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!

•  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!

Read the info at WordPress about Pingbacks.

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!

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?

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!