hey all,
Today and tomorrow are Japanese National holidays, so for today at least I'm relaxing at home. I went over to a coffee shop this morning and got some typing done for one of my Eiken Pre-2 classes, and I also got some more work done on a lesson plan on the six kingdoms.
Tomorrow, Michi and I head to Aomori, where a friend of hers is getting married. Technically speaking, I'm not invited because I only know the bride and the bride is only allowed to invite girls, as the groom is only allowed to invite boys. Anyway, there is a castle about 40 minutes away in Hirosaki that I'll go see while Michi is busy. After the wedding, we'll do a little walking/hiking around a lake trail that is supposed to be really beautiful. Although here in Tokyo the Sakura season has already passed, in Aomori it will still be going.
Michi has been doing a better job of wearing her ankle brace, but I hope the walking will not be too much stress on her ankle.
In other news, I seem to have gotten Tagged Frog working better. I gave up hope on Nemo Docs. Any program that can't even complete a proper string search is too dumb for me (i.e., that can't even find all the files that have "Jackendoff" in the title). Even Windows Explorer can do that. For Tagged Frog, I think I was using some of the rules incorrectly, but now I have it set up OK.
Cheers,
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
ABM
hey all,
Tomorrow is Monday, but this is the first of those holidays known as Golden Week. Michi is taking a 2 day yoga class, so yes, I'm toughing it out. (Cue All By Myself by Celine Dion)
I've been messing around with the computer some. I finally got the printer setup on the new computer, for example. I've also been doing some typing for work. Two vocabulary quizzes set, questions for 5 essays typed up, plus a set of pictures going from the animal kingdom down to Home sapiens to show my AM class.
Cheers,
Tomorrow is Monday, but this is the first of those holidays known as Golden Week. Michi is taking a 2 day yoga class, so yes, I'm toughing it out. (Cue All By Myself by Celine Dion)
I've been messing around with the computer some. I finally got the printer setup on the new computer, for example. I've also been doing some typing for work. Two vocabulary quizzes set, questions for 5 essays typed up, plus a set of pictures going from the animal kingdom down to Home sapiens to show my AM class.
Cheers,
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Stupid and Stupider
hey all,
I've been trying to get a decent semantic desktop going, but have been unable to do it so far.
We all know by now the wonderful things that Gmail's labels let you do with emails. Of course it is impossible to surf the internet without encountering lables or tags everywhere. I was using Tagged Frog to do this on my computer, except that it is retarded. Now I am trying out Nemo Docs, but it too is retarded.
Say you have a bunch of pics in a folder named Japan. But inside that folder, you have lots of other folders (Yokohama, Hakone_Random_Date, etc). Tagged Frog supposedly allows you to create a rule that says: give all the files in folder X the tag X. You can set this to be recursive, so that Japan pics all get the tag Japan, Hakone pics all get the tag Hakone, etc. But these tags only show up in your tag manager if you run a manual scan and tag. That is, the automatic tagging is useless.
Nemo Docs has similar problems, but more extreme. If I do a search for files that have SEMANTICS in the file name, it only returns a certain number of those files. Plus you can't set up any autotagging rules, so you might as well go through each and every file and tag it one at a time. In my Linguistics folder, I have 1,700+ files, and well more than 6,000 photos in my Pictures folder, and another 1,700+ music files. It would be more cost effective to hire some poor 3rd world tech savvy drone to do it for me.
Tag2find doesn't seem to work on this computer, and neither does TaggTool. iTag looked nice, but it has a limit of 3 tags per file for the free version and is designed primarily for photos.
Yes, Picasa will also put tags on your photos, and also let you manage the people, locations, etc associated with them, but what about the .doc, .docx, .ods, PDFs, and other files? Sure, Windows Media Player and others will help you manage the tags on your OGGs, MP3, and WAV files, but what about your AVIs, MPEGs, MP4s, and WMVs?
My point is that I want a program that will let me tag or label any file, and that will store and make searchable all that metadata in the same place. I don't want to have to use Picasa to find that one particular picture just because the tags on it are unavailable to Explorer, etc. This shouldn't be a difficult proposition, and yet I have yet to see it implemented on Windows effectively. After all, I can easily add a label to this blog post.
Cheers,
I've been trying to get a decent semantic desktop going, but have been unable to do it so far.
We all know by now the wonderful things that Gmail's labels let you do with emails. Of course it is impossible to surf the internet without encountering lables or tags everywhere. I was using Tagged Frog to do this on my computer, except that it is retarded. Now I am trying out Nemo Docs, but it too is retarded.
Say you have a bunch of pics in a folder named Japan. But inside that folder, you have lots of other folders (Yokohama, Hakone_Random_Date, etc). Tagged Frog supposedly allows you to create a rule that says: give all the files in folder X the tag X. You can set this to be recursive, so that Japan pics all get the tag Japan, Hakone pics all get the tag Hakone, etc. But these tags only show up in your tag manager if you run a manual scan and tag. That is, the automatic tagging is useless.
Nemo Docs has similar problems, but more extreme. If I do a search for files that have SEMANTICS in the file name, it only returns a certain number of those files. Plus you can't set up any autotagging rules, so you might as well go through each and every file and tag it one at a time. In my Linguistics folder, I have 1,700+ files, and well more than 6,000 photos in my Pictures folder, and another 1,700+ music files. It would be more cost effective to hire some poor 3rd world tech savvy drone to do it for me.
Tag2find doesn't seem to work on this computer, and neither does TaggTool. iTag looked nice, but it has a limit of 3 tags per file for the free version and is designed primarily for photos.
