Raising Successful Children – NYTimes.com:
But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.
[Well said. (Not just for children.)]
Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox:
Here’s why this concerns me a little: I’ve argued in the past that the kind of “open” we should really care about is open data. It shouldn’t matter whether I’m using Emacs or BBEdit or Byword for text, GIMP or Photoshop or Acorn to edit a PNG file, Alpine or Postbox to access mail on IMAP servers. If all of your meaningful data is open, you seriously reduce the friction inherent in switching applications or even computing platforms.
As neat as iCloud is, I’m concerned that it adds friction that a solution like Dropbox doesn’t. It may make “power user” tasks just within the Apple ecosystem a little more difficult—and it makes moving between ecosystems a lot more difficult. Suppose that I want to keep my Air and my iPad but replace my iPhone with whatever the next Nexus phone is? (Look, you never know.) If everything on the Air and the iPad starts adopting iCloud as the One True Sync Solution, doing this in 2014 might be a lot tougher than it is in 2012.
[Worrisome indeed. But it’s a question of motive, and this game is still being played.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute:
I’m not saying I love Apple’s approach to these kind of disputes. But this is folding like a stack of cards, and then declaring that you actually folded like a stack of something else foldable, just in case “cards” are trademarked.
[I simply loved how he put this.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech:
The best bit: By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock… it opens. According to Brocious, it takes just 200 milliseconds to read the sitecode and open the lock. “I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,” Brocious says. His current implementation doesn’t work with every lock, and he doesn’t intend to take his work any further, but his slides and research paper make it very clear that Onity locks, rather ironically, lack even the most basic security.
[Simple. Onity never considered that as part of the security. What a mess.]
→ Louis C.K. interview at The A.V. Club:
“Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.” [Laughs.] Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started.
There’s a lot of great wisdom in here that goes far beyond the comedy business.
[Interesting synchronicity here for me…]
Source: Marco.org
iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs:
Anyway, at first glance it seems that you absolutely need individual Apple IDs to enrol students in a course now. I’ve always been keen on handing over as much IT autonomy to the student as possible, and that’s where I think we should all be aiming, but changing your AppleID structures is a once-a-year thing to do and no small matter. Is there a workaround in the meantime?
It turns out that there is: to create a course that students can subscribe to without entering AppleID credentials, you have to:
Create the course in Course Manager – this creates a private course with an enrolment roster.
Submit the course to the person who controls your institution’s iTunes U Public Site Manager
Have them ‘hide’ the course in PSM.
This creates a course which has a direct URL for subscription (it’s referred to as the ‘Audit URL’ in iTunes U) but which does not require Apple ID credentials to subscribe to.
This isn’t an ideal solution as it requires coordination between all the course authors at an institution and the person running the Public Site Manager. Still, it works for now and the future is ever more clearly heading towards individual Apple IDs for individual students. That’s where I’m recommending all new 1:1s start their thinking but, still, always the two stumbling blocks of no Volume Purchase and COPPA’s lower limit of 13-years-old for an iTunes account. I hope we can get these things ironed out soon.
Source: Fraser Speirs
Personally, I’m looking to iTunes U. My project for the next three years is to lead a transition to using iTunes U across the whole of our school. Initially, we will adopt it for assignments and content distribution. Next year, as the new National 4/5 exams come in, we will be redesigning our courses on the assumption that this kind of technology is available to us. Further down the road, I hope to use iTunes U to expand the range of courses available to our students and, once that model is proven, make those courses available to schools across Scotland.
The second trend I picked up on was the continuing shift towards total student autonomy in IT. The shift to mobile is eliminating the need for dedicated computer space in schools. The shift to iOS is eliminating the need for dedicated server hardware, home directory infrastructures and backup systems. On iOS pupils can genuinely administer their own devices in a secure and stable fashion, eliminating a broad range of tech support oversight functions.
The final step is to eliminate the network. I had several conversations about the difficulty of scaling school networks beyond the 300-400 device range into the multiple thousands of devices in larger schools. Several people observed to me that mobile networks are designed to scale to those numbers without issue. The shift towards LTE cellular networking – which is typically faster than the broadband in a school – is starting to look like an interesting option for schools that cannot provision or scale their networks to multiple thousands of devices.
Imagine, in 5-7 years having gone from the complexity of laying ethernet in fixed locations in schools, building broadband, deploying servers and switches all over the school to the simplicity handing out an iPad and a SIM card and getting on with the learning.
[Interesting. So far, my experience with using an iPad for “work” is a mixed bag. I can code, I can write, I can communicate. But sometimes I do all that stuff in rapid succession, and need awareness of them all. OK, so maybe a laptop is the correct tool, and that’s fine. But I will continue to explore what the office of the future looks like, and am heartened that such great strides are being made in the field of education, and am looking for ways to incorporate the same type of thinking into our office.]
Source: Fraser Speirs
The average speed of this year’s Tour was 39.883 kph (that’s almost 25 mph), which made it faster than the Tours of the past two years, and faster than eight of the 10 Tours held when there was no drugs test for EPO (1991 to 2000). To average that speed (including long mountain stages when speeds average closer to 30 kph than 40 kph), you can only imagine what it’s like to hold a wheel in a peloton often moving at between 50 and 60 kph. That’s no sinecure, and only the fittest, most talented athletes are capable of doing this day after day.
[Incredible, when you think about the mountain stages.]
We should make it so there is part of the Internet that does not expire. A place where you can put stuff, write them a check, and be reasonably confident that it will stay there as long as there is human civilization on this planet.
[Nice.]
Source: Scripting News
More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions:
Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.
[So why is there such a terrible market for email clients. I admit I’ve come to loath email, because a generation of folks have been taught to abuse and misuse it. Still, you’d think that there’s enough of a market, even with the “meh” if default options. I enjoyed Sparrow for the iPhone because it let me separate work email from everything else in a really easy fashion. Ah well.]
Source: Marco.org
turnings :: daniel berlinger 