DV for Teachers » Site News

New Design – In Stages

Tim Merritt — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:42:23 +0000

This post is “sticky,” so it will stay on top of the other news until I make the final change.

You may see some weird layouts here until I finish adapting the new design here. More after the jump.
I’m in the process of adapting the Atahualpa Theme to DV for Teachers. The default Atahualpa design is kind of… not my style, but it’s got hundreds of different settings that are easy to change. I’ve been tweaking one version on my personal blog, tim merritt [dot] net. Atahualpa is more flexible and adaptable than any WordPress theme I’ve ever seen.

w00t! Eight Years Old!

Tim Merritt — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:23:10 +0000

I missed the date! DV for Teachers turned eight last month. From the formerly free blogs at Userland to my current version using WordPress hosted at Joyent, I’ve linked to and written about making and using multimedia for education. Through the years I’ve gone through slack blogging periods and some busy ones and learned some html and css trying to customize things. Though I’ve emphasized use of the Mac, I’ve tried to point out good tools that would work on Windows as well. I could never cover everything, and of course I could cover less more thoroughly, but this thing has always been rather ad hoc. I post about what I find or what I think of when it’s in front of me. I suppose more of a plan would be nice… my friend Stefan and I often talk about having a plan, and how useful that would be. It’s really become a sort of diary and memory bank, and once in a while I go through some of the older posts and realize how much the technology has changed and how much I’ve changed.

So please wish DV for Teachers a happy birthday! I think of this as a renewed commitment to blogging on technology and multimedia for anyone who teaches.

Spring Brake

Tim Merritt — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:33:21 +0000

Lots of things to catch up on – I’ve saved several drafts I want to get back to, five just this morning, from sites I’ve found in the last week or so, since my last post – and I’ll take a break from the web for a day or two. I have to do email here at work of course, but the edit room and some overdue projects there call me. The biggest issue there is audio dropout in a multi-camera shoot. The tape with the two-shot of a conversation also has the main audio, and there are several places where words and parts of words just disappear, along with the time code, but there are no breaks in the video. Odd, and Final Cut just doesn’t like it. I’ve tried capturing with iMovie but FC doesn’t like to import those files either. I’ll keep at it and report back here.

And then I’ll finish updating the site, and catch up on the many many many drafts I haven’t posted, and keep up with my video projects, and work on more workshops, and continue to add features and fine tune the lab iMacs and MacBooks – including adding Windows via VMWare on one for a test case – and continue to learn more about Photoshop, add more storage to the XServe, and there’s always more which is good.

Ooh Shiny

Tim Merritt — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:00:46 +0000

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.

BabelFish Good Wishes

Tim Merritt — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:48:14 +0000

A dear friend sent this:

To celebrate I translated your post into Chinese at Babel Fish and then translated it back into English:

â€œMy blogging about multimedia is the educationalist six years. Each blog progresses the work, with therefore me never will complete this, or will cause it to consummate. But I will continue to try to discover and to post teacher and the study which the idea and the resources will help any type makes the digital medium each their life effective part. Thank studies!â€

I love the web.

DV for Teachers is Six Years Old

Tim Merritt — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:34:14 +0000

I’ve been blogging about multimedia for educators for six years. Every blog is a work in progress, and so I’ll never finish this, or make it perfect. But I’ll keep trying to find and post good ideas and resources to help teachers and learners of any kind make digital media an effective part of their lives.

Thanks for reading!

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed

Tim Merritt — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:28:36 +0000

Will Richardson is a vanguard edublogger, and I discovered (in an overdue visit to his site) that he’s converted to WordPress. Yet another high-profile blogger converts to this excellent open-source system, with a phenomenally active and (critical, this) newbie-friendly community. So much easier to find guidance and examples than it was with Manila. I’ll endlessly repeat my gratitude to Userland for the five years of free hosting that got me started in blogging, but their product just hasn’t kept pace.

The PowerBook is Back

Tim Merritt — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:55:33 +0000

It’s got a new hard drive in it, too; but it’s another Toshiba hard drive, and there are more complaints about this make of drive dying in PowerBooks than I’d like to see. But, it’s what I’ve got, and it’s still under AppleCare protection, so I’ll just back up all the time. As I should have been doing, anyway.

They’re Working On It

Tim Merritt — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:00:59 +0000

Here’s from the Apple Repair Status page this afternoon:

I hope it ships tonight, so I can get back to normal.

The Drive Really Died This Time

Tim Merritt — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 14:08:32 +0000

I still hope for a happy ending, but right now, the PowerBook is on life support.

It came back from service Thursday, still chilled from its stay in an unheated DHL truck. It was hard to wait to start it up. The service details said nothing about the hard drive, though:

Service Description and Parts Used: 603-1652 BZL SUBASSY,PB15”

When it had warmed up a bit, I started from the software restore DVD that came with it, ran Repair Permissions once and Disk Repair twice on the hard drive with no problems. I booted from the internal disk, which had what must be a standard troubleshooting system installed, complete with daisies on the desktop. and now I’m restoring the software to the factory defaults, minus the foreign language translations and Internet Explorer. Once that was done, I used the utility to move my home folder from my backup to the new install, and I was off to the races.

Until Saturday night. The internal drive had behaved well Friday and during the day Saturday, but all that time I was making sure not to do too much that needed backing up. (I keep my email on the various servers it comes in on for 5 to 7 days in case something like this happens.) My error here was not making sure to sync my Palm Desktop app, which holds all my appointments, with either the Palm Tungsten C work has given me (don’t like its little thumb-y keyboard) or an online calendar (a perennial to-do list favorite that will get done once this episode of nastiness is behind me).

After returning home from a nice wedding party, I needed to send an email to another wrestling parent who needs access to the Dunwoody Wrestling site so he can help with updates (thanks, Jeff). That afternoon, I’d set it not to go to sleep and for the drives not to spin down; the slo-o-o-wdowns and unresponsiveness always had come after it had gone to sleep. No sleep, no problem, I thought.

Problem. Couldn’t rouse the laptop. Hitting a key gave me the mouse pointer against a black screen, and I could hear the internal drive making some noises, but they didn’t sound like “I’m dying here” noises. Held the power button down to force a shut down. Restarted, and got the dread folder symbol with icons in it alternating between the Finder’s little blue semi-cubist face and a question mark – “I can’t find a valid system folder to start from.” Oh yes, problem.

Started up from my Firewire backup, and the internal drive didn’t show on the desktop. Started Disk Utility to see if it could repair the drive. Nope – the drive wouldn’t mount, its name listed in red and it gave me this awful message:

This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility

If the drive has not failed completely, backup as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive.

Thus I’m back to running exclusively from my backup drive, the appointments I made on late Thursday and Friday aren’t in my calendar, and I have to negotiate another return with Apple. I can’t really blame them – they were able to install a functioning system on this drive while they had it. Meanwhile, life must go on. Bottom line: back up your stuff, regularly.