During a recent workshop with QTL, Barry Cochran was demonstrating Camtasia Studio. While the presentation was very interesting and Camtasia does a great job of making really cool demo videos the $299 price tag hit me hard.

Yes, I know... Barry was giving away free copies thanks to the fine people at TechSmith. And yes, they do offer free trial versions. But, hey I'm all about the free stuff and I wasn't lucky enough to get a free copy. :-(

Well, a little investigation at I want a Freeware Utility to ... 450+ common problems solved helped me to find Wink. Now, Wink may not have all of the functions that Camtasia has. (To be honest, I'm not sure... I never got around to downloading the trial.)  I have to say, that once I played with Wink, I didn't want to bother with Camtasia.

After a day of playing around with it and reading the included documentation (A video tutorial, sample tutorial, and a PDF file to search through) I was able to produce a pretty cool little tutorial. The tutorial I created isn't really useful except for those who are involved in Moodle at QTL, but, it came out really well anyway.

So, rather than linking to a useless tutorial that I created... I'm linking to the great little tutorial at Wink itself.

From the Wink website....
"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink. Click the green arrow button to start viewing it. (More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found at the User Forums.)

This is a good example of how you can create tutorials in Wink, by capturing screenshots, mouse movements and specifying your own explanations with them. And all this in a standard Windows-based UI with drag-and-drop editing makes it very easy to create high quality tutorials/documentation.

It is estimated that Macromedia Flash Player is installed in more than 90% of the PCs. Using Wink you can create content viewable across the web in all these users' desktops. Similar applications sell for hundreds of dollars, while Wink is free with unrivaled features. So spread the word about Wink to your friends."

I teach technology, so, my needs may be a little different than your own. However, there are a lot of times when my students or myself need to transfer files. Now, sometimes a flash drive is quite sufficient for moving around documents, pictures, etc. However, in my courses we sometimes move around ISOs or we backup entire directories full of files. After a certain size flash drives get really expensive.

So, my solution is simple.... I often get computer "leftovers" either PCs that don't work or are just too old to use. I usually just buy several inexpensive external drive enclosures and rip the hard drive out of these dinosaurs! Sometimes the drive sizes are pretty small, but hey, I'm not buying the drive.... :-)

Removing the drives usually makes for an interesting activity for my classes and it gives me some portable storage. The install process for these things usually just involves putting the new drive in the enclosure and attaching power to it. From there just attach it to your new PC and wow, you've got storage. As a side note, if you've got an old laptop lying around, pulling the drive from that one will give you an external storage device that usually doesn't require an external power source.

Oh, and don't forget too that a lot of MP3 Players also can be used as external drives as well. That's why I bought my iPod!! :-D You've got to love a multi-tasker!

Geek Note:
Chances are your new drive will be mostly full from the PC it came from. Yes, you can just delete everything on the drive, but, it's even easier to just reformat the drive so you've got all the space on the drive just for you. Once you've put the drive in the enclosure and plugged it into Windows, you can run the FORMAT command to reformat the drive. You'll probably want to format the drive as FAT32 so that it can be used in any machine: Linux, Macintosh, Windows 98, Windows XP, or even Vista. You'll need to open up a command prompt.

Click on the Start button and choose Run...

Now, open up My Computer and see what is the drive letter that is assigned to your new drive. Once you've got that, type the command format e: /fs:FAT32 in the command prompt window. I'm assuming here that "e" is you're drive letter. If it's anything else, change the "e" to whatever your letter is.

You'll be warned that all of the data on your disk will be lost. Just type Y to agree and wait a few. After a while you will have a new external storage device. For more information on the format command in Windows XP go here.

Okay, so maybe everyone else has heard of this, but, it saved my sanity this week.

The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning has been having some problems with their Moodle Site recently, so, we thought we might investigate whether or not it's our hosting company (have a sneaking suspicion it is). The long and short of it is that we've set up a site at another host and it was decided that I'd move Moodle over and give it a try.

Moving Moodle was relatively easy, except for the database. This hosting company doesn't give command line access, and phpMyAdmin was really not liking the 27 MB database I was trying to get it to import.

Enter BigDump. This cool little script takes the database dump file and breaks it up into chunks so that it loads the entire database dmp file with no problems. I have to say I've done this manually through phpMyAdmin before, but, this was a lifesaver.

Just wanted to post this here so it could save someone else's day too!

In a previous post (actually hosted on another site) I described how to Install Moodle In The Uniform Server. Since then I've had several requests on how to open up UniServer so that it can be accessed by any computer on the LAN.

I'm about to do a presentation on "Classroom Management & Communications Using Moodle" at the CTE Summer Conference, so, I thought it would be appropriate to finally write a quick howto on the steps I took to get this to work.

Open up htaccess
Uniform Server disables external access by default, fortunately rendering this problem is really easy. All you need to do is navigate to the W:\www folder once UniServer is running. Look for a file called ".htaccess". Open up this file in Notepad (or Notepad2 if you've got it). The file should look something like this:

<-----START----->
# This file provides security to the server limiting access to the localhost only.
# Comment to deactivate.

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1

# To allow execution of cgi scripts in this directory uncomment next two lines.

AddHandler cgi-script .pl .cgi
Options +ExecCGI

# To unlock your server, comment the next 4 lines.
# Defaults: Username = admin; Password = userver

#AuthName "Uniform Server - Secure Server Access"
#AuthType Basic
#AuthUserFile /htpasswd/www/.htpasswd
#Require valid-user

<-----END----->

All you'll need to do is to add a "#" before the lines:

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all

Allow from 127.0.0.1

Once you add these "#" and save the file your new web server will be available to anyone else who knows either your Windows Host Name or you IP Address. If you need to know either of these pieces of information in Windows XP, simply open up a command window. {Go to Start > Run then type cmd} Type IPCONFIG /ALL in the window and note the Host Name and IP Address displayed. The .htaccess file should look like the following when finished:

<------START------>

# This file provides security to the server limiting access to the localhost only.
# Comment to deactivate.

#Order Deny,Allow
#Deny from all
#Allow from 127.0.0.1

# To allow execution of cgi scripts in this directory uncomment next two lines.

AddHandler cgi-script .pl .cgi
Options +ExecCGI

# To unlock your server, comment the next 4 lines.
# Defaults: Username = admin; Password = userver

#AuthName "Uniform Server - Secure Server Access"
#AuthType Basic
#AuthUserFile /htpasswd/www/.htpasswd
#Require valid-user

<-----END----->