My Week Ending 2019-06-02


Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.


Readings 

You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week.

  • Get used to it. When you have two or more players in exactly the same playing field, each think they’re the best game in town. We’re going to see a lot of this, methinks.
  • Overlays like this are going to be amazing when people have access to 100 years of Google Earth. It’s still amazing with the tools that we currently have though.
  • I find this really intriguing. In any curriculum that I’ve ever seen released that I care about, I do know who some of the authors are. No idea at all with this one.
  • Some people are just too dumb to run computers. In the past, the answer was always – they could always use a Mac. What if that doesn’t work out?
  • Would you upgrade to the Galaxy 10 phone for the fancy wallpapers?
  • If you don’t use a Password Manager, you really should. Here’s a review of some of the best. Post-it notes didn’t make the list.
  • Finally! An interesting maker project.
  • For people that can’t get a grip on them themselves, Google will fix Chrome to handle cookies better.
  • According to the prediction from The Weather Network, I opened the pool too soon.
  • Every programmer knows and understands this. In fact, in school when your program messes up, there’s usually a teacher there to place blame.
  • I’d love to have a conversation about this. Has Google over-reached in its efforts with favicons?
  • Probably because of human error? I don’t know. I don’t let a piece of software recommend my friends to me.
  • Here’s your chance to buy artwork from the Canadian Group of Seven. Of course, they’re going to be affordably priced.
  • I’d never heard of Notion until I read this article. I wonder …

Blog Posts on doug … off the record

My daily contributions to this blog.


#FollowFriday – May 24, 2019

https://wke.lt/w/s/y-XAp2


voicEd Radio

My on demand radio page can be found here.  

Opening song this week:

The latest #TWIOE show features blog posts from:


Technology Troubleshooting

There was an interesting article this week about how people who use the Google Chrome browser may be unable to install ad blockers in the future.

On Facebook, Alec Couros indicated that he might be going back to Firefox. It’s not a bad option and if the Google story is true, there may be a lot moving and we’ll get a message from Mozilla about the dangers.

Of course, a message like that generated suggestions from followers. I suggested Firefox or Brave. Rodd Lucier threw out the idea of Opera. Then, Miguel Guhlin suggested Slimjet.

I’d never heard of it so guess how I spent some of my investigative time.


Video of the Week

In praise of literacy and great music…


Photo of the Week

Glad I cut the grass this morning. Severe thunderstorm here this afternoon. I had to turn on the lights; it’s tough blogging in the dark and without the music channel on television. The duck is avoiding the hail.

Please join me daily and I hope that you check in next Sunday for a summary of my week.

Thanks for reading.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:
https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.

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Whatever happened to …


… Hypercard for presentations?

Thanks, Peter Skillen, for sharing this article recently.

30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web

It’s hard to believe but there was a time when computers went without Powerpoint!

It was a long time ago – before the amalgamation of school boards that I had my first experiences with Hypercard. At the time, my friend Grover and I did quite a number of presentations starting with “Doug and Grover …” at places like ECOO, ISTE, MACUL, WesternRCAC, and local school districts.

This was well before laptop computers for presentations. In our cases, if I was bringing the computer (yeah, a real desktop computer and you’d appreciate venues that had carts to lug it around on), we’d do our presentation on 640×480 graphic images, put them into a directory, and a graphic program would cycle through them. You just had to name them in sequence. If Grover was bringing the computer, he’d bring his desktop Macintosh and we’d create the presentation in Hypercard.

Photo Credit: kalleboo Flickr via Compfight cc

By today’s standards, the presentations are pretty blah but it was cutting edge at the time. You could link from one idea to another. What a concept!

Things moved on – the web became so intriguing and we crafted our presentations in HTML and served them up from the local computer in a browser and then the Ontario Ministry of Education licensed Hyperstudio which worked on both platforms and added all kinds of functionality to the original concept. That really opened the door for neat ways to communicate ideas.

Today, we have special purpose applications like Powerpoint, Google Slides, etc. as presentation tools but in the day…

How about your presentation thoughts for a Sunday?

  • Have you ever used Hypercard?
  • How about Hyperstudio?
  • Of course, presentations are but a small part of what you can do with these products. They are also so powerful in the hands of students. Do you have any other remembrances of using them that way?
  • What’s your preferred platform these days for presentations?
  • One of the powerful features of these packages was the scripting abilities and the ability to embed other media into the presentation. There was a time when Flash was king/queen. Were you a user of Flash?
  • One of the powerful, although time consuming elements of Hypercard was that there were no presentation templates like there are today? Do you start to yawn when you see a presentation that’s using a template that you know you’ve used before?
  • Would you say that older presentations were more powerful because it was quite obvious that the presenter put a LOT of work into making it happen?

Don’t be afraid of “death by comment”. Share your thoughts below.

And, if you have a great presentation tip or two, share those as well!

OTR Links 06/02/2019


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