Rolandt

Commissioner of New York City Parks Mitchell Silver sends  this unique approach to maintain physical distancing while sunning in Brooklyn’s Domino Park. This park is located on an artificial turf field next to a former sugar factory that was located on the East River.

The six foot diameter circles were occupied on a sunny Saturday with people sitting on nearby benches hoping to scoop up a circle should one be vacated.

As the New York Post observes, the new painted circles are being called “human parking spots”  and despite the dystopia of lying in painted circles on the ground, everyone adjusted to the required physical circle distancing quite well.

The physical distancing circles were in place to limit park capacity as outlined by Mayor de Blasio for the weekend.

Similar measures were undertaken in the famous Sheep Meadow at Central Park, but there a large arrow on a sign indicated  “Stay Six Feet Apart”  with a police officer on duty to ensure the meadow did not get too full of sun seekers.

CNU – the Congress for the New Urbanism – has just provided an extensive list of cities that have transformed underutilzed streets with little traffic into temporary pedestrian and bicycle thoroughfares, shared streets, bikeways, expanded sidewalks, and outdoor eating.

“Although these projects are temporary, they may lead to permanent changes in cities, Mike Lydon (of Street Plans Collaborative) said in a recent Smart Growth America presentation.

There are seven types of projects.

Here’s one:

Temporary bikeways. There is a huge surge of bicycling worldwide because people are avoiding buses and trains … and many cities are adding temporary bikeways.

Examples include Berlin, Germany; New York City, Paris, France: Auckland, New Zealand; Mexico City; Budapest, Hungary; Brampton, Ontario.

The article lists cities from around the world, as well as extensive references to other ones in the U.S. and Canada.  Except one.  One city is notable by its absence.

Us.

When Brampton gets listed and we don’t, that is embarrassing.

The debate around who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of tech would be a long one; what is certain is that Morris Chang should be on the list. He certainly leads the way in terms of impact relative to name recognition.

Integration and Modularization

Clayton Christensen, in 2003’s The Innovator’s Solution, explained how the natural course of industries was from interdependent architectures to modular ones:

Customers will not buy your product unless it solves an important problem for them. But what constitutes a “solution” differs across the two circumstances in Figure 5-1: whether products are not good enough or are more than good enough. The advantage, we have found, goes to integration when products are not good enough, and to outsourcing — or specialization and dis-integration when products are more than good enough.

The left side of Figure 5-1 indicates that when there is a performance gap — when product functionality and reliability are not yet good enough to address the needs of customers in a given tier of the market — companies must compete by making the best possible products. In the race to do this, firms that build their products around proprietary, interdependent architectures enjoy an important competitive advantage against competitors whose product architectures are modular, because the standardization inherent in modularity takes too many degrees of design freedom away from engineers, and they cannot not optimize performance.

This makes intuitive sense: optimizing everything results in better performance, at the cost of long-term reliability and flexibility. Sure, long-term reliability and flexibility are nice-to-have, but they are lesser priorities. Once that top priority is met, though, these secondary priorities come to the forefront.

Overshooting does not mean that customers will no longer pay for improvements. It just means that the type of improvement for which they will pay a premium price will change. Once their requirements for functionality and reliability have been met, customers begin to redefine what is not good enough. What becomes not good enough is that customers can’t get exactly what they want exactly when they need it, as conveniently as possible. Customers become willing to pay premium prices for improved performance along this new trajectory of innovation in speed, convenience, and customization. When this happens, we say that the basis of competition in a tier of the market has changed.

This is a big problem for firms that are dominant in a market undergoing this transition; after all, the reason said firms are dominant is because they are the highest performing, which is to say that they are highly integrated, and to unwind said integration is usually untenable for both business model and more deep-rooted cultural reasons. That opens the door for new entrants:

The pressure of competing along this new trajectory of improvement forces a gradual evolution in product architecture, as depicted in Figure 5-1 — away from the interdependent, proprietary architectures that had the advantage in the not-good-enough era toward modular designs in the era of performance surplus. Modular architectures help companies to compete on the dimensions that matter in the lower-right portions of the disruption diagram. Companies can introduce new products faster because they can upgrade individual subsystems without having to redesign everything. Although standard interfaces invariably force compromises in system performance, firms have the slack to trade away some performance with these customers because functionality is more than good enough.

Modularity has a profound impact on industry structure because it enables independent, nonintegrated organizations to sell, buy, and assemble components and subsystems. Whereas in the interdependent world you had to make all of the key elements of the system in order to make any of them, in a modular world you can prosper by outsourcing or by supplying just one element. Ultimately, the specifications for modular interfaces will coalesce as industry standards. When that happens, companies can mix and match components from best-of-breed suppliers in order to respond conveniently to the specific needs of individual customers.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the company Chang founded in 1987, is arguably the single best example of the process Christensen described.

Intel and TSMC

Intel invented the microprocessor in 1971, and for decades to come, it was not good enough. The 4-bit Intel 4004 was followed by the 8-bit Intel 8008, and then the Intel 8080. Then, in 1978, came the Intel 8086, a 16-bit processor that was backwards compatible with programs written for the 8080 and 8008. That was followed by the Intel 80286, and in 1985, the 32-bit Intel 80386. It was the 80386 that defined the baseline x86 instruction set that undergirds modern processors in most laptops, desktops, and servers, but x86 has its roots in the 8008. Intel, by integrating design, manufacture, and software from the 1970s, would go on to define and dominate the processor market for decades.

It would take a very long time for this integrated approach to overshoot the market. Intel’s 80386 was succeeded by the 80486, then the Pentium, and every release made computers so much faster that use cases unimaginable only one or two years prior suddenly seemed within reach, if only Intel could continue its rate of improvement. And, to the company’s credit — and with a solid push from AMD into a 64-bit variant that retained backwards compatibility to the 80386 — Intel did just that.

Still, Intel made general purpose processors; processors that were created for a specific task would be much faster, at least in theory, but it was hard to get started: Chang, then a long-time executive at Texas Instruments, observed in the 1980s that it cost $50~$100 million dollars to start a new chip company, primarily because of the cost of manufacturing. You could contract production from Intel or Texas Instruments or Motorola, but it wasn’t reliable — and they were also your competitor!

A few years later, in 1987, Chang was invited home to Taiwan, and asked to put together a business plan for a new government initiative to create a semiconductor industry. Chang explained in an interview with the Computer History Museum that he didn’t have much to work with:

I paused to try to examine what we have got in Taiwan. And my conclusion was that [we had] very little. We had no strength in research and development, or very little anyway. We had no strength in circuit design, IC product design. We had little strength in sales and marketing, and we had almost no strength in intellectual property. The only possible strength that Taiwan had, and even that was a potential one, not an obvious one, was semiconductor manufacturing, wafer manufacturing. And so what kind of company would you create to fit that strength and avoid all the other weaknesses? The answer was pure-play foundry…

In choosing the pure-play foundry mode, I managed to exploit, perhaps, the only strength that Taiwan had, and managed to avoid a lot of the other weaknesses. Now, however, there was one problem with the pure-play foundry model and it could be a fatal problem which was, “Where’s the market?”

What happened is exactly what Christensen would describe several years later: TSMC created the market by “enabl[ing] independent, nonintegrated organizations to sell, buy, and assemble components and subsystems.” Specifically, Chang made it possible for chip designers to start their own companies:

When I was at TI and General Instrument, I saw a lot of IC [Integrated Circuit] designers wanting to leave and set up their own business, but the only thing, or the biggest thing that stopped them from leaving those companies was that they couldn’t raise enough money to form their own company. Because at that time, it was thought that every company needed manufacturing, needed wafer manufacturing, and that was the most capital intensive part of a semiconductor company, of an IC company. And I saw all those people wanting to leave, but being stopped by the lack of ability to raise a lot of money to build a wafer fab. So I thought that maybe TSMC, a pure-play foundry, could remedy that. And as a result of us being able to remedy that then those designers would successfully form their own companies, and they will become our customers, and they will constitute a stable and growing market for us.

It worked. Graphics processors were an early example: Nvidia was started in 1993 with only $20 million, and never owned its own fab.1 Qualcomm, after losing millions manufacturing its earliest designs, spun off its chip-making unit in 2001 to concentrate on design, and Apple started building its own chips without a fab a decade later. Today there are thousands of chip designers in all kinds of niches creating specialized chips for everything from appliances to fighter jets, and none of them have their own foundry.

There was one other thing that happened along the way: as I detailed in 2018’s Intel and the Danger of Integration, TSMC eventually surpassed Intel in not just flexibility but also pure performance:

In time, though, TSMC got better, in large part because it had no choice: soon its manufacturing capabilities were only one step behind industry standards, and within a decade had caught-up (although Intel remained ahead of everyone). Meanwhile, the fact that TSMC existed created the conditions for an explosion in “fabless” chip companies that focused on nothing but design…the increased business let TSMC invest even more in its manufacturing capabilities.

In short, TSMC is the best chipmaker in the world, no matter what vector of performance you care about. And with that came an entirely new class of problems, not just for TSMC, but also Taiwan.

Geopolitical Concerns

The international status of Taiwan is, as they say, complicated. So, for that matter, are U.S.-China relations. These two things can and do overlap to make entirely new, even more complicated complications.

Geography is much more straightforward:

Taiwan, you will note, is just off the coast of China. South Korea, home to Samsung, which also makes the highest end chips, although mostly for its own use, is just as close. The United States, meanwhile, is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. There are advanced foundries in Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona, but they are operated by Intel, and Intel makes chips for its own integrated use cases only.

The reason this matters is because chips matter for many use cases outside of PCs and servers — Intel’s focus — which is to say that TSMC matters. Nearly every piece of equipment these days, military or otherwise, has a processor inside. Some of these don’t require particularly high performance, and can be manufactured by fabs built years ago all over the U.S. and across the world; others, though, require the most advanced processes, which means they must be manufactured in Taiwan by TSMC.

This is a big problem if you are a U.S. military planner. Your job is not to figure out if there will ever be a war between the U.S. and China, but to plan for an eventuality you hope never occurs. And in that planning the fact that TSMC’s foundries — and Samsung’s — are within easy reach of Chinese missiles is a major issue.

China, meanwhile, is investing heavily in catching up, although Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), its Shanghai-based champion, only just started manufacturing on a 14nm process, years after TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. In the long run, though, the U.S. faced a scenario where China had its own chip supplier, even as it threatened the U.S.’s chip supply chain.

