Archive for the ‘edtech’ Category

In 1995 I started using Eudora as my main email program. Before that I used PINE on a terminal client. All of my email from 1989 to 1995 fit on one floppy, so a text based terminal program was fine.

Today I get more than a “floppy full” of email every day and Eudora has served me well until last Thursday.  That morning I tweaked one of my filters and Eudora didn’t like it.  While I was away from the computer, Eudora collected one message 528,000 times.  It corrupted my IN.MBX file in Eudora.

I have a backup.  I didn’t really lose anything, but the hassle was the last straw.  The real problem is the program.  Qualcomm stopped updating Eudora in 2006.  That same year, the base code was turned over to the Mozilla foundation.  The program was “Thunderbird-ized” and renamed Penelope.  I switched to Penelope on my laptop.  The basic operation of Penelope was drastically different than Eudora.  If I was going to do something different, it had to be worth the pain of switching.  Penelope wasn’t.

I have six email accounts that I have to check regularly.  Eudora did all of them.  Every night I backed up my EMAIL folder and that was all there was to it.  I can switch to a new computer and take 13 years of email with me just by copying that folder.  That’s right… I have 13 years of email.  Many times that has been handy.

After looking at several options I decided to give Gmail a try.  I have had an account for years, but only use it for my calendar.  Now it POPs all my mail from those other accounts and gives me one web-based interface from any computer with a browser.  The learning curve was about one day.  On Monday I sifted through about 2000 messages.  I learned the short-cut keys and added Greasemonkey’s Gmail Macros.

So far, so good.  I have about three months of email that made it to Gmail.  Those messages consumed just two percent of the space Gmail allotted me.  I should be good for eight to ten years given the 6GB limit.  I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.  Just in case, I have one machine still running Eudora as a backup.

Yesterday, TechCrunch proposed a challenge to build a web tablet for $200.  The initial product specs are pretty simple.   The device needs to run Firefox and Skype.  The screen needs to be some sort of iPhone-like touch screen.  There must also be WiFi, a speaker, camera and microphone.

The basic idea is a device that can be used any time you are away from your main computer.  Since many people surf the web during much of this screen time, the TC Tablet will handle this quickly, from any WiFi location.  If all the software is open source (Linux, Firefox, etc) and customized by the open source community, all the cost is in the hardware.

Personally, I think this problem has been solved.  I can use my iPod Touch to do all the “quick computing” I need to do.  If I need to check my email, the Touch goes from “off” to “checking mail” in five seconds.  The Touch is also more portable.  It easily fits in my shirt pocket.  The battery lasts all day with constant use and three or four days if I use it periodically throughout the day.

I’m not sure how I would tote the TC Tablet around all day.  If I am going to carry something this big with me all the time, that screen better be sharp.  Although my Touch screen is small, it is high resolution.  I can easily read six point text on the Touch.  The big screen with multi-touch may be the demise of the TC Tablet.  I don’t know the prices of such hardware, but the screen alone might be too much of a factor in the bottom line cost of the TC Tablet.

If TechCrunch can pull this off for $200 it will be something to see.  It will take a dedicated effort from the open source community to make the software perfect.  For $200, it could be useful in a classroom setting.  E-books would look nice on a device of this size.

This one is for Buzz.

Sometime yesterday Protopage had an upgrade.  Here is what the site looked like before the upgrade.

Below is the same page after the upgrade.  Notice how everything is shifted down about half an inch so that the options tab can be seen at the top. 

The options tab is not new.  Before this upgrade, the tab was at the bottom.  That was nice considering that I use the options tab only a few times each year.  I have posted a “downgrade” request on the Protopage blog.  While I wait for a response, I’ll spend a little more time scrolling on my startpage.

The iPod Touch has become my most valuable piece of technology.   Last week I added this gem from Nemustech.  Nemus Sync is a free utility that syncs Google Calendar with the Touch’s built-in calendar.  Syncing works in both directions.

You have to jailbreak your Touch before you can add this utility.  About a month after I bought my Touch I watched a couple of videos on YouTube and found easy to follow step-by-step instructions.

The average person can probably get by just fine with the built-in functionality of the Touch now that POP and IMAP email are included.  Some of my jailbreak additions include Wikipedia and Mobile Twitter which I use on a daily basis. 

If you do jailbreak your Touch, don’t do the automatic updates of the firmware.  I turned those off a long time ago.  I think it was the day I got the following message from Apple:

There is an upgrade for iTunes.  It’s called Safari.  Would you like to install it?

I had a flashback to 1996 when everyone was trying to get you to install “their” browser.  I don’t understand how Apple can do something like this and it goes mostly unnoticed.  If Microsoft were to try to push a browser out to an OS X machine that was upgrading a media player, it would be all over the tech news.

I’m not about to drink the Kool-Aid.