The Fry Side

Into the final part of my series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we find ourselves at miscellany. Some of these are little programs I have picked up recently and started toying with, other just don’t quite fall into any of the other main categories.

• Fluid
• TweetMyMac
• Photoshop Elements
• Toast 10
• MacTheRipper
• RipIt
• Acquisition
• Xtorrent
• Time Machine

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Looks like I’m back on the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency bandwagon. I left for a while, because they don’t publish anything in their RSS feed beyond the title. But damn if it’s not worth clicking over for gems like this, Five Other Activites During Which Texting Can Be Dangerous.

While Fighting 99 Ninjas

Sure, your phone is a great weapon in fights like this. And texting your friends while killing 99 ninjas, one by one, is a great way to show off for the camera. But what about all the blood you’ll get on the phone? And what if the ninjas start texting you just to mess with your concentration? And ultimately, what happens when Ninja 99, the leader, spins a Chinese star into your keypad? Well, now you’ve got to go back to the cell phone dealer, and you know from previous experience they don’t honor warranties just because your phone has a Chinese star in it. This is going to cost you. Keep your phone in your pocket while fighting 99 ninjas!

I have so far written on my general computing programs (part 1) and my internet/blogging tools (part 2). This third part is on the programs that are more utilitarian and what I use as an administrator. Some of these could easily fit in the general computing category, but they are more in the way of utilities than regular-use programs.

• Smultron
• The Unarchiver
• Perian
• CoconutBattery
• VLC
• Handbrake
• Disk Utility
• Terminal
• Apple Remote Desktop
• Snow Leopard Networking
• LogMeIn

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The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun’s angle to the ring plane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and to cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. Also at equinox, the shadows of the planet’s expansive rings are compressed into a single, narrow band cast onto the planet as seen in this mosaic.

I have been following an RSS feed for NASA’s Image Of The Day (link to feed in right column) for a while now. I don’t have as much interest in the stuff dealing with the shuttle or general equipment. But frequently, there are stunning pictures from our probes and telescopes of the objects in our heavens.

The picture above is my desktop picture. I like the humbling reminders of my insignificance in the universe, as well as the reminder that there is a greater universe beyond my own life. Perspective is a healthy thing to regularly inject in one’s existence.

For my second installment of my Digital Tools series (part 1 here), I will be going through my blogging and web-based tools. These are my little doodads that let me keep up with the web wide world.

• Firefox (w/ add-ons)
• NetNewsWire
• Google Reader
• MarsEdit
• WordPress
• Dreamhost
• Tweetie
• Adium

Full descriptions after the break.
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I upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as I could. And I did my version of upgrading: wipe out everything and start over. It may be a little more tedious to reinstall every little thing I work with, but it beats upgrading a lot of dead weight from my experiments. Plus, installing stuff on new computers is part of my job, so I definitely have gotten good at it.

What I did this time, though, was keep track of all the little things I use on the computer. As a tech admin, I use some tools that most people wouldn’t touch, but then again, I also use lots of tools freely available to accomplish my work.

To start out, I wanted to go through the basic system software for my day to day computing. For hardware, I run 90% of my life through a three year old MacBook from work. It has a 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 1gb RAM, and 120gb HD. At home I have an even older iMac that I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard at some point.

The programs in this post:

• Snow Leopard
• iLife
• Preview
• Quicktime
• iTunes
• Dropbox
• 1password

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to proffer a technique to teach young students to type up papers. My method is an alternative to the standard in which students open up a massive word processor. From there, they have all the bells and whistles to clang and blow that are built into the program with which to screw up their document before they even type their name.

Basically, unless there is some dedicated, direct instruction with constant scrutiny, the space for error is great. And even with all the that monitoring that is so easy to pull off in a room of 30 kids, all the ever-present and easy to access features are going to get accidentally clicked on anyway.

So the method I propose is a way of operating similar to that of web development: content and formatting are separate.

To begin typing a formal document, I would open up a basic text editor. Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac would be fine. Be sure the settings are for plain text, not rich text (not sure about Windows, but on Macs, you do have to go in and change the default preferences). We have no interest in fonts, alignments, spacing, or anything else. The point is to get the information clearly written.

Student could go ahead and put in a little header on the first couple of lines:

First A. Lastname

Class

Teacher

Date

Title

Lorem ipsum…

Note, everything is just sitting on the left margin. Not a big deal. Information is key.

So the extent of the paper is done. The student has their document.txt file sitting in their folder, nicely saved and ready for the next step. This next step also teaches some basic computer operations that are absolutely essential to know: switching between programs and copy/paste functions.

This also becomes a chance to teach clicking and dragging and highlighting goodness. If they are advanced enough, I would toss in keyboard shortcuts. In this case, we start off easy: highlight all your text, then go to the Edit menu and select Copy.

Now the students, with their plain text files staring at them, will go down and start up the full-featured word processor. Once a blank document is ready, paste in the text. Save your newly minted document to be the same name as previous, our new document.docx (if that’s your format).

Students can see the original text file and the full document file right next to each other in the folder, very good for organizational purposes, plus it is a built-in backup. Also, if your students blow up their formatting, there’s original plain text to try again with.

From in this new document, students can work on highlighting specific sections to change justification, font size, type, spacing, etc, as well as checking grammar and usage. The point is that all these things happen last in the process so the actual document gets written in the first place.

It’s just a wonderful bonus that file management, computer usage, and basic editing techniques are also included in such a lesson. I’m going to propose this to some of the English teachers I work with and get their opinions.

Any pros/cons out there that could raise or ruin this idea?

PS, I would also just mention here that I firmly believe that a first draft should be written by hand. Then typing it up becomes a clear editing stage when typing it up. But if not doing that, clean plain text is the way to go after that.

Educators, and definitely my dad, can appreciate this. Just take an 18 minute break and watch, please.

If we weren’t free, we wouldn’t have this. Thanks, America!

Short midweek kids fix, this time with quick pictures from my iPhone.

Here’s the boy’s hair for his last day of school.

And the Raging Princess’ neuroses are starting to show.