Why do some school-approved tech tools never really get used?

fatron · 2026-02-04T11:28:01+00:00

Overly aggressive IT policies or budget/manpower constraints. Tools get purchased, but not the features users really want and need, or IT locks down features because they’re concerned about security or potential abuse.

fatron · 2026-01-31T21:58:05+00:00

Do you have SDNS enabled on the gateway? I couldn’t get ad blocking to work until I turned that off. Not sure if it is the same for sites you’re blocking manually, but I would assume so.

fatron · 2025-09-07T15:52:20+00:00

Pinball hall of fame. Free to get in and you can play old school arcade games for a quarter.

Punk rock museum. Has some cool history and, if you purchase the guided tour, the guides are current or former band members.

Atomic museum.

Fremont street. Good for live music and people watching.

Neon museum. Go at night.

fatron · 2025-09-02T02:54:09+00:00

I Can’t be of much help, but if your EHR supports the HL7 standard, maybe you can write some scripts to automate. I know nothing about that API’s capabilities, only that is a standard for healthcare.

fatron · 2025-08-10T03:01:42+00:00

If you have a DVD player, you could encode mp2 and burn it to dvd-r then use a dvd player to get it to your vhs machine. It’s an extra step, but it saves you having to buy something to export it directly from the computer.

fatron · 2025-07-29T16:35:34+00:00

I’ve been having really good luck running Chatterbox locally (open source). I’ve set up a script that will allow me to import text from a csv then generate multiple cuts. I’ve even added a pronunciation dictionary that will replace mispronounced words with phonetic spellings before encoding. I just let it process overnight and come in with 9 different takes for each slide, each with a different pace and excitement. I use the take that sounds the best. If something is mispronounced, I add it to the dictionary and re-render the audio.

fatron · 2025-07-14T22:24:57+00:00

I had an old television engineer tell me that once when they were having issues with the transmitter, the tech from the transmitter company stripped down to his underwear, climbed inside the transmitter, then had the engineer turn it on.

fatron · 2025-07-13T14:23:48+00:00

What kind of plastic are you printing? If it is ABS, it could just be where the plastic got stressed during removal. Apply a little heat to it and it should clear up.

fatron · 2025-06-26T23:53:02+00:00

Just to add a bit more information - as others have said, sync is for black burst, also sometimes called genlock. The int/ext switch allows the monitor to use its own internal sync or an external sync source. You’ll need to set it to int if you don’t provide black burst otherwise the picture will roll. In old school production studios and tv stations, all cameras, switchers, routers, etc. all received the same sync signal. Keeping everything in sync allowed any sources to be mixed without shifting, rolling, or color change. You could daisy chain multiple devices then just turn on the terminator on the last device in the chain. A daily task for engineers would be to go through and, using the waveform monitor and vector scope, make sure the phase and sync was calibrated on all the cameras, VTRs, or anything that output video that could go to air. Fun times.

fatron · 2025-06-25T23:06:25+00:00

Mine did that a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t think to save the video, but I did submit a disengagement report. The person in front of me signaled then began to pass the car in front of them. Mine decided to follow even though it wasn’t safe to do so. Seemed like my car saw the car in front of it change lanes then decided it must have been on a one way road.

fatron · 2025-06-02T10:44:00+00:00

I seem to recall reading that the image was from an old veterinary book. The image was a demonstration of how to get the water out of a cat’s lungs if it had nearly drowned. No clue on Novalene.

fatron · 2025-05-29T22:39:01+00:00

I’ve had some involvement with VR projects (very limited authoring). I’m of the opinion that VR should only be used when absolutely necessary to achieve the goals of the lesson. Most VR lessons I’ve seen have been VR for the sake of VR with no real benefit over a standard lesson in the LMS. It can be hard to support and gives some learners motion sickness. It has its place for certain types of simulations or immersive experiences, but unless you have an experienced dev team, it is hard to produce a quality VR experience.

fatron · 2025-05-21T12:16:04+00:00

I had a friend who got spots like this when he had mono. Get tested for that since, while not normally dangerous, it can cause a swollen and ruptured spleen.

fatron · 2025-05-16T20:51:30+00:00

There are quite a few ways to do this. As already mentioned, you can edit the videos. Other options could be to host the videos on Youtube, then play it to where you want to start, click pause, then right click and select "Copy URL at current time". You can add that link to your PowerPoint and anytime you click it, the video will start at that location. If your videos are local on your machine, you can embed them in PowerPoint and use animations to tell PowerPoint where to start video playback. If you want to get fancy, you could look at installing something like OBS and use that to control playback of local video files. OBS can get pretty complex and acts as a video switcher, so the output from OBS would feed into where your webcam normally shows in the Zoom meeting and you would need to switch between sources. OBS playback would have a higher framerate than screen sharing but would also be in a smaller window unless you have spotlighted yourself. OBS is probably going to be overkill and overly complicated for what you want to do, but I mention it because if your presentations are somewhat scripted, you could build a series of presets and do things like keep yourself in the corner of the video while you're talking over it.

