Category Archives: Misc
The End Of An Era
Final Netflix DVDs arrived this week…
Duet Prevents Reflector 3 From Installing Properly
Recently, I had to install Reflector 3 on a Windows Surface Pro laptop to resolve an issue presenting in a classroom. Unfortunately Reflector 3 would not work for me after installing. All I could see was a blank window.
The issue was sue to Duet being installed on the Surface Pro. Removing Duet, rebooting, then reinstalling Reflector 3 fixed things. Thanks to Squirrels support for suggesting this.
Resources For The Future (To-Do)
Over time I accumulate a set of resources and things-that-I-should-do,-but-don’t-have-the-time-at-the-moment. Rather than these getting lost, I am posting them here to come back to later. Maybe.
- The Survey Quality Predictor (SQP)
- A “an extensive open-source database of survey questions and quality estimates built up through the collaboration of the users. The SQP database contains a wide range of survey questions concerning many different topics in many different forms and languages” and other things.
- SSRN
- Formerly known as Social Science Research Network, a repository of scholarly research.
- Geoff Petty
- Geoff Petty’s resources to “improve your teaching and that of your team.”
- Positive Psychology Constructs and Scales
- Nico Rose’s resources on Positive Psychology Constructs and Scales.
- Data USA
- An accumulation of US Government data.
- IPEDS Data
- IPEDS is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Another accumulation of data. There is a very useful video tutorial on “How to Find and Use Free College Data” here.
- A brand marketer’s guide to programmatic
- Google’s resources and tutorials.
- Ad Blocking: What you need to know
- Old, but informative, set of links and resources that cover ad blocking (from the IAB).
- RICOH Live Streaming Driver (THETA UVC Blender) with Equirectangular Output
- A RICOH driver that I need to test.
If I were to get a new workdesk…
… it would properly be this one (GeekDesk Max).
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
I enjoyed the book (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and I am looking forward to seeing this…
Greenscreen / Chromakey On The Mac
A work colleague asked about creating chromakey / green screen images the other day. The wanted to use their Mac computer to superimpose pictures of students on notable Chicago locations.
My quick-and-dirty suggestions were:
- Photo Booth (the easiest, most appropriate solution from my perspective)
- The downside to using Photo Booth is that it crashes on my laptop due to my installation of a Bluetooth webcam.
- iMovie (a bit of a hack, but the process within iMovie is extremely easy)
Another colleague suggested using Photoshop. This tutorial clearly outlines the process. The above example only took a few minutes to create – I did not follow the tutorial fully to the end (hue saturation) which would have removed the green fringing.
Another option would be to use Veescope on iPad.
Rabbits In The Back Garden
http://youtu.be/-WBuQjWIgvM
A doe and her three kits in the back garden. Fun to watch, and I hope they survive. Happy to give up some of the raised bed for them to make it through the spring.
This, I Want To See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTZ2Tp9yXyM
Steamed
For the first time in quite a few years I have a Windows PC (Surface Pro) at home, so I thought I would check out a few PC games. Nothing too taxing on the tablet, the Surface is not really a games machine. As luck would have it, Steam was having a sale. I now have a mini-library of older games to play:
- Final Fantasy VII
- Half-Life
- Half-Life 2
- Portal
Unfortunately Half-Life refuses to play on the Surface Pro, with this error message:
The game has detected that the previous attempt to start in OpenGL video mode failed. The game will run in software mode.
Solutions on the Web suggest changing the Set Launch Options:
-software , -OpenGL, did not work for me (the game ran, but in a unusably small window).
-w 640 -h 480 allowed me run the game in a usable window.
-w 1024 -h 768 allowed me run the game in a better window.
I believe the screen dimensions of the Surface Pro are 1920 x 1080, so I gave that a try:
-w 1920 -h 1080
However, that resulted in a window that exceeded the bounds of the display. For the moment I will stick with XGA.
Next, getting a suitable joystick/gamepad…