In the last week I wrote about the house at 2825 Clark Drive and the family, Edith, Arthur and Willie Millachip who proudly stand in front of that house in 1913. I had purchased the card with this remarkable family scene  in Prince Edward Island. After finding that the house was still standing (although now devoid of its handsome shingle style wood exterior ) readers helped me piece together their Vancouver story and find the Arlington Virginia branch of the Millachip family.

Sadly the Millachip name has died out with the demise of Arthur’s son Willie who died of tuberculosis at Tranquille B.C. at the age of 39, and with the death of Arthur’s brother John in World War One. Called “The Great War”, this conflict wiped out four members of this extended family~John Millachip and his brothers in law, George, Edmund and James Spencer.

We stand in the 21st century with not a lot of first hand stories of what happened in the First and Second World Wars. Those conflicts resulted in over 103,000 Canadian soldiers being killed with  wounded soldiers numbering over 227,000. That’s the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Kingston Ontario being wiped out, and a population the size of Abbotsford B.C. being wounded. It was a devastating loss to the economy and to the social fabric of the country.

Richard Zeutenhorst in Arlington Virginia sent me the story of Arthur’s brother John Millachip. John  had settled in  Canada along with  his brother Arthur. John was born in Britain in 1883 and immigrated to Canada  in 1911. He had married Sylvia Frederick Webb in Winnipeg in 1911. John joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force for the Great War and was in France in 1915. In 1916 He was reported missing at the Battle of the Somme and his body was never found. His widow Sylvia was an active volunteer in Vancouver and remarried in 1924.

But it was not just Arthur’s brother that died in the First World War. Arthur’s younger  sister Grace Emily Millachip had married Lieutenant George Spencer during the war, in 1915. George survived being torpedoed on a ship in February 1918 only to be fatally wounded on His Majesty’s Ship Iris in the raid on Zeebrugge. He died that day. A month later, his widow Grace had a daughter named Iris, after the ship’s name.

George Spencer’s brother Edmund served with the Royal Field Artillery and was captured and held as a German Prisoner of War  at the Giessen camp in Germany. He was released from military service in 1922 and died in 1936.

George’s youngest brother James was just 20 years old when he volunteered for World War One with the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was part of the landing and campaign at Gallipoli in Turkey, where over 500,000 soldiers were wounded and 110,000 soldiers died. James was wounded, recovered and was sent to France in 1918 where he was reported missing in April.  He was taken wounded into a German Prisoner of War camp in Limburge an der Lahn, Hesse, Germany and died of his wounds 90 days later.

There is a remarkable film of Iris, who was born in Britain  during the First World War and served as a fireman during the Second World War at this link below. It describes in her own voice her life after the death of her father, how she met her husband during the Second World War, and how she settled in Ville Platte Louisiana to raise her own family. Iris passed away in 2009. You can watch the video by clicking this link.

At this time of year  when we remember the losses and families that  were and are torn apart by conflict and war, this story of resilience and forging ahead resonates clearly. Our job is to honour the way forward.

 

 

 

 

Images courtesy of  R. Zeutenhorst

 

I’m often cold. While hanging outside with friends on a chilly fall evening, wandering around a too-air-conditioned office in summer with a throw blanket tossed over my shoulders, and yes, on a warmish January beach day.

My eyes are out of whack, so for the last three weeks I’ve had a stick-on fresnel prism stuck to the inside of my eyeglass lenses to see if the extra prismatic juju could offer me some relief (against the headachy vertigoy hard-to-scroll-on-a-computery feelings I’ve been having for a long time). Today was the day to have Dr. Judson, at Charlottetown Vision Care, do a re-exam to see if the juju is helping.

It also happened to be a day with a temperature of 19ºC, so the combination of a place to go, with excellent cycling weather, added to a desire to try out a new over-the-top-of-UPEI route, spurred me onto my bicycle for the trip.

I cycled up Prince and Upper Prince to Gerald, right through Orlebar Park to join the Confederation Trail, and then up the trail to the University of PEI. The new northern road across the top of campus isn’t open to vehicles yet, but it’s certainly ready for cycling, and so I enjoyed its buttery smoothness all to myself (and was dismayed to discover that its putative active-transportation-friendliness is limited to a small section toward University Avenue). From University Avenue I cycled up Enman Crescent to Royalty Centre, then through the back parking lot to Burns Avenue, where I ended up directly across the street from the office I was headed to (the only fly in this ointment being there’s no pedestrian crossing on this stretch of North River Road for blocks in either direction, so I had to ford the traffic). The trip took 20 minutes.

It turns out that the juju is, indeed, helping, and so my new prescription has a 2-down, 2-up prismatic superpower built into it:

At the end of my eye exam, I suggested to Dr. Judson that she look into the City of Charlottetown bicycle rack cost-share initiative, as the new connectivity to the Confederation Trail afforded by the new UPEI road means that it’s easier than ever to cycle to an eye exam (and she confirmed that cycling, like all things that contribute to general fitness, is good for your eyes).

For the ride home, with visions of Madame Vuong’s bánh mì dancing in my head, I took an alternate route: down North River Road to the Hermitage Creek trail, along the trail to Doc Blanchard, along Doc Blanchard to Queen, south on Queen to Nassau, and then along Nassau to my sandwich (enjoyed on the warm and sunny lawn of the Research Station across the street).

For a second act, I stopped at Outer Limit Sports on my way home to pick up a new saddle for my bicycle (they’re not called “seats” anymore, I learned). I picked out a nice used CCM one for $25, and supplemented it with a replacement water bottle holder (which I’m sure has a cycling-insider name, like “water creche” or something); both replaced original 20-year-old equipment.

As a special bonus contribution to cyberspace, I used the traces my phone gathered on my cycle to update OpenStreetMap, replacing the sketched in path from last year with the finished access route:

Stephen Downes, Nov 10, 2020

I just read a post from Mitch Resnick on the seeds that Seymour Papert sowed, and highlighted for myself this most important statement: "Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which 'the computer is being used to program the child' and argued for an alternative approach in which 'the child programs the computer.'" A few minutes later I read a post in Getting Smart from Tom Vander Ark saying that "The pandemic laid bare the inequity and inadequacy of the patchwork American system of education. It made clear that learner experience (LX) is an invention opportunity." He offers a list of 12 strategies. It's not a bad list, but we really need to change the focus. Hence, I've adapted his list for my own needs, and repurposed is as '12 Degrees of Freedom', describing ways we can enable students to do the programming rather than have a system program them.

See also on [Original Location] [This Post]

Anytime someone asks me how to turn their weird tech project into reality, my immediate instinct is to recommend the Raspberry Pi. This $35 computer, the size of a deck of cards, is as capable as it is cheap. With just a bit of know-how and curiosity, you can use it to make a retro-gaming console, a robot brain, a smart-home sensor, or even a fully functional Alexa-compatible speaker.

As a kid, I was always more fascinated with learning how to use computers than I was with doing anything productive with them. I had more fun hacking together a half-working machine with cables stuck awkwardly into a breadboard than I ever did typing up my latest school paper. The Raspberry Pi is a window into that world.

sillygwailo shared this story from Richard’s Raspberry Pi Adventures.

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Because of how inexpensive it was, and the small size of the package, I bought a Raspberry Pi 400 from Canadian re-seller BuyaPi.ca. The news of its release jumpstarted my interest in the Raspberry Pi, and the 40-pin GPIO header means I can connect a lot of of what I’ve discussed on this site and my humble Arduino mission accomplishments site.

I watched Jeff Geerling’s teardown of the Raspberry Pi 400 as soon as I could, but it was his unboxing and review that sold me on it, especially how easy it was to connect to a TV. That immediately resolved the issue of which display I’d connect it to, and it would make use of the HDMI switch that has gone heretofore unused.

