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The Childrens’ machine

A small one for the kids this weekend. My daughter has reached the age of two, and it’s impossible to keep her from hacking away at my keyboard. We have yet to buy one of those small kids’ computers for learning letters and stuff – but this weekend I am installing CrazyLittleFingers. Basically it allows you remap the keyboard and taylor it to your kiddo’s needs (and it’s fathers’ needs…).

You must provide the kid yourself and download CrazyLittleFingers here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?PHPSESSID=hon787djaqnnqrsthkjpflith5&topic=16131.0

Weekend before pi

Thanks, Ola, for this link.  Having endured a whole year of my mathematics teaching, you still seem rather obsessed with pi…! A fun video here, to round of the week before pi-day.

How not to make frinds via software

Trying to make a software friendly may be a good idea. Making it too friendly is a bad idea. Making software that annoys you might be the worst of ideas, still that’s the experience I most often feel around Vista. I rarely get the sensation that “wow – this is good”, but rather “is this wrong too?”.
My latest annoyance is the problem report. For no apparant reason Vista decides to suddenly and at random times run a problem report check to see if it can solve any of the heaps of crashes and problems Vista has encountered. Today this happened, and Vista searched for a couple of hundred errors (!). It found the solution to three (see picture).
The two first errors are anonymous, while the third is Firefox related. Clicking on the first took me to a screen where it said I should get Nokia drivers for my telephone. Well, I couldn’t think of why I needed that since everything has been working with my Nokia connection to the PC. So when I clicked “Information is confusing” I was asked “what where you trying to do”. And who can remember that, months after the problem may have occured?
Second problem took me to a Bluetooth screen. I am quite happy with my bluetooth antenna, it works perfectly and I can easily send files to my computer from around the house and using phones or laptops. So when I was recommended to go to this site to download a driver I was skeptical. Not to mention that when I arrived at the web site, I found that this was actually gonna cost me heaps of money. Just to upgrade something that works. No good help there.
The third one was Firefox related. The technical information in the corner said I needed to install latest version. Which I always do via the excellent filehippo.com update checker. So that was wrong info too. I tried to figure out what must have been the error, but the help I got was “this is community based”, and a link to Mozilla Inc. was provided (it did not work, but may hopes weren’t high anyway).

So out of hundreds of errors, Microsoft decided to fix three, making them all worse if I had follow through with their help. Thanks, Vista, but no thanks! I’d rather run my computer to a halt without your help…

Greenshot

Taking a snapshot of your computer screen or a screen region is something I do quite often. Whether for showing students or mom where to find something on the screen, or making tutorials, it’s nice to have a fine little screenshot utility. I earlier used FastStone for this, and this being a great program, it couldn’t stay free forever. So if you can get your hands on older versions of FastStone Screen Capture utilties, do it

There are fortunately several other options, one is built right into Windows and uses the PrintScreen key. Using this however, causes the entire screen or the entire window of a program to be captured. So it works, although a bit quirky. In Vista this feature has been improved, and you can change the region when clipping.

I prefer to use the freeware utility GreenShot. It easily allows you to edit the screen capture with arrows, textboxes and ellipses. Just what you need to point out important features of the clip. You can download this free utility here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/.

Edit: Another seemingly good utility for screenshooting (is that a verb in English?) is Screenshot Captor, found by way of Lifehacker at http://lifehacker.com/304548/take-and-annotate-screenshots-with-screenshot-captor

A funny thing happened on the way to the moon

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (2001) (V)

Directed by Bart Sibrel. With Anne Tonelson. Visit IMDb for Photos, Showtimes, Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussions, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Fan Sites

Well, here’s some more comic relief albeit of a different type. I hadn’t seen this movie until recently, and really enjoyed it the other day. It’s really, really hard to believe how conspiracy theoreticians (or HB’s – Hoax believers) can relate to all the nonsense and moronness that they actually believe. This movie is worth its weight in gold as far as entertainment goes. It tries to give the impression we never landed on the moon. Of course, it’s easy to kick back at all claims in the movie, many web pages will even lay out the argumenatation bit by bit (i.e. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html ) but I recommend you see it for yourself first to see how much nonsense you can spot on a see-through. And I have to admit, even if most arguments in the movie are utterly stupid there are some which you might want to look up to understand.

The Darwin Awards

The Darwin Awards.

Now for some comic relief. This site is dedicated to those who improve the gene pool of the world by killing of themselves (or making themselves unable to reproduce) in horribly stupid manners.

Read about the terrorist who mails someone a bomb – with insufficient postage, causing it to be returned to sender – And read more hilarious ways to go!

Norwegian GeoGebra Institute

Image via Wikipedia

NGI, Norsk GeoGebra Institutt (Norwegian geoGebra Institute) was founded this year. Located at NTNU, the university of Trondheim. This institute is aiming to be a gathering point for all activities related to GeoGebra. If you don’t already know this excellent piece of software, take at look at the GeoGebra tag to the right to see some of my older posts, or check it ouf free on the official site, http://www.geogebra.org.

The institute will facilitate courses and seminars, online and on campus, and the first courses are already being planned and starting out. Also, you can be certified for being an instructor at four different levels by attending courses and seminars.

Twittervalue

My Twitter is worth $39

Periodic table in pictures

A nice page at http://universe-review.ca/R13-01-periodictable2.htm where you can see a more visual version of the periodic table of the elements. Could be a handy printout for the classroom!