TSMC’s Announcement

This was the context for last week’s announcement that TSMC is building a fab in the United States. From the Wall Street Journal:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract manufacturer of silicon chips, said Friday it would spend $12 billion to build a chip factory in Arizona, as U.S. concerns grow about dependence on Asia for the critical technology. TSMC said the project, disclosed earlier Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, has the support of the federal government and the state of Arizona. It comes as the Trump administration has sought to jump-start development of new chip factories in the U.S. due to rising fears about the U.S.’s heavy reliance on Taiwan, China and South Korea to produce microelectronics and other key technologies.

TSMC made the decision to go ahead with the project at a board meeting on Tuesday in Taiwan, according to people familiar with the matter, adding that both the State and Commerce Departments are involved in the plans. Construction will begin next year with production targeted for 2024, the company said in a statement. TSMC’s new plant would make chips branded as having 5-nanometer transistors, the tiniest, fastest and most power-efficient ones manufactured today. TSMC just started rolling out 5-nanometer chips at a factory in Taiwan in recent months. TSMC said the plant would make 20,000 wafers a month, making it a relatively small facility for a company that made more than 12 million wafers last year alone. TSMC’s Fab 18 in Taiwan, which currently produces its 5-nanometer chips, was targeted for 100,000 wafers a month when it broke ground in 2018.

First off, while this announcement has superficial similarities to the star-crossed Foxconn factory in Wisconsin, that project reeked of political theater from the start, and, more pertinently, never made much sense for anyone involved. The current outcome — empty innovation centers and a still-unfinished factory that has already been re-purposed — was frankly the default outcome.

This TSMC project is different for several reasons. First, you don’t halfway build a foundry; TSMC is either in for billions, or they’re in for nothing. Second, it seems clear that the federal government is contributing significantly to the cost. And third, that is exactly what the federal government should do, because the national security implications are real.

This does raise the question about just how committed TSMC is to this project. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Arizona fab is quite small, relatively speaking, and while 5-nanometer chips are top-of-the-line today, they won’t be in 2024, when the fab opens. Moreover, it is worth noting that TSMC has a fab in Washington that it opened in 1998; it still operates, but TSMC didn’t make any additional investments in the U.S. until now.

I think, though, that this is an overly pessimistic reading of this news, at least from a U.S. perspective. First off, of course TSMC is going to start small, and with technology it has already figured out how to build. It is one thing to build a massive “gigafab” next door to the ones you have already built in Taiwan, even as your best employees, who have pushed TSMC to the top over the last thirty years, figure out the next processing node; it is quite another to attempt something similar across the ocean.

What is a much bigger deal, though, is that the Taiwan of 2020 is not last in line when it comes to processor technology, but first, and the government — which retains a significant ownership stake in TSMC — has been committed to keeping TSMC’s best technology in Taiwan. That this move is happening at all suggests the sort of momentous choice not simply on TSMC’s part but also Taiwan’s that is hard to undo: when it comes to the U.S. and China, ambiguously sitting in the middle, selling to both, was no longer an option.

Lessons for Tech

There are three big lessons for tech specifically and America broadly in this news.

First, while we learned in 2016 that technology was inseparable from domestic politics, the lesson in 2020 should be that technology is inseparable from geopolitics. It is chips that gave Silicon Valley its name, and everything about this chip decision is about geopolitics, not economics.

Second, at some point every tech company is going to have to make a choice between the U.S. and China. It is tempting to blame the tension between the two countries on Trump, but the truth is that China, particularly under Xi Jinping, has been significantly hardening its rhetoric and actions since before Trump was elected, and has been committed to not just catching but surpassing the U.S. in technology for years. There is a fundamental clash of values between the West and China, and it is clear that China is interested in exporting theirs. At some point everyone will be stuck in the middle, like TSMC, and Switzerland won’t be an option.

Third, Intel, much like Compaq, is an allegory for where the U.S. seems to have lost its way. Locked in an endless pursuit of efficiency and shareholder value, the U.S. gave up its flexibility and resiliency in favor of top-end performance. Intel is one of the most advanced chip makers in the world, but it turns out that capability is far too constrained to its own needs to be of general applicability. Worse, to the extent Intel was willing to become a contract manufacturer, it wanted the federal government to pay for it, the better to satisfy shareholders. The government, rightly, in my mind, chose an operator that was actually used to operating in the world as it is, not once was.

At the same time, TSMC’s justifiable carefulness in building a U.S. fab gives Intel an opportunity. Back in 2013, in one of the first Stratechery articles, I urged the company to embrace manufacturing and give up its integration, margins be damned. Intel specifically, and the U.S. generally, would be in far better shape had they acted then. As the saying goes, though, the second best time to start is now — and that applies not only to Intel, which should spend the money to get into contract manufacturing on its own, but also to the U.S. The world has changed, and it’s time to act accordingly.

1. The very first Nvidia chips were manufactured by SGS-Thomson Microelectronics, but have been manufactured by TSMC from the original GeForce on

My wife, who was a crack soccer player in her youth and an overall able athlete, is full of sport metaphors for life. One, particularly relevant to the story today, was “Learn to kick with your other foot.” Basically, being able to kick well with both feet opens up so many more possibilities for you in a game.

Soaring to another tool
I’ve been taking an PCB skills class. When the class started, everyone had to mention what eCAD tool they were using. I’ve designed a few boards on Eagle, chosen as my first eCAD tool because there were many tutorials already. I had heard of KiCad, but an initial peek around it wasn’t too appealing.

For the PCB class, Eagle was a major tool used by the students. But I was intrigued how many also used KiCad. And, in the name of ‘kicking with the other foot’ decided to make an effort to learn and use KiCad for the course.

Getting to Hooked
In the PCB course forums, folks mentioned the Getting to Blinky tutorial series by Chris Gammel, from Contextual Electronics. The series is a few hours of going through all the key features of KiCad as you build a tiny blinky badge.

The series was very fun, perhaps too fun as I zipped off an order to Oshpark without critically thinking of any potential mods I’d like to do (which, of course, came up after I ordered the boards and components).

Nonetheless I was thrilled to get the boards and solder them all up (GIF above shows complete badges).

First time for everything
The other great thing about the tutorials is I ended up with a PCB that would need surface mount components. So, when I assembled the badge, I had my first experience with SMDs. Nowhere near as impossible as I thought.

Which comes to the heart of the subversion of the series: you can do it – you can design a board, order parts and PCBs, and solder the SMDs.

And that’s a great feeling when you realize that.

The post Learning to KiCad with the other foot first appeared on Molecularist.

Liz Hall is Flickr’s talented and passionate Principal Designer. Over the last four years, her work has been focused on understanding and improving the Flickr experience for our members and conducting studies and surveys aimed at learning about how people use Flickr. She’s worked on everything from the Flickr homepage, the 2018 Galleries redesign, the new About and Checkout pages, and Flickr Prints, among others. Her team is also responsible for the design and experience of Flickr’s mobile apps. Here’s more about Liz and what she does here at Flickr.

Can you tell us a bit about your role at Flickr and what made you want to join?

My official title is Principal Designer, and I lead the design team at Flickr. It sounds a bit more grandiose than it is, since there are just two of us. Given our team size, it’s probably not a surprise to hear that I wear many hats. My biggest responsibility is designing the website experience as part of the engagement team.

My journey to Flickr started with the decision to join Polyvore in 2015. Polyvore was a community-powered fashion e-commerce site that was acquired by Yahoo later that year. A few months after the acquisition, the company’s priorities shifted and my team was reassigned. With that change, I knew it was time to move on. I looked at my options in Yahoo’s product line, and Flickr was an easy choice. I had been a regular user of Flickr since 2007, and thought it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. I also thought that perhaps my community-based product design skills would be useful to the team. Luckily for me, the team needed a designer. My first day at Flickr was September 12, 2016.

What does your typical day look like?

My typical day is usually very busy, spent in meetings or on Slack, where I field questions, review work, or get lost in discussions about cool new things we could build. There’s a lot of cross-functional design coordination happening with various teams within Flickr and SmugMug. My favorite days are the atypical ones, like the day we did our first fully-remote brainstorm session, delivery days for new batches of stickers, or the rare, quiet day that lets me really dig into a design problem.

What are the biggest challenges of being a designer for a product as large as Flickr?

The single biggest challenge with a mature product like Flickr is not deciding what to build, but rather, what to cut.

Every feature that’s been built on Flickr is used by some fraction of our members. We’ll hear from those members quickly and persistently if a feature is taken away. It’s tempting for us to avoid the barrage of feedback and simply keep every feature, but that has costs. There’s the cost of a cluttered and confusing experience using Flickr. Also, every feature must be translated into multiple languages, built to work across multiple devices, and tested to make sure it works well with other features. That’s a lot of overhead and complexity to maintain. It also slows us down from building useful new features for the community to enjoy. My team has to evaluate if the cost of that work is worth the value it brings.

We use a combination of analytics and member feedback to make decisions on where to cut and where to build. We don’t always get it right the first time, but we listen, adjust, and try our best to give our members a better experience than they had before.

What is your favorite part of Flickr? What drives your passion for what you do?

This may sound surprising, but my favorite part of Flickr is the loading message in our web uploader. They are random phrases such as, “Milking butterflies,” and “Reticulating splines.” I appreciate that the team put thought into the details, and infused a basic loading bar with humor and personality. I can’t help but smile when I see it.

I also appreciate the challenge of making old things new again. I grew up with a big family in an old house. There were always things to fix or replace, and hand-me-downs that needed to be given a new life or purpose. I see the potential in Flickr to become the smarter, modern, fun, friendly, and community-focused product our members need, and deserve.

Do you have a proudest or favorite moment since working here?

There are many great moments to choose from, but only one moment really matters to me. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I had just ordered a sandwich at the local sandwich shop. It was at that moment, in that sandwich shop, when I learned Flickr was going to be acquired by SmugMug.

I know you probably know the story of the time that Verizon was selling and shutting down various Yahoo properties. I had just witnessed Polyvore’s sale and shutdown, which hit really close to home for me. The Polyvore community wasn’t warned, so when the site was turned off, many friendships were lost in an instant. When I learned that Flickr would both avoid that fate, and finally have an owner that understood and appreciated the product, I was elated.

That day I was given a truly magnificent sandwich. I think about that sandwich a lot.

What is it like to work surrounded by engineers on a daily basis?

My coworkers at Flickr are an incredible group of people. We can just as passionately unravel gnarly product problems as debate preposterous hypothetical situations. There’s a great sense of humor on the team, which really makes it a joy to go to work everyday.

What’s one thing you would like our members to know about you?

