Through a wonderful little game called TeXnique, I became aware of the online typesetting system KaTeX. Unlike MathJax, which is immensely finicky, slow, and has limited support for proper LaTeX, the KaTeX system supports scaling of rendered images, automatically detects the text color of my site and adapts as necessary, and has a fuller implementation of LaTeX commands.
Continue reading “The Gold Standard for Math Typesetting on the Internet”Update: Animal Crossing Takes Hold
This is a quick update, as I’ll be traveling over the weekend and don’t have much time to write a longer post.
In short, Animal Crossing has captured my mind. It’s a cleverly simple game that lets you focus on whatever grabs your attention. While my initial weeding endeavors have fizzled out, I’m very much invested in trying to obtain every fish and bug I can over time. Fashion and interior decoration don’t excite me overly much (I probably only have about 7 things in my house), but I’m playing the game to get to the point where I can have free reign over the island.
It’s a fun game, and I get it now.
Animal Crossing: Weed Yourself to Victory
I was finally convinced to start playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’d been hesitant to give it a try for a few reasons. First, Nintendo games are expensive. Second, I wasn’t sure I’d actually enjoy it. And third, if I did enjoy it, I wasn’t sure I’d want to sink time into it.
Having played it for a few hours today and successfully paid off my initial expenses to Tom Nook, I totally get the appeal. No, it will never be thrilling. But it’s a simple “life simulator” that you can enjoy to whatever detail you prefer. For me, I’m not necessarily interested in the things I can get. I’m currently motivated by the Nook Miles achievements. I’ll be a big bug-catcher and fish-fisher. The first thing I did was clear my island of weeds, and I intend to do so tomorrow. I found out quickly that if I just suspend my own judgement and allow myself to appreciate the straightforward charm of the game, it’s a relaxing way to pass the time.
Of course, these are all first impressions. I have no idea what staying power it will have in my life, but there’s a large catalog of fish and bugs to find, so that will almost certainly keep me going back every so often. I think the best aspect of the game is that it isn’t any sort of survival or sociology simulator; I don’t need to eat or drink, as best I can tell I’m unlikely to upset my island neighbors. I can focus on myself, do what needs to be done, and that’s it. It’s a game that simplifies activities that can already be considered calming and rewarding. Plus, they buy weeds. I’m going to fund my house using weeds and conch shells, or at least that’s my plan right now.
Personal Organization Sucks
Work has been getting crazier in the past week or two. We are now planning on being online for a while, and the curriculum work that has resulted is growing rapidly. There are many courses to rewrite as we experiment, on the fly, to figure out what tools we want to use (or avoid). I’ve been put in charge of these experiments, and it’s a much larger logistical task than I’ve ever had to deal with. It pales in comparison to what others have done, but it’s quite a doozy on my end.
Continue reading “Personal Organization Sucks”iPadOS Cursor Support
iPadOS 13.4 was released a couple weeks ago, and with it came full support for cursor devices. You can now connect a mouse or trackpad and have a small circular cursor that acts like a mouse for your iPad. Certainly many people won’t find this useful, but it was really the missing piece that allows my iPad to go from a device mainly useful for handwritten notes and media consumption to a full-fledged computing device. I can fairly comfortably navigate 90% of what I do on a daily basis. While I still prefer my regular computers for podcasting, and also prefer the larger screen real-estate, the iPad now allows me to perform my regular work functions.
In my estimation, there are two things that cursor support brings that completely change the game: hover states, and text selection.
Most of my work is done through browsers. All of the content editing I do is through our browser-based CMS, and a lot of navigation and editing tasks require the ability to hover over something to see more options. This is a well-known paradigm in the computing world: Hover over a menu, see options related to the top-level item, then click on the option you want. This was completely missing from iPadOS; if you used mobile Safari, then the iPad would try to be clever and say one tap gets you to a “hover” state, and another tap lets you select. But this was not universal, and failed in most situations I find myself in at work. However, now the cursor has a complete hover state, making it very usable.
Text selection has been frustrating on all mobile devices for a very long time. You have to try and remember what number of taps you need, where to tap, and what to do after. The OS is guessing at what you want, and while it has improved, it doesn’t always get it correct. While dealing with a whole paragraph, or even a single word, isn’t too bad, editing a few characters here or there is extremely painful. The Apple Pencil has helped with precise selection, but the whole situation has been limited by the text selection paradigm that iOS has chosen. The new cursor support gives a new look to the familiar “pipe/I” selection cursor seen in all text-editing situations on a computer. You can now finally precisely place your cursor where you want it, and select any number of characters without fiddling around.
Overall, this has been an amazing upgrade for my use of the iPad. Definitely check it out.
PDF Tools for Teaching
As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality.
At our learning centers, we use a Windows-only piece of software called Drawboard. It’s a pretty nice piece of software with nice annotation tools. It could be a bit more fully-featured (making straight lines or shapes is rather difficult/impossible), but our teachers are used to it. However, it’s $12 and we can’t expect teachers to buy it. Furthermore, all of our teachers are working from home, and many will be using Mac (or even Linux, believe it or not!) So, this isn’t an option. Luckily during my time training, I got some recommendations from a few resourceful teachers.
First is Xodo. It’s a browser-based app where you can import and mark up PDF documents. That’s really all there is to say. It has the same features our instructors are familiar with, and works pretty fine. I actually had some trouble getting it to be as responsive, but I haven’t heard that complaint from others, so it might be specific to me.
Another is bitpaper. This one I really like. It has collaboration features (although teachers likely wouldn’t use them), but it’s much sleeker than Xodo in my opinion. It has a more “iPad” feel to it, with the tools in the bottom very similar to those in the Apple Notes app. It has basic straight-line drawing and keyboard shortcuts.
I’m still working on properly vetting these before we can officially recommend as a company, but they all pass the smell test for me. Even if you aren’t a teacher and just want simple PDF tools, I think Xodo is a good place to start for a lot of mark-up, and bitpaper is excellent for easy collaboration.
Zoom
My company is using Zoom, as are many universities and public school systems, to teach online. I’m hoping at some point, when the fires are put out, I can provide some of my own suggestions for using Zoom that have come up during my time dealing with the transition. For now, another short post.
The biggest thing for us is being able to still run interesting activities that are engaging. Just because this new medium assumes lecture-style classes on the surface, there’s a lot that can still be done with a bit of creativity.
On Fire
I lost track of getting a blog post written, but it has been a hectic week. This is my first true things are on fire situation at work with the Coronavirus. Since I work in education, and we have in-person academies where students take classes, it has been a massive effort by a lot of people to figure out what to do. We are switching to online classes through Zoom, and I have been declared the resident Zoom trainer and expert. I enjoy learning new technology, but doing so this quickly under this pressure has been quite a lot. It’s still not all over, but I figured I would write a post before the week was officially over to at least stay within my “updates weekly” tagline.