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As a result of renewed interest in the Raspberry Pi computing platform, I’ve refreshed the site, converting it from Harp to Jekyll. The temptation to host on GitHub pages was strong, but I want more flexibility with this site, including plugins and web server redirects and URL slugs. I’m looking forward to more Raspberry Pi adventures and documenting them here!

I can’t think of any company, country, or industry that has diversity, equity and inclusion all figured out–it’s an emergent space where we’re all learning how to do better. We can always learn from the people leading the work and from the research. I am sharing this list of nine thought leaders who I admire. I admire that they center their values in their work, drive results and are generous in sharing their thoughts and ideas. It is weighted towards women of colour and queers in the tech sector. I think these people’s work experience, formal credentials and lived experience, makes what they have to say extremely valuable. 

Dr. Erin Thomas (Twitter, LinkedIn) 

This year when we started having conversations about anti-racism, and specifically anti-Black racism, at work I would gut check my strategies and tactics against the detailed Sunday Twitter threads posted by  Dr. Thomas. Dr Erin Thomas is the Heads of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging and Talent Acquisition at Upwork and was named in Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40. With a doctorate in social psychology Dr. Thomas pulls in relevant research and skillfully bridges it to action in a corporate setting. Her most recent Sunday thread is about how Kamala Harris’ win connects to the future of women leaders with a bonus of awesome illustrated and animated gifs. 

Candice Morgan (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Candice is one of the few DEI leaders working in the venture capital space. She describes her job as creating inclusive strategies for GV (Google Ventures) and its portfolio companies, and helping the firm expand diversity across the entrepreneurs it funds. She’s my mentor and I’ve been able to level up my strategy and execution from our conversations. 

When she was at Pinterest she led impressive increases in diversity internally on their teams and shared some of what they learned in HBR. Externally she made an impact in the Pinterest product too. The skin tone filter allows users to find makeup that is relevant for them and was featured in Wired. Personally I’m delighted by this–a blue-red lipstick looks really good with my skin tone but an orange-red makes me look ill. I love citing this example of product inclusion. 

She’s not a prolific social media poster but when she posts it’s useful and thoughtful. Candice recently shared a conversation with UK-based Dr. Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey on anti-racism in the workplace across cultures. In September she wrote a piece for Fast Company titled How to build a race-conscious equity, diversity, and inclusion strategy outlining four not-so-easy steps companies must make to move from recognition to integration.

Michelle Kim (Twitter, LinkedIn)

I admire the boldness, honesty and integrity that Michelle Kim brings to the DEI space. She is the co-founder and CEO of Awaken and says: “I dream big and get sh*t done.”  

I’ve shared these posts many times this year:

• How to Manage Your Team in Times of Political Trauma: Here’s what to do and say to boost psychological safety
• How to Lead When You’re Afraid
• A Love Letter to “the Onlys”: Underrepresented People Experiencing Tokenism and Isolation at Work

As someone who is mixed race and Asian, I appreciate her writing on how Asian people can show up as allies for Black communities and how Asians perpetuate anti-Black racism has helped me deepen my anti-racism work. 5 months ago, when there was a huge surge of interest in unconscious bias training, she put together a spreadsheet of Black Owned DEI Companies + Consultants Currently Accepting New Corporate Clients. 

I can’t wait to read the book that she is currently writing.

Aubrey Blanche (Twitter, LinkedIn)

I’ve been a fan of Aubrey’s for awhile. She shares a lot of her corporate DEI work. While at Atlassian she shared the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment tool and Atlassian’s Team Playbook which has several DEI plays, including How To Run Inclusive Meetings. I’m a huge fan of Culture Amp and as their Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp she shares a lot of useful information like, how they’re preparing managers to support employees during the US election week. 

I love that she’s unapologetic about her politics and very human on Twitter. 

Steven Huang (LinkedIn)

Steven is a generous and thoughtful leader and colleague. Currently he’s the Managing director of the Collective – DEI Lab and an Inclusion and Diversity advisory for Jumpstart. 

His posts on LinkedIn are thoughtful and invite interesting conversations. A couple of months ago he posted a real life scenario on cancel culture and invited people to “collectively broaden our nuanced understanding of this topic seeking to understand other POVs”.

Lily Zheng (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Lily regularly writes several times a week on LinkedIn. They clearly articulate things that are still half baked in my mind or say them in a way that shifts my thinking to include different perspectives. Here’s one example: 

I no longer ask clients to pick company values or describe their own company #culture. Every time, leaders come up with generic, cookie-cutter terms drawn from the same pool of 50 words. “Excellence.” “Integrity.” “Quality.”

Overwhelmingly generic. Nobody knows what they mean, not your employees, not your lawyers, not your leaders. They’re not really culture, or values–just words.

Now, I flip the question on its head: “what AREN’T your values?” “What ISN’T your culture?” “What are the ANTITHESES to the identity of your company?”

They are the author of The Ethical Sellout. Lily’s article in HBR Do Your Employees Feel Safe Reporting Abuse and Discrimination? clearly outlines four practices that you can adopt to rebuild employee trust in reporting. They were also on the HBR Women at Work podcast talking about how the gender binary restricts people at work and how to be respectful and supportive of gender-diverse colleagues. 

Dr. Janice Gassam Asare (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Dr. Gassam Asare has a PhD in Applied Organizational Psychology and is prolific writer. She is Senior Contributing Writer for Forbes and has published hundreds of articles on topics from anti-racism, hiring practices, inclusive leadership and examining various case studies of companies through the lens of DEI. I’m grateful that one of those case studies profiled the work I led at Mozilla on trans and non-binary inclusion. 

Here’s a few of her articles about anti-Black racism and system change that are all Forbes editors’ picks:

• Dear Companies: Your BLM Posts Are Cute But We Want To See Policy Change
• Misogynoir: The Unique Discrimination That Black Women Face
• If Black Lives Matter, Pay Your Black Women Equitably

She is also the author of Dirty Diversity: A Practical Guide to Foster an Equitable and Inclusive Workplace for All. You can preorder her second book The Pink Elephant that comes out on November 27th. 

Dr. Sarah Saska (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Dr. Saska is the Co-Founder & CEO Feminuity, a DEI consultancy based in Toronto that works with a lot of US technology companies. Her PhD is in Equity Studies and Technology and Innovation Studies. She is a frequent speaker and shares useful content including some of the practical guides her team has written including:

• A Guide to LGBTQ2S+ Inclusion for HR, People and DEI Leaders –  a super comprehensive guide that includes leading policy practices, benefits and inclusive culture. There’s an excellent glossary and really cute illustrations.
• The Future is Inclusive, Accessible and Digital: A Guide to Accessible and Inclusive Social Media Practices 

I learned about Namedrop, a service where you can record how you pronounce your name, from Sarah’s email signature. (BTW–My name is Tah-rah, not Terra) 

Joelle Emerson (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Joelle is the Founder and CEO of Paradigm, a strategy firm that partners with companies to build more inclusive organizations. She leads an amazing team of DEI practitioners.She’s written for HBR Fortune and signal boosts articles people on her team write. Recently she coauthored a post with Dr. Evelyn Carter and Y-Vonne Hutchinson In Fortune magazine asking Why is President Trump trying to kill off diversity training programs? I really enjoyed her tweets during last week’s US election. 

The post Thought leaders in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion you should know appeared first on Tara Robertson Consulting.

If you ask Apple — or watch their seemingly never-ending series of events — they will happily tell you exactly what the company’s differentiation is based on; from this year alone:

This integration is at the core of Apple’s incredibly successful business model: the company makes the majority of its money by selling hardware, but while other manufacturers can, at least in theory, create similar hardware, which should lead to commoditization, only Apple’s hardware runs its proprietary operating systems.