I’d like our members to know that everyday I do my best to advocate for them. When I joined the team, no research had been done to learn who they were or why they used Flickr. Big decisions were made without their input, and features were launched without user tests. We’ve made huge strides in our ability to understand our member’s needs, get feedback from them, and provide them with channels to give feedback to us. We truly cannot make Flickr a better place without working together.

Well, we hoped that things would go more quickly and we’d be back out in the world by now. Some of us are still (mostly) sheltering in place. We’re doing a final extension of the 50% off shelter-in-place sale of all DAM Useful publications until May 31st. This applies to both electronic and paper publications when purchased from DAMuseful.com

While we don’t expect that things will be back to normal by June 1, we are hoping that we will all be able spend more time outside, while observing proper social distancing.

Note that we have not updated the copy on every link on the site, but if you buy from DAMuseful.com, you will get the discount. (Sorry, can’t afford to do this on Amazon,)

Stay safe everyone. See you on the other side.

The post Shelter-in-place sale extended to May 31 appeared first on The DAM Book.

More interesting stuff to play around with in Windows. I still prefer to install Linux directly on my personal hardware, but I can see the appeal for this, and have no trouble imagining useful scenarios.

Apple is looking more and more isolated by the day.

Faisant contre mauvaise fortune bon coeur, j’ai voulu profiter du temps libre offert par le confinement, pour suivre le cours que donne Jean-Marc Jancovici à l’École des Mines Paris Tech. 20 heures de cours qui, parce qu’on peut arrêter le prof quand on veut d’un simple clic pour mieux prendre des notes, m’ont pris au moins 30 heures pour générer 71 pages de notes manuscrites, c’est dire si c’est passionnant.

Pourquoi s’infliger un tel effort intellectuel ? Pour comprendre les problèmes énergétiques et climatiques auxquels doit faire face l’humanité. Et pour ça, Jean-Marc Jancovici est un professeur passionnant, drôle (à condition d’aimer l’humour d’ingénieur !), un véritable puis de science, qui parle d’histoire de l’humanité, de pétrole, d’histoire des sciences, d’économie, de politique avec un charisme certain, osant poser les questions qui fâchent et en y répondant avec des informations sourcées. Bref, je recommande à tout le monde qui s’intéresse aux sujets du climat et de l’énergie. Notons que le cours s’adresse à des élèves ingénieurs de haut niveau, donc ça demande une certaine culture scientifique.

Parmi les sujets abordés :

1. L’énergie — introduction, et pourquoi elle a permis le développement économique d’une partie du monde
2. L’énergie fossile — À quel point nos sociétés sont dépendantes des énergies fossiles, même en France
3. Le changement climatique (partie 1) — Comment le recours aux énergies fossiles intensifie l’effet de serre et contribue à changer le climat (et c’est grave)
4. Le changement climatique (partie 2) — Faire face à la fois à la raréfaction des énergies fossiles et le besoin de réduire les émissions de GES
5. Les économies d’énergie — l’équation de Kaya
6. Le nucléaire — un argumentaire pour défendre le nucléaire comme seule option permettant de négocier plus facilement le virage énergétique et climatique
7. Les énergies renouvelables — Les nouvelles énergies renouvelables : on en parle beaucoup, mais elles ne couvrent qu’une toute petite partie des besoins et en plus ne sont pas pilotables, par opposition aux centrales à gaz, pétrole, charbon ou nucléaires.
8. La comptabilité carbone — Il sera difficile (euphémisme) de décarboner l’énergie et donc l’économie et il faut pourtant le faire très vite (diviser par 3 les émissions de GES D’ici à 2050).

Pour suivre le cours :

• La liste des 8 cours de 2 h 30 chacun sur Youtube (20 h tout de même !).
• L’ensemble des présentations au format PDF (plusieurs centaines de slides !) ;
• Les notes prises par Sylvain Bessonneau, qui a suivi le cours, qui complètent bien celles qu’on prend en suivant le cours ;
• En complément, son livre Dormez tranquilles jusqu’en 2100, que je n’ai pas encore fini, mais qui est plus facile à suivre que le cours.

This is a very long article, about meaningful work and about imagining possibilities. Hope you find it inspiring, and worth the read.

Calgary restaurant workers separate tables to meet new social distancing rules prior to reopening. Image from the CBC’s Bryan Labby.

REIMAGINING OUR WORK

I‘ve written often about our modern world being one of staggering imaginative poverty. The signs of this poverty are everywhere: in the utter unoriginality of almost everything coming out of the film industry, the music industry, arguably most of the creative arts, modern fiction and poetry, philosophy, political and economic thinking, and of course technology, where indices of ‘innovation’ suggest it’s in serious decline.

Instead our energy goes into special effects and other ‘wow’ distractions from the endless bad news of the day, or into self-preoccupation (compare how many modern novels are written in the first person compared to a generation ago — twice the proportion according to a recent study), or into rage against seeming helplessness and hopelessness, or into inventing useless forms of novelty, like financial ‘products’ that repackage worthless investments and other complicated cons in just about every industry. And of course, much of our energy goes into just struggling through the day coping with the dysfunctional way things are.

Most modern entrepreneurs’ dreams of “success” are now seemingly to become  billionaires by starting tech companies and then sell them off and retire at 30. It is not about doing anything of use to anyone, let alone doing anything new or risky.

So now, we’re struggling through a pandemic crisis that has ground most of the things that we do do, to a halt. For many of us in the unnecessariat these are more or less useless, make-work activities anyway (what David Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs). The “flunkies, goons, duct-takers, box-tickers, and task-masters” who do these jobs are understandably nervous — there’s a good chance these jobs will be eliminated permanently, especially as the early-2020s deep economic recession feeds into the predicted mid-2020s Greater Depression.

But a lot of people, many of them in high-risk, low-paid jobs, are and will remain what we are now calling Essential Workers (medical staff, care workers, teachers, garbage collectors, janitors, delivery people, grocery store workers, farmers etc). This is of course not how the government and the powerful define “essential services” (which include their own jobs, the financial and banking industry, the military, the energy industry, the mainstream media, lawyers, the transportation industry, a slew of manufacturing jobs, much of the technology sector, and most of the construction industry, among other jobs that are in no sense actually essential).

And then there is everyone else. Not Essential, and not considered essential by the rich and powerful, but not working in unnecessary, Bullshit Jobs either.

THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER WAY

The question that many of us are now asking (other than How’s it going to end?) is now: Is there a better way? For the truly Essential jobs, that question is being asked with a sense of urgency but not much forward thinking: Is there a better way right now for a while that runs less risk of pandemic infection?

But for many, either laid off at home or with plenty of idle time at workplaces where volume of business is down 50-90%, it’s a deeper, more existential question: Now that I’m not totally preoccupied with doing my job — Is there a better way to do the work I do? Is this really what I’m meant to spend most of my waking hours doing?

If we lived in a world that exercised and practiced our imaginations, as many of us did before technology and entertainment dumbed everything down and replaced the need to imagine with the simpler need just to react, we would probably be very capable of coming up with a ton of better ways to do just about everything. But not anymore.

We have forgotten that the need of the person drilling into wood to make a piece of art or craft is not for a drill — faster, quieter, more efficient, or more ergonomic. It is for a hole. If we want to escape imaginative poverty, we are going to have to relearn and re-practice imagining how else we might meet the need for a hole, rather than how we might add “features” to the drill, or connect it to the internet to do something flashy that could not be done otherwise, just to produce the same damn hole. In many industries, what is called “innovation” has forsaken responding to what is needed in favour of what is possible (which requires much less imagination).

This is true for just about everything we produce, and, as desperate as is our need to produce monumentally less of all the crap we don’t need at all, we also need to rethink — and reimagine — how we produce just about everything, with an eye to increasing local resilience to crises, and at the same time decreasing our ecological footprint.

WHAT DO WE REALLY NEED?

Let’s consider restaurants for example. What are the needs that restaurants meet, in light of our CoVid-19 discovery that they really aren’t Essential Services? Perhaps our longing for their re-opening suggests that the needs they meet aren’t entirely about the food, and that the needs they meet are actually pretty essential to our health.

So rather than thinking just slightly imaginatively about how restaurants could reopen while still protecting staff and customers from pandemic infections, let’s take a step back and ask what the needs are that they fill, how those needs might otherwise be filled, and what are the other important needs (that they have never tried to meet) that they might be able to meet with a little more imagination.

I’m talking here about healthy human needs — those that enrich us, make us genuinely happy, bring real pleasure, heal us from real pain. I’m not talking about pandering to the unhealthy needs that arise when we lose capacity to get what we need in healthy ways — unhealthy needs like escapism, distraction, indulgence, thrill-seeking, or inuring ourselves to reality through acts of violence, anger, vengeance, ruthless competition and hate. We can meet a narcissist’s needs in the short run by indulging them, but in the long run we’re not doing anyone any favours.

Last year I wrote an article that tried to distil, from several lists, what our basic human needs are. I identified eight:

1. the need to belong to, connect and collaborate with a safe and engaging community, starting with attachment to one’s mother in the critical first years of life
2. the need for meaning and purpose in one’s life, including meaningful work
3. the need to be valued, appreciated, and heard
4. the need to be optimistic about the future for oneself and loved ones
5. the need for control and a degree of autonomy over one’s life and work
6. the need to be regularly and closely in touch with beauty, joy, wonder and the natural world
7. the need for a sense of belonging to place, and home
8. the need for freedom from chronic stress (financial, physical etc.) and the time and space to recover from it (including getting adequate sleep)

I’m unsure whether the need to create (and to co-create), and the need for the freedom to be authentically oneself, should be added as ninth and tenth essential needs. Let’s add them for the moment.

Some of the obvious ways we meet these needs when we visit restaurants are by providing the pleasures of:

1. social interaction and social stimulation, including creating and deepening relationships, and finding sounding boards for information, ideas and feelings (sensemaking, dialogue and dialectic) (meets needs #1, #3 and #10)
2. intellectual stimulation (#1, #2 and #9)
3. learning and doing new things (#1 and #2)
4. various forms of play (#1, #2, #6 and #8)
5. engaging in sensory and aesthetic pleasures (#6)
6. sharing a joyful, local shared “third place” (#6 and #7)
7. saving time (preparing meals, which for some is a chore that precludes doing other valued or urgent activities) and giving ourselves a break (#8)

These seven essential pleasures are not unique to restaurants and bars: I would argue they are the drivers for many other activities, from ancient potlatches to modern potlucks and “cocktail parties”, games nights, coffee klatches and coffee houses, tea ceremonies, neighbourhood music jams and song circles, and even a lot of non-food-related activities like yoga, gym workouts, group meditation and chanting circles. In all of these there is a certain sense of collective ritual that pleases and enriches us.

