Working on the Wireless

A couple years ago, our high school principal purchased some laptops to use in the media center. Our media center is small, and frequently crowded, and there wasn’t room for more tables full of computers. Still, he wanted to accommodate as many students as possible. With the freedom of wireless technology, it seemed like a [...]

Physics is Phun

This week, one of our physics teachers requested that a physics simulation site be unblocked by our web filter. The site is Paul Falstad’s Math and Physics Applets, and it’s classified as a “personal page” and therefore blocked by the filter. Our teachers can request that sites be unblocked. Those requests go to a panel [...]

Managing My Digital Rights

I have four copies of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s the original vinyl, the vinyl picture disk (unopened, no less), the cassette version that I bought before I had a CD player but after I stopped listening to records, and the CD version. All are original, genuine copies, obtained legally. Why [...]

Wink!

I usually start my tech team meetings with a demonstration of some software, resource, or other tech-related concept. We had a meeting yesterday, but it’s been a busy week, and I was going to skip the demo. I didn’t have time to prepare anything, and there weren’t any resources jumping out screaming to be shown. [...]

Is it Time for OpenOffice?

In 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision, and its flagship product, Star Office. The following year, they took aim at Microsoft’s near-monopoly on the desktop productivity market by offering a free, open source version of the package, StarOffice 5.2. In my December, 2000 technology newsletter, I wrote: Sun Microsystems has decided to play Microsoft’s game [of [...]