet charts?
The Atari 2600 iPod battery pack
I spent the weekend in Iowa City and did a little shopping with my brother in law. While we were at a store that buys and sells used video games, I saw a few old Atari 2600 cartridges behind the counter. I always get a little nostalgic when I see those, but most stores sell them for around five dollars. This shop had them for the low low price of $0.94. I stood there staring at the cartridge and realized that I could probably cram a couple of AA batteries along with a couple of 9 volt batteries. I had a feeling I was looking at my next iPod battery pack! I bought one and within minutes of arriving home in Chicago I was cracking that cartridge open.
Atari cartridges are closed by plastic pieces that snap together along the sides and a screw underneath the sticker rigth in the middle. I thought about trying to peel the entire sticker off to get to the sticker, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it without tearing it. Instead, I decided to make a small cut and lift the smallest part of the sticker that I could to get to the screw. Once the screw is out, the key to popping it open is simply to push in on the sides with the plastic tabs. Squeeze those sides together and it’ll pop right open. Inside you’ll find a spring, the data card and the plastic top that would slide up to reveal the card when the cartridge was plugged in.
In order to fit the batteries inside the cartridge, you’ll need to do a bit of dremel work. I wound grinding down every piece of plastic inside of there except for one tab and the column that the screw goes into. I kept one tab in there to help seperate the batteries. To be honest, I’m not sure it was too useful to keep that tab in there and next time I might grind it down as well. Once the inside has been cleaned out, you can create the hole for the firewire port. Trace it out and then cut it out slowly. The last thing you want to do is create too large of a hole. I stopped pretty often to check it for fit. Once I got the hole just right, I set the firewire port in it and hot glued it in there.
That’s when I made my first mistake. I filled in one of the plastic slots with hot glue that another piece snaps into when you try to close the cartridge. I wound up having to scrape it out later, so be careful when you’re doing this part. At this point, I basically followed the same directions that people have been using to make altoid battery packs. I soldered everything together and then used a little more hot glue to make sure that the wires on the firewire port won’t come loose. It was pretty tough to get it all closed as things are pretty tight. I wound up having to rearrange the batteries several times before I could get it closed with minimal seperation on the sides. I think part of the problem had to do with the issues I had with the hot glue. I did wind up getting it closed well enough that it feels quite durable now. I put the screw back in and tried to arrange the sticker back just right. You could see the silver of the screw a little so I blacked it out with permanent marker. The final step is to grind down the top so that it’s just a thin little flat piece. Once it’s flat, you can snap it back into place. Once it’s all done, it should look just like the original cartridge!
I have to admit, it isn’t quite as easy to open and replace the batteries as the Altoids battery pack, but this definitely gets serious style points. The next time I create one, I’m going to try to figure out a way to get the screw out without damaging the sticker. It would also be helpful to be able to simply snap it open and closed without using a screwdriver at all.
The diagram below was created by Drew Perry who may have been the first to create a DIY battery pack. He used the box from a deck of cards to make his. Both Chris Diclerico and Unixmonkey both took the same design and stuck it into an altoid’s tin. I’ve made a few of those and they work great! Unixmonkey also has a nice new diagram of how things should be wired together, just to clear up any confusion that could arise.
Materials:
You can buy the firewire sockets from any major electronics site. For example, you can buy them here, here, or here.
The battery connections all came from Radio Shack. You’ll need three 9 volt snap connectors and one battery holder for the two AA batteries. It looks just like this but I couldn’t find the right part online (the one I have linked seems to be for “D” batteries).
As for the Atari 2600 cartridge, you can’t go wrong with eBay!
Photos (click for high resolution):
Would you believe that this is all an Atari 2600 catridge actually is?
Podcast: Beyond Freedom of Speech
Just a quick podcast for ya’all today. It’s Good Friday, Easter and Purim, so Happy (Insert holiday here)! On today’s podcast, I discuss a news story that I found via The Education Wonks. A high school principal was smoking behind her school despite the fact that state law dictates that it is illegal to smoke within 25 feet of a school. He took some photos of her, posted them on his blog, and passed around memos directing people to check them out. He also made some derogatory remarks about the principal and a dean at the school. Behind the issue itself is a larger problem that I think the educational community is ignoring. We don’t teach our students how to communicate electronically in an appropriate manner. In fact, most schools try to ignore electronic communications and prevent students from using them. As you’ll hear in the podcats, I think this is a mistake.
