If you’re a long-time Windows user, you’re aware that several processes or features in the operating system are linked to File Explorer. While explorer.exe should be associated with file management only, it’s also associated with other parts of the Windows experience, like the Taskbar, which isn’t exactly a good thing for performance. Microsoft has been…
At work, I have just migrated to Win11 and have noticed all the Windows Explorer weirdness everyone has documented since the release of the OS to the general public. No doubt all of this effort comes years after the run up to Windows95 when Explorer and Internet Explorer were turned into a Frankenstein’s monster hodge-podge of integration into the OS. Now MS is paying off the technical debt of adopt, embrace, extend of http, and browser tech integrated everywhere. Hopefully new bits of the OS will also migrate to the Rust language as well, and MS will become 10x more stable.
Mastodon don’t fail me now! It’s that time, the time where people adopt the next big thing. Just like when I got my first FB account in 2005 and sat around waiting for the big wave to come in (2007) I had 1 half-hearted attempt at a Mastadon account, that I let go fallow. But then my brother joined, and picked a new server instance. So I started over and that was round about 2018. And there that account sat after an initial flurry of activity. But now, NOW things are shaking up again. And it feels like 2007 all over again where all the cool kids start dropping in and waves of people who swore they would never join, start coming in droves. Better late than never. So long Friendster, bye-bye MySpace, too-do-loo FB, sayonora Twitter. Hello Fediverse.
This film was so novel in it’s day people freaked out at how good it was. The production values were exemplary. No crappy animations, or amateurish attempts at lighting. No. This was space as rendered by Norman McLaren’s National Film Board. And that narration, the voice,… that gentle whispery voice of Canadian stage actor Douglas Rain.
This movie impressed NASA so much back in 1960 they bought a bunch of copies to keep on hand and distribute to people, even before JFK was elected, much less before he announced the Moon Program. It as THAT good. But guess who else noticed it? A young film maker named Stanley Kubrick. Look at ever frame. Pause, rewind and watch it again. Does it remind you of something? And that narrator,… Does that voice ring a bell? Well Kubrick took one look at this film and wrote down the names of all 3 guys who did the Special Effects and hired them (along with a young Douglas Trumbull) to make 2001: A Space Odyssey. And the voice actor, was hired to play HAL 9000. When you see this and realize Kubrick was obsessed and wanted to make his own version of this,… and wanted a kind of “open-ended” script from Arthur C. Clarke, he got everything he needed to whip something up. It just took forever to get it perfect. This film came out just 6 days prior to me being born. But it started some 8 years prior to that.
From the Martin Shkreli school of product pricing, I give you RealPage: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent. More or less you can subscribe to this service and “anonymously” compare your tenant leases with others in your area. Therefore it’s “NOT” collusion, or price-fixing, or gouging. Let the algorithm do the work of raising the rents.
Ditch Google Image search this very minute. They’ve given up, they don’t care. What’s cooler still is if you’re on a WordPress.com hosted site like me, you already can access OpenVerse from the Upload Image button in the Block editor. It shows up as a image website you can search and insert pictures from. I did it just now with the jet picture at the top, with full annotation/attribution/citation info in the caption. I didn’t lift a finger other than to search for “SST” then pick the coolest picture it showed in the results. It’s that easy.
And Today I Learned – there’s a thing called “Moral Injury” which is separate and independent of PTSD. And it’s something that can be treated. Learning and reading about this, has brightened my day.
While the iPhone 14 features aren’t hugely different from the iPhone 13, a teardown reveals Apple has made internal changes which make repairs easier.Below the iPhone 14 display [via iFixit]Apple doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to enabling repairs. It has begrudgingly started to provide repair manuals and loans out tools to replace…
I give iFixit it full cred for looking at the “lesser” cousin to the iPhone 14 Pro to see what is inside. And it is vastly different as mentioned in their full YouTube update:
Sounds like a good deal of extra engineering went into routing antennas to the new full-span “mid-frame” where the torsional rigidity is now concentrated. Front/Rear panels are both user replaceable as far as I can tell. But getting Apple-certified parts and tools to repair are still being hampered by Apple. They are in a passive-aggressive battle internally to make their devices repairable by the owners of the devices, STILL it seems.
New entry rules go into effect next month, but the borders won’t be completely open just yet. Japan has been reopened to foreign tourists for nearly three months now, but you wouldn’t know it by looking around. That’s because currently inbound leisure travelers are only allowed into the country as part of guided tours, which…
Finally Japan is loosening the tight visitor controls put in place during Covid. I hope to visit myself soon, as I haven’t been able to enter Japan since my last trip in June 2019.
