Rolandt

Many years ago, I was brought in to save a dying community of teachers.

I was the third consultant brought into the project.

The previous two had undertaken research, made recommendations which failed to reverse the downward trend, and had vanished.

My research quickly revealed precisely what the former two consultants had learned; teachers were too busy to participate in a community!

They were overwhelmed with grading papers, adapting to new edicts from above, responding to student questions, dealing with tricky parents, etc…

The community was never a priority for them!

Their lack of time came up in every single interview and almost every survey response.

Before you scroll down, take a second and think what you would recommend if they were your client.

Seriously, stop and take a second to think what you would recommend.

Would you try to make the platform easier and quicker to use?

Would you try to make the community more fun and engaging?

Would you try to build a small, private, base of community members for mentoring and ensure every interaction was high-value?

If you answered yes to the above, you are recommending precisely what the former two consultants recommended.

None of these recommendations worked!

The Solution

The solution is staring right at you but you’re probably not seeing it.

It’s easy to listen to members but not truly see what they’re saying.

I made a simple recommendation, if teachers are clearly too busy to participate, make the community a place for teachers to share their time-saving tips.

This is what we call ‘tweaking the concept’.

Nailing the concept is one of the most powerful ways you can drive more activity and participation.

Activity in the teachers’ community exploded and eventually surpassed its peak within six months. We brought in productivity experts, let teachers track how much time they had saved, and highlighted our time-saving idea of the week.

Once we nailed the concept, it became easier to come up with powerful engagement ideas.

Do You Know What Your Members Really Desire?

One of the first things I do in any client project is interview and survey members.

I’m not randomly putting questions together at the last minute, every question guides me closer to finding out what every segment, not just needs, but deeply desires.

Only once that research is done can I create a community concept that deeply connects with what members desire.

If you get the concept right, everything becomes much easier.

The best part of this, is it costs far less than changing technology and the impact is indefinite.

As part of our Psychology of Community course, I’m going to teach you how to undertake this research and build your community concept.

If you have an existing successful community, this can maximize the level of participation.

If you’re about to launch a community, this will ensure your community thrives.

And if you’re struggling, you should refine your concept before tweaking anything else.

This is a set of skills you can use on any community you ever work on.

I hope you will join me, the course begins next week!

You can sign up for Psychology of Community for $750 or sign up for Strategic Community Management too at a combined rate of $1100 USD.

See you on the inside.

Received my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip just now. Opened the box. Removed the protective/instruction film. Flipped the phone as you would do since it’s a flip phone and this happened. I heard the crack as well. 😰 cold weather?#SamsungGalaxy #ZFlip #samsung pic.twitter.com/j8KLL2vm8d

— Amir 💎 (@mondoir) February 14, 2020

Consensus around reviewers is that the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip is vastly superior to the Motorola Razr. I am not so sure about that. But in any case, these devices are too delicate for me.

Did you notice the other news last week? A Motorola G8 Power with 5000 mAh battery for 229 €, available in March? I bet you did not. This phone solves real world problem, not those created by marketing.

I was talking with one of my colleagues here at Michigan about the fascinating recent journal article from Tim Weston and collaborators based on NCWIT Aspirations award applicants, which I blogged about here. I was telling him about the results — what correlated with women’s persistence in technology and computing, and what didn’t or was negatively correlated.

He said that he was dubious. I asked why. He said, “What about the Black girls?”

His argument that the NCWIT Aspirations awards tends to be white and tends to be in wealthy, privileged school districts. Would those correlations be the same if you looked at Black women, or Latina women?

I went back to the Weston et al. paper. They write:

Although all respondents were female, they were diverse in race and ethnicity. Because we know that there are differentiated experiences for students of color in secondary and post-secondary education in the US, and especially women of color, we wanted to make sure we captured any differences in outcomes in our analysis. To do so, we created a variable called Under-represented Minority in Computing (URMC) status that grouped students by race/ethnicity. URMC indicated persons from groups historically under-represented in computing–African-American, Hispanic, or Native American. White, Asian and students of two or more races were coded as “Majority” in this variable. Unfortunately, further disaggregation by specific race/ethnicity was not possible due to low numbers. Thus, even though the numbers in the respondent pool were not high enough to disaggregate by specific race/ethnicity, we could still identify trends by over-representation and under-representation.

18% of their population was tagged URMC. URMC was included as a variable in their analyses, and their results suggest that being in the URMC group did not influence persistence significantly. If I understand their regressions right, that doesn’t tell us if the correlations were different by race/ethnicity. URMC wasn’t a significant factor in the outcomes, but that is not the same as thinking that those other variables differ by race and ethnicity. Do Black females have a different relationship with video games or with community than white females, for example? Or with Latina students?

