Inside View

Big Thanks to @msajolliffe @saorog and #Dreamspace

WE SPENT MORE THAN SIX HOURS inside One Microsoft Place and learned how to create Sphero Chariots before donning Hololens (in the photo) to catch over-sized insects running around Microsoft Dreamspace in Dublin. This was a major life event for 11yo Mia, 8yo Dylan, and three members of the Youth Media Team. I wish every primary school student in Ireland could avail of this engaging experience.

AMPing up practical skills @LimerickIT

I WORK WITH a wide range of creative students on three campuses of the Limerick Institute of Technology. This year, I'm taking a page out of my 1998 notebooks as we share techniques about making rich media content that shows up in less than two seconds on mobile phone screens.

Algorithms in my Personal Decisions #MIS

I TRY TO DO everything I teach so because I'm currently teaching Decision Support Systems (DSSs), I will explain my Personal Decision Support System. By doing this, I expect to compare and contrast the personal DSSs my business students share with me.

Like all of my students, I have a mobile-fueled lifestyle and that means I use information served up through mobile browsers and applications as integral parts of my personal DSS. I bought handsets and tablets that I carry with me to do my job--like the venerable Lumia phone in the photo below. If you flip backwards through the 20 years I have blogged you can see that I update my blog as often from my mobile phone as I do from a desktop. In fact, I have not had a desktop computer since 2010.

Trying Chat Center h/t @scobleizer

I ALREADY HAVE too many contact mechanisms in place so it might not be smart to add yet another method. But I like the IRC feel of the Gillmor Gang's Chat Center so I'm playing around with the code on my Typepad blog.

Except I know I need more control over my default templates on Typepad and on Wordpress, so it means going the extra lap and making a custom template for pages on both platforms. I'll try the Chat Center widget as part of this blog post to see if I can make it work when this short update publishes. And then I'll try the same thing on a free Wordpress site. I'll be impressed if the short snippet of code connects RSS readers to my Chat.Center/Topgold space.

Say "Hi!" if you spot this update in your news reader--it's showing up as two chat center buttons in the edit screen of this post.

[Bernie Goldbach has experimented with random snippets of HTML since 1994.]

New Flickr Experience

Screenshot by @topgold

A BLUE BAR at the bottom of Flickr screens now invites people to “try our new Photo Experience” but power users are noticing they lose things when they click into the new experience. I lose the ability to quickly grab code like the snippet that displays the image at the top of this post.

But the photos are bigger.

On a normal laptop, a larger image now appears but some essential community functions take a back seat. I can't see comments on the images. New tags become hashtags. In a sense, I lose part of the story about my photos. That said, the new photo experience is about 25% bigger than on the previous photo page. So if I valued Flickr mainly for pixels, I get top service.

Audioboo Option

ONE OF THE most interesting things you can do with a mobile phone is sharing quickly while on the go. While my blog is partially hidden from view through a DNS outage, I'm playing around with a roll-your-own Audioboo set-up. I'll be amazed if it works.

E90Boo.mp3

Making Intelligent Signs

Screencap from US Patent 20040165006.

IN JULY 2002, I started playing around with Typepad at night while drawing up a patent during the day. I think it's important to put the initial thoughts of the patent on my website, if only to serve as a point of reference for others investigating the same kind of intelligent digital signage.