There has been much talk and hype about Peak Oil - the fact that the global production of petroleum is about to reach its maximum level, after which it will start to decline until it eventually becomes a scarce resource and we all have to scavenge in landfills for decades-old plastic to recycle.
I’m pretty hooked on the new games for the iPod. I’ve already bought 4 of them, and am trying to hold back from buying the rest. (I know - I should have bought the bundle, but I didn’t think I’d want them all…)
They’re really great implementations, most are likely better than their desktop counterparts due to being better suited to a circular controller. I’m addicted to Zuma. Like a junkie.
I’ve been following the TED Talks videos as they’re published - recordings of the various presentations at the 2006 TED Conference/Symposium. There are some absolutely amazing presentations, ranging from Al Gore, to Nicholas Negroponte, to Mena Trott (and many others).
TED Talks in iTunes
The video production and publication is sponsored by BMW, who are hoping to be associated with the innovation and Deep Thinking presented at TED, and I think it’s a great example of how online advertising can work.
I was asked to share my Edublogs reading list, which is published automatically by my copy of BlogBridge, in the BlogBridge Topic Guides website. It’s basically a web front end for the .opml file generated by BlogBridge, but it might be a handy way to share the list.
So, now I’m a “BlogBridge Topic Expert” - I’m rather uncomfortable with the term “expert” but it’s their word, not mine. The new Edublogs Reading List is online, and (I think) should stay synced with my list in BlogBridge, so maintenance won’t be a problem.
I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they’re taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.
Ronald Moore and his crew have been consistently doing amazing, high quality work. They’ve “gotten it” in a whole bunch of ways, from podcasting show commentaries as episodes air, to blogging, to video blogging behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m so totally, perhaps unhealthily, hooked on this show.
But they totally dropped the ball on the Season 3 webisodes. There are 10 mini-episodes leading up to the season 3 premier, viewable on the scifi.com website.
I’m doing a couple of projects that involve writing some custom code and deploying it on Other People’s Servers. The code works great locally and on my server. I can run through the entire thing, and it works great.
Then, I move it to Client’s Colocated Server That Is Managed By A Third Party. It’s completely locked down. Like I can’t even use which to find commands in bash. Like I had to grovel for MySQL command line access (and was eventually granted mysql - but notmysqladmin access). Want a text editor? Yeah… We haven’t enabled your account to see any of those. Want to run your custom code? Yeah… It’ll fail for some unknown reason. Access to the error log so you can debug it? Nah…
People have said that Macs are more expensive than PCs. Until Apple made the switch to Intel chips, we had to basically eat that, because there was always the Apples-to-oranges comparison. Now that all new Macs are running the same chips that Dell etc. use, it’s fair to make direct comparisons. And the result blows me away. Not only are Macs NOT more expensive, they can be cheaper. Much cheaper. Like, half the price cheaper.
After a nearly month-long hiatus due to an unforeseen DNS snafu, SocialLearning.ca is back on the air. There’s still some work I need to do to get the entire site up and running (mostly just porting content from the old Flexinode to the new CCK custom content types).
I should be able to tweak the content types on the fly, so after much ado, SocialLearning.ca is open for business once again.
My Newton MessagePad 120 came in the mail yesterday (well, it almost came on Friday, but Mail Dude decided to not even try my house, and left a card in the box to come get it the next day after 1pm. nice.)
It worked out of the box - needed AA batteries, but I knew that. I’ll be picking up a new internal backup battery asap as well. It turns out that it was very handy having an antique PowerMac 8600/300 still running in the home office, because installing the Newton Connection software (and connecting the old school serial cable) was trivial.
I was at the mall with Evan today, and we popped through the Toys ‘R Us store. They had a cool looking little toy digital camera for $19, so I just had to pick it up for Evan to mess around with. The box said the software was only for Windows, but I just assumed that MacOSX would be able to see it magically, as it does for everything else that claims to be Windows-only.
