Cristiano on Tech/Life

Ever since I had a mac I had the following problem. When my mac is turned on for a long time, at a certain moment icons start missing. Sometimes icons in the Dock, sometimes in the Applications folder, sometimes both (yes, sometimes an app doesn’t have an icon in the Dock while it does in the Applications folder). It even affects Quicksilver, which then can’t start the application.

It is extremely random, sometimes can be solved by restarting, sometimes not. Sometimes it affects starting up applications, sometimes not. It is just the weirdest thing and I can’t figure out what causes it, and google is no help either. Anyone else had this before?

I’m currently working on two little projects. One is getting FourStarters – an information portal by Alper, Reinier, Martijn and me – from the ground. Alper already started blogging and I was waiting for Martijn’s cool design but that seems to take a bit more time. Additionally we (I) would like to really create some kind of community on the site to inspire and maybe invest in web startups. Today I started with some new posts that are simply derivatives of this blog

The other project I am working on is called teachr.tv and will try to tackle a major problem in education at this moment: education educators. The whole idea originated at BarCampLondon2 and tries to help teachers with electronic education (or education 2.0). The concept first came to me when we started up Education Made Easy in 2005, but in a talk to Ian Forrester the current social possibilities of the web gave me some new ideas. For now the site will integrate:

• Vodcasts that will explain basic web2.0 and social software tools to teachers
  • Del.icio.us
  • Wiki’s
• Integrated wiki to create a simple reference for educators
• Forum for discussion and posting of new ideas

For now I really want to focus on these things but any other ideas are welcome. In first place the site will be informative but I am planning to offer integrated services for teachers once the site is basically launched. Some things that could be build:

• Integrated Wiki generation and management for teachers (like wikia) because most teachers don’t have the expertise nor server available to setup a wiki for a project.
• Integrated presentation recording: this is something I have been working on for a while and I really think this is possible. Integrating audio, video, slides and maybe even questions to enable teachers to easily create online course content.

I am looking for people that might want to help creating content for teachr.tv so all help and suggestions are welcome.