30 May
Large Hadron Collider Presentation
18 May
ScratchDay @ MIT
I attended ScratchDay 2009 @ MIT on Saturday May 16th. I’ve been an advocate of Scratch for about a year and a half. I love the low barrier of entry, programming / science_single skills, and sandbox-type environment. We got play around around a little bit and connect with other educators. Some new sites are going to be cropping up to help educators implement Scratch. Look for ScratchEd (headed by Karen Brennan) to appearing soon. The new version of Scratch (1.4) will also be able to interact with Lego WeDo motors and modules.
However, Scratch aside I was really excited to get to poke around the MIT Media Lab and Lifelong Kindergarten area. If I were to redesign our computer lab. I would do it around something like the Lifelong Kindergarten room. Couches, work areas, modular furniture, organizing bins, and organized chaos as far as the eye could see. It was the kind of place the invited you to work. Now I just need to find the naugehide couches.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
28 Feb
Zen and the Art of Hard Drive Failure Part 2: Life in the Cloud
When my hard drive bit the dust, my immediate worry for was my data. I knew how difficulty and expense of data recovery. With this in mind, I approached my Apple Genius Bar with little hope. After talking with Carl the Genius, I had two options: data recovery or complete hard drive replacement. I went with the latter.
After getting a spankin’ new hard drive, I went about the business of reconstructing my data. My first impression was how much of my data exists in the cloud. Through email attachments, web posts, Flickr accounts, Google Docs, and web servers I was able to download almost all the data for my current projects. I was also using CrashPlan and Mozy to various other archived files. The big chunk of data that were missing was iTunes Library. Senuti was essential for retrieving my iTunes Library from my iPhone and iPod.
I was lucky in the fact the much of data exists off my laptop. In the future I’ll be thinking of my hard drive as a rest stop for data instead of its final destination.
31 Oct
Zen and the Art of Hard Drive Failure
Last week I heard a violent clicking noise coming from my laptop. When I rebooted and saw folder with question mark emblazoned on it, I immediately knew my hard drive was screwed. I powered down my MacBook Pro hoping in my heart that the next restart would bring it back to life. My colleagues watch at an increasing distance as I muttered and spat obscenities at my machine. It is not a pleasant site when the IT director’s hardware turns against him.
About 3 hours into this ordeal something miraculous happened. I accepted that the hard drive was toast and moved on. Data had been lost; files, workflows, and applications would need to be replaced, but world was still spinning. I may have set a land speed record for moving through the stages of grief. I backed off and realized that the worst part of the hard drive failure was hoping that there was some way to fix it. Now I know that there were sectors of that disk that had undamaged data. I also know that the files I could have rescued would have been the blurry pictures that should have been deleted from iPhoto and ABBA’s Greatest Hits. The time, energy, and emotion spent trying to rescue a gigabyte or two wouldn’t have been worth it.
My big takeaway from the big crash of ‘08 is that disasters strike everyone. Wishing a disaster didn’t happen often prolongs misery and delays resolution. Wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth rarely results in a constructive recovery. When a disaster strikes, calm and perspective are the two qualities most needed and the most difficult to achieve.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
16 Aug
Datacase, My New Wireless Drive
Being a self-confessed technophile, I tend to pounce upon anything new and slick. While some people feel buyer’s remorse, I feel late-adopter’s regret. My most current pang of regret happened recently when Apple pulled the app NetShare by NullRiver from the iTunes Store. Now I may never be able to tether my laptop to my iPhone. I guess there are greater tragedies in the world.
When I saw that Veiosoft released Datacase, I jumped on it like a 13-year-old Chinese gymnast on a doctored passport. Datacase is an app that lets you transfer files wirelessly to from your computer to your iPhone. Right now I am putting it through its paces.
Once you launch Datacase, the iPhone is available as network accessible computer. My iPhone appears as a local computer. It also makes your files accessible through web and FTP interfaces. In order to transfer files, Datacase needs a wifi signal and to be on the same local network as the computer. All I needed was to transfer files to the shared volumes (Shared Files, Drop Box) on my iPhone. One minor bug I encountered was that the Shared Files and Drop Box volumes were not visible from a list view in the Finder. I needed to switch to an icon or column view to see them. Once I traversed that relatively small hurdle, I easily uploaded some pictures and an excel file to my iPhone. Datacase also allows the user to view common files types. I opened up my excel document and was treated to this month’s budget numbers.
