FeedBlitz - EMail Blog and RSS Subscription Services

If you'd like to give your readers the option of subscribing to your posts by email instead of by RSS, FeedBlitz is a handy little tool. Ideally, of course, everyone would just get on the RSS bus, but the reality is that many people -- even people with a reasonable degree of technical savvy -- are slow to adopt changes. Feedblitz is a nice way to be a little more inclusive of the dawdlers.

Color Fields Colr Pickr

Yet another innovative Flickr tool appeared on my radar today. Color Fields Colr Pickr allows you to search within a given color for photo's that feature your preferred color in some way. I don't do a lot of design work, but I can see how handy such a tool would be.

Small, Fast, Clean, and FREE PDF Reader for Everyday Use

If you use a Tablet PC, notebook, or other wireless device running a Windows OS, you probably get annoyed having to open a PDF. I find myself always seeking out another format rather than wait the extra twenty seconds while my Gateway M275 Tablet struggles to launch Adobe Acrobat and then the corresponding file. Now there's Foxit Reader, a lightweight alternative to Acrobat. For as many PDF's as our library daabases offer without alternative, I figure my net time-savings for life will be about six months.

While we're on the topic, if you're similarly tired of the memory-pig that is iTunes, Winamp now plays AAC files.

Flock

Monkey Bites has an interesting article on a new browser built for the newest permutations of the Web, commonly called Web 2.0 . Flock is only in Beta, but includes such features as Flickr, del.icio.us, and as-you-browse blogging with the additional option of tagging content for later blogging. It also has a searchable history and RSS feed discovery.

NYT Award Winner, Best Blogger for a Mid-size Paper, Visits Hardcore Ambiguity Country

 
Award-winning blogger Joel Mathis -- famous for Cup o'Joel -- and his more attractive counterpart, Jocelyn, visited (physically, actually) Hardcore Ambiguity territory last week. His advice to me was to include more pictures. You can read more about the nationally-known blogger at NPR. Oh, and that's Joel on the right. You can tell by the subtle glow of success that surrounds him.

And yes. Yes this was a shameless attempt to increase traffic by association.

The American Thinker

When even I can tell the object in the photo is NOT a rocket, let alone one that can be launched from a Predator drone, things have gotten pretty bad at the New York Times. The American Thinker catches the Gray Lady in yet another botched attempt at contriving information to fit their worldview.

How to convert AVI to Flash

Jake Ludington's MediaLab blog has a nice tutorial on converting an AVI file to Flash. Imagine the possibilities! Convert entire lectures! Make instructional videos out of anything you can film! Adapt the Monkey-Smells-His-Poo video for pedagogical needs.

KDLT story

At long last, KDLT provided me a tape of the story they did. I'm disheartened that they so poorly understood what I was saying, but they did convey I was doing "something" new and it involves how I grade. That's something, I suppose. But you'll see from their title -- "Email Homework" -- that I failed to convey that macro-driven feedback and active rubrics had made a great difference.

I'll plug here for ATI's All-In-Wonder video cards, one of which, the 9600, allowed me to convert the footage from a VCR to a 10 meg download. File cleanup, conversion, and compression brought to you by Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker. Adobe Premier couldn't recognize any of the file types ATI offered. So, I'm enough of a man to say it, thank you Microsoft.

retrievr - search by sketch

Wow. This Flickr search tool, called Retrievr allows you to draw what the picture looks like -- sorta -- and search!