Unexpected Obsolescence

March 30, 2013

From the Google Graveyard

Planned obsolescence has been a driver of our consumer culture since the Great Depression. I tend to resist it with respect to durable goods: my car is 12 years old and has over 200,000 miles on it, and my home repairs include appliance repairs, rather than replacements, whenever practical. However, the fast pace of technological development forces me to upgrade computers and related devices more frequently. I tend to buy high-powered desktop systems and use them for about five years, but I’ve been replacing my iPhone every two years and have frequently replaced my Kindle book readers and iPads.

The internet churns at an even faster pace. Companies and services come and go, with a long list of services I once relied upon which are now essentially defunct. I don’t particularly mourn dead online services like CompuServe or WebShots, but they certainly were useful to me in their day.  But it is disruptive when the plug is pulled on a service you still rely upon. In a couple of weeks CableOne, my internet service provider, is pulling the plug on its webpages service, which forced me to relocate/recreate some websites with new providers. But what really has irked me is Google.

Google has a history of creating extremely useful free services, luring me into relying upon them, and then killing them off. This has happened with Google Notebook, will happen shortly with Google Reader, and will happen later this year with iGoogle. Slate has a nice Google Graveyard where you can put a flower on the graves of services you loved in their day.

My iGoogle homepage

I use iGoogle as my homepage, having set it up with a number of RSS feeds which show me the latest articles from a variety of favorite websites. That includes a list of articles pushed to me via Google Reader. I like to scan article headlines from certain sites and always read certain webcomics via Google Reader. Now I have to shift over to an alternate service for my RSS feeds and I might as well switch my homepage to a new service as well. What a pain! These services are not obsolete for me, even if many people now rely upon Twitter instead of RSS, dip into the random posts by their Facebook friends, or use FlipBoard and the like on tablets to see news articles.

I want to retain my one-screen listing of article headlines from my favorite sites which I can quickly scan each time I activate my desktop browser. So I’ve been looking at possible Google Reader replacements and the same  for iGoogle, reading through one set of suggested alternatives after another, and there is an exhaustive listing if I get desperate.

Thus far I’m playing with igHome as an iGoogle replacement and it looks like Feedly is a good replacement for Google Reader, but no one has written a Feedly gadget for igHome yet, so I’ll keep using iGoogle and Google Reader/Feedly for now.

 

Dealing with “Retirement” Courtesy of CableOne

March 13, 2013; THIS POST WAS FULLY UPDATED AND REVISED ON MARCH 28, 2013; UPDATED AGAIN 3/30/2013

Thanks for nothing!

I had a most unwelcome email message from my internet service provider in mid-March. CableOne wrote to tell me that they were “retiring” the free personal web space service they have provided to me and other customers for many years. That meant that on April 10, 2013 my existing bartlesvillehistory.org and inquiryphysics.org websites would go dark. (Those links now redirect to the pages I created at awardspace.com and weebly.com to replace the defunct CableOne service.)

Same price, less service. Thanks for less than nothing, CableOne!

I shifted much of my personal web content from their service years ago when I began blogging regularly. I am already the creator of many websites outside of this blog, but most of them are school-related and hosted on the district’s web server. I cannot transfer my Bartlesville History or Inquiry Physics websites to that server, however, since the history site has no relationship to the district and the curriculum site is a personal and commercial page used to promote and sell my physics curriculum.

I tried recreating my Bartlesville History pages on wordpress.com, but it was too onerous a task with the limited formatting options and cumbersome navigation on this blogging service. So, acting upon a suggestion from former student Michael Graham, I switched them over to the free awardspace.com service. It was cumbersome and confusing, but I managed to create a new “bartlesvillehistory” subdomain on their “mywebcommunity.org” domain where I uploaded all of my existing pages and content. Then I switched over the forwarding mask at GoDaddy for my bartlesvillehistory.org domain.

