SteveBentley

Of course the reason for the new shaped coin is you can use a spanner to get it out of George Osborne's hand

Glad it was a success, just a shame you couldn't get out of the new invitations for other events Having done a few of these and a few conference presentations, a couple of techniques I've found useful (YMMV) especially in longer talks like this - if you can get hold of some voting pads use them. Breaks up your monologue, gets the audience thinking a bit and gives you a breather from talking. Also if you're explaining something where there is a recognised authority on the subject there's bound to be a video online of them explaining it - play that as part of the presentation rather than explaining yourself. You get a few moments to gather your thoughts, the audience get to hear it from the horse's mouth. Like the voting pads, this can reset the attention span timer. I also recommend using screen recordings rather than live demonstrations of software things - much less likely to go pear shaped on the day and you can cut down the tedious looking at status bar bits.

Ahh I miss those days, when you could add extra network connections to a room with just a bit of coax and a T piece.

In 1999 I was doing the placement year of my degree, mainly in web development, in a different department of the same uni, where I got a job after graduating (but doing a lot more than just the website) and have been ever since. Strangely enough I was back in my old department yesterday. They are thinking of buying some kit that we've had for a while and, they wanted a demo and to know how we'd used it. Very strange doing a presentation with three of your old lecturers in the audience!

Take a look at the FilmOn private channel for Roku - that has a lot of UK channels and I believe it has some kind of cloud PVR functionality

Working fine on my Roku 2 (the Now TV box is a cut down Roku) although it takes several seconds for the pictures to appear at the start of playback - sound is there straight away.

I read somewhere that Deal or No Deal originally used Excel's random function to allocate the amounts of money into the boxes. Somebody spotted that there was a pattern emerging whereby after a proportion of the boxes were revealed you could predict what was in the rest, because Excel is pseudo-random, not random.

MPs can't be sacked.

That would explain why I wasn't able to find the original model on sale anywhere - had one for a while and wanted some for Christmas presents.

Dyslexia and Meares-Irlen Syndrome are not one size fits all - hence why well intentioned things like printing everything on yellow paper can make matters worse for some people - the shade has to be quite specific. It's no surprise that this font works for some people and not for others.

It's hard to see where Twitter's revenue comes from - a few quid for promoted tweets here and there is about it, unless I'm missing something.

It's Exacta Weather, same source as the Express's usual nonsense. See BBC - Blogs - Weather - What's behind the 'coldest winter for 100 years' headline?

I think Southport has (or had) what is claimed to be England's smallest pub.

Barcodes are a lot easier than they look - to produce them you just need the right font (in theory) and to scan them, hand held USB barcode scanners present themselves to the PC as a keyboard, so anywhere you can type, you can scan a barcode.

What is the benefit to a student of using your email service? Is it a solution waiting for a problem or are there genuine benefits to using it?

Modals are also a bloody awful user experience on mobile devices, especially when (mis)used for adverts and you have to play hunt the close button.

This is why we have standards. If you design your site to require features which are additional to the standards, you can't complain too much when it doesn't don't work in every browser. I would argue that a website that doesn't have at least the basic functionality working properly in a standards compliant browser is what is unfit for purpose.

Ah, I wondered if it was this weekend, I saw some aircraft in formation fly over the M61 as I was heading to Preston. Been a few times, usually a really stressful journey because the sat-nav can't cope with the road closures and I don't have any local knowledge whatsoever.

Not sure it's a wheel that's worth reinventing - I think the first line of your post is a pretty succinct description of a blog! Use Wordpress - I think there are extensions to do LDAP authentication - and then display its RSS feed on your intranet, a fairly trivial thing to do and there are plenty of pre-written widgets.

I haven't heard any rumours about Bill Roache since he was found Not Guilty.

Absolutely. And in many respects if he isn't guilty of anything it may be to his advantage for there to be an investigation, which would find no evidence and kill the rumours rather than letting the speculation drag on.

Apparently police are looking for a locked trunk containing a crying talking sleeping walking living doll.

My Superhub 2 is pretty reliable to be honest.

I think having a balance of learning techniques is a health thing - if everybody was flipping everything there would be legitimate issues with workload and how much pre-reading students were expected to do. But that's the nice thing about the technique, you can use it for very small bits of the overall curriculum - you can start by flipping that one hour of really boring, dry theory that is as tedious to teach as for the students to sit through.

We've been doing quite a bit of work on the flipped classroom, I think the key thing is that this isn't really a technology thing, it's about the pedagogy. Lecturing (which I readily accept isn't the way in which schools tend to teach, I work in HE) has always been a compromise, there is plenty of published evidence that students learn more from reading than from listening to somebody drone on for an hour, but the lack of access to sufficient books has meant lecturing had to continue. Now we have this thing called the internet getting access to reading material, videos and other material for students to study isn't difficult. I frequently refer people to this 1981 paper which makes the case against didactic lectures quite eloquently https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/20reasons.html