Chris Betcher – Page 170 – Education. Technology. Ideas. Travel.

November 10, 2006

OzTeachers Skypecast

Following on from the success of the “When Night Falls” Skypecast that concluded the recent K12 Online Conference, I offered to run a similar Skypecast for members of the Australian OzTeachers group.

If you have an interest in education, you might like to drop in to say g’day. It starts at 10:00am Saturday morning (AEST), or 6:00pm Friday evening (US EST). You’ll have to do the math for other timezones.

https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=52950

Update: It was quite a success and about 30 people showed up. Keep your eye out for the next one, which we will do as a conference rather than a Skypecast I think…

November 9, 2006

One Fast Mac

I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It’s a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more…

The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple’s built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro’s standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop.

For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I’d suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I’d say it’s definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the aftermarket memory from places like Crucial seem to be much cheaper than buying memory directly from Apple.

November 9, 2006

Thanks James

Kudos to James Farmer, who runs the Edublogs service. He has outdone himself.

The server was upgraded last week and the new functionality is fabulous. We can now easily embed Flash, Director, YouTube, Google Video, and iFilm files directly into blog posts, which is a greatly appreciated feature. As well as that, he has installed additional WordPress plug-ins which enable us to do a heap of cool stuff, like the “listen to podcast” option through Talkr, and a link to easily add photos directly from your Flickr account, like so.

Thanks James for continuing to make Edublogs (and I’m hoping Learnerblogs too!) better all the time.

By the way, all this funky Web 2.0 spelling of words like Flickr, Talkr, Frappr, etc is making me wonder if I should start spelling my own last name as Betchr?