I tried doing the same for my curriculum sales page, but after a day or so the subdomain I created on awardspace’s “onlinewebshop.net” domain stopped working, generating 403 Forbidden errors. I filed a trouble ticket and awardspace revealed that you cannot use “PayPal” on their webpages. That took them out of the running.

My curriculum sales site

I didn’t want to use Google Sites for the curriculum sales page because I simply don’t trust Google anymore after they announced killing off two of my favorite services, iGoogle and Google Reader. So I opted to create my new Inquiry Physics curriculum sales pages on weebly.com at inquiryphysics.weebly.com. Those pages seem to be working okay thus far and were easy to create. I’ve now changed my forwarding mask for the inquiryphysics.org domain.

I’m tempted to eventually switch the entire high school physics website to weebly.com for easier maintenance, but I’ll have to explore its calendar service options. I gave up on using Google Calendar for my classes’ assignments calendars since that service doesn’t offer good live links support; that is why a couple of years back I switched to localendar.com for my class calendars. But I don’t know if localendar.com will prove compatible with weebly.com and having my class pages on the school district’s web server ensures they remain accessible to students through the heavily filtered school district internet service.

My local history site

3/30/2013 UPDATE:

Today I upgraded BARTLESVILLEHISTORY.ORG site by incorporating newly scanned larger images into the front page, making them expandable. I also reworked the front page and the links on all subpages so that I could change the forwarding mask. Now, when someone visits the site through the usual masking weblink, the subpages display without revealing the underlying web host. That should allow links visitors decide to bookmark to still work even after the site has to be ported to a new service. I’m trying to do my part to fight link rot. I can’t complain too much: it had been five years since I’d had to update some of the history pages, which is LONG time for the internet.

 

Bartlesville Public Schools Since 1950

February 17, 2013

I’ve given two community presentations recently about the history of the Bartlesville Public School District since 1950. In January I was with the Downtown Kiwanis Club and this past week the Arvest Friday Financial Forum, held each Friday at 10 a.m. at the Eastside Branch. You can now view my presentation as an online video.

Making the Video

I put the slides up on the web back in January using Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. Its online PowerPoint tool is actually quite good, although the stupid thing would not play back my slideshow when I saved the PowerPoint file to SkyDrive with fully embedded fonts, saying some were restricted, even though I’d downloaded them all free from the internet. Switching the Tools settings in the PowerPoint Save Dialog Box to only save used characters fixed that issue.

The slideshow is much better with narration, however, so this weekend I decided to invest the significant amount of time needed to add audio narration, background music, and convert the presentation into a video. I had purchased a Plantronics USB headset with microphone last year to record audio narration for the August 2012 bond issue video; using USB for sound recording in Windows is much easier than relying on the old analog line input on the computer.

I was displeased with the sound quality of the built-in sound recorder in PowerPoint, so I used Audacity to record audio narration, saving it as an MP3 file for each slide. That turned out to be a mistake; PowerPoint is not compatible with all of the MP3 format variants. Mind you, all of the MP3 files I created would import into PowerPoint and play within the program itself. It was when I told it to create a video that it balked (after trundling along for a very long time), saying several of them were in an incompatible format. Unclear instructions allowed me to try and convert them within PowerPoint for compatibility, but only some were converted and the remainder were reported as Unsupported.

Aaaaargh! PowerPoint has never handled imported audio and video well. All too often the files will not work at all, or work on one machine but not play on another. Even formats they claim to fully support don’t always work: witness the MP3 issues I encountered. I know there are oodles of video and audio codecs, but for goodness sake you would think PowerPoint could fully support MP3! Thankfully much patience and perseverance usually finds a work-around.

In this case I used the free Boxoft MP3 to WAV converter to rapidly convert the MP3 files into the old uncompressed WAV format which PowerPoint seems to use without fail. (Audacity will save to WAV, but it isn’t good for batch conversions.)

