Pre-orders for first Ubuntu Tablet went on sale on Monday with a shipping date of mid-April. I hesitated for maybe 10 minutes before putting in an order for the high resolution model ($340). I ran Ubuntu for about 18 months before going back to OS X, so I’m already comfortable with the operating system, but why…
Open Live Writer Open Live Writer is like Word for your blog. Open Live Writer is a powerful, lightweight blog editor that allows you to create blog posts, add photos and videos then publish to your website. You can also compose blogs posts offline and then publish on your return. Open Live Writer works with…
Most of my blogging takes place with WordPress, of which I’m a big fan, but sometimes the online editor included with WordPress isn’t what I need to get things done. So for those times, I fall on to the Scribefire Addon for Chrome (also available for Firefox). It provides an editor inside Chrome that you…
Over the weekend I stumbled up Twitter’s Emoji artwork, which is Creative Commons licensed, and thought how the emoji could be used to create some cool badges. I had also been looking for a project to try out Teachers Pay Teachers, and the Emoji Badges project was born. I’ve been playing around with gamefication in…
If you use Google Forms to collect entry or exit tickets, or other information from students, a quick and fast way to offer custom feedback is to use the formMule add-on. I posted a how-to before on using formMule, and you can follow that page with a couple of changes. By using formMule, you can…
Nicky Case has created an easy to use site for creating simulations. These simulations use a grid and emoji to represent complex systems. The first examples on the page are about forest fires, and then they evolve from there. Items can be placed on the grid with a purpose or randomly through the set up of…
Here are some of my favorite Twitter tips from Missing Manual. 140 Unicode characters The length of a tweet is limited to 140 characters, and unicode characters count as one character. For most this would be assumed, but if you know how Unicode characters are stored, they are usually two or more bytes, so you may…
Inserting an image from the toolbar into a Gmail email takes four steps. Reduce those steps by pasting or dropping an image into an email.
Google Drive navigation can sometimes become an exercise in tedious clicking and waiting. Google Drive isn’t always the fastest interface, and you may have folders 3 or 4 levels deep that you need to access quickly. For example, I create a folder for each school year, such as 15-16, inside of my Documents folder. You…
Google Docs has offered the ability to insert special characters, such as arrows and emoji, for awhile now. Under the Insert menu, select Special Characters. Google Docs opens the special characters palette. Mousing over the characters brings up a magnification of the characters the mouse pointer is hovering over. The listing of characters is broken up into…