Day: May 15, 2022

My Week Ending 2022-05-15

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

  • Whoops! What if you gave a party and everyone came – that’s what Queen’s University is afraid of with some mis-mailed acceptances
  • An interesting guess about how the Twitter Edit button might work – for those who don’t know how to proofread <grin>

Monday

  • Web browser – Browser engine – a nice discussion of the difference
  • Essex County / Windsor pizza is absolutely the best – neat story about someone ordering $600 of it delivered

Tuesday

  • Many Canadians have been fascinated by Jeopardy lately for obvious reasons and here’s a list of the all-time streaks
  • Guinness always had interesting world records that people would try to break and now have discontinued some bizarre ones

Wednesday

  • Steven Lecce apologizes for participating in the slave auction when he was in university
  • A list of some of the Conservative members of Provincial Parliament who got allowances to add to their regular salary

Thursday

  • Some really interesting perspective from some Ontario students who are too young to vote but I’ll bet that they make sure that Mom and Dad know before they vote
  • Before you get a new profile picture with that new app, read this and make sure that you know where your personal information is going

Friday

  • First the Opera browser and now it appears that Edge might be getting a built-in VPN
  • Some thoughts about how Essex County might be just ripe for some Conservative MPPs this election

Saturday

  • I thought it this was interesting – Google Extensions arranged in a periodic table fashion. I’ll probably blog about it some time this week
  • Another Google thing – this time it’s Google Translate with 8 new Indian languages

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 – May 13, 2022

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

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

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:

  • Sue Bruyns – @sbruyns
  • Marie Snyder – @MarieSnyder27
  • Matthew Morris – @callmemrmorris
  • Will Gourley – @WillGourley
  • Heather Donnelly – @TESLOntario
  • Laura Wheeler – @wheeler_laura
  • Marc Hodgkinson – @Mr_H_Teacher

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

I think I have a solution for the problem that I had with Shareaholic that I checked in with last week in this section.

I went into the configuration and it was using bit.ly as a link when sharing.

I changed it to Shareaholic’s own proprietary link sharing utility and it seems to be working reliably now. Why? I have no idea.

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 – May 15: Up to 56 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

The Boy and me. Don’t let his hat fool you. We’re the same height.


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/

Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in OTR

…Doodle Bug?

When you grow up in a small town, you don’t have too many different places to go. During high school, we would always walk or drive to the pool hall for lunch. You could get a submarine sandwich and heat it (pre-microwave times) and play a game of pool before heading back.

The pool hall had one snooker table and two nine ball tables. On the other side of the wall, there were two bowling lanes and you could actually pick up a quarter or two by setting pins. Up near the front, there was a typical selection of candy and cigarettes but just before you got there, there were three pinball machines.

Two of the machines would get cycled out so that there was always something new. But there was one machine that was always there and never seemed to move – The Doodle Bug.

Thanks, Hector L Degado

It had your typical pinball action with the metal ball released by the plunger, flipper buttons on the side and lots of bumpers and targets in the playing field. Also, lots of noise and flashing lights! You’ll notice that it’s dated – no digital scoring here, there were number wheels that spun to keep up with your play. There also was an action centre right in the middle that could be activated and really elevate your score? The worst thing was seeing the ball come down between the flippers and there was nothing you could do about it.

This came back in memories when Google released a digital pinball machine before its I/O event.

You can play it here; https://pinball.flutter.dev/#/

That got me thinking. We don’t have a pool hall or arcade in town so playing a real pinball machine is out of the question these days. The last time I could remember playing a pinball game was at an arcade on Clifton Hill one evening after attending the Bring IT, Together conference a few years ago. It was a long walk from the hotel but worth it.

One final memory from a small town – when you skipped class, there weren’t a lot of alternatives so heading to the bowling alley was only natural. It was also the first stop for our vice-principal when he went hunting for missing bodies.

For a Sunday, do you have any memories to share?

  • Did you ever play the Doodle Bug?
  • Do you remember playing any other pinball machines?
  • Did you leave the school premises during lunch? Where did you go if you did?
  • If there were a number of people waiting to play, how did you signify your interest?
  • What happens in a real life pinball machine if you try to shake it to influence the ball movement?
  • Did you ever set pins to make money?
  • Where did you go when you skipped class?

That’s got to bring back some memories. How about sharing some of them.

This is a regular Sunday morning post. You can check them all out here and, if you have any ideas that you’d like to see posted here, let me know.

OTR Links 05/15/2022

by dougpete, posted in Links

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