Creative Quarantine

Maybe artists and writers of centuries past had it right, that isolation and odd situations gives a creative surge. Being cooped up at home more than usual has led me to seek out more novelty, and with that has come a desire to create that novelty myself. Over the past weekend I messed around more with Garageband on my iPad, and wrote a small RPG (which I’ll post about once I play it this weekend.)

Having a hectic schedule due to work has also caused things to move around in my head. I’ve lost my routine for a while, and though I’m eager to reestablish it this upcoming week, having things shaken up has given me a lot to think about. Of course, implicit in all this is that I’m in a privileged position that allows me to take advantage of the current situation, and other people are not so lucky. But I am still happy to count the creative outcomes of this situation among my blessings.

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.

Caffeine (For my Computer)

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.

Seeing a Professional Musical – Fly

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.

Continue reading “Seeing a Professional Musical – Fly”

Coffee and Donuts

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.)

Playing with Android Development

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.