Since it seems everybody has to do one of these “10 <insert marginally useful term> I can not live without” articles here is my take. The 10 Apple iOS Apps I can not live without Enjoy ! I hope you find them as useful as I do. :)

With the Internet of Things slowly becoming mainstream the potential uses of this technology can also be seen in the Education sector. This blogpost is the first installment of a series of posts that highlights practical examples that can be used in teaching and training. Part 1 – Environmental Noise Monitoring Some of the skills taught in these projects are: Environmental science Citizen science (collaborative data gathering) Measurement / sensing Data visualisation Data comparison With WideNoise users can monitor the noise levels around them using an App downloadable from Android Market or Apple AppStore.

Here are the slides from a presentation for the South Australian Department of Education & Childrens’ Development – Luchtime Bytes Series. The original copy of this blogpost was posted on http://www.brightcookie.com/2011/11/education-and-the-internet-of-things/

To get an idea on the current power usage and some suggestions on how to improve power-management ‘powertop‘ is a must-have. sudo apt-get install powertop

EDIT: Here are some tweaks if you install 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change. by adactio There are a few tools that will make this work a lot easier: Google Chrome Chrome does have some nice dedicated plug-ins to help with this task Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc) appMobi HTML5 XDK (https://chrome.

One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications Scanning of barcodes Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned. Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog: Let’s say you’re reading a magazine article you really like and want to share it with your friends.

This is an interesting report and info-graphic by the folks at VisionMobile on a new way of measuring the openness of some mobile open source projects. The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo ! sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).

Finally I made the effort to completely get rid of my Facebook Account. After initially getting a Facebook Account in the very early days (as an ‘occupational hazard’ to investigate the potential of Facebook Applications) I have always been suspicious of the companies motives and decided not to use such a closed system as a base for application development. Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/ Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create).

One of the most annoying things in the recent ‘upgrade‘ of the Google Docs editor was the removal of the ‘Edit CSS’ and ‘Edit HTML’ functionality without any replacement (such as a Custom Styles Editor). Thanks to a discussion on the Google Help forum (where 100’s of people wonder how this could have been called ‘upgrade’) I discovered this hack. Create an empty document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice (MS Office is also reported to work) Change the default styles (using Format –> Styles and Formatting (F11)) Upload the resulting document to Google Apps (Note: you will need to convert to GoogleDocs) and use as a template To get the ARIAL font on Ubuntu I also had to do install the MS Fonts package

If you have kids going to school you will know these questions: Why can’t you have Microsoft Office ? I can not find ‘xyz’ font on this …. – why ? I have managed (after some time) to convince my kids that there is no need for having a particular Word Processing Software and they are much better off knowing the concepts of text processing rather than some particular office package.