My Recipe for Fake-uccino's

NOTE: No guarantee or warranty is associated with this recipe.  Use at your own discretion and risk.  Provide for entertainment purposes only.

There are those in our household that enjoy the StarBuck's bottled Frappuccino's ( at more than $2 per 9.5 Fluid Ounce bottle).  So....I set out to create a homemade version that would satisfy my family Frappuccino experts.

Ingredients listed on the bottles which served as the launchpad for the creation of this recipe:

     Brewed Starbucks Coffee
     Low fat milk
     Sugar
     Cocoa
     Pectin
     Ascorbic Acid

I start with a well-cleaned and sanitized 9.5 Fl. Oz. Frappuccino bottle.  It is important to do this since this recipe has no preservatives in it. Goodbye Pectin and Ascorbic Acid!  I'm no food scientist but I'm assuming that these ingredients are in there to keep the stuff viable and good looking over long spans of time.  Therefore, it is also important not to keep these drinks around too long before drinking them and to keep them well refrigerated.

After that, I follow a 4 - 2 - 1 - 1/2 system in adding the ingredients.  To the bottle I add:

     4 Tablespoons of 2% milk.

     2 Tablespoons of Sugar

     1 Teaspoon of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup ( Please note that this is the only ingredient not measured in Tablespoons).

     1/2 Tablespoon of Pur Java ( I started adding this when I received complaints that the coffee taste wasn't strong enough).

I then fill the bottle the rest of the way with regular, leftover coffee (usually just Folgers Classic Roast ) that has cooled down.

After putting on the lid securely I move to an open area so that I can safely shake the bottle vigorously to get the sugar dissolved and all the ingredients mixed up.  The bottle then gets chilled in the refrigerator until it reaches a nice, cold drinking temperature.  NOTE: It will likely be necessary for the end user to shake up the bottle again as the ingredients tend to settle out ( particularly the chocolate syrup ).

I reached this recipe after several permutations; all the while being guided by feedback from my in-house expert.  I have never actually tasted this stuff myself;  I don't really like coffee.  I am more of a cream soda person myself.

Have fun!

Can you add a weblink to a Google Calendar event?

On July 23rd, ‏@hcallihan tweeted the following...

" Question: Can you add a weblink to a Google Calendar event? I can add a file, but want a weblink?? #gpsummit #nebedu "

Someone has probably already answered this question but I finally had a few minutes to explore it for myself and thought I would write this up.  I believe that this is possible provided a couple of conditions are met:

1. The HTML for a hyperlink must be included with the web address in the Google Calendar Event description.  For example, if I wish to have a clickable link to Apple's website in the description of a calendar event I would need to enter all of the following into the description field of the event:

<a href="http://www.apple.com">Apple's Website</a>

The text shown above in red would be replaced with the web address to which you want the link to go.  The blue text shown above should be replaced with what you want shown as the text for the user to click upon.  

2. It appears that the active hyperlinks in the description of an event will only work if the entire calendar is shared.  I tried to get this to work when trying to share just the individual event.  In that case the link was not active and actually displayed the address plus a remnant of the HTML.

Here is a link to a test calendar that I have made public and have embedded into a simple web page.  The July 26th, 2012 event should have an active link to Apple's website in the description...

Link to a web page with an embedded Google Calendar.

I hope that this made sense and is found to be helpful.  Further questions about this could be directed to @pdlindgren on Twitter.

Test an Aurasma Aura?

Aurasma Lite is a free app for the iPad 2, smart phones, and other tablet devices equipped with cameras.  It allows one to view a predetermined "trigger image" within the app and then have augmented content appear overlayed or next to it on the screen.  This augmented content can be a still image or a video.  The combination of the trigger image and the augmented content to be displayed is called an Aura.

If you are interested in seeing a simple aura that I have created:

     1. Install the Aurasma Lite app on your iPad or other tablet/smart device (camera required).

     2. Subscribe to my Aurasma channel by clicking on this link while you are on your smart, camera-equiped device (it won't work in a non-mobile browser):  http://bit.ly/Hb8k9E

     3. View this image by itself and then print it out (it does not need to be printed in color). NOTE: It actually doesn't need to be printed out at all.  I just got the trigger image to work by just viewing it on my laptop screen...

