Drawings with Picasa

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Alvin Trusty

I have been using Picasa for several years.  If I am looking at a picture on my computer, chances are good I’m probably using Picasa to do it, especially if it’s a picture from my digital camera.

Above is a picture I took for Buzz.  He has converted all of his overhead transparencies to PowerPoint slides by having me photograph each picture.  Then he creates a slide from each picture in PowerPoint.

The whole process is actually very low tech.  We use a white piece of foam core on Buzz’s desk.  He holds the foam core at an angle so we don’t get a shadow from the lights in the ceiling.  I snap a picture.  Picasa does the rest.

In the Tuning tab of Picasa is a Highlights adjustment.  By cranking this up, all the edges of the paper and shadows go away and leave only the black ink behind.  It’s literally that easy.  I export the picture and it’s finished about ten times faster than a scanner could do.

Now if I could only figure out who this Sherman character is.

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Feedreader3 – Update

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Alvin Trusty

After I started to seriously use FeedReader3, I began to get this error:

A error occured in program
Can’t perform execSQL operation. Query active ? {TEnclosures}

I went to the support forums to see if anyone else had had the same problem. I searched for “execSQL” and there we no hits. I then searched for “TEnclosures” with the same result. My thought was that I may be the first person to have this problem.

I started reading through the forums and found this page.

http://www.feedreader.com/node/1963

My exact problem. I have no idea why the search didn’t find this article. “execSql” is right in the title… and in the body.  I re-did the search matching the case of the words in the post.  Still not found.

I added a post giving a specific blog site which causes FeedReader3 to crash. Since then I have found about ten more. In fact, the program has been completely unusable.  An error on a site creates a message in FeedReader3. As soon as OK is clicked, the error box pops back up. The program cannot be closed at this point because the error message blocks all other activities in the program. I have to kill the program in Task Manager.

No responses have been given in the discussion. I had to uninstall the application. It looked great at first, but turned out to be a dud. I wish I could find another reader which sorts by tag. If you know of one, please let me know.

Meanwhile, Google Reader has worked flawlessly.

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Easy Photography

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Alvin Trusty

My students are working on a PowerPoint file in class.  I give them all the text.  They come up with the pictures.  All the pictures must be licensed with a Creative Commons license and several of the pictures must actually be taken by the student.  The subjects of the photos are ordinary objects like pencils, pens and calculators.

My daughter was looking at this assignment and thought it might be fun to take all the pictures.  Some time ago I spent $5 at Staples for a roll of white paper.  We use this for our seamless background for pictures.  Above you can see our setup.  We took the pictures in the sun room to maximize the nature light available.  I had to lie on the floor to take the pictures.

When we finished with the camera, all the pictures were dropped into Picasa for simple editing.  I changed one picture to sepia and a couple to black and white.  Other than that, we cropped them all to a 4:3 ratio because the camera shoots 3:2.

That’s about it.  The PowerPoint file is below shared on SlideShare. If you would like to see the work of my students, search for the tag. I wrote it in chalk on the second slide.

Technology And Education

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RemarkableOhio almost 500

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Alvin Trusty

Over the weekend we did a little travelling.  I promised my wife a night out of town and since we were already going across the state to pick one of the kids up at church camp, it seemed like the perfect time.

We stayed in a nice bed and breakfast called The Barn Inn in Holmes county.  We weren’t planning on doing much other than resting, eating (it is Amish country) and taking some pictures.  Then without even looking, an historical marker showed up in the middle of the Amish community.

On the way home, we were sitting at a red light in Loudonville when we saw this one.

Outside of Perrysville, we passed this one and I actually turned around and went back to get a good picture.

No one in the car seemed to mind stopping to take a picture since we weren’t really out to find these markers.  That’s the way we have been doing them this year.  We spent last summer driving all around to find them.  Now we find them naturally along the path to wherever we happen to be going.

When I added these three markers to Flickr I noticed the count is approaching 500.  There are some duplicates, but we have a lot of unique pictures. See them all here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/remarkableohio

I should add one thing about that last picture.  A bird had left a nasty white mark over three lines of text.  The new version of Picasa easily removed the blemish.  If you haven’t looked at Picasa in a while, you should take another look.  I haven’t found another free picture manager that has nearly as many features.

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FeedReader3

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Alvin Trusty

Like many other people, I use Google Reader as my main RSS feed reader.  However, I like to keep my class feeds separate.  For years I have used a free piece of software called RssReader.  This simple program keeps all my feeds in a stand-alone app with one big bonus.  RssReader archives all edits.  So if someone changes a post, the reader keeps track and shows all versions.  This is super handy when using blogs with students.

The main problem with RssReader is its age.  It was last updated more than five years ago.  As a result, it lacks some of the features of newer readers, plus I’m starting to get random errors with some of the blogs I read.

I went looking for a new reader and found this list at the Open Directory Project.  Specifically I was looking for a reader that could handle sorting by tags.  I found FeedReader3.  As you can see below, the feeds can be sorted by tag.

When I give a blog assignment in class, I have the students add a very long and specific tag to each post.  This does two things.

1 – I can sort the posts in my reader by assignment.  This makes grading much easier especially if there are several posts which are similar.  I can tell which post goes with each assignment.

2 – The students can find each other easier.  Google picks up each post with its tags and a search of one of the tags will show all posts by all students.  At some point I always have students consider the work of other students.  These tags make it easy to see what everyone else is saying.

So far FeedReader3 has worked well.  It has an OPML import and export feature, so moving all my feeds into FeedReader3 or out to something else is snap.  From what I see,  I will probably stick with this one for a while.

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