RichardRadio

I managed to get Riven the 1997 Point and Click adventure game working today. It only works with Quicktime 2 so you have to mess about a bit getting it to work on XP.

Rather than waste the whole day playing, I did a little bit of reading on Riven and Myst (perhaps its more famous predecessor). Seems like recently the code has been open sourced. Makes sense because the nature of the game’s simple (but stunning) interface lends itself to online playing – you could almost program the game in Powerpoint, you move between a series of photographs the interactive pieces eg. levers and doors are very simple animations.

In 1997 on a 800×600 screen the photograph quality images and beautiful soundscapes were quite a thing.

Doing a Powerpoint version of the school was a project that I dreamed up a couple of years ago for the kids at school. Now we have the gifted and talented kids turning up on Thursday night, I might have to dust that plan off.

That and keeping my eye on development of independent Riven games based on the opens source code.

See 30 Second TV advert for Riven. This animation is actually an unusual part of the game like a video reward for when you beat a level and go up to the next one. The game play is more sedate.

Wondering why my new XP install has already filled an 8GB partition, it turns out that Adobe Acrobat 9 takes up 210 MB of disk space. Astonished that a pdf reader could be so large, I googled “Adobe Reader bloat”.  For an entertaining and informative read check out http://blog.micropledge.com/2008/07/adobe-reader-9/

Foxit is a good alternative. I also downloaded Foxits pdf creator (unfortuneatly not free – the evaluation copy leaves a saved by Foxit message). When experimented printing pdfs from a couple of browsers I noticed that Safari created a 1.2 MB file whilst Opera made a 78 KB file - a factor of 15. Add that on to Safari’s slow startup time Its bye bye Safari too. What was it that made me think that apple would write good PC software? I have no idea.

Only remains to see if I can unbloat Service Pack 3

Reading Toxic Childhood produced some kind of epiphany for me. It has clarified so many of the questions I have had in my head not only about teaching but also how I view the UK and modern industrialised soceities.

It tells us why teaching is hard and getting harder. And that is surprisingly freeing. Our failures in the class room are not because we teachers are lazy or inadequate there are actually powerful forces at work in soceity that make it a difficult – but not an impossible job.

We’ve always worried and moaned about previous generations and its difficult to distinguish the messiness of forming young minds with systematic change in soceity.

Once we allow ourselves to realise we CANNOT actually hold back the tide on our own, we can look to solutions that allow us to group together to solve the problem. And a book like this is a good start. What a secondary school teacher (me) should actually do is not really the subject of the book.  Nor what school leaders should do, but I do feel that they should read it.

One small help would be to give parenting skills classes for 16 year olds. I think this could be easily achieved. But this is a small part of the solutions that Sue Palmer offers. Ideally initiatives should come from the parents. But if they do come to schools and say help us? Schools need to be ready.

I just successfully used a Gparted Live CD to resize my C: drive that I made too small over three years ago when I installed Windows XP.  I used to make the partition small (5.5 GB) for speed, XP installed in just over 3 GB at that time, but what with Service Pack 2 and Office updates I later came up against drive capacity problems.  I’ve been avoiding solving this problem for a while. Partition resizing could of course go drastically wrong.

So Phew.

Other than the stability of the drive, what was it that forced me to action? Well its a convoluted chain of events that ends in Audible audio books. My iPod died so I can’t listen to the books in the car. The only way I have is to burn the books onto CD as the iTunes plugin allows you to do.  I haven’t yet found another way of listening to these DRM protected books on my other non compliant mp3 players. The lack of drive space caused the CD burn to fail as there wasn’t enough space to create the CD audio cache.

An interesting result is that if you leave the CD in the drive iTunes will rip it again giving you, hey presto, DRM free mp3 files. So now I have 2 ways of listening in the car!

I’ve been playing with a lot of Linux distros over the summer. Once I’ve got an Mp3 player and media player that can play wmv and DVDs working and once flash video is configured, here is a list that follows of the stuff that needs to be installed.  I love the distros like Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) that has all of the above working out of the box.

Fspot or Picassa
GPaint
Google Earth
Inkscape or scribus
Kino (best of a poor bunch on linux)
Mame
OpenArena – Quake
Skype

Just had 3 hours of ICT with Year 9. They were pulled off timetable to do ICT catch up because they were seriously underperforming in the subject. The normal Year 9 problems apply: Kids spend more time messing about or socialising than working.

The three hour lesson with a different class grouping and for some a different teacher was successful.

Kids were engaged and keen to get the work done. More than one student thanked me at the end of the class – very unusual.

There was less poor behaviour than normal, I think because the class grouping had changed. Year 9 get really comfortable in their tutor groups and have got it down to a fine art how to push the boundaries collectively and be disruptive.

There are interesting implications for timetabling and project based learning – hmmm.

I visited Ladakh last year. Ladakh was opened up to tourism in the mid 1970s. As a child I remember visiting the village hall to see a slide show of a local mountaineer/traveller type who had visited, so the name of the country always stayed in my memory.

Because of the clear and recent change in policy Ladakh has been an interesting ‘test case’ of the effects of globalisation. Helena Norbert Hodge was a linguist studying Ladakhi folk songs in 1976 and she noted the effects of Westernisation on a culture that was largely harmonious both socially and ecologically. Her book Ancient Futures was an epiphany for me, it bought together in a logical framework so many things that I’ve observed on my travels and living in other countries (mainly Venezuela).

It seems that Bhutan is a generation behind Ladakh. Does this year’s move to democracy mean the begining of the end of the last Shangri La? Check out this video from (rather interesting) Current TV by Christof Putzel:

Lost in Democracy

Bhutan is different though. It is an autonomous state that is already famous for promoting Gross National Happiness before Gross Nation Product.

Also check out this podcast on Happiness (in Bhutan) By Michael Hawley of MIT. I remember listening it one night driving across the country to Norwich its from from IT Conversations.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail289.html