Archive for May 14th, 2007

Imitation is best the compliment.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names. As of May the 13th, 2007, we were working on over 1,815 articles.

I would hope that all 1815 articles are spectacular, especially when being compared to Wikipedia’s 1.8 million.

I do wonder what a “real name” is. Will someone run a “wiki background check” on each author? At any rate I wish them all the best. The more resources we have, the more chances our students will have to compare and contrast.

I hope the masses never decide what is fact and what is fiction based on the number of hits in a Google search.

Try this. Type “recieve” into Google. It looks like 13 million people have misspelled this word. Would you “beleive” is at 4.8 million? “Noticable” is hardly noticeable at 2.1 million and “aparent” is anything but… at 1.1 million.

Hopefully we never write a dictionary based on mob rule.

A picture can say a thousand words. Sometimes the picture is right there in front of you and you need to explain it to someone that cannot see your screen.

Just above the Insert key and the Page Up/Down group is a key that says “Print Screen” right on the key. Some keyboards shorten it to “Prt Scr”, but it’s in the same spot on the keyboard.

Pressing this key seems to do nothing. Actually, the operating system captures the screen and saves it to the clipboard, effectively doing a Ctrl-C of the screen. To access the captured picture, open any program that can paste a picture (Word, PowerPoint, PaintShop Pro) and paste.

There is your picture. Save the file and email it to someone that needs to see your screen.

Windows actually has two flavors of screen capture. Pressing Print Screen alone copies the whole screen. If you hold down the Alt key and then press Print Screen, only the active window is copied. If the active window is not maximized, this will create a smaller graphic that only shows one program window.

I tend to use the Alt-Print Screen more because I have two monitors. Both screens are captured by the Print Screen key alone. That’s a big picture.

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