So how might we provide these seven pleasures, perhaps even better than we do now, and even if we have to continue to exercise social distancing? Assume we’re starting with a restaurant or other social gathering place with amenities. How might we better provide these pleasures and hence meet these needs? And what additional, novel opportunities might we start to offer with our reinvented ‘social space’ service that meet these and other essential human needs?

In other words, what’s a better way to do this, to be of use to those we care about with the skills, capacities and resources we have to offer?

Ideally we’d do this investigation with a diverse group, but let me get the ball rolling and, if you’re interested, jump in with your own thoughts.

I’d start by acknowledging that these activities have evolved to be the way they are for a reason, and messing with their essential elements unless we have to, would be an error. We’re not out to change people’s behaviour, we’re looking for, to borrow a bit of business jargon, ways to “enrich the user experience”.

I also think it’s important to acknowledge some needs that these spaces wish they could fulfil, but often cannot:

• The desire to include all our loved ones, and some people we would love to meet but can’t, in our gatherings, because of physical distance, for example
• The desire to meet new friends and new partners (both personal and business) in these spaces
• The desire to be less of a spectator and more of an active participant in these spaces (eg not only eating a great meal, but learning about its ingredients and process)
• The desire for broader connection (most of the time) with others or even everyone in the place, to make the place a true community space, a place that is collectively “ours” rather than one we just “rent” for a while.

STARTING WITH TECHNOLOGIES: REIMAGINING SHARED SPACES 

Most of our new technologies offer us a slew of new things that can be done, without any reference to whether these things actually have any value. Their lazy and unimaginative offerers simply keep throwing new variations at us, and leave it up to the “market” to see what users seemingly want. Their hope is that the technology will be addictive enough that the want will become a need, and then they can sell out and retire. As a result, most of the technologies in ubiquitous use today are horribly designed and provide an awful user experience, with Facebook and Twitter being the absolute worst.

So, starting with needs — with the hole that is needed and not the drill or any of its fancy attachments — how might we design some technologies to help us ‘reinvent’ the restaurant or other social-gathering experience?

I would start with an appreciation that people want any new technology to emulate as closely as possible the behaviours and actions that it presumes to enhance. That means using it should be as simple and intuitive as opening a door or scanning a menu.

And I would start with the idea of presence. More than just being “immersive”, a well-designed technology would achieve a level and sense of presence nearly indistinguishable from reality (some of us believe our whole sense of reality is actually just a clever wetware illusion produced inside our bodies anyway, so this shouldn’t be too hard a feat to pull off).

But we really can’t hope to capture the sense of presence on the tiny screens of cell phones. If we really want to emulate the sense of being with others using technology, we will need big, ultra high definition monitors. If you’ve watched any videos in 4K, you’ve probably realized that they convey a completely different sense of presence, of actually being there, compared to low-def video. A surprising number of people now have large, inexpensive, 4K-compatible screens, that are used mostly for watching mind-numbing films and pap reality series, but which could be used for a much more powerful connection with people we care about right from our own homes.

But of course a big 4K screen isn’t enough for presence. Until VR technology can evolve past the clunky headsets, what might be useful is technology that monitors what we are specifically looking at and adjusts the screen image to focus on that, to simulate what it is really like to move around in another’s presence. Technology that responds to our head and eye movements in an intuitive way.

Another thing that’s needed (and regular Zoom users can attest to this) is technology that can blend multiple sounds being made simultaneously from different places into a single signal. It’s so artificial when each voice has to end before the next begins, or when two people speak (or sing) at once and the result is an unintelligible screech or pop. There is no reason why we can’t improve our technologies so that their sound closely emulates the conversation (or music) we would hear if we were all in the same room.

Ideally, this higher-quality, more realistic video and audio could be incorporated into a lightweight and unimposing immersive headset that would allow more natural interaction to occur ‘virtually’, but my sense is that’s still a way off, and it may always be too strange for many to ever agree to use. In the meantime, large high-quality video and integrated, high-quality audio could get us most of the way there.

My sense is also that people are rarely focused on one thing at a time in their ‘real’ environment, so even better than one large 4K screen would be two, with each ‘remembering’ one of the last two things you were looking at — your virtual ‘dinner’ colleague and the menu, for example.

The next improvement I’d like to see is shared 4k ‘environments’. As fascinating as it is to look at the living rooms of strangers on Zoom, if I’m sharing a conversational experience with faraway friends, colleagues and family members, it would be wonderful if we could ‘seem’ (from our pictured ‘backgrounds’) to be actually in the same place, with the same background. That could be as mundane as one person’s living room, or as rich as the background of Venice as seen from a virtual canal boat. Imagine taking a 4K virtual ‘tour’ of the Pyramids, or the Moon, ‘with’ a group of people all over the world all hearing and seeing the same thing. The ultimate dinner cruise, even if you each have to cook the same thing in your individual ovens to experience it!

This is what I mean by enhancing the user experience. The shared experience could ‘happen’ in a place that all participants love or fondly remember, or a place that none has ever seen before. It could be a beach in Bali, or, if the experience is to be educational and not just recreational, a factory floor of a world-class manufacturer, or a deepwater undersea exploration, or the rim of a Black Hole. Or something as prosaic as the aisles and shelves of the store one of you is shopping at on behalf of the others. A virtual ‘shared’ space anywhere in the world (or beyond it).

OTHER TECH-ENABLED WAYS OF ENHANCING THE VIRTUAL SHARED-SPACE EXPERIENCE

Since I’m dreaming, here are some more things that could make for a larger-than-life, or better-than-ordinary user experience: The ability to invite people (those you know, those you’d love to get to know, or anyone who might know what you’re trying to find out) to just seamlessly “drop in” to your conversation, based on a very sophisticated form of Invitation. So instead of asking a question on Quora, you could invite people to just drop in on your permaculture garden, look at the setting and the soil nutrient data, and suggest just what is needed to deal with the problem of the wilting plants. Learning how to craft engaging, irresistible invitations is potentially a total game-changer for how we learn, how we meet new people, and how we collaborate. Sites like Quora have destroyed the myth that you need to pay people to get useful (and even expert) counsel, and that the most valuable knowledge is only accessible by the select few. (Sadly, Quora is also drowning in narcissists and awash in unsupported opinions and just plain wrong information. But that’s another problem.)

What else? If your conversation is with people you’ve just met or don’t know well, it would be great to have ‘permissioned’ access to the personal Profiles of everyone in the ‘space’, to scan while you’re talking with them to get a sense of context for where they’re coming from, and how knowledgeable and trustworthy they are about what they’re saying. This is one of the key advantages of another promising but failed “presence” technology, Second Life. Whether you’re just looking for a friendly and knowledgeable conversation or the start of a beautiful relationship, the Profile, if available to browse with a single click, might let you know what you have in common, and what they care about, and hence what is probably most fruitful to talk with them about (avoiding long and awkward silences).

A few years ago there was an independent app developed for Facebook (which Facebook naturally shut down) that scanned all your “friends”, and by looking at those friends’ friends and their overlap, automatically ‘clustered’ those friends into those with the greatest commonality. It couldn’t tell you what they had in common, of course, but for the user it was immediately obvious, and enlightening. I found that my ‘networks‘ were a mix of physical communities (people in each of the places I have lived), communities of practice and capacity (people I have worked or collaborated with on projects or activities or share expertise with), communities of interest (people I share hobbies or affinities with), and communities of identity (people I share beliefs with). What I would love is a tool that would suggest who else might fit into each of these communities that I might want to converse and ‘share space’ with, and how I might, through existing contacts, explore short impromptu meetings with them (yes I know LinkedIn attempted to do this, but hey, we all know it didn’t work because it didn’t acknowledge the reality of power politics).

And I would love a more robust and intuitive way of signalling how I’m feeling, and ‘seeing’ how others in the ‘shared space’ are feeling. The ‘thumbs up’ icon is the right idea but it lacks subtlety and doesn’t begin to cover the range of things I’d like some means to convey. Just like ‘private messages’, such a feature would allow me to be selective in who I signal to.

And I would love to be able to emulate physical actions (hugs, handshakes etc) in virtual spaces in a more realistic way.

So: More natural emulation in ‘virtual’ shared spaces of how we behave in ‘physical’ spaces, including more vivid and natural video and audio, simulation of virtual shared spaces where all participants ‘feel’ they are in one environment (which could be anywhere imaginable), simpler, more powerful capacity to invite others to drop in to the space (and suggestions on who to invite), capacity to ‘sidebar-view’ information about other participants and volunteered information on how they’re feeling, and virtual emulation of a wide range of important and demonstrative physical gestures. Those are just some of the ways I think we could reimagine ‘virtual’ shared spaces to be more natural, more pleasurable, and better able to meet real, healthy human needs.

REIMAGINING THE PHYSICAL SPACE, TOO

There is only so much we can do until we are once again able to convene in real physical spaces again. Once we can, there are plenty of other things we can do to enhance the ‘user experience’ in restaurants and other shared physical spaces.

For example, these establishments could provide additional flexibility in their physical space to allow “breakout rooms” analogous to what Zoom offers. These rooms might allow quiet conversations of a “Philosophers’ Café” style, for example. They could host community events, or open mics, or theatre or film showings, or workshops (playshops) or games nights or cooking presentations by one of the chefs, or other educational, recreational or community-building events. This would require some flexibility in movable walls, or outside tents or other innovative “breakout room” schemes and I’m not expert enough to know how they might happen, but I’m sure the Japanese, for example, would have some ideas, as their homes are often designed to be reconfigurable. This would, of course, sacrifice the noisy and boisterous sports-bar/party atmosphere that some restaurant-goers enjoy, but I think the trade-off would be worth it.

Restaurants could also provide “electronic menus” that would allow diners to learn what the precise ingredients (and even recipes) of their favourite menu items are, the nutritional value “score” of each of the menu options, and/or which menu items have been highest rated by customers over the past 24 hours. They could even offer a “kitchen-cam” that would allow solo diners and prospective gourmets (those for whom the restaurant visit really is mostly about the food) to be able to watch their dishes being cooked.

Speaking of solo diners, I can imagine that some would appreciate an app that would allow people to identify if they might be willing to share dinner with another customer present in the restaurant. This could easily be done in a way that would prevent harassment (eg a 2-step process where one party would volunteer that they’d be willing to meet other diners, and under what circumstances, and then if there was an acceptance, the initial party would have to confirm willingness to dine with the second party that had offered the connection; and a non-confirmation or non-response would be a polite ‘no thanks’, no insult intended).