Jim Groom thinking back after some recent “edtech” announcements in the blogosphere
I think Alan Levine no doubt pre-dates me in “doing” edtech. I got started in May 1996 doing edtech support which (in spite of teh crazy webz and Internet Bubble) was targeting production of CD-ROMs, interactive multimedia. Hypercard and Macromedia Director and Authorware, etc. Heady days those were, and each and every software package allowed new functions, flexibility, media support and programming. I can go down a litany of software “authoring” environments but know this, each one was more expensive than the last. Authorware being the king of them all $2,000 – $5,000 roughly in 1996 dollars. But that bought you a giant box with manuals and CDs and clip-art and, and, and all the things. And if you were astute enough you could participate in their Usenet Newsgroups or dial-up bulletin boards. It’s been a long time since then, and the threshold is considerably lower (mind you costs now are “subscriptions” that are renewed yearly).
But the LMS came along because nobody had “time” or “skilz” necessary to develop even a static web page themselves. Note, the aftermarket of static web page software, again Macromedia and Adobe ruled the day and the cost of single seats (while lower than Authorware) was not free. But Dreamweaver was pretty cool, so we taught people how to use that, how to make links, organize files and folders and then navigate the file manager in Dreamweaver, let it track changes and upload just the things that changed. Then things got more confrontational, management wanted an LMS regardless of what I thought, so we adopted one, and that’s where things kind of started to cool down and ice age over. We retrenched, and eliminated our old web server (which was more a glorified file share ala Box/Dropbox for instructors to get PDFs to students). And the LMS became that glorified (e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e) file share. Nobody really took advantage of ALL the other functions granted by the licensing of the LMS. Journals? Blogs? Discussions? Submissions? Nope, it was here’s the PDFs, here’s the slides, we have 3 exams, best study up with a partner, and ask the TA questions, and attend office hours. Yeah that was the “future” circa 2003 and beyond.
But HERE I still am, ‘cuz’ we didn’t stop with the LMS. No. We just kept adopting and adopting and adopting add-ons for all the things the LMS didn’t do or do well. Like online meetings (now Zoom) or hosting videos (that’s Panopto) or scheduling recordings of in-class meetings (also Panopto via Remote Recorder), Polling (Poll Everywhere) the hits just keep on coming. But nobody once every talks about the outcomes, artifacts, proof of what changes occurred in the student A-F-T-E-R taking the class. It’s all the Price is Right with a showcase of things that get negotiated and adopted and handed off, and more often downwardly to support, on a daily basis. That’s the edtech where I live today, a far cry from that techno-futurism of CD-ROM development and authoring packages circa 1996. Now it’s all, “student submitted teh assignment but it’s not showing up in the grade center”, etc. ad infinitium, in extremis.
And while I know this is not the best metaphor, but I use it because I know it, if I was a character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,… when it comes to edtech or EdTech,… I am not John Galt nor Dagny Taggart, nor even good ol’ Hank Reardon,… no.
I am Eddie Willers. Dagny’s assistant at Taggart and a hard worker dedicated to the preservation of the railroad. Through his friendship with the mysterious track worker in the cafeteria, Eddie unwittingly provides the destroyer with valuable information about Dagny and the railroad. I try heartily to keep the trains running in the face of adversity, in the face of “The Strike” as it were when everyone repairs off to the luxury/fantasy land of “Galt’s Gulch”. And I’m getting paid and all the other things too. And I’m okay with that version of edtech.
It has been a long time since I blogged about the invaludable hard drive reliability data that Backblaze has been publishing quarterly since 2015, so I checked their blog and found ndy Klein’s Star Wars themed Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022, as well as his fascinating How Long Do Disk Drives Last?. Below the…
I do enjoy reading most of Dave Rosenthal’s blog entries (some are about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship). But occasionally Dave has an outright, practically useful entry on some every day technology. Like hard drives for instance. So today, he’s got the published findings from Cloud back-up soln. provider Backblaze indicating their failure rate on a range of hard drive makes/models. One conclusion I’m keenly aware of is failure rate of HDDs generally (lasting up to 6 yrs. and 9months as a median value). So taking that as the margin of safety, I may now start looking for replacement units to cycle into the mix on that interval, or “slightly” shorter (say 6 yrs and 6 months). Seagate 6TB seems to be the winner overall, and if I try to use it more as a less used, warm storage, maybe that’s good enough. In my case Warm storage might be something I occasionally touch to archive stuff. But I’m not using it for hourly/daily backups (to me that’s hot storage).
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 