Then I had to delete the audio link for each slide and create a new one. If Microsoft had any intelligence, it would create a wizard that let’s you quickly attach a series of audio files to each slide in a show, pre-set to play automatically and hide the audio icon, and automatically set the time for each slide to match the length of each audio recording. But instead you have to add the audio file to each slide and then use multiple clicks to tell it to play the audio automatically on that slide and hide the audio icon. Then you have to look up the length of the audio file in seconds (I looked at each file in Windows Explorer to see that) and then use more clicks to go to Transitions and set each slide to auto-advance after the appropriate amount of time. It is SO STUPID to make me do this over and over when computers are ideally suited to such mindless automation. Maybe there is some way to automate some of this in PowerPoint, but if so, it is not obvious.

Since each set of slides covered a different decade, I wanted matching background music for each set. I didn’t want to break copyright, plus I run the risk of having my video yanked or its audio cut out if I post a video to YouTube with any copyrighted music. I have repeatedly made vacation videos in iMovie on my MacBook Air and uploaded them, only to have them flagged for copyright violations. Each time I’ve filed an appeal and won it since I was using the music built into iMovie, for which end users are fully licensed. But it is ridiculous to have to go to such lengths.

So I did web searches for “royalty free 50s music” and “public domain 50s music” and the like to find suitable background tunes from the likes of sounddogs.com and freepd.com. Then I used Audacity’s Amplify Effect to take those tracks down 20 to 30 decibels, edit them to the length I needed, and add a Fadeout Effect. I then saved the tracks as WAV files and imported them on the first PowerPoint slide for each decade, setting the audio file to “Play Over Slides” and going into the PowerPoint Animation Pane to tell it to “Start With Previous” so it would play simultaneously with that slide’s narration and then keep playing over the later slides. I also had to tweak the Animation Pane settings for overlay graphics and the like in some slides to ensure that my narration would integrate properly.

Once the whole thing was finished, I told PowerPoint to save it as a video. It trundled for over an hour and I then viewed the result. I made a few tweaks, including splicing in some new audio for one slide using Audacity, and then had it render the video again so I could upload it to YouTube.

The entire process took many hours, but admittedly is simpler than what I did back in 1995 with fellow physics teacher Lynne Shaw, creating a 35 mm slide show (a real slide show with actual slides in a Kodak carousel) with synchronized audiotape narration. Years ago I converted that presentation into PowerPoint and later made it into an online video. But if PowerPoint had a decent narration wizard, that would have saved me several hours of tedium.

I long ago gave up on the execrable Microsoft Word from ever becoming a decent word processor (long live WordPerfect!). And don’t get me started on how stupid Microsoft Excel is about not auto-updating charts to match added spreadsheet data. Now I’m wondering if PowerPoint is ever going to wise up. All of Microsoft’s Office products are both ubiquitous and mediocre. But I am glad that I was finally able to render the presentation in a more accessible and full-fledged format.

 

Cro-Magnon Classroom Tech

November 17, 2012

Old school – how I made presentations back in 1993

As I approach a quarter century of teaching, I’m making yet another shift in how I present videos in class, and that led me to ponder the ways classroom technology has changed since I began teaching physics at Bartlesville High School in 1989.

Back then the only videos were on VHS tape and shown on a television wheeled into the room on a cart, and if I wanted to display a pre-made visual, I used an overhead projector like the monster shown at right (the projector, not me!).

The only computer in the high school science department was an Apple IIc, reserved for the science building rep. Some students had scientific calculators, but Texas Instruments had not yet produced a graphing calculator. My students had to graph their data by hand with hand-drawn best fit lines, all record-keeping was on paper, and attendance was on paper slips clipped to the door each period. As for lab equipment, the school had just bought a few air tracks, but not enough to outfit six or seven lab groups. So we were still using springs on metersticks to pull old wooden dynamics carts across the floor for several of our labs.

I’ve been known as the computer whiz at work for decades, but I’m actually rather conservative in my use of technology. I still keep a paper gradebook, since it never goes offline and is easier than the computer for tracking accumulated tardies and absences, although of course I transfer the grades into the online system. I prefer a dumb whiteboard to an electronic one and rarely use PowerPoint, I’d rather have students make hand gestures for feedback than use remote ‘clickers’, and so forth. But my classroom technology has certainly evolved since my early Cro Magnon days.

