CogBlogged from ‘August, 2005’

Previously I described my usual reluctance to be first out of the gate to do an operating system update, so until this afternoon I was still running Jaguar / Mac OSX 10.3. To be honest and repetitive, an operating system is really not something I like to focus on- a good OS should be as transparent and efficient as possible, like I would guess (having no experience) your typical Hollywood British butler is portrayed. I’ve got too much to do than fiddle with the OS- so if it is working and I am working, we are all okay. True to form, I do not upgrade until there is something compelling that requires the upgraded system. The push over the line for me to upgrade to Tiger (10.4) was GoogleTalk… The fact that Apple iChat (10.4 only) would be compatible with audio chat via GoogleTalk/Jabber pushed me over the upgrade edge. [...]

Imagine this- a full immersive 3D world where people from remote locations can share and collaborate ideas… and they can blow each other up. I am not a vidoe gamer but can very much appreciate the novelty, originality, and sheer sarcastic fun of This Spartan Life, or how it is billed, “A Talk Show in Game Space”. Your host, Damian Lacedaemion, sporting a camouflage full body armor and range of high powered weapons, is using a commercial multiplayer game to invite special guests in for discussions of life, music, art, society as the characters leap about the typical post apacolyptic environment of machinery and blown up buildings, and of course, shooting. The guests thus appear in this environment, walk, fly, jump, shoot around, and have conversations, which are all recorded and made available in a series of episodes in QuickTime and Windows Media formats. Now before you go and dismiss [...]

I am now grooving to the tunes of the station at the bottom of the FM dial – thanks to the arrival yesterday of my new DLO TransPod. As advertised, it is simple to set up and use, and now in my truck I am listening to the tunes and talks from my iPod Shuffle that beams audio to my radio rather than the cruft on the air waves. The audio quality was pretty good, a tiny amount of background hiss, but I may just have to fiddle with some different presets for blank airwaves. Briefly you may get a little noise going under high power lines. I ordered mine on Amazon (which actually fronts for J&R) at a sub US$50 price, which is lower than list and other stores. On my station there are no commercials and the music they play is all stuff I like. Yes, I still [...]

Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content elsewhere, moving from static hand spun web pages to live ones, is powerful stuff. So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to: (1) Find interesting sites (2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us (3) Tag [...]

If there is one thing more vile than unwanted spam, it is the automated phone menu trees one is forced to navigate to deal with so called “customer service”. The ever so helpful Lifehacker provided a suggestion for How to get through to an Operator at Comcast: After you finish dialing and you hear that first audio prompt (usually “Press 1 for English, 2 para Espanol”), stop. Don’t press anything. Stay quiet and keep your fingers away from the keypad. In order to provide customer service for those with (archaic) rotary phones, the system automatically connects you to an operator (usually a customer service specialist) after failing to detect a touchtone response. Filed away in some lost neural pathway, it sparked me today on trying to ask a specific question about my home mortgage to Chase. I was in the dead end about 7 button presses deep, it offered me [...]

flickr foto Flickr-ed Magazine: Wiki Wiki Worldavailable on my flickr More flickr fun! The Flickr Magazine Cover allows you to turn any flickr photo into your own cover. Why? Because you can? More flickr fun… Use Magazine Cover to turn a flickr photo into a magazine cover of your own title! And just to show I can do something not related to dogs, I plucked my own photo of the Wiki Wiki bus taken last June in Hawaii.

Very cool.. Rob Wall, who blogs well as StigmergicWeb, shared, in advance, a presentation he did as a nice followup to our Small Technologies Loosely Joined session in Vancouver June, 2004. In Rob’s eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined, he makes the case for consideration of free, open source tools for creating learning contgent, and manages to work in that these are in essence “learning objects” (maybe). The nice part is Rob’s doing his presentation with such tools, ditching clunk PowerPoint for a svelte show using Eric Meyer’s S5 template. The slick thing Rob achieved was using the new OPML editing tool and an XML switch to actually construct the content (S5 is beautiful, but you still need to hand edit edit one basic HTML content file. And heck, look at the URL- the presentation link is ****.xml. Slick, well at least for us techies. Read up on Rob’s [...]

A colleague mentioned the other day that they saw this blog on the front of the web site for the Center for Teaching & Learning at Mesa Community College, the biggest of the 10 Maricopa colleges. So surely I had to drop the work I was doing and check it out (egos need feeding, right?): Sure enough, they are syndicating CogDogBlog in the upper right! (I am not sure why ;-) so let’s give a big hello to the guys and gals at the Mesa CTL… and while you are there check out all the features they have rolled into a relatively new web site with a nice comprehensive design to it. The CTL has been a long time Maricopa fixture for doing great multimedia, faculty development, and technology work at their college (and not just because they are putting my blabbering on their home page). It’s encouraging to see [...]

WordPress has the annoying habit of displaying single and double quotes using pretty curly quotes (nice little balls on the end) which are fine for the page viewed, but they also shove them in RSS feeds, which can end up rendered as all kinds of odd characters (question marks). It also crops up when you copy content from an MS Word document, more than quotes, dashes, ellipses, and more all have odd encodings when yanked out of Word… I’ve killed curly quotes (with a little help from the web). It took a few links from googling wordpress +curly +quotes a few misses in the WordPress Support Forums where more people are asking how…. finally finding the answer here based on the tip from scriptygoddess. To do this, you need to edit your wp-includes/default-filters.php and comment out these line as shown below (put a # before them so they are ignored): [...]

Sure, almost anyone can be one of the Feedster Top 500 blogs, but we are proud of their private message assuring us we were firmly based in the counter part Bottom 500, based on our poor spelling, endless babbling, dog obsession, weak grammar, and the fact we live in a warm climate. So we do not get a web badge. Is anyone flashing back to the mid 1990s when someone dreamed up the Top 5% designation? Something like 50% of the web was in that Top 5, and it started a whole proliferation of other web badge programs. Heck, I have a whole pile of old web badge awards laying around here. So it looks like a boomerang fad is coming back around. At least this time, Feedster is using some sort of data to make the designation. I am workin the most hardesst to keeps Us in the celler. [...]