Archive for the ‘varia’ Category

Are you one of those people who really love Skype, because it lets you…

1. talk with people from all over the world for free;
2. chat through a simple interface, without all the unnecessary bells and whistles that many other messengers feature;
3. have video conversations?

Then we have good (and possibly some bad) news for you. Let’s start with the good news: a new beta version has been released. Skype for Windows 5.0 build 123 beta is available for download, and here’s what new in it:

• 10-way group video calling
• Skype Home experience
• Offline instant messaging
• New contact search and add experience
• Enhanced call experience under problematic conditions
• Post call experience
• General User Interface refresh

If you wonder what “Post call experience” is all about – don’t worry, we don’t have a clue either. We do like the 10-way group video calling feature, though (in a previous version this was limited to 5 only), and the offline instant messaging. Since my conditions for calling are indeed problematic (not everybody’s got access to the same amount of bandwidth, folks!) I’ll be interested in giving this one a go.

The possibly bad news is that I’ve read that this might be a free trial – what that means for the future of Skype I don’t really know, but I do hope they’ll keep the model as it is.

Okay, we know: you use Videolan‘s Media Player VLC (because you know what’s good for you), but what we don’t know is if you’re using Windows as well. If you are, then you might want to upgrade again, because some problems have been fixed:

A bit after the 1.1.3, an important security issue was discovery in most windows applications, and VLC is affected too. Since security issues matters, here is a new release, targeted for the Windows platform!

• Windows Dll loading security issue, in Qt4 and dmo modules – VideoLAN-SA-1005
• Fix for folders opening issue on Windows
• Updated translations

Go and get that upgrade, already!

Everybody’s favourite media player, VLC, has been upgraded to version 1.1.3. Everybody’s favourite music player? Sure! Because VLC can literally play just about any music or video file out there, and if it doesn’t play, then it’s most likely not music or film. It does so by using a series of internal codecs, so there’s no need to install any extra software, either: everything works straight out of the box.

Because this is an open source project, the volunteers behind this program have ported it to many different operating systems: Are you using Windows 2000 or something upwards of that, one of the various flavours of GNU/Linux, or MacOS X, perhaps…no problem: there’s a version for you. If your system is not supported, you can even get the source code and try to compile it yourself.

What is really fantastic is all the different kinds of input it supports. Sure, it can play something from your hard disk, but what about this: if you connect it to a DVB source (Digital Video Broadcasting, via your satellite receiver, your digital TV receiver, or cable TV), it will play that, too. Give it any kind of streaming media via the internet, and you make it happy. If there are subtitles available, it will show them, of course, and if there aren’t, you can always add them. You can even use VLC to send your own streaming music/video over the internet, but if you’re advanced enough to understand this, you probably already knew.

Are you still using Windows Media player? Will you please stop doing that immediately? Get this download, and you’ll thank us soon enough. And if you don’t know how to do that, we can always give you some tips.

Fastcompany has an interesting read about the impact of smartphones and handheld computers on the way we teach (or should teach).

When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: “They loved to push the buttons and see it light up.” The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g.

10 years ago, when I was giving Comenius / Grundtvig trainings and tried to persuade that very “soon everybody would have a digital photo camera”, many of the course participants scoffed at me. By now it’s hard to find a phone without a digital camera, and many of them have built-in functionality to send the videos that have been recorded straight to YouTube!

Tactile technology is making it easier for kids to learn how to use advanced technology, and is going to empower them in a way difficult to imagine for the current generation of teachers. Now does that sound like an interesting challenge to you, or what?

Last week a minor update was released of WordPress 2.9, which itself was released halfway through December last year. So…what are the goodies brought to us in this shiny, new version? Well…if you are one of those people who find themselves throwing brilliant pieces of writing in the bin (and of course regretting having done so soon afterwards), then we have good news for you: 2.9 gives you the possibility for recovering postings from the bin. Images can be edited, too, and it has become easier to embed videos in posts.

This minor upgrade fixes 34 problems, and if you’ve experienced problems with any of these problems before, then now is a good time to do the update. And if you don’t want to download the upgrade, then you can always go upgrade automatically via the Tools > Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

WordPress, one of the better blog systems out there (so good that we at Let’s Learn IT are using it ourselves ), and probably the only blog system that you’ll have up and running on your server in 5 minutes or less, have upgraded their software to version 2.8.6.

The latest version can be downloaded from their site, and contains the following changes:

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From February 7–13, 2010 in Ghent (Belgium) vzw Let’s Learn IT organizes the workshop:

Web 2.0, Multimedia & Presentation Skills: Empowering IT Competences For Today’s Job Market (Workshop Reference number: 2009-1-BE3-GRU13-01100)

The main objective behind this workshop is to give the participants a decent training on how they can use computers to enhance their chances for finding a job. The focus will be on various web 2.0 applications, presentation tools, and digital audio and video.

Objectives

Participants will have learnt the following:

• how to use computers and computer peripherals to create multimedia presentations;
• how to use modern web 2.0 applications like wikis, blogs and social community websites;
• how to work with digital audio and video;
• how to give an efficient presentation.

Interested?

Thanks to the Grundtvig programme of the European Commission and the Flemish National Agency, vzw Let’s Learn IT can offer this workshop completely free of charge (flight ticket, hotel, breakfast lunch & dinner will be paid by us) to 20 unemployed candidates. If you are interested in attending this workshop, you can send us a letter (or email) of motivation in which you tell us why you would like to attend this workshop. You will need to prove that at the moment of applying you are officially unemployed.

• Where? Ghent, Belgium
• When? February 7-13, 2010
• Who? Unemployed European citizens
• Costs? All costs related to the programme will be paid for by the organization

For more information, please visit Let’s Learn IT.

Omdat we natuurlijk allemaal door en door groen zijn, lijkt me PrintWhatYouLike wel de moeite waard: het is een webapplicatie waarmee je zonder probleem een webpagina kunt bewerken vooraleer je die afdrukt -overbodige secties kun je zonder probleem verwijderen.

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Om het goed te maken dat ik al een hele tijd niets meer geschreven heb op deze blog geef ik een youtubefimpje mee dateert al van eind 2008 -de cijfers zijn dus al serieus gedateerd. De getallen die erin vermeld worden zijn duizelingwekkend.

Laat ik er nog snel een berichtje over Voicethread tegenaan smijten. Ik heb mij de laatste paar maanden de onhebbelijke gewoonte aangemeten om alles wat ik internetgewijs interessant vind in open tabbladen te laten staan. Gevolg: momenteel zit ik met 5 Firefox-vensters die elk zo’n 30 tabbladen open hebben over van alles en nog wat. Da’s niet alleen een hele kakafonie als ik Firefox opstart (minstens 20 youtubefilmpjes of andere tutorialvideo’s die tegelijk beginnen spelen), het duurt ook een eeuwigheid tegen dat alles ingelezen is. Affijn, anderen vinden deze eerste “lente”-dagen het uitgelezen ogenblik om hun huis op de kuisen -ik ga beginnen met mijn browser. Het huis volgt nog wel. Hoop ik.

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