Bits and pieces of news

I am hoping (fingers crossed) that I can complete the latest issue of Computers in Classrooms today. I’m in one of those situations where you can’t do X until you’ve done Y and Z. Sorry if this is all meaningless, but here’s the key:

• X = newsletter
• Y = a guide called Getting the Best Out of BETT, which will be made available first to newsletter subscribers, and
• Z = the final programme for Collabor8 4 Change (which is now complete: woohoo!)

In the meantime, I tried using Surfboard, which enables you to view websites in a way similar to the way they appear on apps like Flipboard.  Bizarrely, it tells me that the latest version of Firefox, which sort of upgraded itself yesterday, is not good enough. That led on to nearly three hours of dealing with Firefox, which had decided to spend 5 minutes checking my add-ons every time I fired it up. So in the end I fired Firefox, and opted for Chrome instead.

Surfboard doesn’t work with that either.

Nevertheless, so far, Chrome is pretty fast, and apart from the annoying feature of taking no notice whatsoever of my request to import website passwords along with bookmarks, seems OK. My thanks go to @dougpete for suggesting Chrome, and @grumbledook and @smartleydoesIT for suggesting Safari, and @smartleydoesIT for additional help, including her suggestion that if I installed Opera I could sing arias while I work! I’m a blues man myself. Anyway, nice to know there are other people who spend their Sunday mornings online!

The lesson from all this is do not, as I did in a moment of unthinking madness yesterday, click on OK when a program wants to update itself when it’s working perfectly well already (apart from security programs of course), without first checking exactly what the upgrade is intended to achieve. If it’s plugging a security hole that’s one thing, but if it’s something vague like “to enhance the user experience” or, even worse, no reason at all is given, I say “Forget it!”.