Graphing/Computers

Science teachers and the donated computers and printers back in 1995

I’ve had graphing calculators for years, but have never used their graphing functions outside of training classes since I found them too cramped and limited. Instead, as the years went by I worked to build up a collection of used computers for student lab groups to use with Vernier’s Graphical Analysis software. By 1995 I was trying to interest other science teachers in this approach, with me arranging for Phillips Petroleum to donate a bunch of old IBM AT machines and dot matrix printers for the science rooms in grades 6-12.

Eventually each station in my lab had an old IBM PS/2 Model 25 floppy-disk-based computer for graphing, with a primitive print-only network of telephone cables linking them to a few slow and noisy old dot matrix printers with fanfold paper.

My classroom evolved to having old hard-drive computers at the stations, linked in a daisy chain 10BASE2 network of thin coax cable which I wired up from one station to the next, all linked to a single laser printer. What a breakthrough that was, since I could finally transfer files and everyone could print to a single fast printer with high-quality output. A few years later I led NetDay at our school, with volunteers helping me install the first Ethernet wiring and wall ports in the science labs.

By then the use of classroom computers was not all that different from what we do today – we’re still using a version of Graphical Analysis after all these years – although fat CRT monitors have been replaced with flat LCD panels and the desktop machines are smaller and more capable with each generation. We also now have enough laptop computers that I can provide each student, not merely each group, with a computer if needed for in-class data collection and lab report creation via wireless networking, but it is still such a big hassle to get enough computers wired up and running properly that I only do it once per year to give them the experience. I presume eventually we’ll have convenient tablet computers for this sort of thing, but we’re a long ways from getting there with our pitiful state funding for public schools.

Presentations

Well, I still have an overhead projector and I actually use it in class, although only for a few demonstrations, such as Fleming’s Law and electromagnetic induction, where an apparatus on the overhead can project a huge visual. Until we built the science wing in 2003, I either used a large CRT monitor to show visuals or a portable LCD projector on a cart. Here’s what my classroom technology looked like in 2001, minus the portable LCD projector and a SMART Board I never used much:

My classroom technology in 2001

Thankfully the lab stations in the new wing are MUCH larger

You can see why we needed the new wing, with its large student lab stations with built-in network ports, ceiling-mounted LCD projector, etc.

With the permanent LCD projector at my disposal, I shifted even more to computer presentations for visuals and now have an Elmo document camera for some demos and papers. But I use PowerPoint sparingly, relying much more on the chalkboard (now a whiteboard) since it gives me plenty of space to write and leave things visible for the slower students. Writing everything out each period also helps me pace myself more to the speed students need and encourages me to be succinct. I use PowerPoint only when there are many visuals and/or video clips to integrate into the lesson, not for regular note-taking.

1991 vs. 2012: whiteboards instead of chalkboards, but not much difference

Promethean Board (no, that’s not me; I don’t like them)

I wrote grants for a SMART Board over a decade ago and later a Promethean Board, but neither electronic white board worked for me since the long solutions to some examples took up more than one screen and I wanted the earlier work to remain visible, something I can readily do with my multiple traditional white boards. So I gave both electronic boards away for others to use.

I’m sure there are clever interactive things I could have students do on a Promethean Board, but it just doesn’t suit my style of instruction. Similarly, although some teachers make effective use of them, I don’t want a “clicker system” of student remotes for feedback, instead relying on observation, questioning, and simple student hand signals. But if we ever equip every student with a tablet computer, that might prompt me to change.

Video Clips – VHS to DVD to the computer

Format Transitions

And after all that discursion, we get to what prompted me to think back on classroom technology: classroom video clips. In the old days I had to pop in a VHS tape to show a clip and then painfully rewind it. Later I could burn clips onto a DVD for use in class with the ceiling LCD projector and that also allowed me to extend the life of good clips beyond their pitiful VHS origins. I have been fighting the DVD player again this year, waiting for it to boot up and wrestling with it to show a clip I’ve burned off, or show a bit from a larger video.