Of course software is even more commoditizable than hardware: once written, software can be duplicated endlessly, which means its marginal cost of production is zero. This is why many software-based companies are focused on serving as large a market as possible, the better to leverage their investments in creating the software in the first place. However, zero marginal cost is not the only inherent quality of software: it is also infinitely customizable, which means that Apple can create something truly unique, and by tying said software to its hardware, make its hardware equally unique as well, allowing it to charge a sustainable premium.

This is, to be sure, a simplistic view of Apple: many aspects of its software are commoditized, often to Apple’s benefit, while many aspects of its hardware are differentiated. What is fascinating is that while modern Apple is indeed characterized by the integration of hardware and software, the balance of which differentiates the other has shifted over time, culminating in yesterday’s announcement of new Macs powered by Apple Silicon.

Apple 1.0: Software Over Hardware

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, the company was famously in terrible financial shape; unsurprisingly the company’s computer lineup was in terrible shape as well: too many models that were too unremarkable. The only difference from PCs was that Macs had a different operating system that was technically obsolete, PowerPC processors that were falling behind x86, and also they were more expensive. Not exactly a winning combination!

Jobs made a number of changes in short order: he killed off the Macintosh clone market, re-asserting Apple’s integrated business model; he dramatically simplified the product lineup; and, having found a promising young designer already working at Apple named Jony Ive, he put all of the company’s efforts behind the iMac. This was truly a product where the hardware carried the software; the iMac was a cultural phenomenon, not because of Classic Mac OS’s ease-of-use, and certainly not because of its lack of memory protection, but simply because the hardware was so simple and so adorable.

OS X brought software to the forefront, delivering not simply a technically sound operating system, but one that was based on Unix, making it particularly attractive to developers. And, on the consumer side, Apple released iLife, a suite of applications that made a Mac useful for normal users. I myself bought my first Mac in this era because I wanted to use GarageBand; 16 years on and my musical ambitions are abandoned, but my Mac usage remains.

By that point I was buying a Mac despite its hardware: while my iBook was attractive enough, its processor was a Motorola G4 that was not remotely competitive with Intel’s x86 processors; later that year Jobs made the then-shocking-but-in-retrospect-obvious decision to shift Macs to Intel processors. In this case having the same hardware as everyone else in the industry would be a big win for Apple, the better to let their burgeoning software differentiation shine.

Apple 2.0: The Apex of Integration

Meanwhile, Apple had an exploding hit on its hands with the iPod, which combined beautiful hardware and superior storage capacity with iTunes, software that offloaded the complexity of managing your music to your far more capable Mac and, starting in 2003, your PC; notably Apple avoided the trap of integrating hardware (the iPod) with hardware (the Mac), which would have handicapped the former to prop up the latter. Instead the company took advantage of the flexibility of software to port iTunes to Windows.

The iPhone followed the path blazed by the iPod: while the first few versions of the iPhone were remarkably limited in their user-facing software capabilities, that was acceptable because much of that complexity was offloaded to the PC or Mac you plugged it into. To that point much of the software work had gone into making the iPhone usable on hardware that was barely good enough; RIM famously thought Jobs was lying about the iPhone’s capabilities at launch.

Over time the iPhone would gradually wean itself off of iTunes and the need to sync with a PC or Mac, making itself a standalone computer in its own right; it was also on its way to being the most valuable product in history. This was the ultimate in integration, both in terms of how the product functioned, and also in the business model that integration unlocked.

Apple 3.0: Hardware Over Software

Sixteen years on from the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, and Apple’s software differentiation is the smallest it has been since the dawn of OS X. Windows has a Subsystem for Linux, which, combined with the company’s laser focus on developers, makes Microsoft products increasingly attractive for software development. Meanwhile, most customers use web apps on their computers, PC or Mac. There has been an explosion in creativity, but that explosion has occurred on smartphones, and is centered around distribution channels, not one’s personal photo or movie library.

Those distribution channels and the various apps customers use to create and consume are available on both leading platforms, iOS and Android. I personally feel that the iPhone retains an advantage in the smoothness of its interface and quality of its apps, but Android is more flexible and well-suited to power users, and much better integrated with Google’s superior web services; there are strong arguments to be made for both ecosystems.

Where the iPhone is truly differentiated is in hardware: Apple has — for now — the best camera system, and has had for years the best system-on-a-chip. These two differentiators are related: smartphone cameras are not simply about lenses and sensors, but also about how the resultant image is processed; that involves both software and the processor, and what is notable about smartphone cameras is that Google’s photo-processing software is generally thought to be superior. What makes the iPhone a better camera, though, is its chip.

Apple Silicon and Sketch

It is difficult to overstate just how far ahead Apple’s A-series of smartphone chips is relative to the competition; AnandTech found that the A14 delivered nearly double the performance of its closest competitors for the same amount of power — indeed, the A14’s only true competitor was last year’s A13. At least, that is, as far as mobile is concerned; the most noteworthy graph from that AnandTech article is about how the A14 stacks up against those same Intel chips that power Macs:

Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.

Apple’s performance trajectory and unquestioned execution over these years is what has made Apple Silicon a reality today. Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph will realise that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and x86 in favour of their own in-house microarchitecture – staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products.

Today’s announcements only covered Apple’s laptop-class Apple Silicon, whilst we don’t know the details at time of writing as to what Apple will be presenting, Apple’s enormous power efficiency advantage means that the new chip will be able to offer either vastly increased battery life, and/or, vastly increased performance, compared to the current Intel MacBook line-up.

What makes the timing of this move ideal from Apple’s perspective is not simply that this is the year that the A-series of chips are surpassing Intel’s, but also the Mac’s slipping software differentiation. Sketch, makers of the eponymous vector graphics app, wrote, on the occasion of their 10th anniversary, a paean to Mac apps:

Ten years after the first release of Sketch, a lot has changed. The design tools space has grown. Our amazing community has, too. Even macOS itself has evolved. But one thing has remained the same: our love for developing a truly native Mac app. Native apps bring so many benefits — from personalization and performance to familiarity and flexibility. And while we’re always working hard to make Cloud an amazing space to collaborate, we still believe the Mac is the perfect place to let your ideas and imagination flourish.

The fly in Sketch’s celebratory ointment is that phrase “even macOS itself has evolved”; the truth is that most of the macOS changes over Sketch’s lifetime — which started with Snow Leopard, regarded by many (including yours truly) as the best version of OS X — have been at best cosmetic, at worst clumsy attempts to protect novice users that often got in the way of power users.

Meanwhile, it is the cloud that is the real problem facing Sketch: Figma, which is built from the ground-up as a collaborative web app, is taking the design world by storm, because rock-solid collaboration with good enough web apps is more important for teams than tacked-on collaboration with native software built for the platform.

Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate. Apple, though, shares a lot of the blame: imagine if instead of effectively forcing Sketch out of the App Store with its zealous approach to security, Apple had evolved AppKit, macOS’s framework for building applications, to provide built-in support for collaboration and live-editing.

Instead the future is web apps, with all of the performance hurdles they entail, which is why, from Apple’s perspective, the A-series is arriving just in time. Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!

Integration Wins Again

This isn’t the first time I have noted that Apple is inclined to fix ecosystem problems with hardware; five years ago, after the launch of the iPad Pro, I wrote in From Products to Platforms:

Note that phrase: “How could we take the iPad even further?” Cook’s assumption is that the iPad problem is Apple’s problem, and given that Apple is a company that makes hardware products, Cook’s solution is, well, a new product.

My contention, though, is that when it comes to the iPad Apple’s product development hammer is not enough. Cook described the iPad as “A simple multi-touch piece of glass that instantly transforms into virtually anything that you want it to be”; the transformation of glass is what happens when you open an app. One moment your iPad is a music studio, the next a canvas, the next a spreadsheet, the next a game. The vast majority of these apps, though, are made by 3rd-party developers, which means, by extension, 3rd-party developers are even more important to the success of the iPad than Apple is: Apple provides the glass, developers provide the experience.

