SLUA

Web Goes On Strike Today

podmaster — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:00:16 +0000

“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.. There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet. There’s just the Internet.”

- Hillary Clinton (United States Secretary of State)

Blog Action Day – Let’s Talk About FOOD

podmaster — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:41:55 +0000

The TV channels are littered with food and cookery programmes. Despite the fact that obesity is reaching crisis proportions in the western world. Food ingredients are featured whose environmental footprints are unsustainable.

On the flip side, climate change has resulted in flooding and droughts on a global scale. The poor and vunerable both in the west and developing countries are the first to be compromised. The Euro crisis, the fuel crisis and the world water shortage are all impacting on the cost and availability of staple food items. The abandonment of a low paying agricultural life style in favour of a congested city life has led to a change in eating habits, further demands on urban resources and an exponential growth in urban populations worldwide. The sight of children and adults begging and scavenging for food in bins and at city dumps are testomtomy to a society failing to cope with a food shortage .

As recent history has shown, market forces respond to currency depreciation, crop failures, flooding and droughts. They don’t care about regional catastrophes. The overnight increase in market price reflects the products high supply and demand status and the ability of the better-off sector to pay the asking price.

Look at Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland. Plans are afoot to pipe water from the River Shannon all the way across the country to the city as the reservoirs cannot cope with the increased demand. Vegetables are been imported while market gardeners are forced out of business. The sugar industry was closed down and now we pay through the nose for impoted sugar.

The World Trade Organisation and the European Union have a lot to answer for.

NextGen Slideshow Fixed

podmaster — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:53:34 +0000

I uninstalled the NextGEN plugin and reinstalled it but my gallery links were demolished. I will re-import them to set up a new link table - when I have time. Thanks again for the heads up.

Post Revamp

podmaster — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:59:30 +0000

No I am not giving up on blogging or podcasting!

On the contrary, I have 96 private postings from the last 14 months on various topics which I shared with 43 WordPress trainees. 29 of these WordPress enthusiasts are from the eTwinning community and the remainder are teachers from around Ireland and some PC users who attended last year’s Digital Bootcamp organised by the INTo and delivered by Apple last summer in Alexander College, Dublin.

I will tidy them up, especially the posts with links and publish them (publicly) over the next few weeks.

Thanks for the “Back 2 School” emails.

House Keeping Again

podmaster — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:06:19 +0000

Thank you one and all for pointed out that the NextGen FlashView Widget had died.

It was fine last night (Monday) as I was showing Tom Roche picture slideshow from the 2010 Seville eTwinning on my Android. I have been clearing out a lot of clutter and dumping deactivated plugins. I may have thrown out the baby with the bath water. I will check it out over the coming week. Thanks again.

Double Trouble Solved

podmaster — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:26:26 +0000

The doubling of the post title was a bug in Atahualpa 3.6.7. Btyes For All published a patch last July to tackle the problem http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=14155.

Double Titles

podmaster — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 21:16:38 +0000

Thank you Katariina. I am aware of the double titles problem and I hope to have it under control to-night. Say hello to all the eTwinners in Estonia for me.

Our 7th eTwinning Year

podmaster — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:41:35 +0000

It is Back 2 School time again and this is our 7th year taking part in eTwinning . Unfortunately we have the shadow of a Whole School Evaluation (WSE) hanging over us.This may militate against teachers interested in taking part.

eTwinning is designed to enhance the learning process. The resultant projects are not intended to add to the already overloaded school curriculum.

The projects with which I have been involved served as a motivational force for both the teacher and students alike. The teachers decide on the project between themselves. The project can be as short as a week or as long as a year. The partnership can be between two schools or twenty. Hopefully my school will be involved in eTwinning this coming school year.

eTwinning Gearing Up

podmaster — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:08:42 +0000

I spent a few hours last night roaming through the eTwinning website. There are nearly 137,000 registered eTwinners and nearly 1900 projects up and running. Everything seems to ready to roll for 2011 – 2012.

Take a look at the Welcome Back to School, eTwinners article for an overview of what is to come. As you can see you do not have jump into project mode straight away. The site is full of suggestions and links to successful projects. Give it a try.

Check out www.etwinning.ie for the latest news or follow Leargas on Twitter

Happy 30th PC

podmaster — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:10:09 +0000

I received a tweet this morning informing me that the IBM PC was 30 years old today. How time has flown. I didn’t actually see one after the launch for another year or so in the window of QTH Computers in Dun Laoghaire. I was too busy with my one year old son at the time.

I acquired my interest in and learned whatever I knew about computers from my wife who worked on the IBM 360 mainframes in HOB Dublin Airport 1n the 1970s.. Yes those were the days of punch cards, punched tape, reel to reel and the super fast one foot wide by 8 inches tall hard disks. The installations was manned by schedulers, operators, programmers, analysts and were serviced by the man in the blue suit.

The Irish Amateur Computer Club was a buzz with the news of thenew personal computer. Bob Hammond (club president) wasn’t impressed he said it was over priced for what it could do at the time. We were busy building the 8K (yes 8K) UK101 home computer. It was a bare bones affair with a badly fitting optional plastic cover, no sound card and wires going everywhere but we thought it was great. Take a look at these preserved specimens on Flickr. I later built the Ohio Superboard 11 in 1982. I bought it secondhand in the the Comp Shop beside the Pro Cathederal on Dublin’s Marlborough Sreet. I spotted the basement shop on my way back from the Department of Education one autumn afternoon. It was a glorified calculator and similar to the UK101 it had to loaded using a cassette tape recorder.

In November 1983 I purchased a Dragon 32 secondhand through the small ads in the Evening Press.. It had 16 colours and it beeped in several tones. My wife and I spent hours typing in a game fron the Dragon 32 magazine only to find that it did not work. It wasn’t a great start for we had to wait a month for the typo to be corrected. There was no internet back then. Later on, however, we did re-input it (not re-type it in) and a professional programmer friend spotted the : instead of the ; – we were delighted.

A week later on the 22nd I was brought to my first meeting of the Computer Educational Society of Ireland (CESI) in Belvedere College. There I was introduce to the BBC Model B. About 20 teachers, all male except one, milled around the machine which was plugged into a large colour television. I think it was on a Tuesday or a Thursday night because I remember the priest telling us they had school in the morning and it was then 10.30 and nobody wanted to go home until they had their go. I remember paying my 20p for the night and was later handed a cup of tea and an getstetnered application form and politely asked for £2 if I had it!

In the meantime my first experience of the IBM PC was “The Luggable” – their first attempt at portability. You ended up lobsidded after carting it around. I used it to moved the ARTI (ILSA) database from my BBC Master 128 running ViewStore to dBase and then eventually onto Lotus Notes.

I did not buy a PC until 1990. It was an Intel badged 386 clone made and assembled in Leixlip.

I am in Douglas at the moment trying out my son’s new internet connection from Magnet. I don’t seem to able to download an image I am looking at – I will do back in Dublin.