But showing a clip from the computer is far more efficient than wrestling with the stupid DVD player. What held me back until this year was that the old laptop computer on my teacher desk simply didn’t have enough storage space for all of my video clips and I’ve learned not to rely on the school’s network for instructional components – I can’t stand for the internet or the network to go down and leave me high and dry.

But this year I planted a new desktop computer under the desk, angled a not-too-large LCD monitor on it, and thus gained plenty of disk space and processing power to switch to only using computer-based video clips. I’ll keep the DVD player handy for full-length videos when I miss school, since most substitute teachers can’t handle lab work and simply copying physics notes isn’t very helpful. If I can let students work on an existing assignment I always do that, but sometimes a video related to the objectives is the best substitute.

The problem is that the dozens of short clips I’ve collected were mostly burned to DVDs (with backup discs at home) and not retained on a hard drive. So I’ve been slowly ripping them back off my own DVDs, editing them if needed, and throwing them into my DropBox directory. That way they sync up to the cloud as well as onto any computer I designate, giving me several backups and making it easy to get them onto the computer at school.

I’ve been using HandBrake to rip the video clips off my DVDs on my desktop Windows 7 machine. The default Windows Media Player I use at school won’t reliably play the ripped clips, so if I want to play them with the DivX player, I have HandBrake rip them in MKV format.

But if I want to edit them, I can’t use the free Microsoft Movie Maker to edit the clips HandBrake produces. Instead, I rip them off in MP4 format, copy that over to my MacBook Air and convert the file into a form iMovie can edit with MPEG StreamClip, edit the file in iMovie, and then export it back out.

Frankly, it has been tedious, but now that the job is done I should have all of my video clips at my fingertips in class. No more mucking about with the DVD player, thank goodness. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Meador!

 

The Kindle Paperwhite

This month I received my Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, the fourth Kindle I’ve owned and the best thus far. I love the “electronic ink” screens since they are easier on my eyes for extended reading than the backlit displays on my iPhones and iPads, and the convenience of having many books available to read in a small package, with no need to prop open the pages for reading, means I always try to read a book on a Kindle unless color illustrations are its major focus.

Generation	1	2	3	5
Purchased in…	June 2008	February 2009	September 2010	October 2012
My Cost	$360	$360	$139	$139
Resolution	600×800 (167 ppi)	600×800 (167 ppi)	600×800 (167 ppi)	758×1024 (212 ppi)
Connectivity	Cellular	Cellular	WiFi	WiFi
Major Improvements		Improved forward/back buttons; 16-level grayscale instead of 4	Further button refinements; better contrast with Pearl display	Front lit; improved contrast and resolution; improved battery life
My Review	Kindling	Kindle 2: Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary	The Case of the Crashing Kindle	This post

I skipped the fourth-generation Kindle Touch, since the display improvements were minimal and I was quite content with my third keyboard model and didn’t see much added value in a touch screen. I discarded the defective Amazon case, skinning my third Kindle with an attractive vinyl overlay on the front and back and carrying it around in a soft BUILT sleeve.

But the fifth generation Kindle Paperwhite brings a front-lit display with improved resolution, so I decided to upgrade again. I again face the choice of a WiFi-only or WiFi with Cellular model and opted again to save money by getting the WiFi-only model, plowing $40 of the $50 savings into the ad-free option, which provides attractive “off” screens instead of displaying ads when you turn the unit off. I’ve been using the $139 ad-free WiFi model for  over a week now, so I am ready to share my impressions.

The Paperwhite (left) is smaller but sturdier than the Kindle 3

Smaller Size but Similar Heft

My first impression of my new Kindle was surprise at its seemingly diminutive size. It is only slightly narrower than my third Kindle, but the loss of the keyboard makes it shorter, which made it seem smaller than I had expected it to be. The weight is down from 0.54 pounds (2.4 newtons) to 0.49 pounds (2.2 newtons), but the decreased size disguises the reduced weight in the newer unit’s slightly greater density, amplified by a more rigid body.

