LearnShifting

Windows has a calculator built into it and has had one since Windows first arrived on a PC. If you have been using your smartphone to calculate numbers for the last year or two, you may have missed the fact that the humble calculator which also has a scientific calculator to satisfy those folks miss their HP Calculators of old... Ho Hum everyone says... I knew that.

But did you know that the humble calculator can now calculate differences in dates, convert area, volumes, angles and many other units.

And wait, there is more! It provides four handy little worksheets to calculate a mortgage, car lease and fuel economy in either miles or kilometres per gallon or litre.

Not bad for a humble calculator. Open calculator and click on View in the menu bar to access these goodies.

This entry was posted on January 20, 2012 at 9:22 AM and has received 78 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Someone sends you a file with a video embedded in it... Hoe do you get it out? Solution is easy. Change the file extension from .pptx to .zip and extract the video from the media folder within the resultant zipped archive.

Longer Microsoft step by step technote here

This entry was posted on January 4, 2012 at 3:15 PM and has received 79 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Before I start on this post I want to reflect for a moment on the date. Ten years ago I was driving to work after having arrived in Melbourne on one of the last Ansett flights from Darwin. Helen was at home, 6 months pregnant with Joe resting after the trip. I turned on the car radio and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I rang Helen and told her to turn on the TV and she too couldn’t believe it. It was a terrible day and one that truly changed the world. May we all one day be able to reconcile.

From the horror of that event, let’s move to something nicer and closer to family. In the last ten years we have seen the demise of film in cameras and the matching increase in the use of digital cameras. I take a lot of photographs and although I don’t count them, I think I have about 40,000 or more photographs stored on a 1 terabyte hard drive which is backed up weekly using the Windows backup software that comes with Windows 7.0.

This article is long - the moral is short - back your cherised memories and check that the backup actually works.

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This entry was posted on September 11, 2011 at 11:16 AM and has received 171 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 Joe completed an assignment on Chinese mythology this week and in one of his slides he had pictures embedded into shapes. Some of his classmates asked him how to do it and it made sense to create a small movie. These little movies can be created with camtasia if you have the software or jing or community clips from Microsoft, or screenr from the folks at articulate.

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This entry was posted on September 1, 2011 at 10:24 PM and has received 275 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Between this blog and our Adobe Connect Friday meeting (which I can't attend today due to a little backlog of tasks) contributors in this space provide myself and the audience with some great links to tools that when I think:

"I definately want to share that with my friends who have school children, teachers and family."

I need to share it with you. This blog and our "digital donga" video conferencing meeting each week provides an opportunity to share ideas in our community of practise and re-find them. Having an informal get together is good as long as the great ideas are tagged, recorded and presented in a discoverable way.

This blog serves as one way to achieve that.

Before I show the links to the tools, I want to add an unrelated request. I notice that my blog font is quite small since the change to the new layout and although folks can adjust font size on the fly in a browser by holding the ctrl key and rotating the mouse wheel up or down, I'd like to know if this size is suitable as a default size. (It certainly is for my eyes). Anyway onto the tools...

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This entry was posted on April 1, 2011 at 12:32 PM and has received 395 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Firstly the good thing about the iPad 2.0 (which PCs have been able to do for almost 30 years) - Now you can plug a cable into the iPad 2.0 and display whatever is on the iPad 2.0's screen onto another device like a TV or data projector, not just videos and photos as you can with iPad 1.0. So if you are teaching an iPad app in the classroom, now you can display it on your projector (if you have an iPad 2.0).

For those of us with wireless iPad version 1.0 (me) the latest release of the iOS which is now at version 4.3 allows you to use a 3G device (my iPhone 3GS did the trick) to act as a local wifi hotspot. I was able to tether my iPad and iPod touch to the phone using bluetooth and access the Internet and mail from the iPad.

People in the vicinity can't randomly access your personal hotspot.

With this update it means that you really only need one 3G sim card and therefore one data plan. Something to consider if you have an iPhone and are considering buying an iPad. Was it fast? Certainly was.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2011 at 8:00 AM and has received 1240 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Three things rolled up into one blog entry...

• IE 9.0 Release Candidate available
• Finding out how fast your connection is and what ports are being used
• Partners in Learning links to applications and solutions

This is a bit of a Microsoft Entry. I meant to write about this on Friday and things go out of control. Firstly I downloaded and installed the Internet Explorer Release Candidate 9.0. It is quite good and now we have a complete set of browsers that support the <video> tag and most of HTML5.

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:31 PM and has received 433 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I wanted to add an mp4 video into Moodle. (mp4 videos play on apple devices as well as other computers).

Easy enough, upload the file and then link to it. Problem is the file was 50 megabytes in size which means that in some cases, the way you link to the video will cause the browser to only allow you to download the video before playing rather than streaming it to you via a progressive download.

When you do embed videos to playback like a YouTube video, the video 'window" or "canvas" is much smaller than the original in most cases. There is a simple way to both embed the video and resize it to the dimensions you want.

Here's how...

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This entry was posted on November 8, 2010 at 4:06 PM and has received 618 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Sometimes you want to try out a piece of software or obtain a white paper or gain access to some content stored on the web and in exchange for access to this content you are asked to enter your email address. In the cases where you know the company and are sure they will abide by their "no spamming" or "no passing on your email address" policy then by all means enter your email address. For years I have always entered my active email address and have paid the price by now probably appearing on every spam list sold around the world.

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This entry was posted on September 3, 2010 at 9:58 AM and has received 256 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Someone indirectly reported that they were unable to access Adobe Connect using Firefox.

Our Standard Operating Environment promotes IE as the corporate standard with Firefox as a backup for use at home without needing to reset proxy settings

Upon trying Firefox, I encountered a problem as well. The usually cryptic and misleading message said...

-code-

JRun Servlet ErrorI

413 Header Length too Large

-/code-

As it turns out, this person was having the problem in IE not Firefox and with Coldfusion which also uses Jrun - so this problem stretches across applications and browsers.

The fix?

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This entry was posted on July 30, 2010 at 10:01 AM and has received 609 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.