The iPad has since recovered from its 2017 nadir in sales, but seems locked in at around 8% of Apple’s revenue, a far cry from the 20% share it had in its first year, when it looked set to rival the iPhone; I remain convinced that the lack of a thriving productivity software market that treated the iPad like the unique device Jobs thought it was, instead of a laptop replacement, is the biggest reason why.

Perhaps Apple Silicon in Macs will turn out better: it is possible that Apple’s chip team is so far ahead of the competition, not just in 2020, but particularly as it develops even more powerful versions of Apple Silicon, that the commoditization of software inherent in web apps will work to Apple’s favor, just as the its move to Intel commoditized hardware, highlighting Apple’s then-software advantage in the 00s.

Apple is pricing these new Macs as if that is the case: the M1 probably costs around $75 (an educated guess), which is less than the Intel chips it replaces, but Apple is mostly holding the line on prices (the new Mac Mini is $100 cheaper, but also has significantly less I/O). That suggests the company believes it can take both share and margin, and it’s a reasonable bet from my perspective. The company has the best chips in the world, and you have to buy the entire integrated widget to get them.

I wrote a follow-up to this article in this Daily Update.

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer that can do a lot of things, but few projects are as popular as turning it into a retro-gaming console; imagine something the size of an NES or SNES Classic mini console with a few hundred games on it instead of a few dozen. With about half an hour of free time and some lightweight technical know-how, you can convert this card-deck–sized computer into a console capable of emulating nearly every classic video game system from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Most keyboards that come with laptops and desktops are shallow, drab, and joyless.

A mechanical keyboard is a comfortable, customizable upgrade that allows you to get the look and typing feel you prefer. They’re more durable than regular keyboards, and easier to repair, too. If you spend most of your day typing, coding, or gaming, it can be a delight to customize your daily driver down to the last detail.

But mechanical keyboards bring with them a lot of jargon—layouts and switches and keycap profiles, oh my—so here’s an overview of the terms you need to know to find your perfect keyboard.

Even if you feel a need to make your favorite magic words more important, don’t capitalize them in running text. It makes prose look uneven — and makes you look like an eighteenth-century pamphleteer. Do you write to impress? I edit a lot of prose intended for that purpose — including “thought leadership” blogs, business … Continued

The post Don’t capitalize Random Crap appeared first on without bullshit.

Bonnie Stewart, Inside Higher Ed, Nov 11, 2020

A couple of years ago higher ed needed AI ethics. Now it needs data ethics. In the future it will need DNA ethics. We could just say higher ed needs ethics. Yes, true, as Bonnie Stewart says, "these are relatively new issues on higher education’s radar as a whole." Anyhow, the bulk of this post is about a pilot survey of university educators on their knowledge, practices and perspectives about data. Here is the data set. As Stewart notes in the article, most (about 2/3) don't know where their LMS data is located, and most (2/3) mostly don't read the full terms of service. But why would they? In an institutional context, there are people to do this. Interestingly, most respondents (95%) haven't experienced serious data breach issues. And about half say institutions shouldn't analyze the records of logins, clicks, and contributions posted without express permission. None of this says 'crisis' to me. Image: Wired.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

I redesigned my blog this week, and as part of that I ended up going through every single blog post I’ve written over the past eleven years.

It’s a strange experience to write publicly for this long. There’s an awful amount of blog posts I just simply don’t agree with anymore. A lot of the posts from early 2010-2012 GitHub seem hopelessly optimistic and romantic these days. Some posts blew up in the industry for a week and completely stressed me out to write. Now they’re just amusing to think back on as even being stressful now.

Regardless of how I feel about them today, though, I’m still pretty proud that I tried to write while angry. Or, put another way: I chose to write about things that I cared deeply about and felt like I had a secret perspective on. You should be pissed that everyone else doesn’t agree with you, or that many people are doing things wrong.

This is the case for public speaking as much as it is for writing. Especially in tech, I see a lot of milquetoast blog posts and talks from people trying to make a name for themselves with a bland viewpoint. If you’re not contributing to changing people’s minds, then there’s no point in writing. You’re just contributing some vanilla shit to all the other vanilla noise we have out there.

Playing the heel

I never had much of a problem being the bad guy with this stuff. Not in terms of being morally wrong, but in terms of being fairly black-and-white when it comes to my arguments made.

Take “meetings are bullshit”, which pops up in my talks and posts in the early 2010s a fair amount. I fucking hate meetings. I think things like email and chat are better ways to build software (and indeed, the rise of Slack has proven that to be true). But it’s not that we didn’t have meetings at GitHub, or get together for synchronous meetups from time to time. That also was a big component of work. But it’s much easier for someone in a small company to tell their boss “HEY THE GITHUB GUYS FUCKING HATE MEETINGS LET’S CHANGE THINGS UP TOO!” And usually that company would find their own happy balance of what worked for them.

Getting people — and especially companies — to change how they work, or what tools they use, or how they interact with their coworkers is really goddamn hard to do. But I think it’s just more effective to position yourself on the far extreme and let people discuss it from there. For one, it forces people in Hacker News comments, on Twitter, at lunch, to clarify their own opinions and make a stance of their own. You end up with people finding their own common ground with the kernel of what you’re trying to argue for.

Belittle the process, not the rationale

Everyone thought GitHub’s main competition early on was Subversion, which was completely wrong. Our largest competitor was HeaderFile_FINAL_2.2009.JOHN-checkpoint_FINAL.jpeg. People didn’t know Git, much less version control in general. And when you’re trying to convince potential customers that your way is better, you can’t just settle with “yeah this will help you keep cleaner filenames”- you have to go really fucking strong and point out that the way they’re doing things is wrong and life will be so much better with these changes.

The most ideal behavior for a society? Maybe not. But I think that last point is the key: you can get angry about things, but always keep it pointed squarely at an aim to improving people’s lives. You can be negative, but only if you try to uplift through that negativity. Belittle the existing process, not the existing people or decisions of how they got to that point.

In diesem Jahr habe ich Sonos nur noch wenig verwendet. Meistens waren die Geräte ausgeschaltet. Es wird Zeit, mich davon zu trennen. Dazu gehört diese wunderbare Playbase, die mit zehn Lautsprechern den ganzen Raum füllt. Drei links, drei rechts, drei in der Mitte, dazu ein Basshorn. Das Ding kann einfach alles, was Sonos so anbietet: Fernsehton über SPDIF, Ethernet, Wifi, Airplay 2, Spotify Connect, spielt Musik von allen Musikdiensten unter der Sonne und natürlich Internet Radio. Zustand: Wie neu.

Playbase passt in ein ganz niedriges Regalfach oder unter den Fernseher. Mit einem iPhone kann man den Lautsprecher für den eigenen Raum einmessen. Ich habe noch den Originalkarton und kann Playbase deshalb auch verschicken. Ich biete sie lieber erst mal Euch an, bevor ich sie inseriere. Bei Interesse Mail an mich.

Update: Und ... verkauft. Jetzt habe ich nur noch drei Sachen abzugeben:

Sonos Connect:Amp
Sonos Play:3, schwarz, 2 Stück

Letzte Preis? Der Ankaufspreis bei rebuy.de. Auf das Bild klicken für den VK. Zustand perfekt.

Die Play:3 waren bei mir die Rear Channel für die Playbase. Das coole ist, man kann sie auf die Seite stellen und dann strahlen sie schräg nach oben. Wo sie stehen ist egal, denn das ganze System wird sowieso eingemessen.

