July 2019 – Technology Stuff

30 July 2019

Connectivity issues

I was in London today, at a venue on Southwark Street and I was surprised to have connectivity issues, not just with my home iPhone on the Three network, but also with my work phone on Vodafone.

I don’t know why the connections were so poor, certainly both phones had high signal bars. We were on the seventh floor, which I have found isn’t usually an issue, but today, poor bandwidth or sometimes non-existent bandwidth.

It didn’t help matters that the guest wifi wasn’t working either.

All was fine by the time I got to Paddington.

16 July 2019

Ten years later, it works….

On this day ten years ago I was trying really hard to read the this QR Code chocolate from that Andy Ramsden, who back then was working at the University of Bath. I think the chocolate was from a QR Codes workshop that Andy was running as part of a JISC programme. Doing a Google search unearthed this paper that he presented at the ALT Conference that same year.

Back then I failed miserably to read the code, despite using lots of different QR Code readers….

So I took a photograph instead and then ate the chocolate.

I even mentioned this in a blog post a few years ago about QR Codes on Cadbury chocolate bars.

It took a while to scan in the code as the foil packing and colours used on the QR Code made it difficult to capture the code. It reminded me of the chocolate QR Codes that the University of Bath made for the QR Codes project we did a few years back.

I think the issue back then was the contrast between the dark and white chocolate.

Today I wondered a bit….

So I used the in-built QR code reader in my iPhone and checked if it could read the QR code. Years ago you needed a unique app to read QR codes, today the iPhone camera has that feature built in, as do many Android phones.

So could my iPhone read this ten year old QR code, it could…

Yay!

Alas…. Though the QR Code works the website link it had encoded inside it is now dead and gone….

I wonder what it was all about?

5 July 2019

Going back in time for Windows

I quite enjoyed the tweets this week from Microsoft celebrating the 1985 initial release of Windows.

[tweet https://twitter.com/Windows/status/1146154842777407493/]

My first experience of Windows was some time later with Windows 3.0 and remembering the big advance that Windows 3.1 brought to computing. It was probably Windows 3.1 that really made me appreciate the affordances that technology could bring to teaching.

I remember the huge fanfare that was Windows 95 and what a step change it was from 3.1. We even had video now on Windows, though it was quite small.

I never really moved to Windows 98 and moved straight to Windows 2000 when I started a new job in 2001. Well the laptop I was provided with did use Windows Me, but I soon moved over to 2000. I liked Windows XP and thought it was a huge improvement over previous versions of Windows.

After that I was more of a Mac person and rarely used Windows. I did have to use Windows 7 for a while, but found it confusing as I hadn’t used Windows for a long time. Today I have been known to use Windows 10, but my main computing platform these days is still OS X.