Guardian reports on the Eddies…
The results are in for this year’s Edublog awards (“Eddies” for short), an online event that showcases the best use of blogs, podcasting and other social software in education.
A full list of winners and nominations can be found at edublogawards.com.
The BBC reports from CES that Intel see mobile devices as core to the future use of the internet.
Mobile devices will deliver a more personal internet within five years, using chips with the power of today’s desktop PCs, Intel’s head has said.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Paul Otellini predicted mobile devices could soon “augment reality” by pulling data from the net in real time.
He said the industry was on the verge of creating a “new level of capability and usefulness to the internet”
It’s interesting to see how Sony are changing the way they view their PSP, from the ease in which you can now add video to what they intend to do with Blu-ray disks, through to LocationFree and how it works well with the PS3 for gaming and video.
Soon you will be able to make phone calls on your (new) PSP using Skype.
Today saw this blog pass the 10,000 visits mark since I (re)started this blog in June of 2007.
Thanks to everyone who has visited and hopefully enjoyed reading my ramblings on e-learning and ILT.
Here’s to the next 10,000 visits.
Today sees the launch of Wikia Search.
Wikia is a new search engine and unlike the closed Google system, the results are “created” by a community of users.
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
As Wikia comes from Jimmy Wales (one of the names behind Wikipedia) you will have an understanding of the philosophy behind this new search engine.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
So there I was looking at my new Samsung Q1 Ultra and seeing how the graphics were working, working on a document and looking at a few things online, when I got called away. Knew I was only going to be a few minutes to just placed the Q1 on the desk and left.
I came back to find that Windows Vista had decided (in my absence) to update Windows, restart, lose my wireless connection and then admit that it had lost the document I was working on and would I like to create a new one!
I do find this very frustrating, if I wanted the Q1 to run itself I would leave it switched on and never use it, however I want to use the Q1 to do stuff, create stuff, read stuff, reflect on stuff. I don’t want the Q1 to try and be nice and update itself in the middle of me doing stuff. I want to retain my wireless connection so I don’t lose my blog entry, or lose the thread of the online discussion I am involved in.
I don’t want software to continually nag me that I haven’t either set it up or registered it, or run it for a while, and I don’t want the software to do it in the middle of me doing stuff.
I don’t want the Q1 to download huge updates whilst I am trying to do stuff online, downloading will slow my internet connection, download updates while I am doing other non-online stuff such as making a cup of tea.
Please just let me do my stuff, don’t do your stuff and pretend mine isn’t important!
I just want to do my stuff…
What with HMRC losing personal data, along with others, it doesn’t surprise me that next to be looked at is education.
The BBC is reporting how an IT firm believes that:
Sensitive information on school pupils is being put at risk by staff who take it home with them.
How often are teaching staff in your institution given proper training on how to deal with sensitive data?
This is an issue which doesn’t just affect schools, colleges and universities also have data protection policies, though a policy is only a statement, practice is another matter entirely.
If you take a computer from work home, you have to ask yourself is the data secure?
One of the problems with being off work for a while is you do miss a few things, so catching up on the JISC website I was pleased to see that the e-Books from the 2007 Innovating e-Learning Conference had been published online.
‘Institutional transformation’ and ‘supporting lifelong learning’ were the themes of the JISC online conference held earlier this year and two conference e-books have been published today to reflect both of these themes.
You can download the books from this page (scroll down).
You can read the outcomes of the joint presentation I delivered and the discussion that followed on Personal technologies and the future of learning in chapter five of book one.
The books make for interesting reading if you missed (or even just missed parts of) the conference and are a useful reminder of what was discussed for those that took part.
If you have a PSP with firmware 3.30 or later you can now (much more easily) play full screen h.264 video.
Prior to firmware 3.30 adding video to a PSP was a bit hit and miss.
When I first got a PSP I was very disappointed with the quality of the video I encoded for it using either EyeTV or Toast, more so when I compared it to the demo video I had on the demo UMD disk which came with it.
