Or Save As Draft

Of course, the fact that you can do pretty much the same thing with an email program, or blogging program (save your spill sheet as a message draft), kinda took the wind from my sails!

Spillsheet

Some time ago I created a heuristic form for expository writing to be used with Firefox and its Scribe extension (the Scribe extension lets you save as an html file any text you type into a form).

Recently I simplified this form to use as a browser-based "spill sheet," that is, a place to store information temporarily before pasting it elsewhere (such as in a blog entry or a word processor).

Here's a screenshot of the simplified form:

Podfathers

CIMG1502
Originally uploaded by camoby.

I scoured the Web to find a photo of Dave Winer and Adam Curry sitting together at Gnomedex 5.

These pioneers of podcasting had a falling out over plans for a business partnership. It is good to see this talented pair on speaking terms.

Nvu

I am excited about Nvu. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") is an HTML editor based on the late Mozilla Composer. Backed by Linspire, it looks as good as gold. Here's the list of features.

Blogger Hosts Images

Today Blogger announced that it will host images. So, if you've got a Blogger blog hosted at blogspot, you don't have to put your pics on another server.

Perhaps this move to host images is Google's way of competing with Flickr. Google owns Blogger. Yahoo! owns Flickr.

Students as Information Explorers

In his "One Big Head" podcast for June 20, 2005 , educational technology coordinator Jeff Moore suggests that, rather than give students highly structured and prepackaged content, teachers should encourage students to become explorers and judges of information in a content area.

Example: Instead of walking a web design class through a set of projects decided beforehand, have students analyze the XHTML 1.0 specification at the World Wide Web Consortium and evaluate web pages with reference to a rubric. Then have the students design their own projects.

Catch the Wave: Optimize Your Audio

Normalizing their audio output is one way audio producers (including podcasters) can show kindness to listeners. Here is a way to normalize audio waveforms in Audacity, an open source sound editing program.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows Audacity after a recording has been made. The user (okay, it was me) highlights the waveform, then selects Amplify from the Effects menu.

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the dialog that appears after the Amplify effect has been selected. Here is the wonderful thing: Audacity seems to be able to calculate the degree of amplification required to bring the highest point of the recorded wave up to the highest possible point of the available spectrum. So all the user has to do at this point is click, "ok."

Figure 3

Figure 3 shows Audacity after the wave has been amplified.

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows Audacity at the moment the user (still me, could be you) has selected another effect: Normalize. The Normalize effect brings the range of the wave back down to a happy segment of the available spectrum, so it will be neither too high nor too low.

Figure 5

Figure 5 shows the nicely shaped sound wave that results from this process. Of course, this techniqe only works well if the sound levels of the original recording are pretty consistent. Otherwise, the processed wave will show equal variation.

Digial Potato Chip

Look good enough to eat?



This chip is a digital drawing I made in OpenOffice.org Draw.

First I made a circle, then I tweaked it. Then I gave it a potato chip skin. Then I dropped in a shadow.

Goin' Mobile!

I'm in love with my iriver 795: 512mb of portable mp3 playing, voice recording power in the palm of you hand.

Hello, World!

From now on, I'll be using this space for new posts.