Khan Academy now with Computer Science courses
The Khan Academy is a free online learning resource with more than 3000 educational videos. Everyone is welcome to join any course or lesson on the site. Up until now, the focus has been largely on math with other science thrown into the mix for good measure. What makes the academy interesting is not only the free approach to education, but more than that the way lessons are taught. The idea is to make the lessons understandable to users of all experience levels, provided that users either start at the very beginning for a good foundation, or skip classes provided they are already proficient in a certain field. The courses are even understandable if you have never had a lesson of math or science in your life before.
Today the Khan Academy launched their much anticipated Computer Science program which at the time of writing offers 14 different computer science related tutorials. The preferred programming language of choice is JavaScript, but instead of walking you through a step by step instructional course that covers the basic foundations of JavaScript, all commands and examples, you step right into the programming.
Probably the best way to get a feel for the course and concept is to watch the welcome to Computer Science video that introduces you to the course and some of the basic concepts of the JavaScript language.
It is recommended to follow the course in the right order as it is building up on previous lessons. If you skip lessons you will have a much harder time following the instructions as you may be missing essential information that were explained and taught in previous lessons.
A total of 14 lessons are available right now that walk you through some of the basics of the JavaScript language. This includes using variables, understanding Boolean operators, animations and drawing. What is interesting is that you can modify code and output in real time to get a better understanding of the concepts. Below the introductory video for instance you find the code on the left and the actual output on the right. While you won't see all of the code, you get to play around with some of the variables to change the position or color of elements. A pretty powerful environment to better understand how variables and code changes impact the output.
Here is the launch video that you may be interesting in.
New lessons and courses will be posted on a regular basis. For now, the Computer Science course is nowhere near complete as that offered by Udacity and maybe even Academic Earth. The latter is however less interactive and consists mainly of videos that you can watch.
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?