Category: Blog

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Tell Me About Yourself! (Student Assignment)

Many months ago I bookmarked a blog post entitled “What I want my teachers to know about me” with the intent of adapting the concept for my own classes.

In the original post, the teacher (@Allanahk) had each of her students create a slide in response to “five things my new teacher needs to know about me”. As much as I loved the idea, I wanted my students to have more privacy with this assignment so they’d be more likely to share.  So instead, I created a master template in Google Slides that each student would use, with the following prompts: Continue reading “Tell Me About Yourself! (Student Assignment)”

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Clean Dictionary File for CS Classes

For Computer Science teachers that need a “clean” dictionary file, here is one that I have on my GitHub account you can use:

The file was created as a student project by taking a “dirty” dictionary found online and using it to programmatically remove all the inappropriate words from a complete dictionary file, such as this one.

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Article: How (and why) to use Google Photos on your iPhone or iPad

Article source: https://goo.gl/OyllG4

Installing Google Photos on your mobile device is a recommendation I make to all my students.

If you take pictures with your smartphone, it’s silly not to use Google Photos. At a minimum, it serves as a safe backup for all your photos, at no cost to you. A bonus is that Google Photos creates cool content of some of your images, including instagram-stylized photos, animations, and collages. Continue reading “Article: How (and why) to use Google Photos on your iPhone or iPad”

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A Trio of Goldfinches

This picture, I’ll admit, was a total accident. I was shooting through some thick brush which, being so out of focus, ended up giving this photo a ghostly, swooshy feel. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all, but I like the effect.

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A Trio of Goldfinches
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start.ca – Awesome Internet Provider

“Effective February 1, 2017, your internet service pricing will go down by $10.00 per month and your speed will increase from 30 Mbps download to 40 Mbps download with 10 Mbps upload.”
 
How many times have Rogers or Cogeco sent you an email like that?!!
 
I’ve been a very happy customer of this company’s since I switched to them. The few times I’ve had technical problems their customer service was fantastic, and their prices are much better then Cogeco’s or Rogers’.
 
https://www.start.ca/. If you subscribe, please tell them I sent you so I get a referral bonus. You won’t regret switching to them and your wallet will thank you.
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How to “Clean” a Flash Drive, SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems

The instructions on this site were invaluable to help me fix a USB drive that had multiple partitions and was no longer usable in Windows.

If your USB flash drive, SD card, or another drive isn’t working quite right, “cleaning” the drive and removing its partitions is one possible solution. This can fix problems with a drive that can’t be formatted or one that shows the wrong capacity.

Source: How to “Clean” a Flash Drive, SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems

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Motorcycle Ride in El Salvador, March 2016

Just for fun, I attached a GoPro camera to the handlebar of the Kawasaki KLX 250 I was renting from Moto Tour El Salvador back in March 2016 and set it to take pictures every 10 seconds. With the roads and trails being so rough I was amazed at the photos the camera captured. The quality of the photos clearly isn’t the equal of anything even a point-and-shoot could have taken, but I think they do a great job of capturing the adventure of the ride. Continue reading “Motorcycle Ride in El Salvador, March 2016”

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HandBrake News: Version 1.0.0 Released

This has always been my go-to program for converting DVDs or video files to MP4. I’m glad to see it’s finally graduated to version 1.0!

“After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0. Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today. We again remind everyone that the HandBrake website is the only official source for HandBrake. Downloads are not mirrored on any third-party services, excepting the Linux PPA. For more information on downloading and installing HandBrake safely, please read Where to get HandBrake.”

Source: HandBrake: News