There are other, established but still rarely-offered restaurant dining innovations such as “long tables” and “nuits blanches” that could be instituted and expanded upon. And participatory events like “murder mystery” dinners.

Or, for busy people who want to grab a bite on the way home but don’t want fast food, restaurants could offer limited-menu “grab-and-go” gourmet takeout selections that would not need pre-ordering.

And finally, there are all sorts of possibilities if restaurants were to put their heads together with other nearby retail businesses and organizations and provide joint offerings — think fashion and art shows, mobile library programs, canning bees, even ask-a-mechanic demonstrations. The possibilities are limitless, but most of us are so focused on our own businesses we don’t think about opportunities for collaboration.

SCENARIO: A REIMAGINED ‘SHARED SPACE’ GATHERING

Here’s a scenario of how this might all come together:

• It’s a big day for our little island: It’s the official unveiling of the First Nations name for the island alongside the English name, down at the ferry dock where visitors first arrive. Because of the need for social distancing, the celebrations all have to be done virtually.
• To get ready, six local restaurants, in consultation with First Nations elders, have assembled hundreds of packages for islander pick-up, each containing the measured raw ingredients and step-by-step recipes for First Nations ceremonial foods (enough for two people to cook at home), plus some ceremonial gifts. Six hundred people have picked up the packages in the week leading up to the event.
• People started to dial in to the event, using the new enhanced technology, hours before the festivities were scheduled to begin. Those “arriving” were immediately immersed in a virtual diorama scene developed by a local artist, picturing how our island cove might have looked 300 years ago. There are several long, rough-hewn, slope-roofed Coast Salish houses and fire pits in this amazing shared ‘background’, with the pounding sea and soaring mountains behind, and when the viewer turns their face, the background swivels to show an astonishing expanse of old growth forest as far as the eye can see.
• The faces of other attendees in the ‘main space’ can be reordered and re-sized, or moved to my second screen so I can just look at the moving diorama if I so choose. When each person arrives, we are ‘pre-garbed’ in a ceremonial costume, though we can of course choose from any number of other head-and-shoulders outfits from our virtual ‘trunks’, suitable for the occasion.
• My grandkids, who live thousands of miles away, have ‘joined’ me for this event, and they are partaking of several pre-celebration activities in the event breakout rooms. My granddaughter is virtual-snorkelling in one room, watching 4K narrated footage produced by a celebrated island underwater photographer. She is laughing and jumping around in her virtual headset as a pod of wild seals seemingly cavort all around her. My grandson is learning about carving in another breakout room, practicing with his own tools as a teacher points out the fine points of the art. As they ‘arrived’ I was able to give them virtual ‘hugs’ that used our actual faces to seem surprisingly real and intimate. And I receive notifications of their ’emotional state’ gestures throughout the event to ensure they are safe and happy even when off in other ‘rooms’, and which prompt me to ‘join’ them at appropriate times.
• As the celebration begins, we are called back to the main ‘room’ on the ‘beach’ where we are immediately assigned to other breakout rooms in groups of eight, each resembling the inside of an ancient canoe, where our First Nations leader instructs us how to use our imaginary ‘oars’ — and we are on our way! The large screen now shows us the view over the front of our ‘canoes’ as we make a narrated, sacred journey to a nearby island where the ‘feast’ will occur. I’m surprised to see that one of the passengers in my canoe is the wife of our Prime Minister (recently recovered from CoVid-19). The Profile Monitor ‘compares’ her interests with mine and prompts that we’re both involved in documenting the genealogy of our respective families, and both fans of complexity theory, Ursula Le Guin’s writing, and the game Pandemic. After a brief chat with her on these topics I invite my sister-in-law, who is a huge fan of hers, and who lives overseas, to ‘drop in’ to our canoe to meet her. The sea around our canoe teems with marine life and birds — whales, sea lions, vast schools of herring, flights of cormorants, gangs of bald eagles — each pointed out by our guide. The sounds and sights are so vivid I can almost feel the motion of the waves.
• Some of the canoes are set aside for singles, and for international student group meet-ups. In them, some potentially deep and important new relationships are being forged in this enchanting atmosphere.
• Finally, we arrive at our destination, and as we come ashore (back to the ‘main room’) we are instructed to begin cooking the feast. Each in our own homes, following the instructions of a chef who is cooking ‘live’ on our large screens, we cook the ingredients we’d picked up over the past week. We’ve had the choice to either purchase a ‘ticket’ for this special event, or to participate free (including the food ingredients); in the latter case we view advertisements from the event’s sponsors on part of our smaller screen. The substantial proceeds from ticket sales and sponsors are divided among the participating restaurants, artists and photographers, and several local charities.
• And now, we break bread together. We can choose a ‘private room’ (made to look like the interior of a longhouse), or ‘outside’ in the main space where singing and dancing occurs, the combined voices and instruments of hundreds of participants creating a spectacular and moving sensory experience of sound, rhythm and harmony.
• Afterwards, post-event breakout rooms allow First Nations and Second Nations people to gather, learn about and discuss local issues such as how to prevent an LNG facility and terminal that has been proposed for just north of our island. Elected officials are also holding information and engagement sessions on issues of local interest in other breakout rooms.
• Oh, and there was a game: Three famous Canadians ‘attended’ the event in disguise, and those who were able to pick out Margaret Atwood, David Suzuki and Sarah McLachlan in their strange outfits and affected voices won prizes. Lots of people watched the video recording of the event afterwards and realized they’d been in ‘canoes’ with one of these celebrities and had no idea!
• I will never look at my island quite the same way again after this. It is now ‘populated’ in my memory with those who give its history, geography and ecology new meaning, people and wild creatures I’d never ‘met’ before. And I’m haunted, as I walk through the lovely but vastly-diminished forests of our island, at the realization of what it must have been like when this island was thick with rainforest, trees hundreds of feet tall and ecosystems as rich and varied as any on earth.

.     .     .     .     .

CONCLUSION: IT COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS

Most of us, of course, are not in the restaurant, or another shared-space-with-amenities, business. But we could do the same kind of imaginative exploration of just about every type of work in our economy. Does it actually meet any real (healthy) needs at all? If it doesn’t, could it? How, with imagination, could it be transformed or replaced with something that does meet a real need? And if the work that you’re doing does meet real needs, what are they, and how, with imagination, could your work be transformed or replaced with work that more effectively meets those, and other, real needs, and do so in a resilient and sustainable way?

It’s a cliché to talk about “outside the box” thinking, but this is what we sorely need to do if we want to find a truly better way to live and make a living, not merely one that reacts to and begrudgingly accommodates some new unpleasant realities. We reacted really badly, and utterly unimaginatively, to 9/11. We owe it to ourselves to find a better way to deal with this new crisis, and the ones to follow. That means nothing less than a war on imaginative poverty, and the shoddy, inferior, mundane products and services it provides.

Following up on our report for Linux 5.5 and 5.6 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem5 phone and its development kit during the 5.7 development cycle. Our contributions improved support for the hardware found on our Devkit as well as phone components like the accelerometer and GPU.

Devkit updates

We have greatly improved support for the Librem 5 Devkit by describing more hardware components that will work with mainline Linux right now. Along with fixing the Wifi hardware killswitch and smaller improvements, the proximity sensor and audio codecs have been added:

• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: increase the VBUS current in the kernel
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: allow the redpine card to be removed
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: add the regulators for DVFS
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: allow modem to wake the system from suspend
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: add the simcom 7100 modem and audio
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: add the sgtl5000 i2c audio codec
• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: add a vbus supply to usb0
• arm64: dts: imx8mq-librem5-devkit: Add proximity sensor

IMU sensor

The following small addition concludes the work on supporting the accelerometer on the devkit and adds the correct mount matrix that describes how it is oriented on the board.

• arm64: dts: librem5-devkit: add lsm9ds1 mount matrix

Vivante GPU

The GC7000 GPU on the imx8mq often failed to enter power saving mode when idle. This was fixed with the help of Lucas Stach with the following series:

• drm/etnaviv: Warn when GPU doesn’t idle fast enough
• drm/etnaviv: Ignore MC when checking runtime suspend idleness
• drm/etnaviv: Consider all known idle bits in debugfs
• drm/etnaviv: Update idle bits
• drm/etnaviv: Fix typo in comment

This improves the power consumption of the Librem 5 considerably when in active use.

Misc fixes

We enabled runtime power management for the Librem5’s light and proximity sensors

• iio: vcnl4000: Enable runtime pm for vcnl4200/4040
• iio: vcnl4000: Use a single return when getting IIO_CHAN_INFO_RAW

Mainline redpine wifi driver saw a minor bug fix

• rsi: fix null pointer dereference during rsi_shutdown()

Sources

Have a look at our Linux tree to see what is currently being worked on and tested (or help if you feel like joining the fun :). For the upcoming release we’ll be able to operate the full display stack on the Librem 5 Devkit with mainline Linux, and possibly have a basic device tree description for the phone, so stay tuned.

The post Purism and Linux 5.7 appeared first on Purism.

R 4.0.0 has been out for a while, now, and — apart from a case where merge() was slower than dirt — it’s been really stable for at least me (I use it daily on macOS, Linux, and Windows). Sure, it came with some headline-grabbing features/upgrades, but I’ve started looking at what other useful nuggets might be in the changelog and decided to blog them as I find them.

Today’s nugget is the venerable stopifnot() function which was significantly enhanced by this PR by Neil Fultz.

