| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

Not upgraded yet

Well, it's the last possible day to be upgraded before the year ends. I don't think it's going to happen. Sixapart lied to me. Fifteen hours for me to be proved wrong...

Make an iPhone custom ringtone

Before starting enable the "ringtones" folder in itunes in the preferences --> general area

• Play the song in iTunes and record it in Audacity (set to stereo mix)    
• Highlight around 30 seconds that you want to use, cut the rest, fade in the beginning, fade out the end.    
• Export the sound as an .mp3 - save to desktop (or somewhere handy)    
• Open iTunes, copy the .mp3 and paste it into your itunes "music" list.    
• Right click on the .mp3 file and choose to convert to AAC    
• Close itunes once the file is converted    
• Now find your itunes music folder on your computer - nornally in my documents / my music. Look for sub folder with artist name / album name and find your converted file (it will be an .m4a file)    

*Important*  In folder options you must have unticked "hide file extensions"

• Right click on the .m4a file and rename the last part to .m4r    
• Double click on this file and it should now play and magically open in the ringtones folder    
• Connect your iphone - and in the ringtones tab make sure that the ringtone(s) is/are selected before syncing. Once synced you've got a new ringtone to choose from for both phone and alarm.  

Embed anything...

I was sent a link to this website today: http://embedit.in/ . It allows you to embed...

.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx, .pdf, .wpd, .odt, .ods, .odp, .png, .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .psd, .bmp, .eps, .ai, .txt, .rtf, .csv into a webpage, as well as embedding actual webpages inside webpages.

Note: it seems that Internet Explorer will not show the embedded media. Firefox, Safari and Chrome all do perfectly, but IE just refuses.

Here's a powerpoint file;

Here's an excel file;

and a word file;

Plus, an embedded website page;

Animoto 4 iPhone

Those guys at animoto who created a fantastic tool to make video slideshows with, have just released a version for the iphone.

It allows you to take images from the iphone camera / photo library (albeit only 16 at a time), add one of their many audio tracks and mixes it into a slideshow for you. As with the "grown up" version through a browser you can edit and remix a finished movie.

The upsides are now you can make - and view - animoto on your iphone (the only way before was to download individual movies or put them into a vodcast feed) for FREE, but the limit of only 16 images means you get a very short movie.

I'm sure that future updates will see changes to these slight hinderences.

Only 8 more days...

...for my blog hosts to complete their promise of;

"but we should be on track, as Ben predicted, to have everyone on the new platform by the end of the year" (sixapart comment)

Now that I read it again though I notice the use of the word SHOULD.

Damn it, I SHOULD have read it more carefully first time round.

...I guess I'll still be waiting in the new year.

...Still reading about all the "great features" of the new system that I can't use.

...Still hearing about how all those who have been switched over "love the new system".

Cheers Guys. Users of your system who were there are the beginning are still waiting to be transferred. The same users who helped iron out all those bugs in the early days and suggest improvements to the system.

Now that's a reward for loyalty. Not.

The Show must go on

Well what can you do when it's one day until the Christmas Concert, you are about to start the final dress rehearsal, and you suddenly get told that one of your lead characters is away.

Not because they are ill. Not because they have had to go to hospital. Not because their mum / dad / brother / sister / dog / cat / goldfish is ill.

Oh no, this is the best one ever.  The reason that "Polly" won't be at the play - she's gone on holiday!! I mean come on - they must have known when they were going. Surely.

A very quick audition, and a new "Polly" was selected and fed lines throughout the dress rehearsal.

Oh the joy of the Christmas Concert!!

iPhone copy and paste

Cut and Paste, or rather the lack of it, is the biggest problem I have with the iPhone (that and no Flash). Well, thanks to a twitter from @willrich45 earlier today, I've now installed pastebud (@pastebud) that offers a workaround for cutting and pasting.
It means clicking on a special bookmarklet and reloading pages, but then yes the ability to drag across the screen and copy paste becomes possible.
So, if it's now possible to do it, how long before apple officially aknowledge it and put it in their next phone update...

Car Headlight Hell

How hard is it to change a light bulb in a car?

I've just spent over an hour trying to change one bulb on the passenger side of a Ford Focus - without success I might add. Firstly, I couldn't get the clip that holds the splash cover to move. It went with a bit of a struggle. Then, once the clip was off, the cover couldn't be removed because the battery housing is in the way (removed that).
Once I tugged the splash cover off - and probably bust it - it was then time to get to the bulb. All I managed to do was pull of the electric cable, leaving the bulb in place. After looking on the web for help I discovered that there is another retaining clip that holds the bulb in place, so tomorrow I'll have to try again if I can find time to do it in the limited daylight available.

No escaping

Here I am, happily being an ordinary teacher once again, when I go read a blog posting that lists one of the projects I created during my out-of-classroom digital teacher time.
Suprised? I nearly dropped my iphone as I read about Adventure Island once more. :-)

Bears in space

Why wasn't science this much fun when I was at school?  From the CU Spaceflight website;

Students from Parkside and Colleridge schools helped to launch four teddies wearing space suits that they had designed. The teddies reached an altitude of just over 30 km and their temperatures were logged throughout the flight to see how they fared in the extreme cold. The different spacesuit designs resulted in distinct difference in the temperatures of the teddies. However, we fear that the bears may all have frozen, with each dropping below -40 °C and one reaching -53 °C. When the payload was launched, just after 11am, there were some fears that it might end up in the sea. But, with a very quick ascent, these fears were laid to rest and the payload landed 4 miles north-east of Ipswich. For the first time ever we actually made it to the landing site in time to see the payload come down! At burst our prediction software provided us with an estimate that was less than 2 km from the actual landing site. We arrived in time to see a beautifully inflated parachute floating just a few hundred meters above our heads.

A full gallery of photos of the astro-bears are here

iPhone on the cheap

Here's an interesting idea. Turning the iPod touch into an iPhone is now possible thanks to a new app from truphone.
Simply speaking, as long as you are in range of a wi-fi network you can use VOIP to make phone calls, saving an absolute package on call charges.

Oh what a day!

Yesterday the BBC reported that some pupils in some schools were getting around the security settings in place, and managing to get into some places that they shouldn't at school (myspace / bebo / youtube etc).
Well, it would seem that someone at the embc (our local broadband consortium for schools) went a bit "over protective" and overnight put a block on accessing Typepad sites.
There is a slight problem with that - Typepad host the school website and, although we were able to view the website today, staff were unable to log into the admin side to add new posts / resources. Brilliant!
So, that meant that all my other typepad hosted sites were unavailable within school - so no access to Bectan Sands in particular. If there had been a class that were going to use Bectan Sands as a resource today, then the lesson would have gone to pot.
Thanks for emailing the school with a message about the change embc! With phone calls from the HT, it was eventually restored and full access available later in the day.

Secondly, the laptop safe developed a dodgy lock that meant we couldn't get into the safe to remove the computers this morning.

Thirdly, my favourite iphone Twitter client - twitterfon - has died a death. The creator is aware, and has created a fix. It's now up to apple as to when the put the update into the apps store for me to download.

Just need some of this elusive snow now to complete the day in style!!