After countless Covid-19/Corona Virus meetings across nearly all aspects of my life my dark sense of humor won’t let me rest until I do something fun and share it. So here it is. Covid-19 Response Meeting Bingo!
Enjoy!
You may find yourself in a situation where you need to start teaching on-line soon. If you are a classroom teacher who uses PowerPoint you are in luck! You can add audio content to your slides and then post the presentation for students. Here’s a demo video that walks you through the process of adding audio content to slides and two methods for saving your presentation to use.
Here’s a link to a list of inexpensive microphones that would be helpful for recording lectures. I use the SAMSON Go Mic USB at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001R76D42 and it works well, but you may have better luck with one of these USB Microphones under $50
I’ve started podcasting with my son about RPGs. We are tackling topics related to being a new GM and also talking about our favorite RPGs and pop culture stuff. Head over to https://jmskoda5.skoda.com and look for Set The Table.
Today I cancelled my Kindle Unlimited and Audible subscriptions. The latter because I’m not using audio books as frequently as I once did and the former because Amazon adds and removed content to the unlimited library in a similar fashion to Netflix. I don’t see the value in maybe having something I like to read. I’d rather own the book and not a license to maybe see the book when Amazon feels like it. I wonder if a market exists for devices that allow you to interact with digital content that you own. It would be a huge up hill battle to make such a company and try to compete with the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google.
After migrating to the Note 4 from the iPhone a few years back I decided to try the Galaxy Tab S 3 as a replacement for my aging iPad. I figured that the Samsung phone was an able replacement for the iPhone, why not the S 3?
It’s been two years now with the S3 and I’ve nearly stopped using my laptop. Everything I need to do works via the S3 with the keyboard cover. I can access Office 365, run openVPN, and interact with machines via ssh. I do miss some of the games I purchased on the iPad but I doubt there’s anything that can draw me back to the Apple ecosystem now.
I’ve been in a few places where teamwork dries up. I’m not sure why it happens, but when it does the results are usually pretty bad. For some reason across the entire enterprise people just stop being kind to one another. Sometimes they hide behind rules and policies and stop trying to help each other. “I’m sorry I’d like to email you a heads up about situation X but my supervisor has to approve any inter-departmental emails now.” is an example. Sometimes they don’t share information because they worry it will be used against them. Sometimes they just don’t consider their fellow workers because they are too self focused or stressed out.
I wonder if senior leaders see this happening from their vantage point? How does one see friction in an organization?
My long delay in posting is somewhat attributable to my discovery of the Neverwinter MMO on PS4 and then on PC. I really enjoy playing MMOs on the console.
WoW was great and fun and I spent way too much time playing that game, but the console MMOs are great because they have less options for spells and actions. I don’t need macros and a qwerty keyboard to play. All the important things are mapped to a set of buttons and everything else is left out.
This Father’s day I had the rare treat of going to the Origins Game Fair. I really enjoy Origins and should probably consider attending more of the con rather than making a Sunday exhibit hall run for deals. Don’t get me wrong, the Sunday deal hunt is a time honored tradition passed down by my friend Rocky and this year I scored a most excellent deal. I am wondering I shouldn’t have sat in on a Pathfinder 2 demo session just to see what changed. I really would like to avoid the need to buy version 2 materials since I’ve got a nice original Pathfinder collection going already and I like the system as is.
Maybe next summer I’ll go for a few days…
I have been using a *NIX system for a few decades now and it seems to become more challenging as time goes by to teach people about linux command line. I cannot tell if I’m turning into a crumudgeon or if there has been a fundamental shift in the mentality of computer users, especially new system administrators. Is learning a list of useful commands just not done today? Are people happy to use an interface to accomplish most things and then just go without advanced features? I don’t know, but I do know it seems harder now to teach command line usage than it was 5 years ago.
My new HP Spectre laptop is good, but the touch pad is huge and the linux palm detection or turn off the trackpad when typing setting doesn’t work well. For a few months I had to type slowly and carefully in order to not send the mouse across the screen or worse, move the cursor in vim while trying to code.
Here’s the magic, xinput
In a shell use xinput –list to list out the devices providing input to the GUI. Find the overly sensitive trackpad’s number and then disable it with the command xinput disable 14
To make life even easier I’ve added the following aliases to my .login for easy toggling between a live or dead trackpad:
alias padon xinput enable `xinput --list | grep "Synaptics TouchPad" | sed -e 's/.*id=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'` alias padoff xinput disable `xinput --list | grep "Synaptics TouchPad" | sed -e 's/.*id=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'`
