Blog Posts

blogging like it's 2005

so many people have been “coming back” to blogging1. and folks like Audrey absolutely destroying conventional edtech coverage with great blogging.

awesome. publishing whatever they care to publish, however they care to do so.

awesome.

blogging is dead. long live blogging. the web (and culture) is what we choose to make of it. feels like a resurgence. a reclamation. a withdrawal from the silos. so good.

#occupytheweb #makeculture #awesome

  1. Brian Lamb has been killing it. Bryan Alexander is back, baby! my friend Kim has been working on This is It. awesome. Chris Lott is blogging up a storm. Cole Camplese is back. He never left. But he’s back. ↩︎

    Read More

The cycle path to happiness

Half the patients were allowed to ride at their own pace, while the others were pushed incrementally harder, just as the scientist’s tandem companion had been. All patients improved and the “tandem” group showed significant increases in connectivity between areas of grey matter responsible for motor ability. Cycling, and cycling harder, was helping to heal their brains.

via The cycle path to happiness - Features - Health & Families - The Independent.

Read More

on advanced software camera lenses

This is cool. Hipstamatic released a bunch of new lenses. I got a notification on my phone last night, and grumbled something about camera apps spamming me with ads. Then forgot about it. This morning, I see a post from Nick, referring to the official Hipstamatic blog post on the lens:

The Tinto 1884 lens uses facial recognition to recreate a very shallow depth of field unique for each photograph. This is similar in some ways to what some apps do with tilt-shift or radial blur effects, but Hipstamatic’s effect is more customized for faces. Notice, for instance, that it will leave eyes and mouth unaffected, while blurring out the nose and forehead. If the app can’t detect a face, it just switches into a radial blur.

Read More

on 2012

what a year. this is not a sappy end-of-year recap, but I needed to take a step back to see just what an epic year it’s been. in rough chronological order:

  • a bunch of LMS-related activities, to try to kickstart discussion about what to select
  • traveled to mexico to watch my niece get married on a beach
  • got the all-clear after a potential cancer scare
  • Northern Voice conference (likely my last)
  • rode my bike a lot - Banff Gran Fondo and Highwood Pass (twice) and a bunch of other great rides. over 5000km throughout the year. woohoo!
  • Open Education conference (hopefully not my last)
  • got to ride in an ambulance
  • almost lost a parent (heart attacks suck)
  • lost a friend, mentor, colleague (heart attacks suck)
  • realized that winter bike riding freaks my wife out, so decided to cut back on that. cue trainer. less woohoo, but still…
  • finished my thesis, passed oral exam, completed MSc.
  • continued working on the cat herding that is the LMS upgrade project, but stumbled closer to completion.

still working on the whole work/life balance thing. the loss and near-loss (and cancer scare and ambulance ride) kind of kickstarted a focus on fixing that. I struggle with maintaining a sense of perspective. the oldest surviving post on my blog, over a decade ago, is about the same thing (back then, triggered by impending dad-hood). so, yeah. balance.

Read More

on rebuilding public spaces

Anil Dash’s recent post on the web we lost, and a follow-up post on rebuilding it, got me thinking about my own little corner of the web. In his follow-up post, he talks about creating public spaces:

Create public spaces. Right now, all of the places we can assemble on the web in any kind of numbers are privately owned. And privately-owned public spaces aren’t real public spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the creativity and brilliance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to generate profit.

Read More

ambiguously open

Scott posted a Christmas wish - that people would go to the FlatWorldKnowledge library and download one of the books available under the Creative Commons license before that form of access is revoked at the end of the year.

FlatWorldKnowledge started out by being rather awesome - collecting and publishing a series of supposedly high quality1 books with a few options. If you want an eBook copy or PDF or even print, that’s available for a nominal fee. Or, you can have free access through the FlatWorldKnowledge website for free2.

Read More

map war

A quick test, to compare Apple’s Maps app from iOS6 with the new Google Maps iOS app that was released today. All screenshots are roughly centred on the same spot around my office on the UofC campus, taken on a godphone 5.

normal map view. Apple iOS Maps on left, Google iOS Maps on right…

IMG 8852IMG 8851

satellite view, Apple iOS Maps on left, Google iOS Maps on right…

Read More

the daily create - logo

The Daily Create #337: Take a photo of a fave thing. Use a draw tool to sketch it with fewest strokes possible. Delete the pic. It’s your logo.

Didn’t need a photo. 9 strokes of the pen on Paper:

I might have to work that up into something, like I did with the crank for peace thing…

Read More