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.
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.
This is a little note about a wonderful extension for Gnome (a popular desktop environment for Linux). Out of the box, Gnome is a bit light on features and settings. Enabling Tweaks and Extensions allows for a lot of customization.
A recent discovery is the extension Caffeine. There’s very little to it. All it does is put a little coffee cup indicator in your top menu bar. When activated, you get some steam coming out of the cup, and your computer screen will never go to sleep. When it’s deactivated, it does nothing.
(For reference, also visible is Dropbox and another Gnome extension that enables clipboard history.)
This may seem small, but when I’m recording a podcast I am not doing much with my computer, but I certainly need it to stay awake. For a long time I would have to either wiggle my mouse every few minutes, or go into my power settings and set sleep to Never. Neither of these are elegant solutions. Just clicking the little icon in my menu is much simpler. It’s little ideas like this extension that allow my devices to go from a tool I’m working around to one that works for me.
I’m sure very few people reading this run Linux (or have much desire to), but most platforms have similar little applications that can increase ease of use. I suggest thinking about what things bother you on a somewhat regular basis, and search for a solution. Odds are someone else is having the same annoyance.
A theater buff friend of mine visited this past weekend, and convinced me to go see a musical in the area called Fly. It is based on the story of Peter Pan, and focused on the serious idea of what it means to grow up. While that is always a main theme with any Peter Pan adaptation, this show took a slightly darker angle, with more adult humor present. I thoroughly enjoyed this production, but it made me think more about different types of entertainment I consume and the ways I judge them in my head.
I played my new text adventure, Coffee and Donuts, with Jack and Mikhail the other week. It didn’t end up going that well, but the process of having something end a bit poorly was a positive learning experience. There’s a lot to consider when trying to pace a game, create puzzles that are satisfying at the target level, and creating situations that are easy to engage with. I think I had some very good thoughts on this one (I’m particularly proud of the map I created), but the execution of pacing and some puzzles left a lot to be desired.
You can read a little bit more about it on the OHAC website.
And, here is the PDF of the game for anyone interested (it’s also posted on the OHAC website, but I’ve been busy with guests so I’m being a bit lazy with this post.)
In my next adventure of programming projects, I decided to install Android Studio and play around with app development. To start, I have no particular thing in mind, I’m just getting my head wrapped around the structural complexity of an app. It’s a far more involved software situation than anything I’ve dealt with. I’m following this tutorial put together by Google Codelabs. It definitely assumes some familiarity with programming, but I’ve found it fairly easy to follow with simple explanations. Overall it’s been a fun task to play around with. The biggest shift is accepting the number of extremely high-level commands and classes that exist, compared to the (relatively) low-level projects I’ve done before. A lot is done for you in terms of graphical design right away, and the tools seem very nice to work with. It’s a fun shift in mindset that I look forward to exploring more.
I’ve watched the Super Bowl every year for as long as I can remember, and this year was no different. However, this year gave me a slightly different perspective. First, the Patriots were not playing and that was exciting; it’s nice to see an entirely different set of teams competing. Second, I had a conversation with my roommate the day prior that required to contextualize the Super Bowl and its cultural impact.
I saw the film 1917 the other week. I had seen the trailer at least a dozen times before, as well as a two-minute feature in a theater about the cinematography. Despite all the exposure and a fairly decent amount of knowledge about the film, I still thoroughly enjoyed it and and would highly recommend it to anyone who isn’t put off by war movies in general. The movie is excellent on its own. However, what it made me think about the creative process was what stayed with me the most.
