2015 week 29 in review

Work

We are working on finalizing the RFP for installing the audiovisual and collaboration technology in the new Taylor Institute building. That process is coming along nicely - but during this week’s meeting, IT needed to get on-site to see how the server/equipment racks in the mezzanine area would be arranged. I was able to tag along for a site visit. Wow. The interior isn’t quite finished yet, but it’s going to be an incredible space to work in. More details on that ASAP, but I took some photos like a tourist as we went through the building.

Read

• Tim Bray - Web Decay Graph - links on his blog are decaying as sites across the web die and break. And he has numbers to show roughly how quickly it happens.
• Nick Heer
  • Reddit Is Not the Front Page of the Internet
  • Coda for iOS - I grabbed this for my iPad. Wow.
• Rob Beschizza - The perfect Emacs setup
• Kristi Bronkey - Rethinking Direct Instruction in Online Learning
• Michael Stoner - Resources for Fearless Leadership in Higher Ed
• John Gruber - Accusing Amazon of Antitrust Violations, Authors and Booksellers Demand U.S. Inquiry - I never understood how Apple was the target of the ebook antitrust suit, when it was clearly Amazon using its monopoly position to destroy local booksellers and undercut competitors.
• Ted Curran - Is it Time to Give Up on Audrey Watters? - no.
• Christina Hendricks - I taught myself some CSS! (and am very excited about it)
• Nathan Jurgenson - nytimes op-elders - on the NYTimes “eulogy for long emails”.
• Phil Hill - Instructure: Accelerating growth in 3 parallel markets
• Robson Fletcher - Alberta’s open data catalogue rapidly expands, spawning dozens of new apps
• Frank DeRienzo - Firefox May Prevent Connect Access
• Jason Kottke
  • Saving the open web - an Iranian blogger is released from jail for blogging, and is shocked by what has become of the web he knew. It all happened so gradually that we didn’t notice as much. Also, we didn’t have to go to jail for blogging.
  • The four shades of introversion
• via Stephen Downes - What Is Detected? - news flash: “plagiarism detection” services are crap, on top of being evil. Evil crap.
• Jim Groom
  • Syndication Made Easy for WordPress MultiSite
  • List Remote Comments
• Matthew Baggetta - Increase Student Engagement with the Top Hat Lecture Platform
• UW Bothell Learning Technologies Blog - E-Portfolios New Way For New Career
• Scott McLeod - It’s time to move away from simple questions about technology integration
• Max Nisen - Setting your own schedule actually makes you work more
• via Paul Pival - Find the Wi-Fi Network Password from Windows and Mac
• XYZPrinting - da Vinci 1.0/1.0A - Unclogged the Nozzle - this came in really handy. spent way too much time getting the printer back online, but now that it’s up it’s working great (touch wood).
• Mark Kay - Generating a network graph of Twitter followers using Python and NetworkX

Other

I’m trying to switch to an iPad as primary mobile device¹, rather than using my Macbook Air. I picked up a really nice (and cheap!) keyboard/case for it, and it definitely feels like a super-small laptop. I’m finding I can do most of what I need to do on it. With the physical keyboard, the on-screen keyboard disappears, so apps have much more real estate for actually writing stuff. It feels like a Surface, but with better software (although inconsistent - not all apps seem to grok physical keyboard controls - arrows don’t work in Reeder for navigating through posts, etc…). Still working on finding a stylus for iPad that comes close to the pen on Surface. Closest I’ve found is the Wacom Bamboo Finepoint, but not all apps support it.

Ironically/frustratingly, I couldn’t write this blog post on it, because copy/paste from web pages seems to work differently, so I couldn’t copy the links for the Read section from my Readinator utility without having to manually add in each hyperlink. Nope. For now, back to the MBA for this post. And man, does this thing feel like a battleship now. Crazy. Now, back to the iPad…