Connect:Amp treibt Eure eigenen Lautsprecher an. Man kann aber auch zum Beispiel einen Plattenspieler oder einen CD-Player an die Eingänge anschließen und dann überall im Haus verteilen. Connect:Amp funktioniert mit Sonos S1.

AirBuddy is one of those handy Mac utilities that you don’t know how you’ve lived without until after you’ve tried it. The initial release that I reviewed in early 2019 was primarily designed to manage Bluetooth headphones connected to your Mac and report the status of your headphones’ batteries; something iOS and iPadOS does better than macOS. With AirBuddy 2, developer Guilherme Rambo has added a bunch of new features, including new ways to customize the app and interact with Bluetooth devices other than headphones.

As with the original version of AirBuddy, when you open your AirPods or Beats headphone case near your Mac, a window opens, showing you the status of their batteries and connection. The app also works with Bluetooth headphones that rely on an on/off switch like the Beats Solo line. From AirBuddy’s status window, you can click to connect the headphones to your Mac or swipe to connect and set their listening mode in one gesture.

AirBuddy 2’s listening modes allow you to adjust multiple headphone settings all at once when the app connects your headphones to your Mac. For example, you can turn your headphones’ microphone on for meetings or off for listening to music and set the volume and whether AirPods Pro play audio in Normal, Transparency, or Noise Cancelling modes. The combinations you pick for your listening modes are saved as profiles in the app’s settings.

AirBuddy 2 is also a menu bar app. Clicking its menu bar icon opens a window that shows all your connected devices and their battery status, including Macs, iPhones, and iPads. The devices are grouped, so, for example, your Apple Watch shows up as connected to your iPhone as would any AirPods you’re currently using with your iPhone. If you run AirBuddy 2 on a second Mac, that Mac will show up here, too, along with any Bluetooth peripherals connected to it.

My favorite part of having AirBuddy 2 running on multiple Macs is the ability to transfer Bluetooth connections from one Mac to the other using the app’s Magic Handoff feature. I spent a lot of the summer with separate trackpads connected to two Macs as I switched back and forth, testing Big Sur. AirBuddy 2 provides an alternate desk-clearing option by letting you right-click the AirBuddy entry for a trackpad, mouse, or keyboard connected to the Mac you’re currently using and switch it to the other Mac. For anyone who runs multiple Macs, especially connected to the same display, this is a terrific feature.

AirBuddy 2 is highly customizable too. In addition to setting up custom listening modes, which I covered above, you can open the app’s settings from the menu bar and assign keyboard shortcuts to display the headphone status window and to quickly connect to a favorite device, switch listening modes, toggle your microphone on or off, and take other actions. Settings also lets you specify the devices that are shown in the menu bar app, your favorite headphones for quick connection purposes, the status window’s size, and where it appears onscreen, among other things. You can even view historical battery and usage data from the Devices section of the app’s settings.

It’s also worth noting that AirBuddy 2 also includes a widget that works with both Catalina and Big Sur to display the battery status of each of the devices it tracks.

AirBuddy started as an app that brought an iOS feature for headphones to the Mac. With AirBuddy 2, the app’s functionality has been greatly expanded beyond anything Apple offers, making it indispensable for anyone who connects multiple wireless devices to their Macs. Not only can you quickly connect headphones, so they’re immediately ready for a meeting or for listening to music, but the app helps keep you on top of the battery status of every connected device.

AirBuddy has been available for pre-order since last month, but today is its official release date. You can purchase the app directly from the AirBuddy website for $9.99 for new users, $4.99 as an upgrade from the first version of AirBuddy if you bought it in 2019, and for free if you purchased the app in 2020.

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In the last few days my fear of Facebook has been ramping up and in my mind the case for breaking it up got stronger. What happened was, I sold the old family minivan on Facebook Marketplace and it’s a juggernaut.

We bought a reasonably-well-equipped Honda Odyssey in 2007, a few months after our second child was born. Minivans, they really do the trick when you’ve got multiple kids. It’s carried little-league teams and birthday parties and construction materials and everything the family needs at the cabin for a week. It’s taken the two-day drive over the mountains and across the Prairies to Saskatchewan, twice. It ain’t sexy and it ain’t sleek, but if you’re gonna spend a lot of hours schlepping stuff and kids around, there are way worse places than the big high comfy driver’s seat.

Anyhow, we don’t need it any more — our kids are 21 and 14 — so we decided to sell it. Since it’d been driving kids around, it was plenty grungy inside, so I got it detailed inside and out. When I picked it up from Ahmed the car-detail dude I said “This puppy’s going on Craigslist this afternoon.” Ahmed said “No, man, put it on Facebook Marketplace, it’s ten times better. Anybody in the business will tell you the same thing. Hussein over there just sold a bunch of snow tires the same afternoon.”

The experience

So I did; thanks, Ahmed. The listing experience is excellent. It got me to give it the VIN and from that it filled in the model, make, year, and so on. It knew what region the listing should focus on. Upload a couple of pictures and write a blurb and you’re done. It wondered if I wanted to promote the listing, starting at $4, but I bypassed that.

[Maybe worth noting: I don’t use Facebook except for a couple of affinity groups, but I do hit those a couple times a week, and I have one or two occasional contacts that want to chat with Messenger. So my Facebook account is kind of up to date, in case that’s relevant.]

I listed it Thursday afternoon. Facebook says nearly a thousand people looked at the ad, and thirty or so reached out to me. The outreach comes through FB Messenger, with the person’s face replaced by one of my van pictures. I made dates with seven people to look at it, five showed up, the fifth bought it, and we did the papers and money Monday evening.

Running everything through Messenger was clever, although I found it a bit overwhelming on my phone, really needed to use a big-screen browser to stay on top of the traffic. Here’s an interesting sidelight: When I eventually marked the deal closed, which you can do right there in the chat, all those people vanished from my chat history.

I learned a few things. First of all, I carefully researched prices by looking at comparables, set a reasonable price, and stuck to it. Probably could have sold faster if I’d put it like 15% higher and been willing to come down — people really want to bargain.

Basically all the people who showed up to look were pleasant. There was this one pair of dudes who were grumpy but they had made the best offer until the fifth party took it. Another guy was fresh off the boat from Taiwan, almost no English but he din’t let that bother him, had a translator app on his phone and we got along. On the test drive he scared the crap out of me, driving like a madman.

Why worry?

I mentioned to a couple of the folks that I’d never sold anything on Facebook before and wow, it worked pretty well. They smiled at me understandingly — old guy, they were thinking, not Internet-savvy — and agreed, wondering why anyone would use anything else.

At which point my internal alarm bells started ringing. The Internet does not need the giant Facebook amoeba expanding into online retail. I already believed passionately that we need drastic action ASAP to smash up the Google/Facebook ad duopoly and bring life back to advertising-supported publishing as a category.

Monopolies start small and then when you notice them, it’s usually too late. I don’t think it’s too late in this case.

‘The 007 Collection’ is now streaming on Crave, allowing subscribers full access to every James Bond film to date.

This is a particularly notable get for Crave, given that the films weren’t previously on any other streaming services. Instead, you could only purchase them individually on platforms like iTunes and Google Play.

Overall, The 007 Collection includes all 25 James Bond films, including Never Say Never Again, which was not produced by long-running Bond production company Eon.

Here’s the full list:

• Dr. No (1962)
• From Russia with Love (1963)
• Goldfinger (1964)
• Thunderball (1965)
• You Only Live Twice (1967)
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
• Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
• Live and Let Die (1973)
• The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
• The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
• Moonraker (1979)
• For Your Eyes Only (1981)
• Never Say Never Again (1983)
• Octopussy (1983)
• A View to a Kill (1985)
• The Living Daylights (1987)
• Licence to Kill (1989)
• GoldenEye (1995)
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
• The World Is Not Enough (1999)
• Die Another Day (2002)
• Casino Royale (2006)
• Quantum of Solace (2008)
• Skyfall (2012)
• Spectre (2015)

The November release of the entire Bond saga is well-timed, as it helps fill the void left by No Time To Die, the series’ next film and Daniel Craig’s final outing as the super spy. Last month, No Time to Die was delayed for a second time due to COVID-19, shifting from November 12th to April 2nd, 2021 in North America.

