Archive for April, 2005
- MacNoteTaker :: “MacNoteTaker”:http://mac-huwis.lut.ac.uk/~wis/programs/NoteTaker/NoteTaker.html is a possible work around for not being able to synchronise memo pad files. It is a Palm application that allows long notes and a Mac OS X conduit that allows notes to be synchronised and exported as text files. I’d rather just have a conduit for memo pad documents, but this looks better [...] :: Saturday, April 30th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Palm Desktop for Mac OS X :: My little monochrome zire 21 organiser comes in handy for quick notes on the train. “The Mac OS X Palm Desktop software”:http://www.palmone.com/us/support/macintosh/mac_desktop.html is currently at version 4.2.1. If you unstuff and then run the installer, you get a system error message – the installer does not check user rights on the Application folder correctly. The [...] :: Saturday, April 30th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Apple and sweet papers :: “When researching new processes we often find ourselves working with different industries. It was interesting working with a confectionery manufacturer. Their experience in the science of translucent colour control helped us understand processes to ensure consistency in high volume.” “From Jonathan Ive’s account of the 1998 iMac design”:http://www.designmuseum.org/digital/index.php?pt=2&id=1&des=28 (this would be the slot loader judging by [...] :: Friday, April 29th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes, Web | Comments Off
- Processing 1.0 β :: “Processing”:http://processing.org/ is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional [...] :: Thursday, April 28th, 2005 :: Posted in ILT, Notes, Web | Comments Off
- Probability simulations :: “Planetqhe”:http://www.planetqhe.com/beta/information/HOME.HTM is a site by David Kay Harris dealing with probability. There are Excel spreadsheets that present problems in probability in a novel way, including “two stage tree diagrams”:http://www.planetqhe.com/beta/compound%20events%20one/Le%20Choise%20de%20Roi.htm. The presentation is different to the usual one in UK GCSE textbooks – Harris is head of Maths at the International School of Toulouse and the site [...] :: Thursday, April 28th, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- Bill Stickers :: :: Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 :: Posted in Photos | Comments Off
- Geometry applet :: David E Joyce of the Clarke University has provided a set of Java classes that allow complex geometrical constructions too be built using parameters passed to a Java applet. * “The Geometry Applet”:http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/Geometry/Geometry.html * “Euclid’s elements with dynamic diagrams”:http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html The geometry applet looks as if it could be used to provide dynamic graphics to help students explore locii [...] :: Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- Writing, Briefly :: “Paul Graham’s essay on Writing, Briefly”:http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html took just over an hour to write – and two thirds of that was spent re-writing. I learned about “anaphora”:http://www.americanrhetoric.com/figures/anaphora.htm. :: Monday, April 25th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- rLogo puzzle :: “rLogo”:http://embry.epcs.com/rLogo/rLogo.html is a Java based implementation of the Logo programming language. I used a simple ’starter’ in a recent Maths lesson where students had to learn about the exterior and interior angles of a polygon and learn to solve problems along the lines of ‘can a regular polygon have an interior angle of 125 degrees?’. On [...] :: Monday, April 25th, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- Monday :: :: Monday, April 25th, 2005 :: Posted in Photos | Comments Off
- The Constellations :: If you need to find out about a star constellation then Richard Dibbon-Smith’s “Web site about The Constellations”:http://www.dibonsmith.com/constel.htm is what you need. The table is sorted alphabetically and includes all 88 constellations (personally, I would have grouped them by Northern and Southern hemisphere with a generous overlap but who is arguing?) Richard sells a couple of [...] :: Sunday, April 24th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Tinderbox :: “Tinderbox”:http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ is a note taking application for Mac OS X. A Windows version is in the works – in fact the author “Mark Bernstein’s”:http://www.markbernstein.org/ blog includes a link to his “development peekhole”:http://www.eastgate.com/Development/ for Tinderbox. Tinderbox has a range of powerful features for organising and visualising relationships between notes – such that I am going to try [...] :: Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 :: Posted in Notes, Web | Comments Off
- Spirals :: The starting square has side 1. Another side 1 square appears, and then a side 2 square is added across the top of them. Then a square of side 3 appears to the left, and a sqare of side 5 appears underneath. The sequence of the sides of the squares is like this… 1, 1, 2, 3, [...] :: Friday, April 22nd, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- Macintosh religion? :: “The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, [...] :: Thursday, April 21st, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- (simulated) blood stains :: * recipe: 300ml of milk and three tablespoons of treacle – warm milk over electric hotplate in milk pan. Spoon treacle in and stir well. * looks lumpy but dries (in a few days) really convincingly * Students set up a dissection board or similar with some wall paper afixed – set the board at known [...] :: Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- VoIP :: “Paul Graham”:http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html quoted on “Daring Fireball”:http://daringfireball.net in a wonderfully named article “Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/point_counterpoint – the title being very close to home. “In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound [...] :: Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Lunar orbiter images :: * “xephem”:http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/ CD-Roms arrived from US today, about a week after I ordered the package. * The second disc makes the entire “Lunar