Day: May 27, 2018

My Week Ending May 27, 2018

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

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. When I normally think of alternatives to Microsoft Office, I normally think about OpenOffice and LibreOffice.  Into the fray comes FreeOffice.  When you have multiple computers, will free alternatives become more in vogue?
  2. For “Royal Watchers”, this was a secret that was held onto tightly until the wedding.  Exactly what royal title would the newly weds get?
  3. School districts are always looking for magic potions.  In this case, what’s the best way to implement a 1:1 program?  Lenovo has an idea.
  4. I remember a good friend of mine being so upset when someone had made a comment on social media about the history of computers.  You need to know and understand and truly appreciate what others have done in the past in order to move forward.
  5. As people get their acceptance emails to present at the Bring IT, Together Conference, I hope that they turn to great ideas about public speaking.  You don’t want people to go home with a Homer Simpson “Borrrrrring”.
  6. What would it take to get everyone to use the zipper merge concept?  Here’s the reason why it makes traffic go faster.  I don’t see it happening on the 401 any time soon.
  7. Given everything that we read from our neighbours to the south, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Canadian government buys Facebook advertisements.
  8. Want to create digital books?  Either you or your students?  Here are nine tools.  Pick one.
  9. I love my Acer Chromebook.  It’s a higher end model and now there are even more higher end machines geared for business.
  10. Do you want to get started with Google Forms and Sheets?  Here’s a starter guide.

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Blog Posts on doug … off the record

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voicEd Radio

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

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Technology Trouble Shooting

Two Clicks – With the last update to ChromeOS, or as near as I can figure, there is now an annoying problem.  It takes two clicks to close a tab instead of the usual one.  It doesn’t happen in Chrome, the browser.  Just Chrome, the browser on Chrome OS.

It’s a small thing but when you open and close a number of tabs during your workflow, it becomes a big problem.

Tab Crashing –  I had a problem with tabs crashing in Google Chrome when I would wake the computer.  Yes, I rebooted.  The problem followed.

I figured that the problem was probably in an extension and I was right.  I deleted all of the extensions and then added them back one by one until I found the one that was crashing things.  I deleted it and I’m happy again.

Divide and conquer.

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Video of the Week – From “This Week in Ontario Edublogs”

Stephen Hurley called it the greatest song that mentions education…

My Favourite Photo This Week

The babies have arrived.  Mom Robin took some encouraging to move from the nest and was either complaining to me or telling the babies not to smile.

robins

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Thanks for reading.

dp

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Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

… CMT television?

Growing up in mid-Western Ontario and working on a farm as a summer hand, it was only natural to the fellow I was working with that the radio was always on to CKNX from Wingham.  Between the local news reports, there was an endless flow of country music.  The advice given to me…

“It’s great music when you’re on the tractor ploughing all night”

The other word of advice was…

“Where else will you find out about the auctions?”

And it was true for all the above.  Of course, with peer pressure, we normally listened to CKLW from Windsor for the top hits of the day.  That’s where I got an appreciation for Motown music that lives on today.

The only problem was that the playlist was kind of short and so you’d punch up CKNX for a change.  They were side by side on the radio push buttons.

Now, considerably older, and living in a rural setting again, over the air television is pretty limited and cable television non-existent.  But there’s satellite television.  I was pleased when we bought our “package” and noted that CMT (Country Music Television) was part of it.

I actually set the receiver to tune to CMT first thing in the morning so that I could listen to videos and listen to music while going through my wakeup routine.

But then things changed.

The Grand Ole Opry, which was broadcast live on Saturday nights, was pulled in favour of other shows.  Then, gasp, the morning show was replaced by reality television and old movies.  Things just kept disappearing as CMT evolved.  Now, I can’t find any music shows on there any more.

Why is this an issue now?

Part of my morning routine was to change the channel to something else right away.  It was to either another music channel or to a news station.  This morning, I finally had enough and dug around in the menus to find how to set a timer and changed it to something that I know will be reliable entertainment in the morning.  At least for now.

For a Sunday, your thoughts?

  • Have you ever listened to CKNX?
  • How about CKLW?
  • How about CMT?
  • Do you have a favourite media start to your day?  Music, television, or something else to get the blood pumping?
  • In a world of specialty television stations, has a favourite of yours changed format?
  • Do you remember push buttons on the radio to access presets?
  • Did Bruce Springsteen have it right?

As always, I’d be most interested in your comments.  Please let us know in the comments below.

This post is part of a regular Sunday morning series.  You can read (and comment) on any of them here.

OTR Links 05/27/2018

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.