These are some notes on getting some of Dave Winer’s web tools that use node running on a Raspberry pi.
I’d originally posted these on the pi, but the SD card was corrupted and I’d no back up (I’ve had that lesson a few times).
These note are not likely to be of interest to many and are somewhat abrupt.
Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr Blog
Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.
I got my mail from Flickr today explaining the changes. I’ve a pro account so it will not affect my photos at all.
I’ll be more interested in how it affects search. I often use Flickr photos to illustrate blog post, presentations and in my classroom.
I also encourage my pupils to use cc licensed images. It is hard for 8-11 year olds to attribute but the flick API allows me to help them with FlickrCC Stampr.
I wonder if the search will be less useful. There was some chat about keeping CC Images. I do hope so.
Update thanks to ronguest and jemostrom in the comments:
Photos that were Creative Commons licensed before our announcement are also safe. We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.
from: The Commons: The Past Is 100% Part of Our Future | Flickr Blog
That sound better:-)
Featured image for this post: flickr Scrabble by Dirk Dittmar used under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license. Stamped with the tool mentioned above.
Some links I’ve put on my virtual pinboard recently. Ready for the new term?
has over 1,150 Project Ideas in all areas of science
The Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids.
This looks as if it could be very useful for schools.
"Batteries in parallel and in series. 3D visualization of energy, voltage, and the flow of electric current in a circuit." https://t.co/PXURXHEdm6
Never seen circuit electricity presented quite like this. Interesting #Physics— Ian Guest (@IaninSheffield) October 5, 2018
Our Forest, Our Future helps teachers and pupils to explore the interdependence of people and forests and the vital role forests play in sustaining our environment – in the past, the present and hopefully the future.
Daring Fireball: Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing
Next, I wanted to delete every single photo and video from my iPhone. To my knowledge there is no easy way to do this on the iPhone itself. (There are a lot of tasks like this that are easy on the Mac thanks to Edit → Select All that are painfully tedious on iOS.) I connected the iPhone to my Mac with a Lightning cable and used Image Capture to delete all photos and videos from my phone. Image Capture just treats the iPhone like a regular camera. Image Capture crashed three times during this process (I’m still running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6, for what it’s worth), but after the fourth run the iPhone had no photos or videos lefp.
I just deleted all the photos from a school iPad yesterday by selecting a couple and the dragging to select the rest. Worked with ~3000 photos but a bit clunky. I’ll use Image Capture in future. It’s an application I don’t remember very often.
In a 1-2-1 iPad class I do get a lot of benefit from having a mac in school. There a several things that can be solved with a quick airdrop to the mac and back. Given the iPads and mac are of similar vintage (2012).
I’ll edit a note on the mac, it syncs to the iPad (instantaneously it feels like) and I can Airdrop to class or group via classroom app. Now the Classroom app is available for the mac I need to think about upgrading the ageing mac to Mojave. I think it is new enough but spinning hard disk and skimpy ram might be a problem?
Here are some of the things I’ve tagged classroom over the summer holidays.
Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”
To prove this I have used Google Sheets to create a “Random Writing Prompt Generator” that randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. See below to get your own copy of the Sheet, learn how it works, and get more ideas on how to help your students write poems, stories, or other creations.
A Bio Poem is all about you. It is a way for you to introduce yourself to others. Take some time to think about yourself – your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Then, use the template and example below to write your own Bio Poem.
Featured image: my own, I spent a fair bit of the summer trying to get close to butterflies.
As part of my summer holiday fun with WordPress I though I might create a ‘proper’ RSS feed for my microcast.
There are quite a few podcast plugins that would do the job but I though it might be interesting to try a bit of DIY.
Back when I started a class podcast at Radio Sandaig I used to create the RSS feed by hand with a text editor and a fair bit of copy and paste. Over at Edutalk we use feedburner to massage the feed for iTunes.
I used information from How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin | CSS-Tricks to get me started with the template.
I copied the feed-rss2.php file from the wp-includes folder to my child theme folder renaming it feed-microcast.php
wp-content/themes/sempress-child/feed-microcast.php
I adjusted the query to get the posts from my microcast category. I also hard coded the title, link, image and a few other things to simplify the process a little.
I then used the template from CSS-Tricks as a guide to adding the various podcast tags to my template.
This ended up with a pretty broken feed, mostly due to my lack of care, but I fixed it up later I got it linked up.
I didn’t want to use the custom post type approach used in the article because that would involve editing all the old posts or converting them to the new type somehow.
My first idea was to create a feed template and switch to that when the RSS feed for my microcast category was called for.
After failing to get the template to switch for the standard category feed, /category/microcast/feed I ended up with a custom feed at /feed/microcast.
and I add
add_action('init', 'customRSS');
function customRSS(){
add_feed('microcast', 'customRSSFunc');
}
function customRSSFunc(){
get_template_part('feed', 'microcast');
}
to my functions.php file.
I then spent a bit of time using the W3C feed validation service until I fixed the feed up to valadate.
I’ve still got to get a link to the feed into the microcast category page head tag and I hope to do that as soon as I’ve gone a bit of research. For now I’ve a link in the sidebar.
Here is the template: WordPress RSS feed template for my microcast
We have started refreshing the EDUtalk Site. Updating the theme and how the live audio plays. We have started updating the information pages too over the break. If you be interested in appearing on a show next session please get in touch.
A bit over a week ago I got a tweet from Athole
The premise is simple enough, for 7 days you take a B&W image, tweet it and ask someone else to join in.
I did:
Day 7 is the featured image of this post.
What is interesting about this project is that there is no hashtag. You get mentions from the folk you invite, if they take the invite up and perhaps from some of their invitees.
An enjoyable experience, I though a bit about photography (or at least my phone snapping) and enjoyed seeing other folks images. It felt a little more relaxed than hashtag type collaborations. More meandering perhaps…
Thanks to Athole and the folk who I pestered to join in.
I am finding micro.blog a really interesting community.
From an educational POV the most positive experience and the one that I would like to see replicated (in Glow and elsewhere) is #DS106.
DS106 influences the way I think about ScotEduBlogs and the way I built two Glow Blogging Bootcamps 1.
In particular these sites aggregate participants content but encourage any comments and feedback to go on the originators site.
Micro.blog is making me rethink this a little, there you can comment on micro.blog (the same as the blog hub in DS106) and that comment gets sent as a webmention to the originators site. This makes thinks a lot easier to carry through.
Micro.blog also provides the equivalent of the #ds106 twitter hashtag but keeps that in the same space as the hub/rss reader.
Manton recently wrote:
Micro.blog will never be that big. What we need instead of another huge social network is a bunch of smaller platforms that are built on blogs and the open web.
from: Manton Reece – Replacing 1 billion-user platforms
Which made me think.
Firstly it reinforces how Manton really thinks hard about making micro.blog a brilliant place, avoiding the pitfalls of huge silos.
Secondly it speaks to idea of multiple social networks. Imagine if DS106 and ScotEdublogs where both platforms in this sense, I could join in either or both along with others using my blog to publish. I could decide which posts of mine to send to which community, and so on.
It is the same idea I’ve had for Glow blogs since I started working with them 2.
Class blogs could join in and participate in different projects.
It would be easy to start a local or national project and pull together content and conversation from across the web into one learning space. Although I’ve spoken and blogged a lot about this idea I don’t think I’ve made it stick in the minds of many Scottish educators. I wish I could.