DV for Teachers

OS X Help offers “Insanely simple tutorials for the first time Macintosh user.”

Welcome to OS X help. If you are new to the Macintosh, OS X, and Apple, you have come to the right place. If this is your first time here, we suggest you start at the beginning, and work your way to the current post, which you see below.

The tutorials are friendly and simple, and well well worth it if you’re a recent switcher. Recommended.

Did I say I like them? Just go, already.

Macworld tells us the ins and outs for setting up Time Machine. If you you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, this is more than worthwhile; it could very well save your bacon, by which I mean all your important data… which these days is all your data. Right?

Jochen Wolters at O’Reilly’s Dgital Media Blog posts Play it again, Macworld!, a pointer to streaming video from January’s Macworld, including sessions on iPhones, Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, and a 6-hour (!!!) stream in digital photography. Whew. Grab your camera, get comfy in your chair, and take notes. It’ll be worth your time.

BTW, with this post, the O’Reilly’s Mac coverage begins to regain some of its lost luster. They had a great group blog at MacDevCenter, but last year it went without an update from early August to late November, but no hint of why they were letting it languish.

Now they’re doing more coverage under the Mac category at O’Reilly’s Digital Media Blog. This will make it easier to follow in my RSS reader, but while getting the MacDevCenter URL for this post, they’ve got fresh updates there too.

O’Reilly – please – for a web-savvy company, keep us informed about what’s where without the guessing game.

I’ve upgraded the back end of DV for Teachers with the latest WordPress. I’ve changed to a new look, and it’s going to take some tweaking: I need to update the default blogroll for one thing, fix the background color on the Categories and Archives menus up top for another, unify the color scheme of links pre- and post-visit, as well as come up with (at least one) new header graphic.

All this will be fun. For me, any way.

The inexhaustible Miguel Guhlin posted this about Audio Converters a few months ago, and I finally have gotten around to posting it.

Textile and Markdown perform similar functions: making your text easier to format for posting on the web. The goals of their creators are a bit different, but if you’re serious about your blogging this could make your formatting easier. As I learned to use these tools, it made it easier to learn actual HTML too. An extra benefit.

NB: Both work in many different blog and content management systems, but only on sites you host yourself, so far as I know. As of this posting, neither Textile or Markdown is supported on Wordpress.com sites, and I could find no reference to them at Edublogs.org.

Textile: “A Humane Web Text Generator – Textile takes plain text with *simple* markup and produces valid XHTML.”

Link to Wikipedia’s reference, with several resource links.

An online demonstration page, with a download link.

I’ve downloaded and saved this link as a complete page, with a link in my browser toolbar, as a reference available even when I’m writing a post.

Many people also like Markdown: “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”

Information and download is available here.

Link to Wikipedia’s reference, with several resource links

I think Markdown achieves its goal of making its plain text more readable before conversion, but it lacks one key capability: making tables. Textile’s unconverted markup makes for a bit less readability, but it’s a sacrifice more than made up for with its easy formatting for making tables. Thus, I use Textile for both my WordPress blogs. YMMV. Happy blogging.

MyAppleMenu linked to this post, a link-rich discussion of backup strategies for the Mac. Before Leopard, I’d been using Carbon Copy Cloner, but Apple incorporated its capabilities into Leopard’s Disk Utility, so its developer, Mike Bombich—who works for Apple—hasn’t released a version for it.

I don’t have time to go through it now, but Shawn Blanc’s SuperDuper, Time Machine and Bulletproof Backups looks like yet another reason to be grateful for the terrific community that surrounds the Mac.

Ken Stone comes to the rescue again, posting a brief but invaluable set of tips by Mark Spencer.

The bottom line? Video looks different on your computer monitor than it does on a television. They reproduce their images in very different ways – pixels vs. lines of resolution, etc. Some of the same issues apply with iMovie as well. This is a good introduction if you’re having issues like this, and can lead you to a better understanding of how digital video works.

Stephen Downes points to Software Essentials for the Modern Educator, an exhaustive list of links to mostly free, Windows-only tools for educators. There is a tremendous amount of high-quality software that could allow schools and school systems to save a fortune if they’d do some minimal research, allowing extravagant software licensing fees to go to other costs. I would think that many of the programs linked here would reward a few minutes of careful testing.

I voted this morning in the Georgia primary. Coming to work, I pondered a bit on how things have gone here in America since last I voted. I thought about who would win—I believe that many of my neighbors and I have different political inclinations—about who would win the metro Atlanta area, how the entire state would go, and who would move on toward the nomination and the presidency. Ultimately I hope we get less of the same, but that whatever we get it’s less divisive than what we’ve gone through for the last generation. The high turnout in the primaries and caucuses up to now indicates that lots of people want something different.

Once on the train I remembered I had some appropriate music with me, so I listened to the great Who’s Next. Specifically, to Won’t Get Fooled Again. Of course, the lyric is actually

I get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again.

So do I, brother. So do I.