Day: May 1, 2022

My Week Ending 2022-05-01

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. They’re posted to the blog daily under the title OTR Links.

Sunday

  • Buying a used car used to be so easy but there’s a lot to look at these days
  • If you’re a General Amherst General, here’s a last chance to look through the school – my daughter didn’t know that they had a rifle range

Monday

  • I thought that this was interesting – a phone without Google and it’s no surprise that it comes from Germany
  • The big news is social media – Elon Musk buys Twitter

Tuesday

  • Brave’s own search engine uses crowdsourcing and discussion to make searching there better for you
  • A rational move by our friends at the TVDSB – keep those masks on

Wednesday

  • Facebook apparently might start blocking news – I could recommend a number of news sources they could block – I’ve done it already
  • If you’re a lover of maps and reading them and discovering things and perspective – there’s so much to do with a map

Thursday

  • A feel-good post about a student, social media, and a fund raiser for Ukraine
  • This is such a powerful message about the dangers of gossiping about students in the staff room – a good reminder for all

Friday

Saturday

  • What a wonderful gesture from this police officer
  • This was interesting – I’ve known of the value of Direct X for years but never really knew what it was, just that I had to have it

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 29, 2022

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

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

voicEd Radio

This Week in Ontario Edublogs is a blog post/show/podcast that features great writing from Ontario Edubloggers. Stephen Hurley and I use their writing as the basis for a conversation.

Featured Bloggers:

  • Paul McGuire – @mcguirp
  • Melanie White – @WhiteRoomRadio
  • Diana Maliszewski – @MzMollyTl
  • Jessica Outram – @jessicaoutram
  • Brad Hughes – @brad_hughes
  • Amanda Potts – @Ahpotts
  • Association for Media Literacy – @A_M_L_

This week’s show:

Opening Song:

Closing Song:

All of the shows are archived here. The show is broadcast LIVE almost every Wednesday morning at 8:45 on voicEd Radio and is downloadable as a podcast later.

Technology Troubleshooting

There was big news today about multiple vulnerabilities in the Chromium Browser. The problem is that it just isn’t Chromium and Google Chrome. It also means updating your copies of Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and whatever Chromium based browser you’re using.

Look what I made

With all the Wordle craze, I of course blogged about it earlier but also created a Wakelet of all the Wordle clones I could find. Once created, I’ve been adding to it daily, it seems. I guess it’s presumptuous to think I could do it all in one session. It certainly has taken the online world by storm

My collection is available here: https://wke.lt/w/s/BuvP40

Update – April 30: Up to 52 entries.

Video of the Week

If you’re a lifelong learner, you watch things like this for that one tip you might not know.

Photo of the Week

I used this photo last week. These two return every year. After I posted the picture, we haven’t seen them. I wonder if they’re now nesting?

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/

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Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in OTR

… your old record albums?

I still have mine. Stick with me; this might get long since it was a real passion for me at one time.

My first record player was one of those round players with a shaded black plastic hood and had two round speakers on cables that I could stretch out across a room. I think I got it as payment for babysitting as a teenager and I had three records that I played on them, over and over. All of them were K-Tel! K-Tel would put out summaries of greatest hits based on a theme periodically so you could just listen to the hits and not worry about the other songs on the record. As for the player, it was futuristic looking at the time yet today would probably classify it as retro.

I played those old K-Tels until they wore out. Periodically, they’d skip over a track and I’d put a dime or penny on top of the needle to apply a bit of pressure to keep it honest. I was so naive at the time and it really was record and needle abuse.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

All of this changed at university when I got a roommate who really knew what he was doing. He had a great system that put mine to shame. I ended up getting rid of mine and we’d just listen to his system. The trend had gone to modular and he had a turntable, amplifier, and a couple of external speakers with woofers, mid-range speakers, and tweeters. One of the important things I learned was to keep the records standing up straight. A milk crate was perfect for the job and I got myself some. I have no idea where we got them but I did. In addition to keeping the records from warping, they made it easier to move from house to house. He also taught me about disk care and products like Discwasher, anti-static spray, and Angel Sleeves. The biggest takeaway though was to buy complete albums and listen to everything and not just the stuff that made the radio.

I was a poor university student and could only dream of something like this. It led my wife-to-be and me to many trips to an audio store behind the Eaton Centre in Kitchener. Actually, we’d go to Eaton’s first and then this place to appreciate the price difference. They had the perfect setup to hear beautiful audio. We’d spend hours there listening to music and finally ended up buying at least one component from there. We had to; we monopolised their floor every Saturday, it seemed. Once we had a decent setup (and jobs), we made a point of buying one album a week to create our own collection. Recently, a store opened in town that retails albums. Every time I walk by, I get the itch.

The best setup that we ever had was just like you’ve read in books. It was our first house and the speakers were placed on a concrete floor and backed up against a wall for the greatest of sounds. The turntable was suspended on feet to absorb any shocks and placed nicely in a cabinet. The only glitch was that the lid couldn’t be open fully. When we were done with the record, it would go back into the milk crate and we had enough of a collection that things would be placed in alphabetical order so that we could easily find them.

These days, my wife will just shout “OK Google, play some Guess Who” and this cheap little speaker delivers great audio. When she’s out of the house for a while, I’ll sit back in my chair after putting on a Guess Who album on the turntable, turn the lights off, and just listen. My original JBL speakers really now spend the rest of their time holding these little speakers that do an amazing job of playing audio from the television.

As for the milk crates, I finally gave in and put the records in a cabinet but they’re still standing straight. The milk crates now serve as collectors for pool toys and gardening equipment.

For a Sunday, here are a few questions to continue the conversation.

  • What are you listening to right now? For me, it’s a Garth Brooks concert
  • Do you still own vinyl records? If yes, do you listen to them? If no, how did you dispose of them?
  • What was your first stereo?
  • What’s the difference between a record player and a turntable?
  • What creates scratches on a record?
  • What creates static when you’re listening to a record?
  • What are the various speeds that records are played at?
  • Do you have external speakers connected to your television or do you just go with the ones that are built-in?
  • Where do you turn to listen to music these days? When I’m working on the computer, I’ll have YouTube playing in the background. I find it a challenge to listen to those deep songs as the suggested listening tends to be the commercial stuff. I’ll often listen to a concert to hear the songs that didn’t make the charts. Any tips?

Thanks for sticking with me on this one. I’d be most interested in your thoughts. Please share them in the comments below.

OTR Links 05/01/2022

by dougpete, posted in Links

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