As a security measure, Datacase requires you to approve of any files sent to your iPhone. However, security isn’t as necessarily tight in the other direction. Since your iPhone is visible on the network when Datacase is running, people with access to your ip address will have access to your Shared Files volume (unless you change the permissions). Be careful not to store anything too incriminating in there. Best leave those files containing state secrets in the Drop Box. Or better yet, don’t put it in Datacase at all.
Datacase was a minor lifesaver during a trip to Gettysburg, PA. I forgot my iPhone’s usb cable at home and had no way to transfer an audio tour of Gettysburg battlefield to my iPhone. Remembering my shiny new app, I created an ad-hoc network, assigned some static ip addresses to the iPhone and computer, and I was able to transfer the files like usual.
Datacase does not play DRM-protected files. The audio files play within the Quicktime player, not as part of the iTunes library. So if my audio tour was purchased from iTunes, I would have been out of luck. A great future feature would be to have access to other directories on the iPhone like the iTunes or iPhoto library. Although I’d imagine Apple is a little tetchy about opening those up. Another limitation, albeit small, is Datacase does not let you view Microsoft Office’s newest file type (ex. .docx, .xlsx) and other less standard file types. This limitation is most likely a result of Apple’s built in viewer. I may wait a (long) while for .docx to become the standard.
Datacase also aggregates files by different file types (i.e. office documents, audio files, photos etc.). I can see this feature being useful once I amass a collection of files, but right now it’s a little superfluous. The great advantage to this app is its ability to share high-use files. I can give my ip address to a coworker and have them download the file from my iPhone. Pretty darn slick.
Check out Veiosoft’s walkthrough video:
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
22 Jul
Test Post from iPhone
Just testing the new WordPress app on the iPhone.
12 Jul
Back from the Beyond
It has been a while and a crazy year. I’ll be heading back to full time technology coordinator, and this coming year I want to come out swinging. Lots has happened since my last post. I’m still trying to find the ideal tools to make us more connected. With so many resources, there is a bit of option paralysis. I want something clean, simple, and ubiquitous. Students should be able to access it from anywhere. Connected 24-7. Could it happen? Is there an ideal workflow? We’ll see.
17 Apr
Doozla
I am a huge fan of Plasq program Skitch. The versatility of this program has been documented across the web, so I won’t detail it here. It was the usefulness of Skitch that led me to try out Doozla. Doozla’s a vector design program for kids. It includes premade pictures to color in; think of a 21st century coloring book. It also has a great feature to uses the webcam to import a picture (a la a PhotoBooth-type interface). It looks like it would be a great program for the kids to use for school. My only gripe is the proprietary file format that only works with Doozla. I can bring up a print screen and export it to a pdf and then convert to a jpeg, but where’s the fun in that. I’m striving to have the work the students create at school be in the most open / available format possible. For now Doozla, doesn’t pass that test.
Update: I just received an email from Mathieu at Plasq. Doozla is preparing some export options for their next release 1.2.0. It seems they are aiming for some of the same functionality as Skitch, but with a more kid-friendly interface.
03 Apr
Evil Empire
I understand that both Apple and Microsoft are evil. I find their maliciousness manifests itself in different ways. While Apple locks me with DRM’ed iTunes tracks, AppleTV, iPhone, and integrated iLife apps, I’m willing to forgive them. Its like having a lover who you know will eventually screw you over, but you keep going back to her, thinking this time it will be different or somehow it was your fault. Maybe its because the apps are pretty. Maybe its Steve’s reality distortion field.
Microsoft is like a coworker that you abhor, but have to work with anyways. Think Lumbergh from Office Space. I’ve tried to escape their icy grip, but Microsoft keeps pulling me back in. Since I’ve moved the MacBook Pro, I’ve tried like hell to use Bean and Google Docs more frequently. The rub lies in the fact so many documents I’ve created are in the MS Office black hole, never to escape. Now that I’m making a system image for our new MacBooks at school, do I dare not include MS Office in the image? Would there be wide scale revolt? Or would there be other brave revolutionaries that are willing to throw off the yoke of brutal MS oppression? (ed. Please note note the slight hyperbole was thrown in for effect)
