Archive for July, 2005

Off line soon

Sunday, July 24th, 2005

Not around for a bit

Wood photos

Saturday, July 23rd, 2005

Trees and shadows in local wood. Signs of human activity but no one seen.

Blogs and forums

Saturday, July 23rd, 2005

Some differences between blogs and forums – blogs might encourage student involvement more by being less of a ‘performance’ but forums might be better for a structured activity

Every crowd has a silver lining

Thursday, July 21st, 2005

419 scams amazingly attract 20,000 people to part with real money.

Symbols – a cautionary tale

Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

Beware the use of symbols of a graphic nature in maths lessons – you may have students who take the lesson the wrong way

HTML entities

Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

Maths on the Web is a problem – html entities can provide a limited range of symbols – and I like the immediacy of a blogging approach to Maths. Else it is down to PDFs or scans or Whiteboard captures.

Bridge and entry

Tuesday, July 19th, 2005

Spray can tags on a steel bridge and a newly painted wall

Eyes everywhere

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Becky – the 15 year old school refuser – came out with a tirade against surveillance and CCTV, eyes everywhere. She may have had a point.

Altitude of the Sun and Moon

Sunday, July 17th, 2005

A spreadsheet uses simplified low precision formulas to calculate the altitude of the Sun and the Moon for each hour of a given day. Change the latitude to see the effect of moving into the arctic circle. Change the date to see the effect of slipping towards Winter.

A r i a l

Friday, July 15th, 2005

Where did Arial come from? The history of a computer font as told by a typographer.

Cookies and privacy

Friday, July 15th, 2005

That ‘no entry’ sign causes lots of trouble

Food miles

Friday, July 15th, 2005

How far has your dinner travelled? Perhaps half way round the planet!

Make haste, slowly

Thursday, July 14th, 2005

“We live in a world where instant gratification is not fast enough, in a world of not only speed dating, but even of speed yoga, said Mr Honor?©.”

Dog Star Man

Sunday, July 10th, 2005

Stan Brakhage – film maker

Sven Jaschan gets suspended sentence

Saturday, July 9th, 2005

Sasser worm author gets suspended sentence from German court.

Key Skills 4 u

Thursday, July 7th, 2005

Web site aims to motivate keyskills lessons – self test quizzes and practice tests.

Chi-squared data: flies

Tuesday, July 5th, 2005

Six datasets based on reproduction experiments with fruit flies – used for chi-squared statistics calculations

Xbox chipping and ELSPA

Monday, July 4th, 2005

The European Copyright Directive makes it an offence to alter games consoles so as to circumvent games copying controls. ELSPA has successfully prosecuted a case recently in the UK, and this raises issues about ‘change of use’ modification of platforms such as the xbox.

Bodmas goes Jakob

Sunday, July 3rd, 2005

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the new Bodmas design is borrowed from Jakob Nielsen’s personal site at http://useit.com/

Local pictures

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005

Pictures around Birmingham city ring road

User focus with goals

Friday, July 1st, 2005

“Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn‚Äôt so much that the designers had contempt for [...]

Wireless

Friday, July 1st, 2005

128 kb/s
£13 for 24 hours connection time
I could be using this for heavy downloading
iBook needed the wireless card replacing as well as the combo drive but it is behaving now