Prior to R 4.0.0, if you wanted to use stopifnot() to perform some input validation (a.k.a. — in this case — [assertions])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assertion_(software_development)) you’d do something like this (I’m borrowing from Neil’s example):

some_ƒ <- function(alpha, gradtol, steptol, interlim) {

  stopifnot(
    (is.numeric(alpha)),
    (length(alpha) == 1),
    (alpha > 0),
    (alpha < 1),
    (is.numeric(gradtol)),
    (length(gradtol) == 1),
    (gradtol > 0),
    (is.numeric(steptol)),
    (length(steptol) == 1),
    (steptol > 0),
    (is.numeric(interlim)),
    (length(interlim) == 1),
    (interlim > 0)
   )

  message("Do something awesome")

}

When run with acceptable inputs we get:

some_ƒ(0.5, 3, 10, 100)
## Do something awesome

But, when run with something out of kilter:

some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100)
##  Error in some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100) : (is.numeric(alpha)) is not TRUE

we get a semi-useful, but somewhat unfriendly message back. Sure, it points to the right expression, but we’re supposed to be the kinder, friendlier data science (and general purpose) language who cares a bit more about our users. To that end, many folks switch to doing something like this:

some_ƒ <- function(alpha, gradtol, steptol, interlim) {

  if (!is.numeric(alpha))   { stop('Error: alpha should be numeric') }
  if (length(alpha) != 1)   { stop('Error: alpha should be a single value'); }
  if (alpha < 0)            { stop('Error: alpha is negative'); }
  if (alpha > 1)            { stop('Error: alpha is greater than one'); }
  if (!is.numeric(gradtol)) { stop('Error: gradtol should be numeric') }
  if (length(gradtol) != 1) { stop('Error: gradtol should be a single value'); }
  if (gradtol <= 0)         { stop('Error: gradtol should be positive'); }
  if (!is.numeric(steptol)) { stop('Error: steptol should be numeric') }
  if (length(steptol) != 1) { stop('Error: steptol should be a single value'); }
  if (steptol <= 0)         { stop('Error: steptol should be positive'); }
  if (!is.numeric(iterlim)) { stop('Error: iterlim should be numeric') }
  if (length(iterlim) != 1) { stop('Error: iterlim should be a single value'); }
  if (iterlim <= 0)         { stop('Error: iterlim should be positive'); }

  message("Do something awesome")

}

which results in:

some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100)
##  Error in some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100) : Error: alpha should be numeric

(you can make even better error messages than that).

Neal thought there had to be a better way, and made one! The ... expressions can be named and those names will become the error message:

some_ƒ <- function(alpha, gradtol, steptol, interlim) {

  stopifnot(
    'alpha should be numeric'          = (is.numeric(alpha)),
    'alpha should be a single value'   = (length(alpha) == 1),
    'alpha is negative'                = (alpha > 0),
    'alpha is greater than one'        = (alpha < 1),
    'gradtol should be numeric'        = (is.numeric(gradtol)),
    'gradtol should be a single value' = (length(gradtol) == 1),
    'gradtol should be positive'       = (gradtol > 0),
    'steptol should be numeric'        = (is.numeric(steptol)),
    'steptol should be a single value' = (length(steptol) == 1),
    'steptol should be positive'       = (steptol > 0),
    'iterlim should be numeric'        = (is.numeric(interlim)),
    'iterlim should be a single value' = (length(interlim) == 1),
    'iterlim should be positive'       = (interlim > 0)
   )

  message("Do something awesome")

}

some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100)

##  Error in some_ƒ("a", 3, 10, 100) : alpha should be numeric

Way easier to write and way more respectful to the caller.

Gratuitous Statistics

CRAN has ~2,600 packages that use stopifnot() in their package /R/ code with the following selected distributions (charts are all log10 scale):

Here are the packages with 50 or more files using stopifnot():

   pkg              n
   <chr>        <int>
 1 spatstat       252
 2 pracma         145
 3 QuACN           80
 4 raster          74
 5 spdep           61
 6 lavaan          54
 7 surveillance    53
 8 copula          50

Here are the packages with one or more files that have 100 or more calls to stopifnot() in them:

   pkg                 fil                            ct
   <chr>               <chr>                       <int>
 1 ff                  ordermerge.R                  278
 2 OneArmPhaseTwoStudy zzz.R                         142
 3 bit64               integer64.R                   137
 4 updog               rflexdog.R                    124
 5 RNetCDF             RNetCDF.R                     123
 6 Rlda                rlda.R                        105
 7 aster2              transform.R                   105
 8 ads                 fads.R                        104
 9 georob              georob_exported_functions.R   104
10 bit64               highlevel64.R                 101

O_O That’s quite a bit of checking!

FIN

If you’re working on switching to R 4.0.0 or have switched, this and many other new features await! Drop a note in the comments with your favorite new feature (or, even better, a link to a blog post on said feature!).

As I get time to dig out some more nuggets I’ll add more posts to this series.

So there we go, the Conversations XMPP messaging app has voice and video calls now. A dream come true! Pretty much everyone I used it with so far was stunned by the audio and video quality of the calls. So I was highly interested, of course, to have a closer look at the data rates during audio and video calls.

When audio/video calls are established from behind NAT firewalls, which is usually the case, the user data stream has to traverse my STUN/TURN server so it’s easy to use ‘nload’ or other tools to have a look at the datarates. In case of a Conversations video call, each side sends a video data stream of 2.5 Mbit/s if the bandwidth is available. It seems there is a rate adaption mechanism in place in case this bandwidth is not available, which is sometimes a bit of a problem in the uplink direction for some people. However, I haven’t taken a closer look at that yet.

So in other words, the combined downlink/uplink data rate is 5 Mbit/s on each device. That’s around 1.8 GB of data per hour. Quite a bit of data and not an issue when connected to a fixed line home Wi-Fi. However, for metered cellular connections, it’s a value that needs some consideration. If your monthly data bucket is 5 GB, your video calls and other activities for the month ends after 2.5 hours.

Let’s have a look at a voice call. My TURN server registers 100 kbit/s in each direction, i.e. 50 kbit/s for each voice path. That’s 0.036 GB an hour, i.e. 1/50th of a video call or 125 hours of calling per month with a 5GB monthly cellular data bucket.

If you want better contributions from members, give them clearer instructions and templates to work with.

It sounds obvious, but it so rarely happens.

An acquaintance recently bemoaned the quality of content they were getting wasn’t good enough to be featured on their site.

But looking at the community, there were no instructions or indications about quality. Members whose content was rejected weren’t even given suggestions or a second chance to improve it.

If you want members to create great videos, images, stories, case studies, and more, show them how.

Create a template with clear boxes of what’s expected in each area (this works really well if you want members to provide case studies). Give plenty of great examples members can see, edit, and tinker with. Provide them with simple training they can take. And, most importantly, give them constructive criticism so if it isn’t good enough they can improve it.

We are thrilled to announce the Windows Package Manager preview!

If you’re already familiar with what a package manager is, feel free to skip this paragraph. If you’re still reading, you’re going to love this! A package manager is designed to help you save time and frustration. Essentially, it is a set of software tools that help you automate the process of getting software on your machine. You specify which apps you want installed, and it does the work of finding the latest version (or the exact one you specified) and installing it on your machine.

Just about every developer has wanted a native package manager in Windows. That day is finally here. You are going to be able to winget install your way to bliss. One of the best parts is that it is open source. I had to pinch myself when I was able to winget install terminal, and then winget install powershell, and then winget install powertoys. You get the idea, and If you do not see an app you use, just create a new manifest, and submit a pull request.

When can I try it?

As of today, the Windows Package Manager preview has been made open source. You can clone, build, run and test the code from the GitHub repository (https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli). There are other possibly easier ways to get your hands on it if that doesn’t sound appealing. Please continue reading.

What functionality is included?

You can install any app with a valid manifest (even local ones -- manifest). The command line client “winget.exe” is already pre-configured to point to the Microsoft community repository. That means you can install any package with a manifest that has been published.

Have you ever had to completely re-install all your apps and tools on your PC? How long did it take? How did you remember where to go to find, download, and install all your editors & IDEs, languages & runtimes, source control tools, etc.?

 

Did you enjoy it? Yeah, neither did we … which is why we created Windows Package Manager.

 

Now you can install all your favorite apps & tools simply by typing winget install <foo> into your command-line. Or better still, you can create a script file that installs ALL your tools while you sit back enjoy a well-earned coffee break!”

You can search for available packages and display information using the show command. There are also commands to help with manifest creation and validation (hash and validate). Once the first third-party repository is published, you will be able to add that repository as a source as well. We’re providing documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/package-manager and both of the GitHub repositories.

How do I get it?

We have provided three different ways for you to get your hands on the Windows Package Manager. If you are a Windows Insider, you may already have it. First, you can head over to the open source GitHub repository for the client. Second, you can join any of the Windows Insider rings. Third, you can join the Windows Package Manager Insider program by providing your Microsoft Account (MSA) to Windows Package Manager Insider Program and request to be included in the preview. Either of the Insider programs will ensure you automatically receive updates as we progress from preview to general availability. After you have joined either Insider program, head over to the Microsoft Store and get the App Installer. The Windows Package manager will be available after you get the update.

Why not contribute to another open source package manager?

We looked at several other package managers. There were several reasons leading us to create a new solution. One critical concern we had was how to build a repository of trusted applications. We are automatically checking each manifest. We leverage SmartScreen, static analysis, SHA256 hash validation and a few other processes to reduce the likelihood of malicious software making its way into the repository and onto your machine. Another key challenge was all the changes required to be able to deliver the client program as a native Windows application.

Which versions of Windows will be supported?

Windows Package Manager will support every Windows 10 version since the Fall Creators Update (1709)! The Windows Package Manager will be delivered with the Desktop App Installer when we ship version 1.0. If you are building software to run on Windows 10 you will have a simple way for your customers to install your software on billions of machines.

But what about…

We are expecting you have plenty of questions. What does this mean for the Windows store? It doesn’t mean anything for the Windows store. The Windows Package Manager is a command line interface, no marketing, no images, no commerce. Although we do plan on making those apps installable too.

What about insert any other package manager here? We think they are great. If they want to leverage our repository of validated packages, they can. If they want to see how we are doing it, it is open source. We’re open to feedback and suggestions.

We have already talked with a few of the well-known package manager teams. Chocolatey has a vibrant community with a massive collection of applications, and a rich history supporting both open source and enterprise customers. Scoop provides a convenient way to allow software to be installed without the UAC popups. Ninite keeps an eye on updates for all the apps it installed. There are many others like AppGet, Npackd and the PowerShell based OneGet package manager-manager.

If you are happy with your current package manager, keep using it. Our goal is to make installing software on Windows better for everyone.

What’s next?

We have a long list of features we think you will like. Take a look at the list of issues we have already created on GitHub. Be sure to +1 any issues you feel strongly about. If you do not see something, and you would like us to consider it, just create a new issue.

The post Windows Package Manager Preview appeared first on Windows Command Line.

Last year at Build 2019, we first announced the Windows Terminal. Since then, we have been working with the community to create a wonderful terminal experience while still being a preview product.

Here we are at Build 2020 and we are so excited to share with you our latest announcements!

Build 2020

Windows Terminal 1.0

We are incredibly proud to announce the release of Windows Terminal 1.0! Windows Terminal has come a long way since its announcement at Microsoft Build 2019. You can download Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Windows Terminal will have monthly updates, starting in July 2020.

Windows Terminal Preview

We are also launching a preview channel of Windows Terminal. If you are someone who likes to be involved with the development of Windows Terminal and use the latest features as soon as they are developed, this is the channel for you! You can download Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Windows Terminal Preview will have monthly updates, starting in June 2020.

