English Central

Google Ventures, Atlas Ventures, and other investors founded English Central and hope to become the leading English language learning site on the Internet for both computer and mobile users. Enrollment is free. All you have to do is provide your name, email address, and make a password. (Enroll here: https://secure.englishcentral.com/ja/register)


You can also choose the level of difficulty: easy, medium, and hard. Each video shows the text of what's being spoken. You can also set the audio to play slower and/or repeat. After the video finishes, you can choose to check out other videos, try the video in Quiz Mode, or interact with the video by repeating each line. (You will need a microphone to fully interact with the videos.)




If you choose to interact with the video, it will check your English and give you some feedback. In quiz mode, some words will be hidden. You will need to speak the missing words. If you click on the blank space, the missing word will pop up and you can practice the pronunciation of the whole word or just the consonants and vowels that are used in the word. The pop-up also gives the meaning of the word and an example of usage.




The best thing about English Central is that if you change the language interface from English to Japanese, you can see a translation of the English text in Japanese. In the quiz mode, you can also choose to show only English, only Japanese, both English and Japanese, or show no text at all.


If you want some help on how to set up your own account with English Central, please ask me in class. I will be very happy to help you out! See you in class!

Chip

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Disclaimer

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information, go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purpose of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.1 Japan License.

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アンミ英会話教室
２３４－００５３神奈川県横浜市港南区日野中央２－６－３
パークサイド日野１０２号
http://www.anmi-eikaiwa.com/ | support@anmi-eikaiwa.com
Tel. 045-841-4218 | Fax 045-841-4288
携帯リンク http://www.anmiweb.com/mobile/

Toshiba Dynabook UX Netbook

Have had some problems with my netbook these days. I bought in only three months ago, so this situation is extremely odd for me. Usually, I can keep a laptop for about 2 and a half years before I reach the limits of its memory or max out the HDD capacity. I even had a ThinkPad that kept working after I spilled beer on the keyboard, although during winter, I had to "melt" the sticky substance under the keys with a blow dryer before it let me type something in a normal fashion.

For the past couple of days, I turned on the computer. The HDD LED on the front edge of the body would light and then suddenly turn off. Normally, it flickers as Windows loads itself. Power LED was OK, but the HDD LED wouldn't flicker and I would be stuck with a silent machine that had a black screen. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

I turned everything off and went to bed. The next morning, I went to work. Turned on the laptop in a dry, cool, air-conditioned office. Surprise! My computer was running again!

After work, I went back to the classroom and tried to boot the computer again. This time, the room was hot and humid. No response from the computer. A black screen, no HDD LED flickering, no fan blowing, nothing. "Hmm...," I thought to myself.

I popped the netbook in the fridge for about 10 minutes and took it out. The computer booted up just fine! I will feel "lonely" for maybe a week or two. This computer is compact, light, relatively responsive, and best of all, has an extremely nice keyboard that is easy to type on!

These users had similar problems with their laptops, too:

- http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread120781.html#
- http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-6398-my-laptop-won-t-start
- http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/laptop-support/35971-toshiba-satellite-a30-wont-boot-blank-screen.html
- http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?s=b7b48e97e0c1015e71854de924f1ee1f&t=131894

Sunday morning, Toshiba will send a guy out to pick up the computer and hopefully they will be able to repair it without having to change hard drives. It took me three days to install all the programs, update all the various versions of software, set up the email accounts and passwords, copy all the documents files from a backup HDD, etc. I don't want to go through all of that again for at least a couple of years!

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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.1 Japan License.

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アンミ英会話教室
２３４－００５３神奈川県横浜市港南区日野中央２－６－３
パークサイド日野１０２号
http://www.anmi-eikaiwa.com/ | support@anmi-eikaiwa.com
Tel. 045-841-4218 | Fax 045-841-4288
携帯リンク http://www.anmiweb.com/mobile/