Goodbye Landline

Like a lot of Canadians, I have decided to abandon my landline. This blast from the past was rarely used, it cost me ~$30/month (works out to about $0.50/min) and compared to a modern mobile, it is very ancient. My current mobile plan meets my calling needs; I have a Fav 5 (or My 5) type of plan which allows me to talk to 5 people anywhere in the country. Also, I have become a big fan of Skype. This amazing service allows free calling between Skype users and for a low charge of just $3/month, I have unlimited minutes to call any mobile or land number in North America, and I can do video calls. Currently I have to do this at my desktop computer, but a 32 GB iPod Touch is definitely in my future which will allow me to do this anywhere there is a WiFi signal. All of this amazing technology will cause more people to wave goodbye to the landline. 

My Next Computer Will Be An iPod Touch

I've made a very important decision; I am going to buy an iPod Touch soon!! I currently own a desktop computer and I spend a lot of time online, this equals a lot of time spent at my desk, and this equals me getting really tired of sitting on a once comfortable chair and once modern desk. With the newest iPod touch (Apple calls it a pocket computer) I can do most of my online stuff, plus play some really great games and use it to cart my music around. Since I have Wi-Fi all through my apartment, I can do all of these things away from my desk. I could purchase a smartphone to meet my needs, but they are damn expensive. For my uses, one would probably cost me ~$100/month which is too much for a laboratory instructor paying off student loans. 


I plan on purchasing the 32 GB iPod touch since this version has more features than the 8 GB and 16GB, most important is OpenGL graphic support which will be very important for future iPod Touch games. The cheapest price I could find online is futureshop, $298.99 + tax. How am I going to finance this? I currently own a 3rd Gen iPod nano, this will be hopefully sold on eBay, and suprisingly, I should be able to get ~$140 for it. So all I have to do is come up with another $200 and it'll be mine, woo hoo!! How am I going to get the remaining $200? That part I'm still working on....

Web Apps For The Upcoming Academic Year

The new academic year is getting erringly close, so instructors like myself will be looking at new programs/applications to aid in the teaching process. Here are few of the apps that I plan on using for the academic year:

1. Prezi: Sitting through slides can get boring. Prezi, the "zooming presentation editor" provides a different take on presentations. All of your ideas/information are present on a large whiteboard, and as you go through your presentation, the app zooms into the appropriate content (see video below). Editing is somewhat basic, but the zooming effect is extremely visually attractive.
   
   
   
   
2. Screen Capture Videos: Last year I tried to instruct new programs to my students by step-by-step insturctions on a webpage or by taking a trip to the computer lab. This year I'm going to abandon the webpage idea because it is just so time consuming. Instead, I'm going to create screen-capture videos with Jing, a simple program that easily captures screen movements, allows narration, and easily uploads to YouTube. Once on YouTube, students can view the instructions from anywhere and even on their mobile.
   
   
3. Google Docs: This won't be a new app, but I am will be taking advantage of the new features like Drawings and Tables, and the latest revamp of forms will allow me to collect information, anonymously, on student backgrounds and their input on my instructing. I've also created a whiteboard page (almost completed) where students, teaching assistants, or myself can post questions, comments, or useful material. Finally, I'll be getting my students to use the spreadsheet mapper tool.

I'm most excited about Prezi. I feel that it's going to change the way presentations are given, and I think the major players in office apps will create something similar. It's going to be a fun year!!

Google Docs Gets Translation

Google Docs introduced a great new feature today, the ability to translate documents (not available for Presentations or Spreadsheets) into 42 different languages. It uses Google Translate's technology and is very easy to use; just click Tools -->Translate, select the language, and your document is instantly translated with all of the original formatting. I gave this a few tries and it seemed to work fine, although comments on other sites about this feature said there were problems. This could be very useful in the education field, especially in colleges/universities where the student body is very multicultural. I will be definitely giving this feature a try in the upcoming semester. 

Today's blog post In English...

and now in French

Collaborative Photo Albums Comes to Picasa Web

I use Picasa for most of my photo managing/editing, and as mentioned in a earlier post, I use picasa web albums to backup my photos to the cloud. Besides acting as a backup location, web albums offers other great features such as the ability to share whole photo albums, order prints, and view other photos from around the world. The latest feature added last week is quite impressive: multiple users can collaborate on a single photo album. Imagine taking a trip to LA with a friend, instead of creating two separate albums by two separate users stored in two separate locations (on the web), a single album stored in a single location (on the web) can be created and both users can add photos to it. This could work very well in the classroom. For example, a group of students that completed a field trip could create a single photo album with captions and geotagging. Each one could add their favorite photos to the album. This is truly a great feature and expect the social networks to adopt it soon. 

Visit here for details of this feature. 

Two Great Taskbar Apps for XP

    For the past two weeks I have been on vacation (hence the lack of blog posts). During this time I helped my brother purchase a new Windows Vista laptop. My experience with Vista had been limited, and I had a very negative attitude towards it which partially came from the abundant negative news on tech websites. This changed when I helped my brother with his new laptop. I liked the sleekness of the Vista OS, the security, and the taskbar thumbnail preview which gives a thumbnail preview of a taskbar item when the mouse is hovered over it. This led to me thinking very hard (smoke came out of my ears) about whether I should install Vista on my work computer. After hours of thought, I decided against the installation since Windows 7 is coming out soon and I didn't see the point of learning two OS's in less than 6 months. So, I decided to do a search for  "Windows XP Taskbar preview", and I came across a simple program called Visual Task Tips. After about two minutes for the download/install, I had thumbnail previews, which is the feature I wanted most from Vista!! 

    The other taskbar feature that I wanted and wasn't sure if it existed is the ability to change the location of taskbar buttons, for some reason I love having my important programs such as the browser or photo editor located to the far right. It would be neat if I could rearrange programs instead of having them appear in the order that they were opened. This lead to another Google Search, and I came across Taskbar Shuffle. This is again a simple, easy to install program. Within 2 minutes I could rearrange my taskbar buttons. Life is good.

  Thumbnail Preview

When Life is Busy, I'm a facebooker and Not a Twitterer

For the past week, life has been very busy. What I have realized during this

hectic time is that I can always find time for facebook, but not for twitter. As the day progresses and I'm in need of a break, I flip through some facebook photos, respond to some wall posts, and glance at a few videos. I rarely log into twitter, and I may get at least 1 tweet out per day, but that's about it. I'm not sure what is behind this behavior, maybe the reasoning is that I physically know my facebook friends whereas I haven't even spoken to most of my twitter followers. Maybe I use facebook more for social networking, whereas I use twitter for getting real-time news. Or maybe I just enjoy the brainless photo flipping and video watching of facebook. Finally the busy life is slowing down a bit, maybe I'll have time for both.