Day: May 2, 2021

My Week Ending 2021-05-02

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

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.

Sunday

  • These were an awesome collection of Eagle Cams for use in the classroom. When I visited one in particularly, mom was ripping apart something for lunch
  • If you get to the point where you want something besides Google applications on your Chromebook, look to these tips

Monday

  • Given all the patches and bug fixes, I’d hate to not be running the latest version of Windows 10
  • Ubuntu 21.04 is here and here are the new features

Tuesday

  • Here’s how to be King for a Day, at least in Google’s Argentina
  • This is a great story about how librarians are stepping up getting people COVID shots in the Middlesex County area

Wednesday

  • I don’t consider myself too old to get into a remake of The Flintstones. I grew up with the modern stone age family
  • A new browser that runs in the Cloud – Mighty

Thursday

  • Trust it to the Opera browser to support unstoppable domains
  • An interesting update to the Vivaldi browser as more and more websites become annoying

Friday

  • I’m not sure that I agree that a high end tablet is needed for Android. There are high end Chromebooks that flip over into one
  • I think everyone would agree that the logic of going back to big lecture halls isn’t something we want to see happening any time soon at universities

Saturday

  • I had to smile at this. Back in my day, we walked to school even during snow storms going up hill both ways. In a way, school districts closing local schools in favour of larger schools further a way caused this problem
  • All I can say is that I love the name my parents gave me and I’m not a fan of what is currently trending

Blog Posts on
doug … off the record

My daily contributions to this blog are linked below. If you’re looking for a week in review for doug–off the record, you came to the right place.

#FollowFriday – April 30, 2021

https://wke.lt/w/s/PfZrTG

voicEd Radio

On this week’s show, Stephen Hurley and I chatted about Principals, failure, poetry, me, and sick pay.

The show, stored as a podcast is available here:
https://voiced.ca/podcast_episode_post/cheer-leaders-feelings-of-failure-and-self-care/

  • Anne-Marie Kee – @AMKeeLCS
  • Amanda Potts – @Ahpotts
  • Setared Dabbagh – @TESLOntario
  • Aviva Dunsiger – @avivaloca
  • Diana Maliszewski – @MzMollyTL

Opening Song:

Closing Song:

All of the podcasts are archived here. The show is broadcast LIVE almost every Wednesday morning at 8:45 on voicEd Radio.

Technology Troubleshooting

Bluetooth is a great technology until you let it take over. Then, it just becomes annoying.

At various points in time, I have my bluetooth headphones connected to various things around here. They’re only connected to my MacBook Pro on Wednesday mornings for my TWIOE show on voicEd Radio.

Annoyingly, or as a feature, they want to reconnect to the device that I last used. That’s basically everything that I don’t want it to connect to. The technology is such that it can only connect to two devices at once.

So, my solution is to leave some devices out of range and then scramble to turn it off on my PC so that there’s room for the Mac. It seems easy enough but every week, I have a “holy cow” moment as I don’t get it right.

That’s the problem with correct solutions; you actually have to implement them.

Video of the Week

I know this but sometimes still get confused. Then there’s the whole European Union and Brexit thing.

Photo of the Week

You might think this is Northern Ontario but it’s actually just down the road from us after a heavy rainfall. I love the resolution that the new Android phone provides for the camera.

Thanks for reading.

Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting for you. I honestly and truthfully appreciate your few moments reading my thoughts. Time willing, this summary appears every Sunday afternoon.

Be safe.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

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

Advertisement

Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in OTR

… AOL?

I was looking through the Padlet for ideas for this post and ran across this from an anonymous source.

Where did AOL go?Remember having you mail box BOMBARDED with those free AOL floppy-disks; the TV commercials sporting the <> voice advising you that ”You’ve got mail!” AOL took North Americans by storm faster than a hurricanes surge waves, and the other day (while checking my e-mail inbox, naturally) a memory of the first time I logged on to the internet popped into my mind briefly leaving behind the question I can’t figure out. What ever happened to AOL?

I actually had a related post and that was about AOL Messenger. You can read it here.

I never signed up or created an account there. This goes back to the original days of getting connected via your computer, a phone line, and a modem. AOL was a portal all to itself. You’d log in and have everything that you’d ever need all in one spot.

That was kind of important since connection speeds were so slow (56K was impressive) so you could actually spend all kinds of time online doing very little. My goto at the time was the Education Network of Ontario (ENOREO) instead. It was there that “dougpete” was assigned to me. You didn’t ask for an ID back then; you asked for access and they gave you a login and password.

I guess, at the time, my connected interests were pretty small. I used dialing into one of the eight local phone lines as my connection to the world which was a real subset composed of Ontario educators. The speeds and interface were slow by today’s standards so we were hardly “active”. Like online services, includung AOL, there were special interest groups that you could join and, as always, email. Connecting via dialup was never a guaranteed activity. There’s a whole message devoted to it – CARRIER LOST.

Like the suggester, I got AOL diskettes all the time in the mail. If that wasn’t enough, people in the building I worked at would put their unsolicited diskettes in my mailbox because “Doug was the computer guy”, I guess. The diskettes would get reformatted and served as backup diskettes for me and I had a collection that was actually a complete installation of Windows. My storage at the time was an old shoebox which would nicely hold two rows and two levels of diskettes.

So, today? Well, AOL is still there. It has a presence at https://www.aol.ca/ and serves as a portal to news and entertainment. It even has a search engine, powered by BING. The navigation menu looks like this:

There even is an option to create an account, login, get an email address, and do all kinds of things from its current presence. It has the same sort of approach as a one stop link to take you anywhere you’d want to go.

For a Sunday, your thoughts?

  • Did you have an AOL account? How about any of the competitors at the time – Compuserve, Sprint, etc.
  • Do you have an AOL account today?
  • Did you have an ENOREO.on.ca account?
  • Do you remember getting those diskettes in the mail? What did you do with them?
  • How big was your collection of diskettes? Was it big enough for a shoebox? Bigger or smaller?
  • How do you get rid of diskettes? Can any of it be recycled?
  • Do you have a routine that could be handled by a portal or do you connect randomly to web resources, making a portal not helpful.

Help the conversation by sharing your remembrances of AOL. Or, share your joy for having missed it all. Regardless of your tact, a comment below is great.

This is a regular Sunday morning post around here. All of the past posts can be found here, including a link to the Padlet if you’ve got an idea for a future post.

OTR Links 05/02/2021

by dougpete, posted in Links

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