My Week Ending May 6, 2018

HERE’S A SUMMARY OF SOME OF THE VARIOUS THINGS I LEARNED AND PUBLISHED THIS WEEK.

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Readings (You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Here are a selected few from the past week.)

1. It’s interesting how most browsers pretty much look the same and work the same these days.  I suspect it’s because everyone’s using Chromium as the base for their browser creation.  I get excited when a browser has a feature or features that promise to be good.  A lot of the time, the goodness is concealed.  Brave is a different sort of browser and apparently there are a lot of people excited to use it.
2. As Canadian elections start to appear on the horizon, will there be forces that are ready to try and sway our perceptions?  What are we doing about it?
3. As I type this, I have no idea if Apple has solved the Siri potty mouth problem.  This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.  What all should developers protect the rest of the world from?
4. Mankind has a list of things that it has banned over the years.  They start out as a great idea until they prove to be dangerout.  The European Union is ready to completely ban pesticides.
5. Who doesn’t love all the things that librarians do for us?  Often, you just have to ask if you don’t know.  Here are 11 reasons why you might want to do so.
6. Loving the new Gmail?  Want to know how to get it?  What to know what to do with it once you get it?  Here are 25 things you should know about it.  Everybody has at least one Gmail account, right?  You might as well learn how to use it as well as you can.
7. Sometimes, you can just get so comfortable with a piece of technology that you can find the button for the action you want to do next in your sleep.  So, when an application gets a makeover, it may well be like you’re doing something for the first time.  In this article Screencastify is the culprit.
8. Are you up for a conspiracy theory?  The Google Chrome browser crashes in the latest Windows 10.
9. Speaking of Windows 10, here’s a good collection of things to ponder if you’re setting up Windows 10 on a laptop,
10. Uh oh.  Security problems.  This time with Twitter.  Time to change your password.

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Blog Posts on doug … off the record

• Sunday – My Week Ending April 29, 2018
• Monday – An Interview with Ramona Meharg
• Tuesday – Really thinking green
• Wednesday – Your creepout for today
• Thursday – Avoiding the creepout
• Friday – This Week in Ontario Edublogs
• Saturday – Things not to do on a train
• Sunday – Whatever happened to … Wilkinson Sword?

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voicEd Radio

My on demand page can be found here.  The latest edition features blog posts from:

• turnmeluce
• Roosloan
• jcasatodd
• jprofNB
• KNAER_RECRAE

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Technology Trouble Shooting

Downloading – I’ll blame this purely on Microsoft.  With my internet service provider, I have a cap on the amount of data that I can download.  I checked April and I still had about 20 GB left.  Microsoft released their latest and greatest update on April 30.  So, I turned on my computer and there was no notification.  Grrr.  I left the computer on all day waiting for my turn.  It never came.  May 1 comes, a new data limit, and guess what?  I shot about 10% of my monthly allocation getting the update.  What’s the chances there are going to be patches?

Tracking Via – I was pleased to find, after a great deal of boredom on a train ride, that Via offers live tracking of the train that you’re on.  Plotted on Google Maps, it’s pretty cool.  You get updates on when it expects to be at the next station too.  On the trip to Toronto, we really started to make time and I wondered – just how fast are we going?  It turns out that’s there too.  https://tsimobile.viarail.ca/ It’s very cool.  And, we were indeed hauling the mail.  151 km/h.  It brings up the question – can trains speed?

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Video of the Week – Where does the water go?

Do you remember the road picture from last week?  If not, here’s a review.

Now, if you go up to the railing on the left hand side, and it’s right after a big storm, the water’s got to go somewhere.  It looks like this.  It’s pretty impressive because Essex County is basically flat.

My Favourite Photo This Week

At the Ontario Teachers’ Federation Curriculum Forum, we went outside to take pictures of things.  Via the original picture or cropping of a picture, you had to put together a series of images or sub-images to spell a word.  I could do it all with just one picture.  Can you guess the word I spelled?

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Thanks for reading.

dp

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