Documentation Website

After you have installed Windows Terminal, you may want to learn how to get the most out of your new development tool. We have just launched the Windows Terminal documentation site, which provides details about all of the settings and features the terminal has to offer, as well as some tutorials to get you started on customizing your terminal. You can find all of the Windows Terminal documentation at aka.ms/terminal-docs.

Top Features

Windows Terminal is full of features that improve your workflow and give you a wide variety of customization options to give you the best experience. Here’s an overview of some of our fan-favorite features.

Tabs and Panes

Windows Terminal allows you to run any command line application inside tabs and panes. You can create profiles for each of your command line applications and open them side-by-side for a seamless workflow. Each of your profiles can be uniquely customized to your liking. Additionally, the terminal will automatically create profiles for you if you have Windows Subsystem for Linux distributions or additional PowerShell versions installed on your machine.

GPU Accelerated Rendering

Windows Terminal utilizes the GPU to render its text. This provides a much faster experience when using the command line. This renderer also provides support for Unicode and UTF-8 characters. This gives you the opportunity to use the terminal in a variety of languages while also displaying all of your favorite emojis. Lastly, we have included our newest font, Cascadia Code, inside the Windows Terminal package. The default font is set to Cascadia Mono, which is the font variant that does not include programming ligatures. For additional variants of the Cascadia Code font, head over to the Cascadia Code GitHub repo.

Customization Options

Windows Terminal is full of settings that provide an unlimited amount of customizations. You can have acrylic backgrounds and background images with unique color schemes and custom fonts for your own personalized experience. You can also add custom key bindings to help you feel more at home. Additionally, each profile is customizable to match the workflow you need, whether it be on Windows, WSL, or even SSH!

Fan-Favorite Community Contributions

Some of the coolest features in Windows Terminal were contributed by community members on GitHub. The first we would like to call out is background image support. Summon528 wrote the functionality for Windows Terminal to support both gifs and images in the background of the text window. This is by far one of our most used features.

Another fan favorite is the retro terminal effect setting. Ironyman added support for glowing text and scan lines within the text buffer, thus providing that feeling of using a classic CRT machine. The team never anticipated this feature coming through on GitHub, but it was so good that we just had to include it inside the terminal.

Top Contributors for Windows Terminal 1.0

Windows Terminal would not be where it is now without the help of our community. We would like to acknowledge those who have made a large impact on bringing Windows Terminal to 1.0.

j4james

mkitzan

pi1024e

greg904

mcpiroman

lhecker

skyline75489

ironyman

summon528

mikemaccana

egmontkob

jsoref

german-one

dlong11

…and many more!

We have had hundreds of contributors and we wish we could list all of them above! We’d like to especially thank them for all their help and we couldn’t do it without them!

What’s Next

We are actively working on new features that will appear in the Windows Terminal Preview release in June. If you’d like to join the fun and help contribute to Windows Terminal, there are many issues labeled “Help Wanted” on our GitHub repo! We will shortly be publishing our roadmap for Windows Terminal 2.0 on GitHub, so be sure to keep an eye out. If you’re curious about what we’re actively working on, our milestones will give you a good idea of where we’re headed.

Cheers!

We hope you enjoy Windows Terminal 1.0 as well as our new Windows Terminal Preview and the aka.ms/terminal-docs site. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to Kayla Cinnamon on Twitter (@cinnamon_msft). If you find any bugs or would like to file a feature request, please file a new issue on GitHub. If you’d like to read more about the developer tool announcements made at Build 2020, head over to Kevin Gallo’s blog post. We can’t wait to continue working with the community and developing new features to continue making Windows Terminal a great tool for developers!

The post Windows Terminal 1.0 appeared first on Windows Command Line.

What does the coronavirus look like? Rebekah Frumkin for The Paris Review highlights various illustrations and renderings, focusing on why each looks the way it does:

The disease that has put the entire world on pause is easily communicable, capable of stowing silently away in certain hosts and killing others, and, to the human eye, entirely invisible. In media parlance it’s become our “invisible enemy”: a nightmarish, oneiric force that can’t be seen, heard, or touched. But with the use of modeling software, scientists and illustrators have begun to visualize coronavirus, turning it into something that can be seen, understood, and, hopefully, eventually vanquished by science. Many of us imagine the virus as a sphere radiating red spikes—but why? Certain elements of these visualizations are based on the way coronavirus appears under a microscope, and others are choices that were made, an exercise of artistic license.

Tags: coronavirus, drawing, Paris Review

Ich bemühe mich, mit möglichst vielen verschiedenen Computern regelmäßig zu arbeiten. Dabei haben sich ein paar Geräte gefunden, mit denen ich alles machen kann und die ich zugleich richtig gerne nutze. Darunter das Surface Pro (2017) und das ThinkPad Yoga 4th gen (2019). Dann gibt es die Geräte, die ich ebenfalls sehr liebe, aber die dann eben doch nicht alles können, etwa das iPad Pro oder das Surface Pro X.

Aktuell benutze ich vorwiegend das Surface Pro X statt des iPad Pro, weil meine alte Tastatur "fies" ist. Das Surface Pro X hat mich nur einmal im Stich gelassen, weil die Prüfungssoftware für mein Azure Examen nicht unterstützt wurde. Das waren hektische zehn Minuten, in den ich blitzschnell das ThinkPad aus dem Schrank gezerrt habe, um meinen Termin noch wahrnehmen zu können. Und diese Unsicherheit ist der einzige Grund es nicht zu empfehlen. Es kann immer wieder passieren, dass es eine bestimmte Software nicht als Win32 (und schon gar nicht als ARM) gibt.

Ansonsten gefällt mir absolut alles an diesem Rechner. Er ist lautlos, hält den ganzen Tag durch, wird bei mir ratzfatz über tizi-USB-Kabel und tizi-Tankstation geladen. Das mitgelieferte Surface-Netzteil habe ich noch nie benutzt. Leicht, einfach zu transportieren, griffig, mit einem Kickstand, der es auch ohne Tastatur stehen lässt. Einfach toll.

Das muss Ironie sein, dass ausgerechnet Microsoft bei der Software stolpert.

I got asked by a long time colleague if I was willing to do a post of all the things that I’ve learned in the last eight weeks about moving online. Not ’emergency teaching’ but actual lessons about people moving to teaching with the internet. I’ve worked with over 100 faculty at my own institution this past few months, taking them through a 1 week intensive course. I’ve also been in constant contact with folks from around the world both through my interviews on http://oliah.ca and in endless backchannels and side chats. Here’s what I got.

1. Moving to teaching on the internet is not a technology problem (unless you make it one)

In our course we have been treating online teaching as a conceptual problem. There are things that you can do face 2 face (like make groups quickly) that can be super difficult online. There are other things you can do online that simply don’t work face 2 face (see design your activity for the internet a little later in this list). The technology is something you will figure out through repeated use. Don’t worry about it. Just set aside enough time over successive days to use the tech repeatedly and it will come to you. Concentrate on how the internet is different. If you choose to use too many platforms or try to be too fancy, though, your technology could become a problem. Keep it simple.

2. Moving to the internet is about understanding information abundance

One of the critical pieces of conceptual work is adjusting to the idea that your students already have access to all of the precious information you were planning to give them in class. If you’ve asked a yes or no question, or you have asked a ‘complicated’ question that has a fairly recognized answer, your students are going to google the answer to it. As they should. Those of us with access to the internet (through literacy, technological and financial means) can reach out for any piece of information we need by simply searching for it. Our learning experiences need to reflect that.

3. Complicated vs. complex concepts on the internet

I’ve found the distinction between complicated and complex concepts a good way of keeping track of what I’m asking students to do. A complicated concept is one that responds to a step by step answer. Thought of another way, it’s an answer you could copy and paste. Those answers only work in that bubble of artificial scarcity that are our f2f classes. If you’re looking to evaluate a student’s work online, add some complexity. Something that personalizes the issue to the student. Something that brings their perspective to bear. I’m not saying we can’t teach basic concepts that learners need to remember, just make them part of other things that include complexity if you want to do an assessment.

4. Learning to evaluate good/bad information on the internet is a core skill in any field.

One of the big objections to embracing that giant, complex abundance of information is that students wont know what is good information and what is bad information. This is true. But learning how to find, evaluate and combine information in any field is a critical skill right now. We can’t protect them from the internet. They need to learn how to deal with it.

Our students are going to need more than information to address the challenges they’re facing. They need to be innovators, problem solvers, and strategic thinkers. You may not have had time to include those kinds of activities in your classes before. But now that your students have all of the information, think about how you can address some of these higher order thinking skills.

5. Pedagogies of care (for students and teachers)

We’ve always needed to take time to care for ourselves and our students. One of the challenges of moving online is that we need to consciously think about how we are to ‘care’ for our students. A smile in the classroom can mean a great deal to our students. How are you going to incorporate that caring in your messages? In your videos? In how you design assignments? At the same time, our face 2 face schools also wrap some sanity around how much work we do as teachers. How can we balance the care that we are giving to our students and the care we are giving to ourselves? Imagine what you do the first five minutes of class (smiles, check-ins) and think about ways to do that online.

6. Think of ‘content’ as ‘teacher presence’

One of the concepts we’ve found useful is in thinking about everything a teacher does as teacher presence. In a f2f classroom the work that we do, dropping a comment in a discussion group or explaining a complex concept are conceptually different from a textbook or an assignment. Online all of this stuff combines into your ‘presence’. There is usually a direct relationship between your perceived presence and student engagement. I say perceived presence, because you need to let students know you’re there… simply reading their comments in a discussion forum and not saying anything doesn’t let students know that you’re present. You need to ‘be present’ the same way you need to ‘pay attention’. It’s an action.

You can easily write one post responding to all the posts on a given subject, highlighting themes and correcting misconceptions. Less duplication for you, and it still shows students that you’re involved.

7. Keep it simple

This is the first of the three messages from http://k12.oliah.ca about how to move to working online. I had a great discussion with one of the science faculty members in our course this week and he was saying that he realized he had to stop ‘covering the content’. He’s always kind of suspected that he was going over too many concepts in his class and that students weren’t getting them. In his move online, he’s focusing on far fewer concepts and digging much deeper. Keep it simple. Focus on the stuff that’s important.

8. Keep it equitable and accessible

This is part access, part care and all about thinking about your context. The accessibility issues that your students have are not going away because they are working from home. Using UDL approaches in your learning and working with student support staff is critical.

