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Archive for August, 2012

Keyboard layouts and IME’s on LRC Windows 7 PCs

You can change the input language using the language toolbar which appears next to the notification area in the lower right of the task bar.

Note that many languages need not be listed since their characters can be typed, Windows-wide, using keyboard shortcuts of the  English-US (international extended) keyboard layout.

Some installed input methods benefit from having keyboard overlays which have been installed on some computer. Other input methods allow for drawing characters, e.g. in Japanese or Mandarin, which works better with the Wacom tablet installed on PC01 and PC02 than with a mice.

Many languages have more than one keyboard/input method. After changing to your  language on the language toolbar, you can switch from the language’s  default keyboard layout to  another by clicking on keyboard icon  behind the 2-letter language abbreviation.

imageBelow is a comprehensive list of all layouts that are available to you:

 

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How to query lab computers for new IPs after network reconfiguration using Symantec Ghost

Foreign Language Character Input on Windows 7 in the LRC

2012/08/16 1 comment
  1. The LRC, now on Windows 7, is testing  Carly J. Born’s U.S. International Extended 2.0 Keyboard, an improvement on the previously used US International Keyboard (still recommended for personal use, as it comes standard with all but ancient versions of Windows) for typing accented characters in Western languages, Pinyin-tone-marks for Mandarin (replacing the also useful, but more evolved Pinyinput), and other SLA tone- and length-marks e.g. for Latin.
  2. Not limited to specific application, you can use anywhere in Windows the following shortcut’s – taken from the original developer documentation (with some minor modifications).
  3. We hope you find the benefit for SLA far outweighs the need to getting used to typing a space between the 2 red characters and a vowel, in order to produce their regular form, without creating a foreign language character.

acute accent, pinyin 2nd tone

apostrophe (= ‘), vowel

(e.g. á é í ó ú)

grave accent, pinyin 4th tone

grave (= `), vowel

(e.g. à è ì ò ù)

c cedilla

comma apostrophe, c

(e.g. ç)

macron accent, pinyin 1st tone

hyphen, vowel

(e.g. ā ē ī ō ū )

vowel with umlaut

double-quote (= “), vowel

(e.g. ä ë ï ö ü ÿ)

vowel with circumflex

shift+6 (= ^), vowel

(e.g. â ê î ô û)

pinyin 3rd tone

Shift+5, vowel

(e.g. ǎ ě ǐǒǔ)

ü with pinyin tones

Accent, double-quote

(e.g. ǖǘǚǜ)

letter with tilde

tilde (= ~), letter

(e.g. õ ñ ã)

letter with dot below

shift+period, letter

(e.g. ạ ẹ Ẹ ị ọ ụ)

letter with double acute

shift+; , o or u

(e.g. ő, ű, Ő, Ű)

«

ctrl + alt + [

»

ctrl + alt + ]

ctrl + alt + 5

ß

ctrl + alt + s/right-ALT + s

ø

ctrl + alt + l

[won’t work in word, onenote, but works in excel]

¿

ctrl + alt + /

¡

ctrl + alt + 1

[To type ¡, disable the command called ApplyHeading1 in the Format category, in word or onenote, but not needed in excel]

œ

Right alt + k

A search interface to the EuroParl corpus

image

(Note the on my IE9, the text in the right column appears “blacked-out” – Select it to view, or use a different webbrowser).

How to change the display language and speech recognition language on LRC Windows 7 computers (and which languages are available)

  1. UPDATE: Since this page seems to be getting a lot of hits, I want to clarify: The step-by-step guide  below only applies after you installed (free) language (or language interface) packs (see list here) on Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate SKU (others SKUs cannot add multiple language interfaces).  UPDATE2: Things got much easier with Windows 8.
  2. In order to
    1. view the GUI of Windows and Internet Explorer in a foreign language,
    2. use the speech recognition in (a subset of the below) foreign languages,
    3. and also switch the default language of MS-Office
  3. Double-click the desktop shortcut “Region and language – Keyboards and languages”.
  4. Select the desired language from the dropdown box, click “OK”.
  5. image
  6. Click: “Log off now”: image
  7. “Log back in” (without restarting).
  8. And if you want the available display languages in English,
  9. here are the fully  supported (MS Language packs):
    Language Native name
    Arabic العربية
    Chinese (Simplified) 中文(简体)
    Chinese (Traditional) 中文 (繁體)
    English English
    French français
    German Deutsch
    Greek Ελληνικά
    Hebrew עברית
    Italian italiano
    Japanese 日本語
    Korean 한국어
    Polish polski
    Portuguese (Brazil) Português
    Portuguese (Portugal) português
    Russian Русский
    Spanish español
  10. and here the partially supported (MS-Language Interface packs):
    Hindi हिंदी
    KiSwahili Kiswahili
    Persian (Farsi) فارسی
    Yoruba ede Yorùbá
  11. And here are the languages that support speech recognition: CAM05478