It wasn’t for some time that I didn’t realise that the PSP did not support full resolution video from a Memory Stick.
You also had to convert the video to a specific MP4 format and importantly change the name to something unfamiliar like M4V01011 and then find the obscure \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder. You were restricted to a 368 x 208 resolution. If you wanted a thumbnail you had to create a jpg file and then rename it as .thm all quite complicated though there were quite a few tools that allowed you to do this quickly and easily (I used Toast quite a bit). One problem was working out what video files were what (easy on the PSP, more complex on a computer).
With the release of firmware 3.30 this changed.
Encoding full resolution h.264 video for the PSP is now possible, this means that you can use the full 480 x 272 resolution and the excellent quality and compression of h.264.
However when I started to encode video for a PSP with firmware 3.30 I did initially have a few problems.
I tried to encode some full resolution video using VisualHub and the in-built settings and then some settings from a forum. However in both instances the video would not play on the PSP.
I initially thought it was maybe because at the time I was using the trial version of VisualHub (which has a two minute limit). However using the default low res settings it encoded and played fine.
I even formatted the Memory Stick wondering if that would solve it, it didn’t.
So I encoded the video in the original pre 3.30 firmware specificiations. As I copied over the video to the \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder when I noticed a Video folder in the root of the Memory Stick.
So I copied the full resolution video over to this video folder, and guess what, yes full resolution h.264 video on my PSP.
Really impressed with the quality.
Really impressed with VisualHub.
So if you have firmware 3.30 or later ensure that you use the PSP to format the memory stick and then you will have a video folder into which you can copy the video files without having to worry about any naming conventions and be able to have full resolution high quality video.
I have been playing about with evaluating a Samsung Q1 Ultra over the last couple of weeks. I was trying out Internet Explorer and was surprised to find that the Q1 was not connected to my wireless network. After some investigation I found out was disappointed to find that Windows Vista decided that the best thing it could do was disable the wireless adapter as it had a found a problem with it.
Initially the problem I was having was that the device failed to connect to my wireless network, which surprised me, as I hadn’t really done very much with the Q1 except switch it on! I hadn’t installed any software (or even uninstalled software).
The wireless was on according to the Samsung software, but as far as Windows Vista was concerned there were no networks to connect to.
Very strange, after checking device manager (something I doubt any general user would do) I found that Vista had disabled the wireless adapter because it had found a problem with it. It didn’t tell me what the problem was, but was willing to go online to find a solution (well I would have gone online, but the wireless wasn’t working was it).
There didn’t seem to be any way of re-enabling the wireless adapter. I could have uninstalled it, but I wondered if Vista would let me reinstall the wireless adapter, I was pretty sure it might have got pretty obnoxious about it.
In the end I went with a system restore, something I do like about XP and Vista and restored the Q1 to this morning’s configuration which I know was working, and is working now.
I wonder if it was a Windows Update that caused the problem, I am not totally sure of the cause.
And a day later…
Windows Vista did it again…
Annoying to say the least. Windows Vista on my Q1 Ultra discovered a (so-called) problem with the wireless adapter on the Q1 and decided (without telling me) to disable the wireless and not allow me to renable it at all (well not easily).
In the end I decided against doing a system restore (like what I did before) as obviously some kind of Windows update was causing the problem. This time I removed the adapter from Device Manager and rebooted the Q1 and let Windows reinstall the drivers, which it did without finding anything wrong!
Then it disabled the adapter once more!
I wouldn’t mind so much, but this is a new Q1 and I haven’t done anything except install updates…
Finally a solution which seems to be working, change the drivers for the wireless adapter, I am using version 7.4.2.15 of the Atheros Communications driver which I believe is different to the supplied Windows Vista driver.
Hopefully this will keep the wireless adapter enabled, the Q1 Ultra connected to the internet and me happy.