General technology, not anything in particular
A specific kind of trauma results when a person’s core principles are violated during wartime or a pandemic
Moral Injury Is an Invisible Epidemic That Affects Millions — Scientific American News
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…
The iPhone 14 is the most repairable iPhone in years — AppleInsider News
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…
Japan removes tour guide requirement for foreign tourists
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.
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…
Backblaze On Hard Disk Reliability — DSHR’s Blog
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).
Inbound foreign tourists will have to comply with numerous requirements. Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, while giving a speech in London, pledged his intention to begin opening Japan’s borders this summer, with the eventual goal of making entry into Japan for inbound overseas travelers as smooth as other G7 nations. On Tuesday […]
Japan to begin accepting tourists from the U.S., three other countries this month
I guess “something” is better than nothing when it comes to tourism in Japan. But I will not be able to visit under these new restrictions. Looks like I will need to spend another year away from Japan. It will be 3 years away this coming June 2022.
Says Japan’s coronavirus countermeasures have proven successful. Since you’re reading SoraNews24, we’re going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re interested in Japan, and would like to come to the country to see it for yourself. Unfortunately, if you’re a tourist, that hasn’t really been an option for the last two years-plus.…
Japan to start easing entry restrictions for foreign travelers next month, prime mister promises — SoraNews24 -Japan News-
I haven’t been in Japan since June 2019. I used to travel there at least once a year prior to that. Sometimes traveling two time each year. But now things have changed, Covid19 blocked entry to anyone not on a student or workers visa. Traveling to visit my wife’s family is considered tourism, and not allowed. But that may finally change this Summer 2022, 3 years later. I may get to visit Japan again. Hopefully this will work out, but I guarantee flights will be expensive due to fuel costs. It’s going to cost a lot of money if my wife and I both go this Summer.
A photo that shows why building roads with no shoulder, no sidewalk and 4 lanes of speeding traffic is downright irresponsible
Failing Our Most Vulnerable — The Urban Phoenix
This all too true for the community where Arian and I both live. Whether it’s the city or the tightly coupled suburbs (more often suburbs) there’s no so-called “district” wherein residents elect to pay higher property taxes to their town or village for simple accessibility like actual sidewalks, or street lights or even trash collection. I will admit City of Rochester DOES at least do that across the miles and acres within the city limits. But step across that line, and this is what happens, the neglect and cruelty of neighborhood that has elected to forego paying into a “sidewalk district”. Sad, sad, sad.
I got married in 2006. It was great, we’d decided to get married on a ski slope in Canada. We flew out with a group of friends, skied around for a week or so, got married on a slope, had drinks and food, skied some more and came home. Piece of cake! Or at least…
Zoom and Room: hidden labour — lawrie : converged
And think too about scale. This is not for a one-off, bespoke event instance. Try doing something for 600+ classes being taught across a 150 acre campus. I have one small bit of this repsonsibility, scheduling automated recordings in 50 classrooms and submitting videos for captioning for classes where there are standing accommodation requests. This semester alone we’ve seen an appreciable inflation of recording requests 40 more than last semester. And, during last semester we saw a giant increase from our single most busy semester prior to that Fall 2019 when we had a grand total of 20 scheduled recordings and 1 or 2 classes needing captions. So lets assess this numerically 2019, 20 classes, last semester Fall 2021, 60 classes and now this semester Spring 2022, it’s 100 classes and 15 with accommodation requests needing captions. Needless to say our staff (meaning me, a team of 1) has not grown or increased. And complaining about it doesn’t seem to be motivation for anyone in charge. So until a big disaster occurs, a ball gets dropped, or god-forbid I get sick and have to leave for a time, this all hinges on me. And that’s just for one small fraction of the overall pieces (our Classroom Tech support folks are bearing the brunt of the support and maintenance issues). So yes, think about the growth, try to get ahead of it, otherwise burn-out will occur.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 