After yesterday’s big announcement, I thought I should give BigBlueButton another look. An open source alternative is pretty attractive, now that the others are all absorbed into the Bborg.
I’ve bought 2 ebooks. One for Kindle, one for iBooks. I can’t seem to force myself to use the kindle app long enough to finish DIYU. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying Medium Raw in iBooks.
But I can’t imagine I’ll be “buying” another ebook for a long time. They’re awkward. The digital tools that would make digital books worth the hassle, most notably copy and paste, are disabled via DRM.
Looks like most of the official shots were taken near the end of the pack, with the photographer hitching a ride with the support cars, and occasionally from the front group. I was somewhere in between, so managed to avoid photography for most of the ride :-)
It’s a new open source project, so I have no idea if it has any legs (the last Big Project That Would Change Blogging Forever was StructuredBlogging and the StructuredBlogging project and site went dark long ago…)
> SocialRiver is based on open source libraries and the OStatus specification, which includes direct support for Webfinger, ActivityStreams, Salmon, and PubSubHubBub (PuSH). We also support OpenID and will add support for OAuth and other technologies, including Websockets.
I’ve received emails from people I’d never heard from before, asking questions about posts, etc…
I’ve received messages from people I know and trust, lamenting their inability to post comments
I get that people do read this blog, although in fewer numbers since the Big Comment Disabling of Aught Ten (for whatever reason). But, disabling comments *still* feels like the right thing for me. I’m having fun with the blog again. It’s been a long time since it felt *fun*. I don’t really give a shit if anyone reads it (or still reads it). It’s for me. Comments distract from that.
If we were trying to build a true, general AI, we would first need to create a way for it to get around and interact with the larger world. And we would need a system for rapid knowledge acquisition, so that we wouldn’t have to manually explain every detail of how the world works.
Which, of course, is precisely what we’re building.
Edupunk isn’t real, in and of itself. It exists only as a concept for people to use as scaffolding when discussing priorities and alternatives in education.
It doesn’t matter what’s inside the suitcase, only that it exists, and that we chase it relentlessly.
>…the Empire of Mediocrity (is) successfully spreading its tentacles everywhere. > >Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw.
This scares the shit out of me. This is why the media/communication landscape is shifting so rapidly. It’s the Empire of Mediocrity, not anything about information wanting to be free. The Market is speaking. It wants mediocrity. Blandness. Unthinking familiarity. It’s not about The Shallows or anything like that. It is about the selection and reinforcement of brainlessness by the masses.
> While studying the paleo-environment of a fossil-bearing site situated near Franceville in Gabon in 2008, El Albani and his team unexpectedly discovered perfectly preserved fossil remains in the 2.1 billion-year-old sediments. They have collected more than 250 fossils to date, of which one hundred or so have been studied in detail. Their morphology cannot be explained by purely chemical or physical mechanisms. These specimens, which have various shapes and can reach 10 to 12 centimeters, are too big and too complex to be single-celled prokaryotes or eukaryotes. This establishes that different life forms co-existed at the start of the Proterozoic, as the specimens are well and truly fossilized living material.
The U of C has had a really great bike shop on campus for awhile now. It’s been fantastic having access to a fully equipped bike shop - although I’ve only needed it a couple of times, knowing it was there was a huge comfort.
Was.
It’s getting the boot at the end of July.
Hopefully we can find a new home for the Bike Root on campus. Perhaps the Student’s Union can find/make some space? It’s pretty crappy for the U to kick the shop out, without having a backup space available. Yes, I know it was a short term pilot project, but the shop was a huge success by all accounts. Closing it, or forcing it to move off campus, is a huge step backwards in the efforts to make the U of C bike friendly.