I also recieved an email from someone asking me for some ideas about creating a new technology curriculum for a school that essentially doesn’t have one. I’m inviting readers and listeners alike to add their own thoughts/comments/words of advice for him here attached to these show notes. If you have any sites that he should check out, blogs to read or policies that you can pass along, post there here!
Show notes:
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em: The news story via The Education Wonks.
Weblogg-ed: Will Richardson’s post about students, parents, and teachers blogging together to provide input about a course.
Sinister Dexter: My theme music! Check ‘em out on iTunes as well.
SubEthaEdit – Wiki-tize your text documents.
Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
I haven’t loaded up SubEthaEdit in a while and to be honest, I kind of forgot about it. However, it really is one incredibly cool text editor. Essentially, it’s a back to basics word processor with one massive twist; multiple people can be working collaboratively at the same time. One person serves are the host of the document and opens it up to sharing. It can be shared via Rendezvous so you don’t even need to turn on File Sharing on the comptuer. Then, other people can load up that document as well and work on it at the same time. It uses color coding to show you what changes different people have made. Great for students learning to program and perfect for group work/cooperative learning. Have one person host the agenda for an upcoming meeting and let people pop on to it and add things as necessary. It’s sort of like an offline wiki text editor.
While it may not be Open Source, it is the next best thing; it’s free for non-commercial usage. Install it on every Mac OSX computer in your school. With summer reimaging coming up, add this to the list of programs that you should put on your image.
Google X returns! Sort of…
Well, for those of you who were interested in GoogleX, it’s back! However, I have a hunch it won’t be around for too long. It’s being hosted at foxified.info which doesn’t sound a bit like Google to me. So I’m asuming that this is an unsanctioned replica based off of screenshots that someone took. However, the functionality matches the original GoogleX exactly, so I’m happy. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google unleashes its hounds on them though so if you wanted to check it out before but didn’t get a chance to , head over there asap and give it a try before it disappears again.
Put some Science in your pocket.
Did you know that NASA has jumped on to the podcasting bandwagon! They have a show called Science @ NASA…. to go that provides audio versions of Science news stories. They’ve apperantly been doing it for years, but started podcasting them back in December. Definitely one to add to the ol’ podcatcher.
Do ya Koha?
We currently use Sagebrush Spectrum as our library catalog server. It’s a real workhorse and we’ve had very few problems with it on the whole. However, there are a few major issues that they still have yet to resolve. Chief among them is the fact that they still don’t have an OSX client yet. The server will run on OSX, but not the client. They do have a client that runs in classic mode, but we’re considering dropping classic. I don’t even know if Tiger support classic mode! So we may be in a situation where we have a library server that our clients can’t even use. The easy solution would be to just add on the web catalog. That would be perfect because not only would we no longer need the client software, but people could access the catalog from home as well! Sounds great, eh? Unfortunately that add on doesn’t work with OSX either. You have to run it on Windows 2000/2003 server.
So now the situation is that we either keep classic mode and continue using the classic client, or buy a new server and purchase the Windows version of Spectrum. I shudder to think of the costs involved there.
Enter Koha – the Open Source Library System. It seems to be pretty robust. Has plenty of the features that I would look for and there are several libraries using it right now.
The big question is, can we export what we have and then use it in a very similar manner to what we use right now? To be honest, I don’t know. But I can definitely find out. You see, we have a few old PC’s that are currently gathering dust. They don’t have an OS on them and are taking up space in the closet. So I’m going to dust one off, throw on a basic install of Fedora Core 3, and load up Koha. I’m going to try to export out all my library records and import them in to Koha. I’m going to try to import in all of our users. Then I’m going to try to set up a bar code reader, print some labels and experiment with the web interface. If it all works, I may even set it up on the librarian’s desk and ask them to use it alongside our normal library server. See if it actually works in production.
And why would I do all that? Because it’s free and open source. Because I can do it without investing thousands of dollars into it. Because I don’t have to buy an entirely new server to run it. Perhaps the more pertinent question is why wouldn’t I do it?
What a wonderful community to be a part of.
Flickr goes Yahoo.
Just in case you hadn’t heard yet, Flickr has gone the way of the Yahoo’s. The rumour has been around for a bit but over the weekend it became official. You can read all about it everywhere in the blogosphere, but here’s my brief synopsis:
No, it is not going to become Yahoo Photos.
Yes, there will still be free accounts, with even more storage space.
Yes, their servers should be more stable now.
No, you do not need to use your Yahoo ID to log in, you can keep your current Flickr info.
