Ruralocity Blog

Last week I worked on a small school project in which we explored the merit of iPhones in education. Abiliene Christian University, it turns out, is on the forefront of this cause, with an excellent blog called iThinkEd posting the progress of their study into the matter.
Today, ACU announced they will begin handing them out […]

I’ve been putting the Apple TV through the paces the last couple of days. This evening I queued up the music collection from my iMac in the other room, turned on shuffle mode, and streamed away. This is a great way to rediscover your music collection, and makes it easy to put some background music […]

Apple finally released the Take 2 version of its Apple TV system software. I updated last night. The focus of the new software is downloadable movie rentals directly from your TV. In all honesty, I probably won’t use this service a whole lot–we’ve got Netflix and that works just fine for me.
Podcasts are another story. […]

I bought an Apple TV last week and got it hooked up over the weekend. I haven’t purchased movies through iTunes for it, and probably never will, but have been streaming the heck out of my music collection. I’m also looking forward to some of the features coming in the “Take 2″ version of the […]

While I wait for my MacBook’s hard drive to clone so I can reformat it and install Adobe CS3* I’m using the Asus Eee PC I mentioned the other day. I talked about it a bit in the blog I write in for work. The keyboard is driving me nuts. I have a feeling it’s […]

OK, I’m not positive this is a permanent return from my self-imposed hiatus, but here you go. Much has been going on.
One: I finished my requirements for my independent study about social networking’s place in education. Verdict: I should have done a better needs analysis. Also, Ning kind of sucks as a social network […]

I’ve only played with the latest version of Apple’s Mac-only productivity suite for an hour or so, but these things I know:

Keynote: I have the most experience with prior versions of Keynote, having adopted it over an increasingly crufty and frustrating PowerPoint:mac about a year ago. I’m excited about the new Record Presentation feature, which […]

I set up a tumbleblog several months ago. As you can see, I never did much with it and didn’t really see myself using it even from the get-go. It’s a neat idea, but I already had this going. So I moved on.
But that’s not the neat part. Last week I was introduced to 120 […]

I spent three days last week at the MACE MTI Conference in Bonner Springs, Kansas. There were some really slick presentations I hope to write more about soon, and a couple of total duds (Apple’s podcasting presentation probably did more of a disservice than anything to their wonderful suite of tools for this application). What […]

After many disappointing efforts to edit my screencasts in iMovie, only to have the software totally munge the video quality during the conversion to one of its native formats, I finally hit upon the right string of Google keywords to find what I needed to know. Simply put, you need to determine your resolution up […]

Everybody knows I use Moodle quite a bit, but what they might not now is I now use Keynote exclusively for anything I’m doing that’s slide-y in nature. Hey, if it’s good enough for Steve Jobs it’s good enough for me.
One of the things I like about it is just how easy it is to […]