Room With A View

My direct access to Edublogs has been blocked for well over a year but now all .Mac accounts are blocked too!! Grrr….

Hopefully it will open up again once the Olympic hoopla is behind us.

This is a tip for Mac users.

Lately, my son and I have been working on separate video projects. As a result, hard drive space has been at a premium. GrandPerspective is an open source utility that graphically shows what’s taking up space on a hard drive. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded goofy but after giving it a try it’s great. (Pictures work for me.) It showed me quickly what was taking up all the space on my drive. Some of the files I didn’t need and so just deleted them. Others I burned to dvd. I went from using 96 gigs on my hard drive to 55 in no time. It’s well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Bob LeVitus and Chuck Joiner at the MacNotables podcast for this.)

This Wired article is for film buffs everywhere. It’s a story about a company called DTS Digital Images and the man behind it all–John Lowry. Lowry and his company take old movie footage and restore it using digital film scanners and 700 Macs. The company’s list of restored films include the Star Wars trilogy, James Bond films, and many others.

As a teacher I especially enjoyed the last paragraph.

When asked how he landed here, Lowry’s expression turns serious. “I have dyslexia,” he says. “I didn’t read my first book until I was 30.” He pauses, and then smiles. “I’m a picture person.”