Additionally, The 007 Collection premieres on Crave shortly after the October 31st passing of iconic Bond actor Sean Connery. Therefore, the collection also serves as an opportunity to revisit the star’s seven Bond films, including Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.

The 007 Collection requires a $19.98 CAD/month Crave + Movies + HBO subscription. You can access the full collection here.

Image credit: MGM

The post Every James Bond film is now streaming on Crave in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple’s new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini each feature two USB-C ports that support both USB 4 and Thunderbolt.

However, for reasons that remain unclear, all three new devices feature Thunderbolt 3 instead of the newer Thunderbolt 4 ports. Further, the MacBook Pro only features two USB-C ports across both of its configurations, compared to the four offered in the laptop’s Intel-powered variant.

While Thunderbolt 4 is very similar to Thunderbolt 3, given that it offers the same 40Gbs data transfer speed and features the same USB-C port design, it also includes advantages like support for two 4K displays or one 8K screen, support for docks with up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, PCIe at 32 Gbps for storage speeds up to 3,000MBps, and more.

It’s unclear why Apple opted for the older Thunderbolt 3 with its new M1 Macs, but it could have something to do with COVID-19 hardware shortages or a limitation related to Apple’s license from Intel to use Thunderbolt technology.

During its keynote, Apple also revealed M1 chip versions of the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini.

Source: MacRumors

The post Apple’s new M1 Macs feature Thunderbolt 3 and not Thunderbolt 4 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A Vancouver company called Extreme Vehicle Battery Technologies has announced that it will start a ‘Battery Revival Program’ to help give used batteries a second life.

The company has an AI program that can quickly diagnose old batteries. Once this is done, the company can choose to attempt to refurbish the old battery to be used in an EV or find some way to use it as an energy storage solution.

The company’s CEO Brydson Goodwin says that “Most EV batteries are deemed non-functional when they lose functionality in 20% of their fuel cells.” So there is a definite need for someone to step up and do something with all of these older batteries.

Extreme Vehicle Battery Technologies also says that since it’s using old batteries, the upfront cost for it to make battery storage solutions is greatly reduced.

The post Vancouver company to help recycle old EV batteries appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Though at one point Apple heavily pushed the concept of an external GPU (eGPU), it seems the tech giant has ditched that direction altogether when it comes to its new M1-powered MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini.

While the tech giant’s new M1 Macs tout impressive CPU performance, none of the new computers are compatible with external GPUs via their two Thunderbolt ports.

Though eGPU use with Apple’s MacBook line likely never truly took off with creative professionals in the photography and video space given how expensive they are, it’s disappointing that these new Macs aren’t compatible with the devices. Apple first started pushing the concept of pairing the MacBook Pro with an eGPU with the release of the 2018 version of the laptop.

It’s also worth pointing out Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 only features two USB-C ports instead of four. While this is consistent with the Intel version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro it replaces, it’s still a disappointing move on Apple’s part. Further, the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro is limited to 16GB of RAM while its Intel counterpart can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM.

With the $1,299 M1 MacBook Air being the only exception given it includes a seven-core GPU, all of Apple’s new Macs feature an integrated seven-core GPU.

Apple still sells Blackmagic’s Radeon Pro 580 eGPU in the Apple Store for $899.

Via: @pmg

The post Apple’s new M1 Macs don’t work with external GPUs appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Now that the dust has settled regarding Apple’s ‘One More Thing’ M1 Mac event, details regarding the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini are starting to trickle out.

For example, while all three new M1-powered Macs feature the same CPU and GPU and can theoretically run at identical speeds, the fact that the MacBook Pro and the Mac mini feature a fan allows the computers to run at peak performance for longer. On the other hand, the MacBook Air doesn’t feature a fan and, as a result, features cooling that isn’t as efficient as Apple’s other two M1 launch computers.

In general, modern CPUs run faster when they have better cooling.

Interestingly, Apple emphasized that the MacBook Air with M1 is going entirely fanless while also talking about the “active cooling solution” featured in the MacBook Pro that is really just the same fan the tech giant has included in its ‘Pro’ laptops for years.

Other differences between the M1 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air have appeared as well. First, the cheaper $1,299 MacBook Air features seven GPU cores instead of eight because Apple utilizes salvaged, weaker chips with one core turned off in the fanless Air. This process is known as ‘binning‘ in the chip manufacturing industry and is relatively common.

The more expensive M1 $1,649 MacBook Air includes an eight-core CPU like the base level M1 $1,699 MacBook Pro.

It’s also worth noting that the 13-inch MacBook Pro features a slightly larger battery coming in at 58.2Wh compared to the MacBook Air’s 49.9Wh. Apple says that this results in two additional hours of battery life for the MacBook Pro than the MacBook Air.

Finally, both M1 laptops can only be configured with 16GB of RAM compared to the 32GB the Intel-based MacBook Pro can feature.

MobileSyrup will have more on Apple’s upcoming M1 computers in the coming days

The post Apple’s M1-powered MacBook Pro and Mac mini can run at peak performance for longer appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I’m stunned by some projects where the community leader hasn’t undertaken a survey of members in years (and a handful where they have never collected feedback).

Their only inkling as to whether members are having a good community experience comes through the interactions of a handful of top members they engage with every day.

You should always be collecting feedback.

Do a survey once or twice a year. Find out how satisfied members are with the community, how relevant they find it to their work, and what aspects they do or don’t like. Use this to plot your priorities.

Try to interview a member at least once a week. Probe deep into what brings them to the community and why. What is and isn’t working for them. What would create a better experience? Use this to refine your personas.

Use polls to tackle more immediate questions about the kind of content and features members find most useful.

I coined a new Dutch word I think. This early morning I was thinking and writing about the words dependency, independency, interdependency, and codependency, and did so in both English and Dutch in parallel. In Dutch I realised I didn’t like the usual translation of interdependency as ‘wederzijdse afhankelijkheid’ which literally translated back to English says mutual dependency. It seems to miss a key aspect. It emphasizes the mutuality of being dependent i.e. two separate dependencies in a vice versa fashion. To me the ‘inter’ in interdependent is not merely the two things that are connected through it, but a third place. A strenghtening of multiple independents by entering into a constellation, not a weakening through mutually assured dependence. A third place that is a synergetic togetherness, centered between the things connected through it, something that is more than the sum of its parts. In that richer connectedness lies the complexity of our lives. ‘Mutual dependent’ sounds like a so much poorer term than ‘interdependent’. It leans more towards codependency even. I of course have a strong interest in the meaning of the word interdependent, as it has been the most important word in the name of this weblog since 2002 (and hence became part of my personal company and holding company name too).

I tried to find a Dutch term for it, couldn’t find an existing one and then I came up with ‘samenhankelijk’, which is a concatenation of ‘together’ and ‘pendant’, into something akin to ‘tangled together’ (the Dutch word for entanglement, ‘verstrengeling’ lacks the mutuality and relational aspect, is more a physical description like of a Gordian knot).

I searched samenhankelijk. It turns out that it doesn’t exist. The word is not in the most authoritative Dutch dictionary, Startpage doesn’t have any results, and Google has 5 (but used, wrongly, as the word ‘samenhangend’ which means coherent).

No results in the dictionary, no results in search.

