Laptop Addicts

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This post has nothing to do with laptops as it explains something we did at work. For a long time we wanted to have an intranet for our students to add stories, photos, links to job offers, links to material for the courses etc.
After using Wordpress successfully as a publishing medium for this website and two other blogs I thought that it was time to use Wordpress for our intranet server, so I approched one of the IT technician students and asked if he could think of a way to install a server which has the following support: PHP(to run Wordpress), PHPMyAdmin (database admin), Apache (server) and MySQL (database).
James, the IT Technician student thought about this and did the research and installation.
The following account is his . . .

This is just a trial for uploading and embedding a video via wordpress. First the video is converted to a smaller file size using ‘ImTOO Standard encoder‘ and saved as a HD with a .mov extension.
You can use ImTOO Mpeg encoder in it’s trial version for small video clips.

The problem is that the controls are not visible on my laptop in Mozilla firefox but they are visible on my old desktop also in Moz firefox …very strange … another problem is that I can’t make the video bigger.
A last problem is the max upload to my host is 30MB which is ok for small video’s but not for longer tutorials.

The Second Life viewer is the new beta 2.0 viewer. The added feature of the avatar is that when we talk in real life our avatar moves their lips but not in sync with our speech. I took this video to show how Mizou is doing with this new speech feature.

This morning I decided to finally create a video and upload it to YouTube. I took the video on ‘Toshi’ my laptop while visiting a virtual nature reserve created by Delia Lake on the Al Albysin sim and also a visit to one of my virtual builds (Carpe Diem Design) on Al Andalus sims, the moroccan riad.

This small production took me the best part of 2 hours and I have a very good idea where I should work on to perfect it. I am not too happy with the film quality which is far removed from the original one.

I filmed it  in Second Life with my in build filming software Camtasia and then I added the 2 title pages and the 3 callouts.

The first screen is not the one I choose, I will need to check out how to change that. My next upload to Youtube will be hopefully in HD if Camtasia manages that???

If you want to have an RSS feed on your blog or website a very handy tool can be found at RSS Wiz. This page explains clearly how it works. To generate the code which will feed the new content from any RSS website click on the link ‘Get the code’ and on that page fill out the URL of the website, the amount of posts you want generated etc.

Before clicking on the ‘Generate’ button at the bottom choose the language you want the code to genrate, you have the choice between ‘JavaScript, Perl or PHP’. I choose JavaScript.

Select and copy the code generated and paste it in a div or paragraph on your webpage and there you are! Voila!

Note: If you have an external style for your website the font will take on the properties and values specified in your stylesheet and not those designed by RSS Wiz.

Sore point: The HTML code of the RSS feed is designed in tables, OK, i can live with that but the very sore point is that it uses the obsolete ‘font’ element and gives it a ‘class’ ….arghhhhhh , this is not good practise … but until I find a tool that does the same and designs better code I will stick with this free one.

Thanks to RSS Wiz for creating and making this free tool available online.

It is Saturday morning around 8:30 and I have been up for awhile, I have some written work to look after before I do anything else; if I don’t write it down now it will continue to bother me while I do my usual week end chores around the house. I seem to be working all the time, my brain is given a taks to think something through and responds very easily with a solution when it comes to coding and organising material.
The material is quite important and needs to be 200% accurate so I will work at this text today, with Toshi, my laptop, at my side while I do more mundane work in the kitchen. The first step towards writing this text is to write the notes which have brewed and matured in my head since I read the brief on Thursday afternoon in a cafe on Nassau street opposite Trinity University in Dublin.
Time to prepare a coffee filter and pen down the notes.
The process of thinking and writing down the thoughts is an easy one for me but I have noticed that for some of my students it feels more like a enormeous hurdle rather then a pleasure, so I take great care in guiding them along the path of thought expression.
10:12 After breakfast & coffee and some household tasks
As planned, I wrote the notes by hand while I was sitting on the couch with a slice of toast with margarine and homemade jam (raspberries from Tadcan’s garden).
Next is planning the layout of the document, sorting out the title and header + footer, checking the original document layout for clues ….
——————
I made a very good beginning for the document, even ploughed into the second part; so I have typed out what I had in my mind now need to think some more..

If you have saved important bookmarks  or on your laptop and you want the very same ones at work or anywhere else you only need an excellent plugin from X Marks. Install it on both your laptop and your work pc, login to your account and save all your bookmarks. This addon is available for the following browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

In Firefox it will be visible in ‘Tools/Add-ons, as well as on the bottom of your browser window to the right. Firefox will prompt you when it is updating X Marks.

Sitting with ‘Toshi’ on my lap, Shadow snoring beside me. The house is quiet and no teenagers have surface as yet. I should have been at the gym this morning but a nasty bug has gripped my head, throat and chest. Not much energy…. My older son is coming over for dinner this afternoon, so we can chat code together. I wonder how many Mams talk ‘computer’ with their sons? I can’t possible be the only nerdy Mam? Anybody out there with similar life?

While I am here resting from a bug, I am going for a visit to the Monastery in Second Life, there is an exhibition on ‘Kisses’ in art. I promise I will bring back some photos.

I took a video with Camtasia and loaded it up to my library on Screencast. Click on the poster to see the video of the exhibition. I am including the Slurl to Monastery so you can go and visit the exhibition. You will land on the road right beside the Monastery. A big thank you to Arria Perreault who organised the exhibition; Arria is the curator of the museum. The Monastery has a website, with more information on the events.

This website has been setup, uploaded and if you like to know how please visit the following video tutorials on Screencast.

Well, Toshi had to wait before I turned him on as I was watching a film. He had our cat Shadow as a companion in the early hours of the evening. Later on when I worked on a film clip in Camtasia to cut a snippet of a screencast which showed my password to my server, holy god, that was a big, silly mistake. I successfully removed the offending clip and now my Toshi  is producing the whole video. Time to go to the kitchen make a cup of green tea with mint and hang up the wash onto Sheila Maid.

I sometimes think that I have a double life, that of a secret web coder and that of a mam in her kitchen. I must say that I love both lives, both fulfil a part of me.

My laptop is waiting for me at home like a patient friend, it knows that I will spend some time with it after dinner when all the dishes are cleaned up and the clothes hanging up over the ‘Sheila Maid’ ( Check this website if you want to know what that is!).  The big TV in the sitting room keeps silent while ‘Toshi’, my laptop’s  is checking out my online magazines and keeping an open line of communication with my friends & family.

Some people think it is totally unsociable to spend time on the computer, but then they think it is alright to spend a whole night watching TV. I am not particularly a TV person, I like creating things as I did in the 80 & 90 when I was knitting, embroidering and making clothes. Now I like writing technical manuals for my students and learning new html / css code.

Is it a sin for me to learn at night? It certainly does not prevent me from talking to my two teenagers or anybody else who happens to be in the house at the time. Of course there are many times when Toshi is happily sleeping on my desk … gosh it sounds like I am talking about a domesticated animal!

Hmmm…. is that what my laptop is, my digital no-footed friend?