A day at the New Hampshire State Archives

NHPCR-5-146r

Originally uploaded by Margo Burns

I spent the better part of today hunting through volumes of preserved court records from New Hampshire in the 1680s, looking for the original documents of the witchcraft prosecution of Rachel Fuller of Hampton. I started with the items listed in David D. Hall’s book, Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth century New England: A Documentary History 1658-1693 (2nd ed., Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1999). It took some doing to find the original documents, since Hall had only copied transcriptions published in the 19th century, but persistence paid off: there were three more documents about the case with the main cache of them, but one of the documents Hall included wasn’t there. So I looked in the next two volumes, and found it — along with two other documents about the case. I am trying to figure out exactly what I’ll do with them. I’d like to write up something about the case and transcribe them fresh, since my skills at reading and transcribing documents from this period are still strong!

Replacing the hard drive on my 17-inch MacBook Pro

This morning I finally bit the bullet and swapped the 120GB hard drive that came in my MacBook Pro when I bought it in Sept. 2006 and replaced it with a 250GB SATA hard drive.  I kept filling up the original one and having to delete lots of things — I even had to  archive my entire iTunes library to an external hard drive, which was inconvenient at best — and I wasn’t convinced that the machine was running its best with only a few GB of available space. I needed these things to start:

•  250GB WesternDigital Scorpio 2.5 SATA ( $142.99 + $7.95 shipping from OWC)
• A generic USB 2.0 external SATA drive enclosure ($2.99 + $7.99 shipping from TrueIon on eBay)
• The free software SuperDuper
• A 000-size watchmaker’s Philips head screwdriver ($5.97 for an 8-in-1 set at HomeDepot)
• A Torx T6 screwdriver ($5.97 for an 8-in-1 set at HomeDepot)

Now my computer has 135GB of free space — more free space than I had already filled on my old hard drive!  For my next log post, I’ll describe the step-by-step process of how I did it, with photographs, mostly because the only instructions I could find on-line were for doing this were for a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and the insides of the two machines are different.  Not radically, but enough that I thought there might be other folks who would like to see the insides of the 17-inch before cracking theirs open.My next step will be to upgrade the operating system to Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, and to install the new Master Adobe Creative Suite 3 our school just got — and several parts of which I’ll be teaching workshops on these new versions of this spring!  I really had to have the extra space to accommodate those, more than anything else.  Of course, it hasn’t help me save disk space to have starting shooting photographs with a 10-megapixel camera this summer!

Presidential Primary in New Hampshire

I waited until the last moment to absolutely decide, and ended up choosing John Edwards, but it was a tough choice. I like Clinton, Obama, Edwards and Richardson, so it was a no-lose situation tonight.  I even went down to watch the returns with the campaign workers and to finally see Edwards in person, since I’ve already seen Clinton and Obama, when they were in the state in September.  Here are my pictures:  

John Edwards in NH, Jan. 8, 2008

Pingbacks

If you make a link in your WordPress blog to another blog at WordPress, the other blogger is automatically notified on their blog. So when Mme Windsor wrote her News Flash post and made a link to my blog, it showed up on my blog that she had! Spiffy, eh?

Read the info at WordPress about Pingbacks.

Downloading and Converting YouTube Videos

Because of the various requests for help downloading videos from YouTube to view off-line on the computer, I’ve looked through a variety of ways to do it, especially for free, and it seems that most of the download/decode websites have stopped working with YouTube, maybe since Google bought it. Hmm. So what’s to be done?

Start with using the FireFox web browser, if you aren’t already using it. (You’re NOT using Explorer still, are you??)

• http://www.mozilla.com

Next, download the DownloadHelper plugin for FireFox:

• http://www.downloadhelper.net/

Install DownloadHelper and restart FireFox. Here’s a video to hep you use it:

The files are downloaded with the extension .flv — Flash Videos. You can view them with a FLV Player:

• http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/flv-player/ (Windows only)

You can also use a converter, like the free MediaCoder, to turn the FLVs into a different format, like QuickTime or AVI.

• http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/download.htm (Windows only)

If you have a Mac, you can add a free plug-in, Perian, to QuickTime Player, to allow it to play a variety of video codecs:

• http://perian.org/

If you have the free QuickTime Player, you can just play the .flv files, but if you have paid for QuickTime Pro, you will be able to save the .flv files as .mov (QuickTime) files with this upgrade.

If you don’t have QuickTime Pro, and want to convert the FLV files to QuickTime for free on a Mac, try iSquint:

• http://www.isquint.org/

You will be constantly prompted to purchase their other video product, VisualHub, but just say no.

Happy New Year!

December Nor’easter

We’re having quite a snowstorm here today!  I’ve already shoveled 8-10 inches out of the driveway.  Our dog, Luna, loves the snow, though.

Dec. 16, 2007 Nor’easter

TeacherTube

Here are a couple more of the great videos I’ve found on-line:

This is a great one about Web 2.0 at YouTube:

This is an entertaining talk about how education today can stifle creativity:

2020 Vision:

More about blogging in the classroom:

There’s also an education-centered video website, TeacherTube, but so far, I haven’t been able to embed videos from there in my WordPress blog. Can anyone help?

Photography

This is a picture I shot this summer with my new Nikon digital SLR camera. (Mme. Windsor and I are both avid photographers!) This is Franconia Notch, here in New Hampshire. See where this is on Google Maps. Until a few years ago, up on the mountain on the left, there was a rock formation that looked like a face. It was called “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and was a special symbol for our state, but one night, the rocks just crumbled and the face fell off the mountain. My family used to live farther north, and we used to drive through “The Notch” a lot, and we always used to try to see “The Old Man.” Sometimes you couldn’t because it was lost in the clouds, like on this day. I still think it’s very pretty!

These are some of my other pictures from this summer, if you’re interested!

Atomic Learning

AtomicLearning, an on-line video tutorial service, has some great help for using WordPress.  It does require a subscription to see more than the first video, but the “Web 2.0 Workshop” videos are all free. It’s done by Vicki Davis, a teacher in the USA who cofounded the Flat Classroom Project with Julie Lindsay, currently teaching in Bangladesh.  They are also involved in the Horizon Project, “a collaborative global project between classrooms in diverse geographical locations.”  

RSS feeds

How to keep track of new posts on blogs: You can find a transcript in English of what is said in this video at http://www.commoncraft.com/rss-video-transcript .  You can also view this video with subtitles in a variety of langauges, including French and Arabic at http://www.dotsub.com/films/inplainenglish/index.php