Now I am blogging this to put the word samenhankelijk out there, and have it indexed by the search algorithms. I also registered the domain name samenhankelijk.nl, just because I can, and will put up a ‘dictionary’ page there, to claim the term’s definition. By default that domain has perfect SEO! Let’s see how soon this blogpost is the first for this Google search

Following my departure from the MDN documentation team at Mozilla, I’ve joined the team at Amazon Web Services, documenting the AWS SDKs. Which specific SDKs I’ll be covering are still being finalized; we have some in mind but are determining who will prioritize which still, so I’ll hold off on being more specific.

Instead of going into details on my role on the AWS docs team, I thought I’d write a new post that provides a more in-depth introduction to myself than the little mini-bios strewn throughout my onboarding forms. Not that I know if anyone is interested, but just in case they are…

Personal

Now a bit about me. I was born in the Los Angeles area, but my family moved around a lot when I was a kid due to my dad’s work. By the time I left home for college at age 18, we had lived in California twice (where I began high school), Texas twice, Colorado twice, and Louisiana once (where I graduated high school). We also lived overseas once, near Pekanbaru, Riau Province on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. It was a fun and wonderful place to live. Even though we lived in a company town called Rumbai, and were thus partially isolated from the local community, we still lived in a truly different place from the United States, and it was a great experience I cherish.

My wife, Sarah, and I have a teenage daughter, Sophie, who’s smarter than both of us combined. When she was in preschool and kindergarten, we started talking about science in pretty detailed ways. I would give her information and she would draw conclusions that were often right, thinking up things that essentially were black holes, the big bang, and so forth. It was fun and exciting to watch her little brain work. She’s in her “nothing is interesting but my 8-bit chiptunes, my game music, the games I like to play, and that’s about it” phase, and I can’t wait until she’s through that and becomes the person she will be in the long run. Nothing can bring you so much joy, pride, love, and total frustration as a teenage daughter.

Education

I got my first taste of programming on a TI-99/4 computer bought by the Caltex American School there. We all were given a little bit of programming lesson just to get a taste of it, and I was captivated from the first day, when I got it to print a poem based on “Roses are red, violets are blue” to the screen. We were allowed to book time during recesses and before and after school to use the computer, and I took every opportunity I could to do so, learning more and more and writing tons of BASIC programs on it.

This included my masterpiece: a game called “Alligator!” in which you drove an alligator sprite around with the joystick, eating frogs that bounced around the screen while trying to avoid the dangerous bug that was chasing you. When I discovered that other kids were using their computer time to play it, I was permanently hooked.

I continued to learn and expand my skills over the years, moving on to various Apple II (and clone) computers, eventually learning 6502 and 65816 assembly, Pascal, C, dBase IV, and other languages.

During my last couple years of high school, I got a job at a computer and software store (which was creatively named “Computer and Software Store”) in Mandeville, Louisiana. In addition to doing grunt work and front-of-store sales, I also spent time doing programming for contract projects the store took on. My first was a simple customer contact management program for a real estate office. My most complex completed project was a three-store cash register system for a local chain of taverns and bars in the New Orleans area. I also built most of a custom inventory, quotation, and invoicing system for the store, though this was never finished due to my departure to start college.

The project about which I was most proud: a program for tracking information and progress of special education students and students with special needs for the St. Tammany Parish School District. This was built to run on an Apple IIe computer, and I was delighted to have the chance to build a real workplace application for my favorite platform.

I attended the University of California—Santa Barbara with a major in computer science. I went through the program and reached the point where I only needed 12 more units (three classes): one general education class under the subject area “literature originating in a foreign language” and two computer science electives. When I went to register for my final quarter, I discovered that none of the computer science classes offered that quarter were ones I could take to fulfill my requirements (I’d either already taken them or they were outside my focus area, and thus wouldn’t apply).

Thus I withdrew from school for a quarter with the plan that I would try again for the following quarter. During the interim, I became engaged to my wife and took my first gaming industry job (where they promised to allow me leave, with benefits, for the duration of my winter quarter back at school). As the winter approached, I drove up to UCSB to get a catalog and register in person. Upon arrival, I discovered that, once again, there were no computer science offerings that would fulfill my requirements.

At that point, I was due to marry in a few months (during the spring quarter), my job was getting more complicated due to the size and scope of the projects I was being assigned, and the meaningfulness of the degree was decreasing as I gained real work experience.

Thus, to this day, I remain just shy of my computer science degree. I have regrets at times, but never so much so that it makes sense to go back. Especially given the changed requirements and the amount of extra stuff I’d probably have to take. My experience at work now well outweighs the benefits of the degree.

The other shoe…

Time to drop that other shoe. I have at least one, and possibly two, chronic medical conditions that complicate everything I do. If there are two such conditions, they’re similar enough that I generally treat them as one when communicating with non-doctors, so that’s what I’ll do here.

I was born with tibiae (lower leg bones) that were twisted outward abnormally. This led to me walking with feet that were pointed outward at about a 45° angle from normal. This, along with other less substantial issues with the structure of my legs, was always somewhat painful, especially when doing things which really required my feet to point forward, such as walking on a narrow beam, skating, or trying to water ski.

Over time, this pain became more constant, and began to change. I noticed numbness and tingling in my feet and ankles, along with sometimes mind-crippling levels of pain. In addition, I developed severe pain in my neck, shoulders, and both arms. Over time, I began to have spasms, in which it felt like I was being blasted by an electric shock, causing my arms or legs to jerk wildly. At times, I would find myself uncontrollably lifting my mouse off the desk and slamming it down, or even throwing it to the floor, due to these spasms.

Basically, my nervous system has run amok. Due, we think, to a lifetime of strain and pressure caused by my skeletal structure issues, the nerves have been worn and become permanently damaged in various places. This can’t be reversed, and the pain I feel every moment of every day will never go away.

I engage in various kinds of therapy, both physical and medicinal, and the pain is kept within the range of “ignorable” much of the time. But sometimes it spikes out of that range and becomes impossible to ignore, leading to me not being able to focus clearly on what I’m doing. Plus there are times when it becomes so intense, all I can do is curl up and ride it out. This can’t be changed, and I’ve accepted that. We do our best to manage it and I’m grateful to have access to the medical care I have.

This means, of course, that I have times during which I am less attentive than I would like to be, or have to take breaks to ride out pain spikes. On less frequent occasions, I have to write a day off entirely when I simply can’t shake the pain at all. I have to keep warm, too, since cold (even a mild chill or a slight cooling breeze) can trigger the pain to spike abruptly.

But I’ve worked out systems and skills that let me continue to do my work despite all this. The schedule can be odd, and I have to pause my work for a while a few times a week, but I get the job done.

I wrote a longer and more in-depth post about my condition and how it feels a few years ago, if you want to know more.

Hobbies and free time

My very favorite thing to do in my free time is to write code for my good old Apple II computers. Or, barring that, to work on the Apple IIgs emulator for the Mac that I’m the current developer for. I dabble in Mac and iOS code and have done a few small projects for my own use. However, due to my medical condition, I don’t get to spend as much time doing that as I can.

With the rest of my free time, I love to watch movies and read books. So very, very many books. My favorite genres are science fiction and certain types of mysteries and crime thrillers, though I dabble in other areas as well. I probably read, on average, four to six novels per week.

I also love to play various types of video games. I have an Xbox One, but I don’t play on it much (I got it mostly to watch 4K Blu-Ray discs on it), though I do have a few titles for it. I’ve played and enjoyed the Diablo games as well as StarCraft, and have been captivated by many of the versions of Civilization over the years (especially the original and Civ II). I also, of course, play several mobile games.

My primary gaming focus has been World of Warcraft for years. I was a member of a fairly large guild for a few years, then joined a guild that split off from it, but that guild basically fell apart. Only a scant handful of us are left, and none of us really feel like hunting for another guild, and since we enjoy chatting while we play, we do fine. It’d be interesting, though, to find coworkers that play and spend some time with them.

