Mini Lesson 0: I owe you an explanation

This is the introduction for a series of videos where I show how to create a variety of art projects.





File size: 1.4 MB



Length: 2:39





(There's also an iPod version if you're interested, but that's 14 MB)

Lessig and Laporte

I'll admit I'm a total Lawrence Lessig fanboy.





I'm also a Leo Laporte fanboy.





So when Lawrence Lessig showed up on this past Sunday's This Week In Tech I was ... very, very happy.




You may want to check that podcast out for yourself. Trust me, it's some good conversation.

Podcast 37: Podvangelism and Movies

In my
37th podcast I say "podcast" a lot. I can't help it, it rolls off the tongue.

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Show Notes:

1. What does my nickname have to do with podvangelism? You may not know as much about podcasting as some people, but if you're hearing my podcast now you know more than most people.


2. The 5th & 6th grade members of my Art Club are going to be making short movies, and so far things are working out well.


3. I feel inspired to make little movies of lesson ideas/instructions. Look for them soon.

Goodbye, Bravenet.com

Ad supported service providers like Bravenet are often ok, because the ads are often not too intrusive while the services (like showing me who visits my site here) are great.




Unfortunately, Bravenet took a turn for the worse. At first I thought it was a fluke. After a restart I visited the same Bravenet page a 2nd time and got the same problem - 94 .exe files downloading themselves onto my desktop (It would have been more, but I eventually geve up trying to hit "cancel" or "quit" and just used the "force-quit" command). How they managed to do this while I was using a Mac and running a Firefox based browser (Camino) is beyond me, but needless to say I was very annoyed. I'm just happy that .exe files won't run on a Mac so I don't have to worry about any spyware infections or the like.





Free is good, but it's not worth that. I filed a complaint with Bravenet but since they allowed this to happen I've decided to remove all the Bravenet.com code from my webpages.




UPDATE: One thing in Bravenet's favor is the fact that their tech support responded to my complaint faster than any online company I've seen in a long, long time. I don't mean a computer generated something, I mean a living human being asked me to clarify some things and then responded again once I did so.



Bravenet might yet redeem themselves. We'll see.

OpenOffice.org 2.0

At long last, OpenOffice.org has released version 2.0 of their impressive office suite. (Of course the Mac version isn't fully debugged yet, but it hopefully won't be long now. Until then NeoOffice J still rocks.)




If you've yet to download OpenOffice and try it out, then now's a good time to do so. It does 90% of the stuff that Microsoft Office does, and a few things that Office has never done to boot.



Oh yeah, and it's free. Free is good.

Welcome back, Steve!

Steve Dembo, one of my main inspirations for starting this site, was going through a bit of a dry spell so far as blogging and podcasting were concerned. Mind you, I'm not complaining - analog life must often take precedence over digital life.





But no matter, he seems to have returned to the Read/Write Web. If you've yet to check out Teach42.com, then you really should go there to browse through his blog and listen to a podcast or two.





Hey, if he's good enough for Apple to feature his podcast when they rolled out iTunes 4.9, then he should have some great ideas, right?

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As a side note, a big hello to everyone over at the Shanghai American School Blogs! They were kind enough to add me to their blogroll.

Going Shopping

After being used VERY hard, my current MP3 player (A Creative MuVo TX FM) is giving up the ghost. I'm looking for a replacement, but I'm not so sure I want to buy the exact same brand again.





What I want is something that ...



... holds at least 1 gig.



... can record audio.



... can double as an external drive.



... will run off of a standard battery (AAA, etc.)



... will work with my Mac.



... and ...



... is less than $200.





In addition to the kind I already own I also found this, but I'm open to suggestions.