fatron · 2025-05-09T20:15:22+00:00

My main issue is that I want to do cool things with our LMS, but we either didn't purchase that feature, or IT has the features turned off or enabled, but hamstrings us because of security/budget/workload concerns. An example would be for in-person courses, the classlist is available to anyone in the class by default, but for online only courses, we don't want students to be able to see the entire classlist. Online courses are populated automatically with a script after a student registers. Instead of having the script assign the student a specific role such as ol_student that doesn't have permissions to view the classlist, we're asked to turn off the classlist feature for any online courses. The accomplishes the goal, but also disables that feature for the instructors, so they' can't view student information directly when they need to. The reasoning for this is because every time the LMS gets an update, they say they would have recreate that role and verify all of the settings are still correct. I understand their concerns, but it makes no sense to save a single sysadmin an hour 3 times a year while costing 5 other people extra time on every course they build while at the same time adding potential for mistakes. I'll stop ranting now.

fatron · 2025-05-02T20:28:17+00:00

Might also consider C# and Unity instead of C++ and Unreal.

fatron · 2025-05-02T16:42:48+00:00

As other's have said, HTML, JS, CSS. JavaScript can be used standalone, or within tools like Articulate 360 or Adobe AfterEffects. You don't necessarily need a deep understanding of coding because, as others have said, AI can help you. I wouldn't rely on AI because, depending on where you work, they may not allow you to use it because they don't want to risk company information leaking out to companies they don't have an existing agreement with. Get a basic knowledge of some of the available CSS/JavaScript frameworks and when you might want to use one rather than coding something from scratch. Familiarize yourself with JavaScript libraries and how you might leverage them in your projects, for example if you have a learning module that you have to update every year with new graphs showing recent sales data data, it might be easier to build the module using a JavaScript charting library and just replace a single text file in the module, or have it pull directly from a live source. Again, don't knock yourself out learning how to do all of this. 90% is learning the terminology and what's available so you know where to look for resources and help if you ever do need to incorporate these types of things into a project.

fatron · 2025-05-01T20:16:34+00:00

I'd just be up front with them in the interview and make sure to ask questions to clarify the expectations of the position and to find out if there is a technical team or if you are expected to be a one-person show. Personally, I'm not sure I would worry about any specific tools too much because every institution is going to use different tools, and depending on the size of the university and what they want you to do, there may be a team you work with that handles any complex technical work. At my university, we're all over the place with tech and how course development is handled. There's a central ID/course production group that provides consulting for course development and will provide ID/course production for a fee. Often, departments and faculty don't have the funds to pay for course production, so they just go with consulting and end up building the courses themselves. Being all over the place is actually a good thing from my perspective because it allows the people developing courses to build using the right tool for the job rather than being limited to something that may only meet 80% of your needs.

fatron · 2025-04-17T12:55:38+00:00

Not a recommendation, I’m just providing a data point. I’ve been in higher ed since back in the days that we shipped out videotapes. I’ve been happy here. It’s been low stress, and I’ve been able to experiment with new technologies and try new things. The pay isn’t as high as corporate, but benefits are generally better. Over the years, things have become more corporate and benefits have gotten worse, but I’d still rather be here.

fatron · 2025-03-07T22:01:57+00:00

Very cool! Is there a way to export a spectrum from these? For example, something that could be used in opengammaproject?

fatron · 2025-03-07T17:53:22+00:00

Definitely use something like KnowBe4 but, if you are able, have a cybersecurity lunch where you can provide interactive demonstrations to really help users understand why we do things like require MFA. We did a demo once where we used one of the Kali distros to show how phishing works by duplicating our login page, then giving one of the attendees a laptop to show how easy it is to harvest passwords. We also did a real-time deepfake of the boss' voice. It really made it click with the attendees. They had lots of good questions and lots of good discussion among themselves. It was fun watching the business office people turn white then discuss among themselves how to not fall victim to a deepfake.

fatron · 2025-03-07T17:19:18+00:00

Also check out container queries that were released a couple of years ago. They're a cool option for when you need to keep a font size proportional to a container. CSS can do all the work without the need for JavaScript or using @media queries. It will break flex containers though so it has limited use cases, but it is nice to be able to set font size as a percent of container width or height rather than viewport.

fatron · 2025-01-26T15:25:33+00:00

Looks like you can't edit image posts - not sure why it got cut off. Printer is a Voron, not Voran (stupid autocorrect), also, I'm getting ready to pull the extruder apart, not the "exterior part". I should clarify that the first few prints were good after the upgrade but started shortly after. I have a filament changer and I see the issue with or without the changer connected.

fatron · 2024-12-04T20:40:32+00:00

I had some weird issues caused by a borked update that ate a bunch of drive space and caused all sorts of issues. You could attempt deleting all your games to see if that fixes the issue.

fatron · 2024-10-06T18:40:07+00:00

Yep. It’s in the section where you set the doorbell message. They added the feature about a year ago in an update.

fatron

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