Ah, satire, my old friend, I’ve missed you.
Three of the little rubber feet on the bottom of the MacBook Pro gave up the ghost over the past 6 months, making the laptop uneven on a flat surface and potentially able to scratch the new wooden table we have. Replaced them with four 3M Self-Stick Rubber Pads and that seems to be working well. Not only do they provide additional elevation to the laptop allowing some air flow underneath it, but they’re ‘grippy’ enough that they stop the laptop sliding around when seated on a lectern (which used to be a problem when lecturing or preaching with the laptop). Only disadvantage is that if you need to turn the laptop sideways on the table (e.g. to show someone something on the screen) you need to lift and turn, rather than slide and turn.
Just one of those things that made life a whole lot easier:
So I’m looking at the ways in which new media stuff might work in teaching theology, so a report on a pilot project using iPads for teaching and learning at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne looked like it might be helpful. But it didn’t really have any substance, and in parts reads like an Apple commercial. The bibliography at the back with some research articles might be it’s redeeming feature. What I really wanted was some concrete examples or case studies on what they did with it, and whether they tried some of the same things on the Android and netbook platforms they also looked at.
Anyway, you can find the report at: iPad Pilot Report 2011 v3.pdf – Powered by Google Docs.
It did remind me to look at the Apple-focused ‘Wheels for the Mind‘ to see if there were any case studies of interest there.
Update: This issue (New Technologies and New Approaches to Higher Education Pedagogy : 20/1 – 2008) of the journal ‘International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education‘ (noted in the report) looks interesting.
Quite possibly the most useful little application I’ve come across in a while – Jomic – a viewer for comic book archives
Nice little article on the development of Mac laptops over the past 20 years. See From Mac Portable to MacBook Pro: 20 years of Apple laptops – Ars Technica.
In order of the ones I’ve owned/used…
Macintosh Portable (back in 91-93 for work) – very heavy, but the trackball worked well.
Powerbook 520c – bought one in 1995 (esp. with the ethernet) back when trackpads were new. Worked well, but sold it to get PowerMac 6100.
Powerbook 150 – best machine I’ve every had for plain writing. A keyboard you can hit, no bells and whistles. Great with Word 5.
12″ G3 iBook (White, twin USB) – got me through the PhD, but ran out of steam towards the end. Still working as a ‘netbook’ at home.
15″ MacBook Pro – day to day machine. Works well, though it’s a bit heavy to carry everyday.
Having my laptop go AWOL is something I’m always worried about. There are some useful thoughts (albeit from a Mac perspective) about minimising the damage of this over at TidBITS Safe Computing: What I Learned from Having My Laptop Stolen.
It’s been a month or so since I posted about my experiences with the Parallels and VMWare Fusion demos. Since then I’ve installed Vista on a Bootcamp partition and that seems to run nicely (though logging in takes for ever) and had a chance to use the demos to access Vista off the Bootcamp partition (though it seems to be either Bootcamp + Parallels or Bootcamp + VMWare not Bootcamp + Parallels + VMWare (obviously not running the virtual machine systems at the same time).
Both Fusion and Parallels worked nicely with the Bootcamp partition and installed their helper applications for sharing data etc. just fine. I tested out the Direct X support – useful for games and for other software that uses that graphics support – and found Parallels 3 was not good, and VMWare stuttered sometimes. The upgrade to Parallels 4 demo produced some nicer Direct X behaviour though.
At the end of the day either system – Parallels or VMWare – would do the job for me (like running Camtasia to make training videos showing how to access eLearning resources under Window). Parallels seemed to have the more integrated interface with MacOSX but did seem to suck resources out of the computer. VMWare seemed a little less integrated but felt (subjectively) less resource hungry and more snappy at installing operating systems etc. If push came to shove I’d probably go the VMWare route for my needs. (However I’ll need to run that past the people who control my budget). Bootcamp works, but there’s been a few times recently where I’d want to have Entourage and NetNewsWire running while doing Windows stuff too.
A couple of useful links that passed across my screen this week.
The first notes several sources of (free) software for plaining Windows media files of various types. It doesn’t link through to VLC, but the links there are useful too. See Play Windows media files on your Mac | Playlist | Macworld
The second is a piece of software that prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Useful for quickly changing settings for presentation mode. See Lighthead – Caffeine.
So I’ve been trying our different options for virtual machines on the MacBook Pro with varying degrees of success. So far I’ve played around with the Parallels 3 demo, the VMWare Fusion demo, Crossover and VirtualBox.
Given I don’t have a spare Windows XP or Vista licence lying around at the moment (something I’ll fix in the next few days) I’ve been playing around with Windows 98 and Ubuntu distributions to see how easy it is install and run the different virtual machines.
Firstly, Crossover which effectively attempts to run Windows applications (using a WINE base) without you having to install a Window OS in a virtual machine. A nice idea but it didn’t really do the job with the apps I tried. Plus I want to record what the Windows setup looks like with something like Camtasia and having the familiar Windows Desktop helps there.
Secondly, Parallels. Easy install and worked well mostly. With Windows 98 it wouldn’t find the CD drive properly (disk image or real CD) which meant it couldn’t install the extras nor additional drivers it needed to run smoothly (like for sound and networking). Ubuntu installed too, but again the extras wouldn’t install either, though it ran just fine without them for testing purposes. Perhaps XP and Vista would work better, but it’s had a couple of strikes against it. YMMV.
Thirdly, VMWare Fusion. Again easy to install and the install of the OSs seemed to work well. It did a better job on Win98 (which is useful because I need to test course CD-ROMs etc. on old browsers and OSs. A lot of our students seem to have second-hand/hand-me-down hardware) but I couldn’t for the life of me get the soundcard to work. The appropriate drivers just gave a blue screen of death on install, though the CDROM worked. Latest Ubuntu (8.10) installed like a charm, with the extras. So, if this one plays well with XP/Vista it could be the one to pick.
Lastly, VirtualBox. Installed Win98 fine but only in basic mode – no sound etc and lo-res graphics. Ubuntu fared better and installed smoothly. If all I wanted to do was run the latter for testing then maybe that would be the way to go.
Next step is to set up a Bootcamp partition with Vista and then see how the virtual machines like Fusion play with that. In a less than perfect world I’d go with that by default, but I’d like to be testing and documenting the Windows and Linux experiences for students at the same time as the Mac experience. So far Fusion looks like it might do the job best, but we’ll wait and see.