Dan Dickinson has posted a new Quicksilver tutorial aimed at intermediate users (if you have never used Quicksilver, check out his beginner tutorial). Quicksilver revolutionizes the way you use your computer, and I can no longer imagine using my Mac without it. It allows you to have instant access to everything on your machine, saving you a ton of time in the process. One of the neat ideas in the new tutorial was using a trigger to pipe local weather information to the screen. I now can access the current weather here in Regina by simply pressing Cmd-Alt-W.
A great tool. If you don’t already use it, you should download it and give it a try.
Although I don’t use the MSN Mappoint service, I found out about an interesting irregularity in the service when requesting the best/shortest route from one city in Norway to another (travelling from Haugesund to Trondheim). Here are some screenshots of what I found:
While this is obviously just a glitch in the system, there are some interesting implications and lessons to be learned from such an example. When students (or anyone, really) are looking up information on the net and not checking its validity with other sources (especially from generally reputable sources such as MSN), there is a serious opportunity for being misinformed. This example would be a good one to show students when talking about the information reliability.
Well, chalk one up for comment spammers — I am turning off comments on this blog until such time that I feel the need to spend time worrying about the various methods of preventing the spam. This is rather frustrating, since one of the great things about blogging in the interaction that is available through comments. A great thing being ruined by idiots.
I recently stumbled across this interesting way of explaining the difference between CD-Rs and CD-RWs to novice computer users. While it is certainly nothing earth-shattering, I think this post shows a critical element of explaining technological issues to non-tech people — relating the technology to everyday things that are already familiar with. If you can build on what they already know, the new learning becomes much easier.