Yes, Picasa will also put tags on your photos, and also let you manage the people, locations, etc associated with them, but what about the .doc, .docx, .ods, PDFs, and other files? Sure, Windows Media Player and others will help you manage the tags on your OGGs, MP3, and WAV files, but what about your AVIs, MPEGs, MP4s, and WMVs?
My point is that I want a program that will let me tag or label any file, and that will store and make searchable all that metadata in the same place. I don't want to have to use Picasa to find that one particular picture just because the tags on it are unavailable to Explorer, etc. This shouldn't be a difficult proposition, and yet I have yet to see it implemented on Windows effectively. After all, I can easily add a label to this blog post.
Cheers,
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Classes and Computer Again
hey all,
It seems that plan C is also a bust. I tried reformatting the HDD from the new computer, but the results are the same. It could be that the CPU or the graphics card have finally bit the dust, but I kinda doubt that, since I was able to see the Fedora and Kubuntu loading screens come up and get to work...But after a minute, I'd get a screen that was half white and half black. In any case, I might take the HDD and give myself another storage possibility and try to sell the rest of the components in Akihabara this weekend. Whatever is wrong with it, it doesn't seem worth the effort of getting it working again.
Classes are moving along. My AM class is more or less stable. I'm still experimenting with different techniques, but Positive Framing, No Opt Out, Do It Again, and Strong Voice are becoming my combo of choice. These amount to setting a positive tone through focusing on the students who are doing what they should and "narrating a success story" ("I've got two students writing, now I've got 4 students writing, and now I've got everyone writing...Good focus everyone"), not allowing a student to not answer, practicing something again if it is not done correctly the first time, and maintaining a formal, controlled register and bearing at all times.
PM classes are becoming more stable, but I'm still trying to figure out how to cope with teaching a different level basically every day, and I'm still adjusting to the level difference between my current classes and my previous class. One technique I'm going to try out for the PM class is teacher generated summaries for reading comprehension. These amount to restating and shortening the original passages, but with key words left blank, so the students have to do some work to fill them in. I'm thinking a word box and the occasional MC question would also be good additions.
There is a three day holiday, then two days of work, then a four day holiday, so there'll be lots of homework to do.
Cheers,
It seems that plan C is also a bust. I tried reformatting the HDD from the new computer, but the results are the same. It could be that the CPU or the graphics card have finally bit the dust, but I kinda doubt that, since I was able to see the Fedora and Kubuntu loading screens come up and get to work...But after a minute, I'd get a screen that was half white and half black. In any case, I might take the HDD and give myself another storage possibility and try to sell the rest of the components in Akihabara this weekend. Whatever is wrong with it, it doesn't seem worth the effort of getting it working again.
Classes are moving along. My AM class is more or less stable. I'm still experimenting with different techniques, but Positive Framing, No Opt Out, Do It Again, and Strong Voice are becoming my combo of choice. These amount to setting a positive tone through focusing on the students who are doing what they should and "narrating a success story" ("I've got two students writing, now I've got 4 students writing, and now I've got everyone writing...Good focus everyone"), not allowing a student to not answer, practicing something again if it is not done correctly the first time, and maintaining a formal, controlled register and bearing at all times.
PM classes are becoming more stable, but I'm still trying to figure out how to cope with teaching a different level basically every day, and I'm still adjusting to the level difference between my current classes and my previous class. One technique I'm going to try out for the PM class is teacher generated summaries for reading comprehension. These amount to restating and shortening the original passages, but with key words left blank, so the students have to do some work to fill them in. I'm thinking a word box and the occasional MC question would also be good additions.
There is a three day holiday, then two days of work, then a four day holiday, so there'll be lots of homework to do.
Cheers,
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
New Computer
hey all,
This is being typed from my new computer. It's pretty nice, although the Japanese OS is turning out to be a pain in more ways than one. For example, even after going out of my way to download the English versions of programs, like Chrome, Gimp, etc, they look at the language of the OS and decide to switch to Japanese.
I did manage to get all my files off of the old laptop (including my bookmarks, which were buried in C:\Users\Hunter\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox...places.sqlite, you get the idea), but my project of turning it into a Linux box hasn't really progressed too far. I downloaded Kubuntu, but despite getting a loading screen, nothing seems to happen. I'm currently downloading Kororaa and Fedora, so we'll see if I have any more luck with those. If not, I'll try reformatting the HDD from this computer, then using the Linux install discs again. If that doesn't work, I'm selling it for scrap parts.
Today is also Michi's birthday. I'll have to leave out how old she's turning, but she had a really busy day which included traveling to Sendai.
(Later) Fedora didn't work either, so on to plan C.
Classes need to be updated too, but that is a separate post.
Cheers,
This is being typed from my new computer. It's pretty nice, although the Japanese OS is turning out to be a pain in more ways than one. For example, even after going out of my way to download the English versions of programs, like Chrome, Gimp, etc, they look at the language of the OS and decide to switch to Japanese.
I did manage to get all my files off of the old laptop (including my bookmarks, which were buried in C:\Users\Hunter\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox...places.sqlite, you get the idea), but my project of turning it into a Linux box hasn't really progressed too far. I downloaded Kubuntu, but despite getting a loading screen, nothing seems to happen. I'm currently downloading Kororaa and Fedora, so we'll see if I have any more luck with those. If not, I'll try reformatting the HDD from this computer, then using the Linux install discs again. If that doesn't work, I'm selling it for scrap parts.
Today is also Michi's birthday. I'll have to leave out how old she's turning, but she had a really busy day which included traveling to Sendai.
(Later) Fedora didn't work either, so on to plan C.
Classes need to be updated too, but that is a separate post.
Cheers,
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