Open Source Relish: Educational

Showing posts with label Educational. Show all posts

Podcasts with gPodder

gPodder downloads free audio and video content (podcasts) for you Listen directly on your computer or on your mobile devices. If you have an android device you can follow my guide at Android Relish on Podax Podcasting & gPodder. In the guide it mentions the gPodder.net service and Podcast Directory, the desktop and mobile version can both be synced with the free gPodder.net service. The website has been unreachable once but aside from that there isn't a better place to discover and manage good podcasts.

gPodder is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X and mobile devices like the Nokia N810, N900 and N9. Some of the highlights are that it has support for RSS, Atom, YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo and XSPF feeds, as well as exporting to OPML which can then be imported on an Android device. Easily synchronize between devices with full gpodder.net API support. gPodder is also easy customization with its' choice of supporting Python as it's extension language.

Homepage: http://gpodder.org/
Download: http://gpodder.org/downloads
Documentation: http://gpodder.org/documentation
Source Code: http://gpodder.org/wiki/Git
Wiki: http://wiki.gpodder.org/

Tutorial for using the gPodder.net for syncing multiple devices.

Android Relish - Podax Podcasts & gPodder

3d Android Dev with jMonkeyEngine SDK

The jMonkeyEngine SDK is a custom environment built on-top of netbeans for developing with the jMonkeyEngine library. The jME3 SDK provides you with unique plugins for creating jMonkeyEngine 3 game content. You can download and install the jMonkeyEngine SDK as a ready-to-use complete game development environment, rather than using a generic Java IDE. (What's an IDE?)

Showcase of some jMonkey Powered Games http://jmonkeyengine.com/showcase/

Lets install and setup all the software to start developing with jME3 for Android, we'll need:

The Java Development Kit JDK6 - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork
Android SDK - http://developer.android.com/sdk
jMonkeyEngine SDK - http://jmonkeyengine.org/downloads/

After installing and starting the jMonkeyEngine SDK start a new project, and make it a jME3 BasicGame, the project will have code already in place that opens a window and displays a cube in 3d space press "f6" to run the project. After seeing the cube and debug info we know that we installed everything correctly and can close that window by hitting the "esc" key and move on to getting jME3 to make Android packages. This is done by adding the Android plugin in the plugin browser. It's under "Tools > Plugins".

After installing the plugin go to the jME3 options under Tools and select the mobile tab, and point it to the Android SDK folder. Almost there getting it all set up, the last step to make a jME3 project run on an Android device, is to right-click the project that you created and select "properties". First click "Build > Compile" and deselect "Compile on Save" Now go to "Application > Android" and select "Enable Android Deployment" then give your package a proper name.

Congratulations!! It is now possible to run jMonkey Engine games on an Android device or emulator.

If there was a problem take a look in the forum for a solution, if there isn't one leave a post and someone will respond with suggestions. http://jmonkeyengine.org/forums

Documentation & Tutorials

One of the best things about the jMonkeyEngine is the community provided documents and tutorials. They have really detailed tutorials that will cover allot of questions that would arise, plus the forum members are always there to answer a question and give a helping hand.

Mozilla Launches Popcorn Maker

Popcorn Maker is an HTML5 web app for combining web media with images, text, maps, and other dynamic web content. Its appearance is unique, but not unfamiliar, providing a timeline-based video editing experience for the web. Once created, Popcorn Maker hosts remixes as simple HTML pages in the cloud, which can be shared or embedded in blogs or other sites. Furthermore, every remix provides a “Remix” button, allowing anyone watching to become a creator themselves by using the current remix as a base project for their own creation. This “view source” experience for web media is a key aspect of Popcorn Maker’s goals as part of the larger Mozilla Webmaker project.

On a technical level, Popcorn Maker is the combination of a number of separate projects, each heavily influenced by the “12 factor” philosophy: a node.js-based web service called Cornfield; a JavaScript framework for creating highly-interactive web apps; and Popcorn.js, with a set of custom Popcorn.js plugins.

Watch one of the creators of Popcorn Maker explain the project

See an example in action

Make something with Popcorn Maker today: Popcorn Maker

More info about the code and development team and process

Repositories
https://github.com/mozilla/butter
https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn-js

Bug Tracker

https://webmademovies.lighthouseapp.com/projects/65733-butter/overview

FlightGear a Flight Simulator

Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for University research and education, for a variety of aerospace engineering and visualization work in industry, and even for interactive exhibits in museums.

FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide seamless scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language, and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Have heard that with the right equipment playing the FlightGear simulator could be used as pilot hours towards a pilots license. The features available in this open source project are amazing, not to mention just the scenerey would fill more then 3 DVDs. Check out the feature list at http://www.flightgear.org/about/features/

Start downloading FlightGear for free on Windows, Mac, & Linux from http://www.flightgear.org

Watch FlightGear in action

The Internet Archive Offers Over 1 Million Torrents

The Internet Archive has seeded over 1,000,000 torrents of creative commons and public domain media, as well as complete websites

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". The Internet Archive permanent handles the storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public-domain books. The only problem is that it costs so much to share that infomation with direct downloads, torrents are the perfect way to share this legal content.

Torrent is a protocol for computers to communicate and share files in such a way that as a user downloads a file they share it as well. When a user has the full download they can choose to seed the torrent longer or remove it from the torrent application while keeping the downloaded data. A single torrent file can have hundreds of files in it, and users can choose to download certain files or the whole torrent.

A torrent file only works with a torrent downloading program. The Opera web browser can handle torrent files and I'd recommend using Opera, it has allot of good features and is secure. If your running a Linux operating system there is most likely a torrent application installed by default. For windows users the best torrent programs are Azureus which is open source and hosted by sourceforge.net it is also a torrent browser and media player. Utorrent also has torrent browsing capabilities but is more lightweight.

Internet Archive blog post - 1000000-torrents-of-downloadable-books-music-and-movies
Internet Archive - Torrent Hotlist
Internet Archive - Torrents Over a Million Books

Django/Rails-Like Rapid Development for Ubuntu

Glade + Python is about as easy as it gets for doing Linux GUI development.

With Glade you build a XML-file describing a Gnome graphical user interface using a GUI editor.
http://glade.gnome.org/

The boiler plate code for a Python GTK project would be some stuff like importing the libraries you need, loading the Glade XML file, creating the initial class for your application and then starting up the gtk.main()-style mainloop.

Once that is done then it's mearly a matter of defining class methods and assigning them to your various buttons.

This tool works perfect for the novice programmer just about anyone should be able to get from zero to 'hello world' GUI program in about 2 minutes. With full version control, build environment, and the ability to easily create installable packages.

From there on everyhing from accessing the hdd, remote file systems, dbus for system events, gstreamer transcoding/encoding/decoding, telepathy for integration into online services, and all that happy stuff is just a few edits away.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install quickly quickly-ubuntu-template

Begin Tutorial

$ quickly tutorial ubuntu-application

Resources

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly
http://developer.ubuntu.com/resources/tools/quickly/
http://blog.didrocks.fr/post/Quickly-0.4-available-in-lucid!

New To Programming? Learn Python, which is a good choice for learning programming.
http://www.learnpython.org/
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/
http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/

Old articles about Quickly
arstechnica.com - quickly-new-rails-like-rapid-development-tools-for-ubuntu -2010
zdnet.com - unchaining-the-opportunistic-programmer - 2009

ChronoZoom

More and more open source projects are sprouting into existence, and they are not just software projects they are hardware and educational resources as well. The ChronoZoom project is an HTML5 piece of software but is more then that, it is a new way to browse, learn and contribute to a wealth of knowledge. Even though it runs o the Azure platform this looks like a cool project, hope it gains momentum quickly.

ars technica - ChronoZoom takes you through 14 billion years of space-time

Click this link to open chronozoom, at the top left corner there is a film-strip icon, click it to show the introduction tab and select with or without audio

http://www.chronozoomproject.org/ - if the link doesn't work in Internet Explorer (your version is out of date), it will work in google Chrome, as well as Firefox 10.x and up.

The code is hosted on codeplex @ http://chronozoom.codeplex.com/

The project is described as "an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information."

"With ChronoZoom," Saekow told Ars, "you can browse history, rather than digging it out piece by piece. Also, today with [fewer and fewer] students visiting the library, the serendipity of browsing for a book and finding another is something we hope ChronoZoom can restore. If you don't know what to search for, it's almost like that topic never existed."

Now comes the time in the project's development where open source comes into its own.

"We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content."