Blog Posts

ePortfolio

My ePortfolio is something of a constant and endless work in progress. It’s a subset of my blog posts, photos I’ve posted to Flickr.

Front Row + Aperture?

I got a MacBook Pro this week, and am absolutely loving the thing. The little remote that controls Front Row (and other apps) is so elegant, and I miss it sometimes on my G5. At home, I set up the MBP on top of the fireplace so it’s visible everywhere, and fire up iTunes or Movies. Very handy and cool.

But, the Photo display is tied to iPhoto. I just moved up to Aperture. So, for now, I’ve got my end-of-life iPhoto library sitting next to my shiny new Aperture library. Wasting 18GB of disk space just so I can look at photos from Front Row.

Jeff Han on Tactile Interfaces

Jeff Han gave a presentation at last year’s TED conference, showing his tactile interface system. Forget mice and keyboards. This is a less-creepy version of Minority Report. Or Star Trek’s LCARS interface.

I’ve watched it 3 times today. I want my next computer to work like this. How about a 30" Cinema Display that tilts backward to become a tabletop surface with tactile interface…

Flickr Faves 2007/01/10

CAREO: Resurrection

One of the tasks that’s been on my desk for awhile has been giving some love to CAREO. It sorta stopped working a few months ago, and nobody really cared enough for it to be a High Priority Urgent Fix. The hard drive started to corrupt, and services went from spotty to unavailable. And stayed that way.

Actually, I think it’s a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?

How about an ePhone?

Wow. iPhone. Must have one. It’s like Newton 2007. I wonder if Inkwell works with it…

Now, if it is possible to write apps for it (or even just web apps might do) this might be an awesome platform for education. A community outboard brain in every pocket. I imagine it’ll only be a matter of time before there are Bluetooth laboratory instruments - pH meters, thermometers, GPS, photometers, voltmeters, etc… Your own personal laboratory instrument manager and data tracker. Tied to your blog, Flickr, wikipedia, del.icio.us, etc..

Education Sessions at Northern Voice

I just checked the schedule, and I’m going to be part of a panel discussion titled “Social Software for Learning Environments”. The other panelists are Chris Lott, Sylvia Currie and Jon Beasley-Murray, with moderation by Brian Lamb.

It should be a blast. I’ve been following Chris and Jon’s (and of course Brian’s) blogs for a long time now (I’m sorry Sylvia - I don’t think I’ve seen your blog yet, although I’ve seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I’m not completely sure what I’ll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I’ll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I’m working on with BCIT for BCCampus.

Testing Flock (again)

Just downloaded the latest build of Flock. It sure does feel faster than it used to. It’s feeling faster than Firefox, even. Not sure if that’s possible, or just an illusion. Whatever.

Let’s see if it handles Categories while posting to Drupal any better than it used to…

Nope. It still provides an unsorted list of my hundreds of categories. Not even a text field with autocompletion. Close. So close… Manually categorizing post from within Drupal’s interface (which has a nice text field with autocompletion)

A Month and a Half in Banff (via timelapse)

The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I’ve been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I’d originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.

Canon 75-300mm USM Lens

Lawrie switched from a Canon SLR to Panasonic DSLR body over Christmas, and was looking to sell off his old Canon EF lenses. I picked up his Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 USM Mark II for a good price.

It’s not the best lens ever made, and the optics aren’t much (any?) better than the kit lens, but it sure is long. I wanted something with a good reach, and this sucker has that in spades. At 300mm, the visible area is about 6? across (if I hold my arm out in front of me, with my hand up and fingers together, it’s about 3 fingers across).

Flickr Faves 2007/01/02

It’s not all sunshine and beaches…

New Camera Toys

The Teaching & Learning Centre picked up a new Canon Digital Rebel XTi and 28-135mm USM IS lens, primarily to better photograph events and workshops. I took a quick walk around this side of campus to try it out. Man, do I love the new lens. The XTi is a pretty nice upgrade, too. I’m still really happy with my (now obsolete) XT, but the XTi is nice. The LCD feels HUGE. The 9-point focus is good (although I have my XT set to center focus only, so the extra 8 points would be wasted).