How you can reuse your speech profile even on deepfrozen Language resource center computers

  1. “A [Windows Speech] profile is basically the collection of all settings and information about how to recognize your voice when using Windows Speech Recognition. Before changing the language used or letting other persons use Windows Speech Recognition it is best to create a new profile so that your current one will remain unaltered”.
  2. To be able reuse your effort training the computer to recognize your voice speaking in your study language – even though the LRC Windows 7 computers get reset when restarted -, you can backup, and later reload, your Speech Profile, preferably to your H:-drive.
    1. The Microsoft tool that allows you to do that has been put on WSRProfile.exe  desktop of the LRC Windows 7 PCs. I can copy these instructions directly from the Microsoft blog page:
  3. Double-click WSRProfile.exe to start the WSR Profile tool wizard. image
  4. To back up a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Backup my speech profile.
    1. In the Select your Speech Profile dialog box, choose the speech profile you wish to back up and then click Next. image
    2. The wizard will prompt you for a filename and location to save the file. When you have entered this information, click Next. The WSR Profile tool wizard will start the backup process of the selected speech profile. image
    3. After the backup operation successfully finishes, click Close . image
  5. To restore a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Restore my Speech Profile.
    1. On the File to Restore wizard page, click Browse and locate the backed up speech profile, and then click Next.
    2. Choose the speech profile you want to restore to.
      1. Select Use the current speech profile if you want to overwrite the current default speech profile.
      2. Select Create a new speech profile if you want to restore to a new speech profile. If you choose to restore to a new speech profile you will be prompted to provide a name for the new profile.
    3. After the restore operation successfully finishes, click Close.

How students upload a video file to Moodle using Kaltura

  1. My closest related instruction so far has been for teachers, and the CTL also seems to have only instructions for how teachers upload videos for students. However, instructions for students are very similar, follow these steps:
  2. Open the kaltura assignment and click “Add video submission”:clip_image001
  3. Under left tab “Upload”, Click “Browse”:  clip_image002
  4. Browse to your video file (note the “files of type”allow only the upload of certain extensions) and  click “Open”: clip_image004
  5.   Click “Upload”clip_image005
  6. Wait for the upload to complete: clip_image006
  7.   Click “Next” :clip_image007
  8.   Add at least a “title”, and fix any errors you might get:  clip_image009
  9. Click “Next”: clip_image011
  10.   Click “Submit”: clip_image012
  11. Look for the success message: clip_image013
  12. You will have to wait for the video preview to become available:clip_image014
  13. If you refresh the page, the wait time gets updated, take the amount with a grain of salt.  Here I could already view… image
  14. Be aware that your video resolution will likely be downscaled (my 1280*1024 screencast in this example ended up pretty grainy).

Setting time zone for all and for all misconfigured OWA users

live@edu/Office365 Exchange in the cloud does not seem to allow setting a default time zone, but rather leaves it to the user to change the time zone (defaulting to the time zone the cloud server is in that the user happens to hit) on first login – in the world I operate in, большая ошибка!

How to use the cmdlet set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration with parameter TimeZone to change the time zone of all your mailboxes is nicely explained on the blog How Exchange Works here, including screenshot and PowerShell command.

Unfortunately such an operation is reported to have needed 3 days for updating all mailboxes in an educational live@edu installation with 30000 users… You can restrict the mailboxes touched by examining first which are not in your local time zone (consult the MS TimeZone table for syntax, e.g. US “Eastern Standard Time”):

 

$mymailboxes = get-mailbox

ForEach ($examinedmailbox in $mymailboxes){

$regionalconfig = get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –identity $examinedmailbox.identity

 

if ($regionalconfig.timezone -ne “Eastern Standard Time”){                      

Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -identity $examinedmailbox.identity -TimeZone  “Eastern Standard Time”  -confirm:$false

}

}