While eating lunch today, and reading Technology Review from MIT, I read an article I amost didn’t believe … "Dog Tags for Virtual Sniffing". Believe it or not, dogs wearing a tag from Snif Labs, exchange ID codes when they meet. Their owners can then download the data and learn information about the dogs, and the owner! You may even view a Snif Animated Demo.
Rover … meet Spot (my dog)!
This morning I found out about a neat "online" conference … available at no charge except for the time it takes you to register. Tony Karrer, George Siemens, Duke Corporate Education and others are sponsoring the event which will focus upon Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations.
The sponsors are folks and organizations which I respect. In Tony’s case, I’ve subscribed to his blog for a long time, and exchanged occasional emails. I hope to be a speaker at the event. My topic would be using Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Collaboration. Here is just one small example of my bag of tricks! (engineering learning wiki)
Okay … where has this math minor / software nerd been? Has my head been buried? I guess it shows how little I watch TV. Yesterday, while driving north to my cabin near Minnesota’s border with Canada, I found myself intrigued while I listened to a Science Friday Podcast. The topic was the hit TV series: Numb3rs. Anyhow, as the CBS web site allows one to time shift and watch a program on your own schedule, I will have to check it out. The theme of Numb3rs is how math may be used to solve crime.
Actually, what’s really cool, is that a "number" of organizations are partnering with CBS and have created content which attempts to encourage children to become more interested in math. Now that’s novel … intelligent television … kind of hard to believe! Regardless, here is an excellent joint initiative on the part of Texas Instruments, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and CBS: We All Use Math Every Day.
I will add this link to my Engineering for Children page of my Engineering Learning Wiki. Remember, as a wiki, anyone may add useful links, not just me!
For well over a year, I’ve subscribed to the 60 Minutes podcast. However, up until recently the podcast only included one story from each show. Having just returned from China, and while catching up on my RSS feeds, I am delighted to find out that the podcast now includes the entire show. Congrats to CBS.
Earlier today I traveled through time back into the past! At 3:00 p.m. I left Japan, and at 11:50 a.m. in the morning on the same day I arrived home in Minnesota … after an eleven hour flight! Obviously the big question is … what does this have to with "converting digital camera movies to Flash". Given my body clock is all messed up, I decided it was time to post some movies from my Run for China’s Children Quest. This also represents a good way to get back to my blogs’ main theme of technology learning.
Like many of you, my digital camera allows me to take movies. However, the larger file sizes are not web friendly; thus I wanted to convert my avi files to the Flash format. Here were my two constraints:
Here was my solution:
Here are my Run for China movies (under 15 seconds each). Pay attention to the viewing instructions!
Initial Viewing Instructions
- Click to select and load any movie
- Once that page loads, click <reload/refresh> via your browser
- The movie should now play
- Click <back> to select the next movie
Note: I’m looking for an html code generator that works with the new version of Flash. This will then eliminate the load and refresh requirement.
And here are the screen shots on how I created these Flash movies using Super C:
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Once you have created your Flash files, it is necessary to create a very simple html file. You can <right click> upon any of my movies and use that file as a template. Use the screenshot given below, and make the few changes indicated.
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