Yale Open Courses

Posted on December 14, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Not to be outdone by MIT, Yale has created a set of free online courses.  The “Open Yale Courses” are seven introductory courses taught by distinguished professors.  The topics are Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology and Religious Studies.

In addition to the normal course materials, all classes are available in MP3 audio and Flash/Quicktime video.  If you don’t want to watch the streaming video, all are available for download.

All the content for the courses is licensed under Creative Commons.  Nice work Yale!

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Flickr Fun

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I use Flickr every day.  It is one of those sites that has everything.  I like to browser through the most interesting pictures, but find the 10-at-a-time interface too time consuming.  FlickrLeech is a site that will show all 500 pictures on one page.

http://www.flickrleech.net

Retrievr lets you draw a picture in a “sketch” box and then do a search based on that shape.  I can’t draw very well, but it is an interesting way to search.

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

Slightlyblue’s site lets you pick a background color and then searches Flickr based on that color. 

http://color.slightlyblue.com

If you need some Create Common licensed photos and don’t like the 10-at-a-time interface, here are two sites that let you search only the CC licensed content and view all of them on one page.

http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net

http://photo.beholdsearch.com

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Picasa on the iPod Touch

Posted on December 12, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I was playing around with my Picasa account on the iPod Touch and suddenly everything looked different.  I thought I had adjusted the browser somehow to make Picasa look better on the Touch.  As it turned out, Google did an upgrade to the site and optimized it for the Touch. 

ipicasa1.jpg

In addition to better Picasa integration, gMail and gReader have also been tweaked for the Touch.  I still need the “open in a new window” option for the browser, but I am finding the portable browser to be so convenient, I use it more than my laptop.  It turns on in a couple of seconds and can do everything except Flash. 

More later…

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Google Charts

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Need to create a chart and embed it in a web page?  Now with the Google Chart API, you can add a chart using simple HTML image code.  Here’s an example.  The URL for the chart is below.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:0.5,36,5&chs=460×250&chl=Florida|Ohio|Arizona&chtt=Where%20Alvin%20Has%20Lived

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Wii Multi-Touch Whiteboard

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Last month, I saw Johnny Chung Lee’s video that showed how to detect finger movement using a Wii remote.  He summed it up best at the end of the video when he said it was cool, but he couldn’t really think of something useful to do with it.

Now he has a video that shows how to make a multi-touch interactive whiteboard using the same Wii remote.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

This could be very useful in the classroom.  I own a Wii with two controllers and over break I plan to try this one out.  I need to pick up the Bluetooth adapter.

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