Sturdier Feel

Overall the new unit feels sturdier and less likely to bend and break. It is the best casing thus far. The first Kindle had a weird shape with horrible large side buttons which were too easily triggered, while the second one had much better buttons, but the case did show marked signs of wear after a year of use. My Kindle 3 was known to pop open at the seams on occasion when flexed, and the Amazon add-on cover was useless since it would change the pages or crash the Kindle when closed and transported. I could easily snap the Kindle 3 back together without any annoyance, but the new unit feels much more substantial. It fits down in my old Kindle 3 BUILT soft sleeve for travel. I don’t intend to put a skin on my Paperwhite since the back is now a matte soft-touch plastic and is comfortable to the touch, providing a good grip.

The Touchscreen

Tap zones on the Paperwhite

The Paperwhite is only available in a touchscreen version, and I was leery of that. I don’t enjoy having to wipe off the screens of my iPhone and iPad, which easily smear, but thankfully I have yet to encounter annoying smears on the Paperwhite. I had wondered how responsive the Kindle’s touchscreen might be compared to the Apple products, but the inherently slower speed of the e-ink display, although much faster than previous generations and far less annoying, disguises any lag.

Losing the hardware keyboard is no great loss since interacting with the touch screen controls is fast and easy. However, I do miss the dedicated hardware forward and back buttons on the sides of the unit. It isn’t hard to tap the right spot on the Paperwhite to change pages (and I do mean “right” when advancing a page, and that is not completely comfortable for me as a southpaw), but I liked the old way I could grip the bezel and just click the buttons underneath my grip to change pages without moving any fingers. The new bezel is wide enough for comfort, but I wouldn’t want it to be any narrower.

Frontlit Display is a Big Improvement

The Paperwhite has a front-lit display with several white LEDs at the bottom of the screen shooting light through waveguides across the screen. The text area is lit evenly enough for my taste, although you can easily perceive where the lights are because of uneven lighting at the bottom of the display below the text. This is not annoying in use, and the lights greatly increase the perceived whiteness of the background and improve the contrast of the display. You can adjust the light level and turn it off, but the screen looks far better with having it on all of the time. I found a single light level which is comfortable for me both in a lit and an unlit room. And reading the Kindle in the dark is a new experience, since all of the previous models relied on ambient illumination.

The frontlit display is a big improvement

Silence, Please

My earlier Kindle had speakers and text-to-speech recognition, so it could read a book to me if the book’s publisher didn’t disallow it. But I almost never used that feature and won’t miss it, and I’ve never used a Kindle to listen to music or audiobooks since I always have my more capable iPhone at hand (with improved ear buds on the new iPhone 5).

Interface

I’m getting used to the changes in the interface design because of the touchscreen. When selecting something to read, the Paperwhite defaults to displaying the covers of books instead of a text listing, but I was able to switch it back to the list view, which I prefer. I leave the WiFi on all of the time, whereas on my Kindle 3 I would always manually turn the WiFi on and off to improve battery life. Thankfully the Paperwhite’s long battery life withstands both the frontlit display and always-on WiFi with aplomb and I have yet to recharge it despite hours of reading. This means WhisperSync can keep my Amazon-purchased books in sync across devices – when I’m not carrying my Kindle on the road I can instead read with my iPhone’s or iPad’s Kindle app, and those apps and the Paperwhite keep the books in sync when I switch devices, so I don’t have to hunt for where I left off. This was true for the Kindle 3, but didn’t work in practice because I kept its WiFi shut off.

Conclusion

So I’m very pleased with my Kindle Paperwhite, and the only change I would make, if I had my druthers, would be having dedicated page change buttons on its left and right sides. I’ll send off my Kindle 3 to a new life somewhere, as I did with my earlier Kindles. Unlike most electronics when they become obsolete, I can’t stand to throw away a Kindle – it would feel just as wrong as throwing away a good book!