01 Jan 2009
When it comes to podcasting Apple is the king. The iPod and its variations lead the market and the software bundled with Mac OS X makes creating any sort of podcast a breeze. Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple Mac be it for financial reasons or for internal IT related issues. Creating podcasts from Windows is a little more laborious, but with the right tools it can be made much easier.
Read More29 Dec 2008
One of the biggest things in the Academy is communication. Just like any other organisation there’s a whole heap of discussion about the right ways to communicate and about who receives what information, and about what constitutes too little and information versus information overload. There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring the options we have available and trying things out from time to time.
Read More28 Dec 2008
My background is as a systems developer and I like to think that I’m quite a good developer in so much as I like to achieve outcomes using the minimum of effort. In my book “a good programmer is a lazy programmer”. So whilst this post does not relate in any way to programming it does relate to me finding ways in which to update this blog with the minimum of effort. In this particular case through something you may have noticed a little way down on the right side of the page called “Spot IT”.
Read More28 Dec 2008
I’ve been running a Windows Home Server for almost a year now but in trying to set-up a new FTP server (which caused some very odd networking issues with my router) and came across an odd issue. I’m guessing this may be down to one of the various updates I’ve applied to my server as I’ve not had cause to tinker with it since before I applied the Power Pack 1 upgrade.
Read More11 Dec 2008
A little while back prompted by a discussion doing the rounds on the Academy technical group I had a bit of a look into quick response codes (QR Codes). These are a type of data matrix represented by a collection of pixels in a square grid that are usually used to represent something like a URL.
Read More11 Dec 2008
I thought I’d start my first post on my new blos with a bit about why I’m starting it. For the last couple of days I’ve been attending an event for The Higher Education Academy where the staff from all of our subject centres and our office in York got together to collaborate and discuss various topics as well as have a bit of a seasonal do.
Read More14 Nov 2008
One of the most useful little scripts I’ve written allows me to copy a file’s path to the clipboard. This provides a quick and easy way of pasting it into a file attachment dialog or even into the body of an e-mail. It’s certainly one of the most useful little automations I use on a daily basis.
Read More13 Nov 2008
One of the problems I’ve found frustrating recently with my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone is the Opera mobile browser bookmarks. The browser has been preloaded by my operator with a number of bookmarks that I have no use for.
Read More08 Nov 2008
I recently changed my mobile phone to a Samsung Omnia i900. Whilst there are several issues with it at the moment - mainly due to Vodafone being way behind on tweaking any of the Samsung firmware releases, I’ve found it to be a good phone, but it hasn’t been great at getting the contact data off of my previous phone; a Sony Ericsson K800i.
After trying a few options I managed to get a neat transfer of data that worked well.
Read More02 Nov 2008
I’ve been working on a few updates on web sites recently and like many web site developers I have been struggling with some nice browser based variations. I hope one day to find that Internet Explorer will actually display pages the same way every other browser seems to be able to without a special style sheet tweak or HTML workaround.
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