Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • PowerPoint Remix Rant

    Re-use, the connotation springs eternal in many facets of our daily and professional lives. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle until it comes to a “learning object”. Then it is as Mike points out a difficult, fragile row to hoe. It’s easier to just start over from scratch rather than build off or stand on the shoulders of the “other person”, what created the learning object. Instead of re-use, maybe what should attempt to do, or maybe NOT do is reinvent. You may not be able to re-use, and if you chose to not re-use, at the very least don’t reinvent. That may be the best use of a learning object. And I think that’s a better use of people’s most valuable resources (1.Time 2.Attention). So hear, hear to Mike Caulfield, it’s absolutely true what he’s saying about the promise vs. reality of re-use for PowerPoint and a lot of other “publishing” or “document-oriented” tools.

    mikecaulfield's avatarHapgood

    I’m just back from some time off, and I’m feeling too lazy to finish reading the McGraw-Hill/Microsoft Open Learning announcement. Maybe someone could read it for me?

    I can tell you where I stopped reading though. It was where I saw that the software was implemented as a “PowerPoint Plugin”.

    Now, I think that the Office Mix Project is a step in the right direction in a lot of ways. It engages with people as creators. It creates a largely symmetric reading/authoring environment. It corrects the harmful trend of shipping “open” materials without a rich, fork-friendly environment to edit them in. (Here’s how you spot the person who has learned nothing in the past ten years about OER: they are shipping materials in PDF because it’s an “open” format).

    The PowerPoint problem is that everything in that environment encourages you to create something impossible to reuse. Telling people to…

    View original post 426 more words

  • Aframe Puts Professional Video Editing In The Cloud

    Aframe Puts Professional Video Editing In The Cloud

    If Adobe can do something like this and keep all the files in situ on a server hard drive “somewhere” on the Internet, there’s no telling what’s possible. I waste more of my professional hours copying stuff from place to place over network connections. Keeping everything in one container and being able to edit and view from that same container, that would be incredible. That would be like giving me back 20 hours of my work week.

  • Adventures in annotation

    Something/Anything that is as flexible and extensible as this, in ways you cannot always imagine, that is powerful. Kudos, Bravo one and all. At the same time it reminds me a little of the Google Waves goal, of not using silo-ized message stores like Email for collaborative work. And at the same time Waves wasn’t this open, connected to the open Web. I say that because the “chatter” accompanying the Preview URL. This is going to be interesting to say the least.

    Jon Udell's avatarJon Udell

    I just wrote my first blog post for Hypothesis, the web annotation startup I joined recently. In the post I talk about how a specific feature of the annotator — its ability to sync annotations across local and/or web-based copies of the same file — illustrates a general approach to working with copies of resources that may live in many places and answer to many names.

    When I finished drafting the post I pinged Dan Whaley, founder of Hypothesis, to review it. Here’s the IRC chat transcript: 

    Jon: https://hypothes.is/?p=3705&preview=true

Dan: I'm annotating!

Jon: The preview URL?

Dan: :-)

    I was a bit surprised. The preview URL was password-protected but annotations against it would not be, they’d show up in the public annotation stream. But hey, I’m all about transparency when appropriate, so bring it!

    Over the next few minutes we traded annotations and I tweaked the post. Here’s a…

    View original post 341 more words

  • IT Can’t Ignore the Video Surveillance Data Explosion

    IT Can’t Ignore the Video Surveillance Data Explosion

    I have a stake in this story as I have had to install and manage a number of security cameras as lecture capture cameras. I have all these same concerns myself even though technically it’s not security video but on request lectures being video captured during a class.

    George Crump's avatarStorageSwiss.com – The Home of Storage Switzerland

    IT professionals are simultaneously being pulled in multiple directions. For most, data center management is more like triage than a well-engineered series of processes. As a result, IT managers and CIOs are very careful about which projects they “own”, which ones they advise on, and which ones they ignore. One project that is sure to cross the IT desk is storing and maintaining video surveillance data. While it may not be on the top of their list, IT could provide tremendous value to the organization if they were to own this particular project.

    The Problems

    Technology is revolutionizing video surveillance, overwhelming the existing infrastructure and expanding its use far beyond the original security purpose. High-resolution cameras are just one example of this technology advancement. Thanks to wireless connectivity and low cost, they can be easily deployed in large numbers. The problem is that the video they capture can be transferred…

    View original post 1,107 more words

  • How To Make Pizza At Home That Won’t Be Horrible

    Being a fan of pizza and a loyal adherent to America’s Test Kitchen, I will be curious to read up more on this article. Always look for some tips and tricks that will cost my game a bit.

  • The 33 1/3 New Author Q&A: Kembrew McLeod

    The 33 1/3 New Author Q&A: Kembrew McLeod

    Kembrew McCleod on Blondie’s album Parallel Lines.

    333sound's avatar333sound

    Today, we’re happy to bring you a Q&A with Kembrew McLeod, who will be writing the upcoming 33 1/3 on Blondie’s Parallel Lines !

    Kembrew McLeod Communications StudiesTell us a bit about yourself in an extended author biography.

    I’m a writer, documentary filmmaker, university professor, media prankster, spazz dancer, children’s music producer, and all around man of many hats. I began writing about music over two decades ago in old-school paper ’zines, and then made the transition in 1995 to online music writing in outlets like Addicted To Noise, SonicNet, and MTV.com. It was a new frontier, and I distinctly remember having to explain to label publicists what the Interweb was. Since then, I have published five books on popular music, copyright law, and—most recently—pranks. My writing has also has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Slate, Salon, SPIN and Rolling Stone. Additionally, I’ve…

    View original post 1,111 more words

  • Moving to Tokyo? Real estate agent picks five best neighborhoods for single residents

    Moving to Tokyo? Real estate agent picks five best neighborhoods for single residents

    I’m happy to see at the end of the article mention is made of Koiwa. Love that neighborhood.

  • Starting from the students to build engaging computing courses for non-CS majors: Response to Goldweber and Walker

    Prof. Mark Guzdial on the topic of designing courses and what is pedagogy vs. what is curricula. They’re not the same.

    Mark Guzdial's avatarComputing Ed Research – Guzdial's Take

    Michael Goldweber and Henry Walker responded to my blog posts (here in Blog@CACM and here in this blog) in the Inroad blog (see article here). My thanks to them for taking the time to respond to me. I found their comments especially valuable in helping to see where I was making assumptions about common values, goals, and understanding. It’s too easy in a blog to only get responses from people who share a common understanding (even if we violently disagree about values and goals). I found it helpful to get feedback from Dr. Goldweber and Dr. Walker with whom I don’t correspond regularly.

    “Pedagogy” isn’t just “how to teach” for me. They argue that their articles are not about pedagogy but about what should be taught in a course that students might take to explore computer science. The page I linked to at the US Department of…

    View original post 647 more words

  • Internet privacy, funded by spooks: A brief history of the BBG

    Internet privacy, funded by spooks: A brief history of the BBG

    Voice of America and all those propagandist triumphalist government programs are funded by us to the tune of $725M/year. That’s a lot of money.

  • Our Japanese staff members pick the top places in Japan they’d like to visit again someday

    Our Japanese staff members pick the top places in Japan they’d like to visit again someday