Podcast: Free and Open Source Software redux
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is definitely a hot topic in education. I’ve written about it before
and podcasted about it as well. When I went to the ICE conference a few weeks ago, I attended a session titled “Providing Open Source Solutions for School-wide Services.” The session consisted of a brief overview, followed by various people that had actually implemented FOSS in their schools who provided some insight into their experiences. Once again, I reccomend that you
During this podcast, I play a few clips from the session, and expand on my previous podcast about FOSS. In the show notes below, I’ve included the resources from my previous podcast and added several more as well.
Direct link to the podcast
Direct link to the entire workshop
Show notes:
The Journey: Jen, the Girl on Tech, is taking the first steps on an incredibly brave journey. You can follow along with her here.
Doug Pratt: The person who organized this workshop. He also has a consulting company.
Resources from the workshop: A list of resources that were mentioned during the workshop.
Why Open Source?: A fantastic list of articles and posts supporting the use of FOSS in schools.
K12Linux Project: A site devoted to using Linux in K-12 schools. They have resources for using Linux on your desktops and servers, as well as case studies about schools who are actually doing it. It looks like they have a custom distro of Fedora Core 3 with a bunch of educational applications installed. This is really an incredible resource.
Centre: This one is new to me. It’s a Student Information System that looks pretty well polished. I like the fact that it targets both public and private schools, as most SIS’s only target public schools. This looks very promising to me.
Seul/Edu Educational Application Index: Hundreds of FOSS programs, many organized by curricular subjects. There’s a ton of software here that I’d never even heard of.
Freeduc: Another directory of FOSS applications, also organized by curricular subjects.
Open Lab: Red Hat Linux’s basic guide to creating an essentially free computer lab. Using machines that you can probably get donated and FOSS, you can create a fully functional computer lab for virtually no cost.
Schoolforge: “Schoolforge is a foundry. It is where you will find the information, the tools and materials you need to “forge” or make a school and all its parts. All free for the asking (or download), and, in the future, international in content and character, schoolforge is not a place or an organization, but a cause, and a collection of people and projects dedicated to it: bringing quality, affordable and dependable software and teaching materials to the people who need them around the world. As such, it is not a “service” so much as it is a community focal point, which, as much as anything else, represents an opportunity to get involved in one of its aspects.”
PDF Creator: Via Jeff O’Hara, this is an Open Source pdf creator for Windows. OSX has this functionality built in, this gives Windows users the same capabilities.
From the previous show:
FOSS Primer: A fantastic report on Free and Open Source Software in education. Definitely a must read if you haven’t seen it before. Worth a second look even if you have.
Open Office: The premier free alternative to Microsoft Office. Much more robust than many people give it credit for.
FireFox: I know most browsers are free anyway, but this one is actually Open Source. I’m a big fan of Firefox, it’s my browser of choice.
Thunderbird: A very full featured email client. Free, Open Source, and can handle RSS feeds as well.
Tux Typing: Educational typing tutor for children. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and free for all of them.
Tux Paint: Open Source version of Kid Pix. Has many of the same tools and it can import stamp sets as well so it’s pretty flexible. They’re even working on a version that allows for shared network storage of projects! They’re really working hard to make it school friendly.
The GIMP: Don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop? Then bring out the GIMP! You’d have to be a real Photoshop guru to find a feature you need that GIMP doesn’t support.
Open Admin: A Student Information System that’s completely Open Source. Demographics, Attendance, Gradebook, Discipline, Report Cards, and it’s all web based. It’s come a long way in a short time.
Apache: If you’re running a web server and don’t know what Apache is, then you’re doing something wrong. Millions of web sites can’t be wrong.
Moodle: A modular Content Management System. Very well developed and runs on just about anything.
Drupal: Another Content Management System, similar to Moodle, but different.
WordPress: There are tons of free blogging packages, so I’m just linking to the one that I use. There is also a MultiUser version.
SendMail: The standard in email servers. Simple, basic, and as reliable as they come.
QMail: Another email server that I used to use on my home server. There’s a ton of resources for getting this set up and running.
Open-XChange: This project has been around for a while. It’s the original Open Source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. To be honest, I don’t know much about this one, but they’ve got quite a bit of history behind them.
Hula: A new kid on the block. An Open Source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. I’m extremely interested in this one and may be installing it on my server. Sounds promising.
DirAdmin: A graphical interface for managing Open Directory users and groups. I’d be curious to see if it works on OSX. Based on what I’ve read, I think it should.
eGroupWare: A multi-user web-based suite that offers up email, addressbook, calendar, infolog (notes, to-do’s, phone calls), content management, forum, bookmarks, and a wiki (kitchen sink not included).