    4.  Start up the Aurasma Lite app an hold it above the picture you printed out (or point it at the picture in this blog post).  An overlay should appear that shows where some of the Westside Community Schools school buildings are.  NOTE:  I threw these images together quickly to test this concept.  The map of the buildings is incomplete.

    5.  Let me know how it worked ( Twitter: @pdlindgren )

Putting Images With a Google Form?

WARNING: VERY ROUGH DIRECTIONS...

Last week @j_allen asked on Twitter if it was possible to embed images into a Google Form.  After a bit of research and playing around, I was not able to find an easy way to do this.

The best approximation that I could come up with involves embedding the form into a page on a Google Site (actually, this should work on any web page--we'll use Sites in this example).  Images could then be added to the page to go along with the form items.

When in a Google Spreadsheet that has a Form, if you pull down the FORM menu you should read "Embed form in a web page".  This will take you to a snippet of code that may be copied and pasted into the HTML of a web page.

So here is my quick and dirty overview of the process:

• Split a Google Sites web page into 2 columns (Layout menu when editing a Google Sites page). 
•  Click in the left hand column and then click the <html> link at the top of the page.
•  Paste in the snippet of embed code from the form and then click UPDATE.
•  Click in the right hand column and begin adding your images.   

This may take some playing around to get the images into the appropriate location in order to line up with the appropriate component of the form.

Again, this is a crude description of one possible solution to this problem.  I haven't thoroughly evaluated  whether this is practical, just that it is possible.  Here is a quick page I threw together to demonstrate the concept.  It has a very short, simple form in the left column and an image I grabbed at random placed in the right column.

  I am certainly open to other suggestions and would love to hear if this idea is workable for anyone.

iBooks Author Disappointment: Revolution Averted

I will leave the lamentation over Apple's iBooks Author user agreement to others.  My disappointment is reserved for the opportunities missed by what the software does not appear to allow me to create.

iBooks Author offers beautiful layouts, stunning colors, multimedia components, and impressive interactivity (through the Review widget and other features).  These are all wonderful steps up from a traditional textbook.  This new system may be considered revolutionary by some.  Yet from the results of my early exploration, I am afraid that a real component of revolution has been missed.  I hope I am wrong, but...

These new iBooks do not appear to allow HTML widgets that dynamically pull content from other internet sites. 

I have tried adding various HTML widgets to an iBook.  The ones that work seem to be those that are completely self-contained.  The standard Dashboard Calculator widget works fine within an iBook.  Regrettably, it seems that any that need to pull from an external server or feed do not.

The promise of adding HTML widgets was very exciting.  I envisioned them as dynamic portals opening users to a vast universe of content and interactivity--that could be embedded amongst the static content of an iBook's pages.  Integrated polling websites,  embedded RSS feeds, or any up-to-date content an instructor/book-builder wanted to incorporate would make iBooks truly engaging, interactive, and completely malleable to needs of the student.

Sadly, when a student opens one of the new iBooks on Day#2 it will look pretty much the same as it did on Day #1.   I realize that hyperlinks to external content are allowed, but having the content within an iBooks' page change automatically over time would be truly magical and powerful.  Hyperlinks within digital books aren't anything new, self-updating pages would be.

I think I understand Apple's decision on this.  If an iBook produced with iBooks Author is to be evaluated for acceptance to the iBooks Textbook Store, it can't be a moving target.  Otherwise a page whose content was completely appropriate at the time of approval might have a dynamic page that later includes something entirely inappropriate.

Please don't mistake this critique as ingratitude.  iBooks Author is a piece of software that allows me to do things I would never have been able to do.  It also cost me nothing.  I just wish that the dynamic potential of self-updating HTML widgets could be allowed for iBooks not intended for distribution through the Apple store.

Many iPad fans will find Alan C. Kay's 1972 paper A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages to be very interesting. While at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Kay imagined the Dynabook. Much of what he envisioned seems to have found a place in reality in the Apple iPad.  I'm a demanding person, though, and I want even just a little more "dyna" in my iBooks.

Back to sports, Ted, the revolution has been averted.

Steve Jobs Biography

During my daily driving time I am currently listening to the Audible version of Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.   I actually finished it on Tuesday and immediately began listening to it again from the start.

Fascinating story.  Great characters.  Great lessons to be learned.  The stories of the two Steve's pranks as youngsters are priceless.

I highly recommend the book in any form but really think that listening to it might be the best way to enjoy this work--not much for pictures, though.