Orbiter”:http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_orbiter/ photograph collection available to xephem * Click on a lunar disc (viewable up to x6 scale) and bring up the feature name * Apple-click to bring up a dialog box with information * Click a [...] :: Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Enchanted learning :: “Enchanted Learning”:http://www.enchantedlearning.com/ is a Web site with a large number of simple resources produced by a teacher(?). A colleague uses this Web site for quick lesson ideas when covering absence in the SLDD section, and she really appreciated the resources on offer. The site asked for a small donation to cover the costs of running [...] :: Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Google bodmas :: The first few sites that come up when you google bodmas are * “http://www.easymaths.com/What_on_earth_is_Bodmas.htm”:http://www.easymaths.com/What_on_earth_is_Bodmas.htm * “http://www.mathspractice.com.au/modules/BODMAS.htm”:http://www.mathspractice.com.au/modules/BODMAS.htm * “http://www.gazinotes.com/KS3-GCSE/AT2-BODMAS.htm”:http://www.gazinotes.com/KS3-GCSE/AT2-BODMAS.htm * “http://www.bodmas.tk/”:http://www.bodmas.tk/ Clearly time for a well thought out information page on the mnemonic acronym with examples, history and a few games. Watch this space… :: Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Children using the Web… :: The NFER has a long term project (started in 2002) tracking students’ experience of citizenship education. The most recent report is referenced as follows…. CLEAVER, E., IRELAND, E., KERR, D. and LOPES, J. (2005). _Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study: Second Cross-Sectional Survey 2004 Listening to Young People: Citizenship Education in England_ (DfES Research Report 626). London: DfES * [...] :: Monday, April 18th, 2005 :: Posted in ILT, Maths, Web | Comments Off
- Flat world :: “In his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Thomas Friedman suggests that because of the universal availability of communications and information processing sciences, the entire global community is now spanned by common technological skills and organizational methods.” - “Alan Miller”:http://www.alan-miller.org/finish-your-homework/ *Translation* If we are going to continue to [...] :: Sunday, April 17th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Strayhorn runs bodmas :: The bodmas site is now being run through WordPress 1.5 with a few additions… * Default Kubrick theme has been munged to remove images and to present post text as right ragged instead of justified * The Kubrick theme uses excerpts to generate archive and category pages – I have changed this to full post content * The [...] :: Sunday, April 17th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- xephem :: “Xephem”:http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/ is a Unix/Mac OS X based sky chart and ephemeris program. The program costs $80 for a precompiled version on CD-Rs or by download along with a huge set of catalogues and the Lunar Orbiter images. An identical version is available for download only at $60. This is a 1 Gb download spread over [...] :: Friday, April 15th, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off
- Audacity sound editor :: * “Free sound editor available for download”:http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ * Versions for Linux, Mac OS X _and_ Windows * Can *edit MP3s* and .wav formats * Can *record from microphone* or other sources supported by the computer * Supports a *sound programming language* called Nyquist * Possibly the *best icon I have seen* for an open source program – wouldn’t mind getting [...] :: Friday, April 15th, 2005 :: Posted in ILT | Comments Off
- Thinking with type :: Ellen Lupton’s book _Thinking With Type_ is supported by a “useful and thought provoking Web site”:http://www.designwritingresearch.org/thinkingwithtype.com/. A table links to short pages of information on various concepts to do with typography and page layout, mainly for printed pages. The table columns move along a logical sequence of scales (Letter – Text – Grid). There is [...] :: Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 :: Posted in Web | Comments Off
- CIMT GCSE Materials :: *The Centre for Innovation in Maths Teaching* based at the University of Exeter provides a range of materials for free download on their Web pages. In particular, there is the *Mathematics Enhancement Programme* for key stage 4 that provides GCSE maths materials as PDF downloads. There are 20 units available, and the units are provided [...] :: Saturday, April 9th, 2005 :: Posted in Maths | Comments Off
- Information access? :: “The Business School hack”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/22/business_school_hack/ has highlighted issues of definition around access to information. The (US based) article in The Register by Mark Rasch reports the facts as follows… * Some US business schools *farm out processing* of Web based applications to a third party Web company * Someone identified a *security hole in the system* used to [...] :: Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 :: Posted in Forensic | Comments Off
- The Teddy :: “Teddys would be with their user for their entire lives. They would change in shape and form to match the growing sophistication and interests of the person, but each time someone got a new model Teddy, the information from the earlier version would be transferred to the new. As a result, Teddy would always retain [...] :: Tuesday, April 5th, 2005 :: Posted in Forensic, ILT | Comments Off
- Being Analog(ue) :: Don Norman is the other half of Nielsen and Norman the usability consultants. He has provided “Chapter 7″:http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/being_analog.html of his book _The Invisible Computer_ as a Web reading. The title of the chapter is Being Analog – which we as humans are… You can also read other chapters on the MIT Press site and [...] :: Monday, April 4th, 2005 :: Posted in Forensic, Web | Comments Off
- Blog upgraded to Strayhorn :: This blog is now running on Wordpress strayhorn using a theme munged from the WordPress classic. Ultimately, I’ll be running the whole site from this blog. The upgrade was as “simple as suggested”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrade_1.2_to_1.5. Nice one chaps. :: Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 :: Posted in Notes | Comments Off