The United Kingdom is considering legislation that would make it a criminal offense to lose a laptop containing unencrypted personal data. We have all heard the horror stories about laptops being lost or stolen that contain thousands of social security numbers, credit card data, or other personal information. Here’s an excerpt from the Computerworld UK article: [Deputy Information Commissioner David] Smith told the Lords constitution … Continue reading Protecting Data

Let’s say you’re planning to take the SAT Reasoning Test. If you’re a college-bound student in the United States, chances are good that you’ll either be taking this test or the ACT (or both) in order to get into college. This is a fairly high-stakes test. It’s only offered a few times per year, and due to college application deadlines, most students only have a … Continue reading Free SAT Prep Resources

I’ve heard Will Richardson speak a number of times, including twice last month. In his keynote addresses, he usually includes this: We have to figure out who we can trust. We can’t have our kids simply looking at something and accepting it. I know many of you have seen this. Martinlutherking.org. This is the stump site for people talking about information literacy. For those of … Continue reading Problem Number Three

This is an example of an album. Albums consist of one or more galleries. This is the extended version: [album=1,extend] … and this is the compact version: [album=1,compact] That’s all…. Continue reading An Album

Another test. A slideshow of me… And a single pic with a web2.0 effect… [singlepic=69,320,240,web20,] Continue reading Another Gallery Test

This should be a thumbnail list: Continue reading Gallery Test 1

Computers store information as binary digits. We frequently explain it like a light switch. A switch can be “on” or “off”. So that switch can store two values. We represent these as numbers. A zero is “off” and a one is “on.” This is a bit. If we put two bits together, we can store up to four values (00, 01, 10, 11). If we … Continue reading Details

I’ve been struggling lately with situations where we seem to be using technology for its own sake. Sometimes, it seems like we use technology just to show we’re using technology, or to show that we’re beeing innovative, or cutting edge. But sometimes, technology just makes things more complicated than they really need to be, or it provides a small benefit for an enormous cost of … Continue reading Because We Can

We’ve been using linear text for centuries. Ever since written language became — well — written, we’ve been stringing words together into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into stories or essays or arguments. It’s very familiar. Pick up a book. Start at page one. Read every word, in order, until you get to the end. It’s easy. About 45 years ago, people started … Continue reading Click Here

You’ve probably noticed that California is on fire. At the moment, there are ten active wildfires. Half a million acres have burned, claiming seven lives, destroying 1600 homes, and displacing almost a million people. Radio station KPBS in San Diego switched formats to 24-hour fire coverage last Sunday. The residents in their broadcast area needed timely, specific, detailed information that didn’t fit in the format … Continue reading The Spirit of Radio

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I needed to write about this. When you want to copy things from one place to another on the computer, copy/paste is a common way to get that done. I can copy some text out of an email and paste it into a Word document. Or I can copy some text from a web page and paste it … Continue reading Paste Special

The Linux Experiment continues, and I realized I haven’t provided an update in a couple weeks. I LOVE: Firefox. It works just as well as it does in Windows. Once I got Flash working, I haven’t had any trouble with it at all. Frankly, this surprised me a bit. I thought there would be more problems than there really are. Thunderbird. Same thing. It just … Continue reading Linux Project Status