Online learning increases the impact of economic disparity on the classroom. If you don’t have a dedicated computer in your house, you are going to struggle to participate in a synchronous activity. You are going to struggle multitasking on a phone or tablet. Many students would go TO SCHOOL, or the library, or McDonald’s to get access to consistent wifi. They may not be able to do this. Think about different ways you can design your assignments to allow for students to complete them in multiple ways. This video does an excellent job of talking through this concept.

9. Keep it engaging

One of the biggest concerns I’ve heard from people moving online is that they struggle to get students to do the work face 2 face, how are they going to get students to do the work online. Part of helping students be engaged is to create the scaffolding they need to understand HOW to be ready to do the work. If you’re assigning readings before a class, give them a 200 word reflection to hand in the day before. Scaffolding doesn’t mean you oversimplify the material, it means you structure the workload, particularly at first, and then maybe reduce that scaffolding as learners get comfortable. If you’re moving away from Multiple choice questions because they don’t work online (and they mostly don’t) you’ll need to apply this scaffolding to let them know what success looks like.

Also. You need to be interesting. If you’ve recorded a super long video to send to students, force yourself to watch it first. When you get bored and want to turn it off… cut your video and send that. Imagine yourself as a student. Really work through what the student experience is going to be.

10. Design activities for what the web can do for you.

This concept seems to be helpful to people thinking about the advantages of teaching online. If you’re going to have an essay or a project or any kind of long term work with students, think of those projects as an iterative process. If you were doing this face 2 face, you might have them submit something halfway through the term. You might even get them to journal in a workbook that they hand in to you and that you hand back. It’s an organizational nightmare. Online you can create any number of spaces where learners can check in and post their progress. The web is very good at keeping track of student work for you. It also makes it very easy for students to share with each other.

For this to work, you can’t think of grading EVERYTHING. Setting up discussion for students and having them submit ‘their five favourite posts’ can be a great way to keep discussion open and also introduce curation.

11. Gather resources together… together

Please don’t try and do this alone. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE TRYING TO DO THIS. IT IS NOT A COMPETITION. Don’t try to create all your resources alone. Don’t try and learn alone. Don’t try to find your resources alone. Make a team. At your school or with others. Here are a few lists of resources.

List of resources about teaching online
List of virtual labs
List of review of online tools for teaching (The Open Page)
Online Learning in a Hurry
#OTT20 ONLINE TEACHING TUESDAYS (Drop in discussion)

There are tons of Open Education Resources (OER) out there you can use. It takes a while. And some deep searching… searching with a team will make it much faster.

12. Last note: If you’re helping someone else

People don’t need to understand the technical language of design. They just need to understand why they need to do what you’re talking to them about.

Initially slated for release by Sony next month, Apple has picked up a WWII navy drama starring Tom Hanks called Greyhound that will stream on the company’s TV+ service. The movie that Hanks wrote was originally scheduled for theatrical release next month by Sony Pictures on Father’s Day weekend in the US. Instead, the film will debut on TV+. There’s no word from Apple yet about when Greyhound will become available to its subscribers.

According to Deadline, which broke the story:

For Apple, this is further indication the company is becoming a major player in features, as this marks its biggest picture commitment. The Apple TV+ slate includes Beastie Boys Story, the docus Dads from director Bryce Dallas Howard and the Sundance acquisition Boys State as well as On the Rocks starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones and directed by Sofia Coppola. Streaming now is 2019 Sundance Film Festival selections Hala and The Elephant Queen. The service also premiered the George Nolfi-directed The Banker, which stars Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson and Nia Long.

With the COVID-19 pandemic closing movie theaters worldwide, movie studios have released many smaller-budget films straight to video streaming services. However, those movies have primarily appeared on multiple streaming services simultaneously. Greyhound is unique because it’s a big-budget film featuring a big-name actor, which will be available to TV+ subscribers only.

With the economic pressures facing the movie studios, video streaming is poised to play an even larger role in the industry. By picking up Greyhound, Apple has made it clear that it intends to play a leading role in the film industry’s evolving future.

→ Source: deadline.com

iA Writer 5.5 for Mac and iOS has arrived. The update adds a powerful mix of functionality and delicate subtlety that will improve your writing workflow.

Still my favorite editor, but not as good on Windows, which is why I write most manuscripts in Word.

More >

This is a good brief article summarizing the work of Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. As I read it, 'culturally responsive teaching' blends some aspects of instructivist approaches focusing on content knowledge along with constructivist approaches supporting student agency. The idea is to supplement the gaps in traditionally marginalized students' background knowledge by helping them connect new things they're learning to the perspective that comes from their home, their community, and their interests. This approach doesn't depend on standardized content, but rather on "thinking about what a student needs in order to have agency over their learning in any situation." There's more on her approach in her webinar.

Notion, an excellent note-taking app and general productivity tool, just got significantly better for free users.

A small update rolling out to the app today makes it so free users can now create unlimited notes. Previously, free users could create 1,000 ‘blocks,’ or individual elements that makeup Notion documents like text, tasks or calendars. To go beyond that, users needed to upgrade to the $4 per month plan.

While it may not seem like a lot, I’ve used Notion for a couple years as a repository for various creative writing projects and didn’t come close to breaking the 1,000 block limit. However, depending on your use scenario, 1,000 blocks may not be enough.

Either way, free users don’t need to worry about that limitation anymore. Along with removing that limit, Notion’s free plan also allows users to add up to five ‘guests’ that can edit or comment on pages. The free tier still limits the size of file uploads to 5MB compared to unlimited for all of the other Notion tiers. Finally, the free tier lacks access to some administrative and security features, as well as priority support features. However, most of those are reserved for the larger ‘Team’ and ‘Enterprise’ subscription tiers.

An improved free tier should encourage more users to join Notion

As The Verge points out, the space for note-taking and collaborative apps is growing quite crowded. Notion’s move to a more generous free tier is part of an effort to convince more people to choose its app over the myriad of competitors. Notion’s CEO, Ivan Zhao, told The Verge that the company planned to improve the free tier last year, but delayed the change because of COVID-19. The pandemic caused a surge in usage, as much as double the pre-pandemic volume of signups every day, according to Zhao.

For those of you who don’t use Notion but are intrigued by the app, it definitely sets itself apart from other note-taking apps. It’s an incredibly simple tool to get started with, but the variety and customizability of the various blocks and elements make it a tough platform to master. It can serve a variety of tasks, from managing a to-do list to keeping a journal, storing recipes and more. Some people have even used Notion’s ability to make public pages to create dynamic resumes.

All in all, Notion is an incredibly powerful tool and, thanks to the better free tier, is more accessible than ever before.

Source: Notion Via: The Verge

The post Notion’s free tier just got much better thanks to unlimited notes appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Respawn Entertainment, the team behind smash hit games Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and competitive shooter Apex Legends, is opening a new studio in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

Apex has been an ongoing success for the studio, resulting in new in-game competitive seasons every few months. These seasons are full of new content for players to buy, such as a free map or new character.

The new studio in Vancouver will help develop new items and code to supplement the central Apex Legends team in California, reports the Financial Post. 

The team chose Vancouver for its wealth of video game development talent, as well as its physical closeness to other studios under the EA umbrella, which helped Respawn find employees and leaders for its new studio arm. EA Vancouver, notably, develops the best-selling FIFA and NHL games that release every year.

The company is just getting the studio off of the ground right now, but in the coming months, it’s hoping to hire developers, designers and more.

Source: Financial Post

The post New EA studio opening in Vancouver to help Apex Legends development appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Instagram announced that blog posts are coming to its platform through a new feature called ‘Guides.’

The social media platform says the new format is focused on ‘wellness’ and is an effort to reach users during the COVID-19 pandemic. It won’t be available to all users, but a small group of influencers, publishers and organizations will be able to use Guides.

The feature combines photos, text and videos into a single blog-style article. Just like with IGTV, Guides will have their own section in a user’s account profile and will appear in a new ‘wellness’ section in Instagram’s Explore tab.

An Instagram spokesperson told Engadget that Guides are limited to wellness, at least for now. The social media site says it is “exploring what the future of Guides will look like.”

Source: Instagram Via: Engadget

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Apple’s push towards a mobile wireless world continues, for better or worse.

A new report from often reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo first covered by MacRumors states that Apple has plans to not include EarPods in the iPhone 12’s box. The tech giant has always given iPhone users free EarPods along with every iPhone purchase.

Kuo goes on to say he expects AirPod shipments to increase by the second half of the year, with Apple likely launching some sort of AirPods promotion towards the end of 2020. It’s unclear what this rumoured promotion will consist of, but it will likely offer some sort of substantial discount on AirPods for iPhone 12 buyers.

Kuo says that third-generation AirPods are expected to go into mass production during the first half of 2021. These new earbuds will reportedly look the same as their predecessors and will only feature internal design changes. This contradicts rumours sourced from YouTuber Jon Proser, who recently stated third-generation AirPods are expected to launch soon.

Kuo says this rumoured AirPods model is likely a new set of Beats earbuds and not the often-rumoured AirPods Lite or AirPods X.

Finally, the TF International Securities analyst says that AirPod shipments are likely to be at their lowest in the second quarter of 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with an expected decline of 29 percent.

While a disappointing move on Apple’s part, the discount the tech giant plans to offer on its AirPods will hopefully be significant enough to soften the blow. Given that Apple often sets the tone for the smartphone industry, with the removal of the headphone jack being the most prominent example, it’s likely that if these rumours are accurate, several Android manufacturers will slowly stop including earbuds with their new smartphones.

Apple first ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack with the launch of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus back in 2016.

Source: MacRumors 

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Zoom has started to notify paying Canadian customers that it is going to charge and collect GST/HST where applicable starting June 1st.

University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist posted a screenshot of the notice on Twitter. The notice indicates that this change is due to “international developments regarding the taxation of electronically supplied services with Goods and Service Tax (GST)/ Harmonized Sales Tax (HST).”

It’s important to note that rules regarding federal sales tax on digital services have not recently changed in Canada.

.@zoom_us advises paying Canadian subscribers that it will begin collecting and remitting GST/HST starting next month. Says this is due to international developments, though Canadian federal sales tax rules on digital services remain unchanged. pic.twitter.com/xhnaxHVUd0

— Michael Geist (@mgeist) May 20, 2020

The notice sent to paying subscribers says that this change goes into effect on or shortly after June 1, 2020. Once the change is implemented, invoices issued by Zoom will include its GST/HST account number.

Zoom notes that it will only be collecting GST/HST for invoices generated on or after June 1st, and that invoices from prior periods will not be impacted.

MobileSyrup has reached out to Zoom for more information.

Via: @mgeist

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