Career

I began my career as a software engineer for a small game development shop in Southern California. My work primarily revolved around porting games from other platforms to the Mac, though I did also do small amounts of Windows development at times. I ported a fair number of titles to Mac, most of which most people probably don’t remember—if they ever heard of them at all—but some of them were actually pretty good games. I led development of a Mac/Windows game for kids which only barely shipped due to changing business conditions with the publisher, and by then I was pretty much fed up with the stress of working in the games industry.

Over the years, I’ve picked or at least used up a number of languages, including C++ (though I’ve not written any in years now), JavaScript, Python, Perl, and others. I love trying out new languages, and have left out a lot of the ones I experimented with and abandoned over the years.

Be

By that point, I was really intrigued by the Be Operating System, and started trying to get a job there. The only opening I wasn’t painfully under-qualified for was a technical writing position. It occurred to me that I’ve always written well (according to teachers and professors, at least), so I applied and eventually secured a junior writer job on the BeOS documentation team.

Within seven months, I was a senior technical writer and was deeply involved in writing the Be Developers Guide (more commonly known as the Be Book) and Be Advanced Topics (which are still the only two published books which contain anything I’ve written). Due to the timing of my arrival, very little for my work is in the Be Book, but broad sections of Be Advanced Topics were written by me.

Palm

Unfortunately, for various reasons, BeOS wasn’t able to secure a large enough chunk of the market to succeed, and our decline led to our acquisition by Palm, the manufacturers of the Palm series of handhelds. We were merged into the various teams there, with myself joining the writing team for Palm OS documentation.

Within just a handful of weeks, the software team, including those of us documenting the operating system, was spun off into a new company, PalmSource. There, I worked on documentation updates for Palm OS 5, as well as updated and brand-new documentation for Palm OS 6 and 6.1.

My most memorable work was done on the rewrites and updates of the Low-Level Communications Guide and the High-Level Communications Guide, as well as on various documents for licensees’ use only. I also wrote the Binder Guide for Palm OS 6, and various other things. It was fascinating work, though ultimately and tragically doomed due to the missteps with the Palm OS 6 launch and the arrival of the iPhone three years after my departure from PalmSource.

Unfortunately, neither the Palm OS 6 update and its follow up, version 6.1, saw significant use during my tenure due to the vast changes in the platform that were made in order to modernize the operating system for future devices. The OS was also sluggish in Palm OS 6, though 6.1 was quite peppy and really very nice. But the writing was on the wall there and, though I survived three or four rounds of layoffs, eventually I was cut loose.

After PalmSource let me go, I returned briefly to the games industry, finalizing the ports of a couple of games to the Mac for Reflexive Entertainment (now part of Amazon): Ricochet Lost Worlds and Big Kahuna Reef. I departed Reflexive shortly after completing those projects, deciding I wanted to return to technical writing, or at least something not in the game industry.

Mozilla

That’s why my friend Dave Miller, who was at the time on the Bugzilla team as well as working in IT for Mozilla, recommended me for a Mac programming job at Mozilla. When I arrived for my in-person interviews, I discovered that they had noticed my experience as a writer and had shunted me over to interview for a writing job instead. After a very long day of interviews and a great deal of phone and email tag, I was offered a job as a writer on the Mozilla Developer Center team.

And there I stayed for 14 years, through the changes in documentation platform (from MediaWiki to DekiWiki to our home-built Kuma platform), the rebrandings (to Mozilla Developer Network, then to simply MDN, then MDN Web Docs), and the growth of our team over time. I began as the sole full-time writer, and by our peak as a team we had five or six writers. The MDN team was fantastic to work with, and the work had enormous meaning. We became over time the de-facto official documentation site for web developers.

My work spanned a broad range of topics from basics of HTML and CSS to the depths of WebRTC, WebSockets, and other, more arcane topics. I loved doing the work, with the deep dives into the source code of the major browsers to ensure I understood how things work and why and reading the specifications for new APIs.

Knowing that my work was not only used by millions of developers around the world, but was being used by teachers, professors, and students, as well as others who just wanted to learn, was incredibly satisfying. I loved doing it and I’m sure I’ll always miss it.

But between the usual business pressures and the great pandemic of 2020, I found myself laid off by Mozilla in mid-2020. That leads me to my arrival at Amazon a few weeks later, where I started on October 26.

Amazon!

So here we are! I’m still onboarding, but soon enough, I’ll be getting down to work, making sure my parts of the AWS documentation are as good as they can possibly be. Looking forward to it!

Because of how inexpensive it was, and the small size of the package, I bought a Raspberry Pi 400 from Canadian re-seller BuyaPi.ca. The news of its release jumpstarted my interest in the Raspberry Pi, and the 40-pin GPIO header means I can connect a lot of of what I’ve discussed on this site and my humble Arduino mission accomplishments site.

I watched Jeff Geerling’s teardown of the Raspberry Pi 400 as soon as I could, but it was his unboxing and review that sold me on it, especially how easy it was to connect to a TV. That immediately resolved the issue of which display I’d connect it to, and it would make use of the HDMI switch that has gone heretofore unused.

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As a result of renewed interest in the Raspberry Pi computing platform, I’ve refreshed the site, converting it from Harp to Jekyll. The temptation to host on GitHub pages was strong, but I want more flexibility with this site, including plugins and web server redirects and URL slugs. I’m looking forward to more Raspberry Pi adventures and documenting them here!

Mitchel Resnick, Medium, Nov 10, 2020

This article is a forward to a new edition of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms and looks back at the influence of the book 40 years after its publication. And if anything was key about Papert's approach, it's this: "Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which 'the computer is being used to program the child' and argued for an alternative approach in which 'the child programs the computer.'" This is a lesson I have always kept in mind, and as I look at the criticisms of ed tech (and especially the work of people like Audrey Watters) I think this is the form a response should take.  Or as I said in my presentation last week, "it's not about the technology all the time, it's so often about critical literacy, about perception, sense of belief, it's so often about how people see things, what their environment is, what their ways of perceiving things are, how they're going to learn." Via Aaron Davis.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Every year we see Black Friday TV deals that look too good to be true—and usually we think they are just that. Companies often come out with special versions of TVs exclusively for this sales event, and those TVs frequently sell out so quickly on the day they’re released that we can’t test them to see how good (or bad) they are. This year, as Walmart began offering its “holiday” TV deals early, we bought a 43-inch Onn 4K Roku TV. We had multiple people attempting to snag it at the doorbuster price of $88, but it sold out within seconds. The next morning, it was back in stock for $184, which is the price we paid.

PetaPixel had the opportunity to interview iPhone Product Line Manager Francesca Sweet and VP of Camera Software Engineering Jon McCormack regarding the new cameras in the iPhone 12 line. They cover the design philosophy behind iPhone camera systems, the new Apple ProRAW file type, and the enlarged sensors in this year’s iPhone cameras. PetaPixel’s Jaron Scheider writes:

Apple says that it’s [sic] main goal for smartphone photography is based around the idea of letting folks live their lives, and capture photos of that life without being distracted by the technology.

“As photographers, we tend to have to think a lot about things like ISO, subject motion, et cetera,” McCormack said “And Apple wants to take that away to allow people to stay in the moment, take a great photo, and get back to what they’re doing.”

He explained that while more serious photographers want to take a photo and then go through a process in editing to make it their own, Apple is doing what it can to compress that process down into the single action of capturing a frame, all with the goal of removing the distractions that could possibly take a person out of the moment.

The full article is well worth a read, and includes a variety of interesting quotes from the interview.

→ Source: petapixel.com

	mkalus shared this story from ottocrat on Twitter:
	Oh please. I’d love to see that.

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