Fife Schools Technology

We often receive tech help requests where someone is not able to login, access an application, reach files on their My Documents, etc.

The first thing to try is to restart your computer.

It may sound simple but it is often overlooked.

For a number of reasons, your computer may have lost its network connection to a server or other network location. Restarting the computer usually restores those connections automatically.

If you try that and the problem continues, please contact us for assistance.

This Sunday (Feb. 22), Tacoma Public Utilities will be doing some work on the electric power at the district office. As a result, all computer related services will be down throughout most of the day. The scheduled work time is from 8am to 5pm.

This outage includes:

• website
• portal
• email
• in-district logins and home directories at the ESC and FHS
• voicemail
• other potential services as well

While staff should be able to use their computers at all schools (other than FHS) on Sunday (should you need to come in to work), there may be some services that are not available.

For some, especially in tough economic times, purchasing software to use at home may not be an option. Fortunately, there are free alternatives. Here are some:

OpenOffice ( http://www.openoffice.org ) is a free suite of programs similar to Microsoft Office. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation software. OpenOffice should provide many of the tools a student would need to do work at home on a computer.

Another “office” alternative online is Google Docs ( http://docs.google.com ). There aren’t as many features as the desktop applications but does provides the basics via the web.

Photoshop is the industry standard for image editing but it comes at a price. A free alternative that provides much of the same functionality is called GIMP ( http://www.gimp.org ). It’s a powerful tool for editing photos or creating graphics from scratch.

One of my RSS feeds is from the official weather service alerts for the Tacoma area.

http://www.weather.gov/alerts/wwarssget.php?zone=WAZ509

I don’t want to be bothered with daily weather reports… most days I don’t really care but when the weather is going to be unusual enough to cause some kind of alert, I get notified via my RSS reader.

Of course, there are plenty of RSS feeds out there that will give you daily weather forecasts if you’re interested.

I think of RSS as robotic web-surfing.

I have a number of websites that I’m interested in, all of which periodically add new content. The problem is that I don’t have time to visit each of those sites one by one on a frequent basis to see if something new has been added to those sites. It’s too much to keep track of and would take too long. I’m bound to miss something.

Instead, I use software (a RSS reader) that automatically goes to those sites and checks to see if anything new has been added. Then I just need to skim the list that summarizes the new content found on all of these sites and if interested, visit a site directly to consume the full content.

I have over 120 sites that I keep track of via RSS. Once a day or so, I review the list of new content and read further when interested. I can skim 120 sites in about 10 minutes. It would take hours to visit all of those sites directly.

What do I subscribe to?
· Work-related news: technical and educational sites and blogs
· People I know: friends and family who have blogs or other content sites such as photo album sites
· Fun stuff: a number of sites that I just think are interesting or hobby-related

Now for the Technical Stuff:

In order to do RSS, the website producing the content must have a RSS feed set up which is a specially configured web page. It’s not intended to be read directly by people so those details really aren’t important to the consumer other than if the site doesn’t produce RSS, it won’t work.

On the consumer side, you need an RSS reader. There are many software options. Outlook 2007 can subscribe to RSS feeds. Most new browsers (including Internet Explorer) have RSS readers built in. There are stand-alone RSS readers but I am currently using a web-based tool (Google Reader) so that I can check from my computer and from my mobile phone.

In the RSS reader, you need to add a “subscription” so the RSS reader knows where to get the RSS feed.

The trickiest part of the whole thing is probably figuring out the web address of the RSS feed and adding that address to your RSS reader. Often, sites will have an RSS link. Just copy the URL of that link and paste it into your reader.

Hope that helps. I’d be glad to answer questions.

I came across a site hosting 100 free pictures of textures. These are pictures that could be used in the background of a slide show, website, or other digital project.

Check it out: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/06/100-beautiful-free-textures

BTW, I found this using RSS. To find out more about RSS, do a Google search and there are many sites that talk about RSS. I’ll also post an entry soon about RSS. Feel free to ask me questions as well.

While my handwriting is not very neat, it could be fun to turn it into a font. A free service called Your Fonts (http://www.yourfonts.com) does just that.

I haven’t had a chance to try it yet myself but I’m hoping to turn my wife’s handwriting into a font. She has amazing penmanship.

There could be some fun instructional uses. Let me know if you try it.

I need to give the disclaimer that this is something to try at home. Due to the potential amount of work installing custom fonts, we won’t be installing your font on your computer. Sorry.