CoolPlay was used a lot on BBC radio and it can be wired up to external remotes on mixing desks for fader or button start. It even tells you the ‘out time’ when any clip will finish. Most audio playlist programs keep playing, but in radio you normally want each item to play, stop, then cue the next one. CoolPlay allows you to make playlists of audio files (WAV, MP3 it doesn’t care) which you can play – and here’s the crucial thing – and it then stops at the end of each file by default. Well it is, but this is a simple program but I have never found anything else that does the same job so well (disclaimer: I designed the splash screen!). The other is CoolPlay – no it’s not a Coldplay tribute band. This is still my favourite tool for editing and mixing speech audio – I used it for many years in the BBC and have made countless radio programmes and packages on it. One is Adobe Audition 3, which (arguably) Adobe gave away when they stopped supporting it.
Today I wiped my netbook clean again and installed… WindowsXP! There was method in my madness – there are two old bits of audio software that a) run in Windows and b) remain very useful. I installed Citrix Receiver without too much difficulty and found I could connect to our school’s Windows VDI pretty much as well as I can on my MacBook – giving me access to all my school data and apps like Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Access.Īudio workstations for school radio or theatre
Sure a code club would love a set of these machines? I can’t wait to get a proper PIXEL install on the hard drive! This saves on money buying screens, power supplies, keyboards, mice. It also means that you’ve turned a laptop into a self-contained Raspberry Pi! If the awesome Ryantek RTk.GPIO board works with this you’d have access to all the GPIO pins too for real world physical computing. Persistence mode means you can keep your work on the PIXEL USB stick – it’s like having your own computer on a stick. In the photo above you can see me showing Raspberry Pi’s director of education Carrie-Anne Philbin just how awesome their PIXEL OS is running on old netbooks. It comes with all the usual coding tools like Python, Java, Sonic Pi and the like. The Raspberry Pi PIXEL OS runs like a dream on these machines! I’ve only run it off a USB stick so far but I used this at BETT (below) to take notes and I got about 4 hours of battery life of a laptop destined for the bin.
Plus there are apps like Inkscape which is a lovely free vector graphic design tool like Adobe Illustrator.
Having trouble getting Mu to install though… There’s also a logic gate simulator Logisim and a whole heap of educational software for other subjects, especially maths and sciences. Programming tools could make a set of laptops for a code club or class use: Scratch, IDLE/Python, Sonic Pi are all easily installed. Could be useful (with internet disabled in the bios!) for forcing pupils (or staff) to get on and write! It’s friendlier than LXDE was, I think pupils will find the UI more familiar, and it runs quite well on the eeePC.įocuswriter is a distraction-free word processor that gives you a blank sheet of paper, basic formatting and it can save in. I wiped one clean and installed Lubuntu – a lightweight version on Ubuntu. We are going to run this as a project to get the pupils to find the best uses and to see if they can identify a group that might like to be given a set of these netbooks. I’ve since played around a bit more and found a whole heap of possible uses for these. Our coach had wifi, so I could even do this on the road. Now I can’t stand seeing things like this being thrown away, so I took one away on a school trip and found it perfectly serviceable for reading my school web mail, and even blogging on our VLE, uploading photos from the netbook’s built-in SD card reader. Controlled assessments are a thing of the past now, so the netbooks were about to be chucked out to save space. Our IT department had rebuilt them with LXDE Linux for use in controlled assessments. They originally had WindowXP on, which obviously is no longer supported so their use was limited. My school has a large number of old Asus eeePC 1001PX netbooks.