While the analysis did not leave race out of the analysis entirely, there was not enough diversity there to answer my colleague’s question. I do agree with the authors that we would expect differentiated experiences. If our analysis does not include race, can we account for the differentiated experiences?

It’s hard to include race in many of our post-secondary CS ed analyses simply because the number of non-white and non-Asian students is so small. We couldn’t say that Media Computation was successful with a diverse student body until University of Illinois Chicago published their results. Georgia Tech has few students from under-served groups in the CS classes we were studying.

There’s a real danger that we’re going to make strong claims about what works and doesn’t work in computer science based only on what works for students in the majority groups. We need to make sure that we include race in our CS education discussions, that we’re taking into account these differentiated experiences. If we don’t, we risk that any improvements or optimizations we make on the basis of these results will only work with the privileged students, or worse yet, may even exacerbate the differentiated experiences.

Effective collaboration, especially in open source software development, starts with effective organization. To make sure that nothing gets missed, the general rule, “one issue, one pull request” is a nice rule of thumb.

Instead of opening an issue with a large scope like, “Fix all the broken links in the documentation,” open source projects will have more luck attracting contributors with several smaller and more manageable issues. In the preceding example, you might scope broken links by section or by page. This allows more contributors to jump in and dedicate small windows of their time, rather than waiting for one person to take on a larger and more tedious contribution effort.

Smaller scoped issues also help project maintainers see where work has been completed and where it hasn’t. This reduces the chances that some part of the issue is missed, assumed to be completed, and later leads to bugs or security vulnerabilities.

That’s all well and good; but what if you’ve already opened several massively-scoped issues, some PRs have already been submitted or merged, and you currently have no idea where the work started or stopped?

It’s going to take a little sorting out to get the state of your project back under control. Thankfully, there are a number of command line tools to help you scan, sort, and make sense of a messy repository. Here’s a small selection of ones I use.

Jump to:

• Interactive search-and-replace with vim
• Find dead links in Markdown files with a node module
• List subdirectories with or without a git repository with find
• Pull multiple git repositories from a list with xargs
• List issues by number with jot
• CLI-powered open source organization

Interactive search-and-replace with vim

You can open a file in Vim, then interactively search and replace with:

:%s/\<word\>/newword/gc

The % indicates to look in all lines of the current file; s is for substitute; \<word\> matches the whole word; and the g for “global” is for every occurrence. The c at the end will let you view and confirm each change before it’s made. You can run it automatically, and much faster, without c; however, you put yourself at risk of complicating things if you’ve made a pattern-matching error.

Find dead links in Markdown files with a node module

The markdown-link-check node module has a great CLI buddy.

I use this so often I turned it into a Bash alias function. To do the same, add this to your .bashrc:

# Markdown link check in a folder, recursive
function mlc () {
    find $1 -name \*.md -exec markdown-link-check -p {} \;
}

Then run with mlc <filename>.

List subdirectories with or without a git repository with find

Print all subdirectories that are git repositories, or in other words, have a .git in them:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec test -e '{}/.git' ';' -printf "is git repo: %p\n"

To print all subdirectories that are not git repositories, negate the test with !:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec test '!' -e '{}/.git' ';' -printf "not git repo: %p\n"

Pull multiple git repositories from a list with xargs

I initially used this as part of automatically re-creating my laptop with Bash scripts, but it’s pretty handy when you’re working with cloud instances or Dockerfiles.

Given a file, repos.txt with a repository’s SSH link on each line (and your SSH keys set up), run:

xargs -n1 git clone < repos.txt

If you want to pull and push many repositories, I previously wrote about how to use a Bash one-liner to manage your repositories.

List issues by number with jot

I’m a co-author and maintainer for the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide repository where I recently took one large issue (yup, it was “Fix all the broken links in the documentation” - how’d you guess?) and broke it up into several smaller, more manageable issues. A whole thirty-seven smaller, more manageable issues.

I wanted to enumerate all the issues that the original one became, but the idea of typing out thirty-seven issue numbers (#275 through #312) seemed awfully tedious and time-consuming. So, in natural programmer fashion, I spent the same amount of time I would have used to type out all those numbers and crafted a way to automate it instead.

The jot utility (apt install athena-jot) is a tiny tool that’s a big help when you want to print out some numbers. Just tell it how many you want, and where to start and stop.

# jot [ reps [ begin [ end ] ] ]
jot 37 275 312

This prints each number, inclusively, from 275 to 312 on a new line. To make these into issue number notations that GitHub and many other platforms automatically recognize and turn into links, you can pipe the output to awk.

jot 37 275 312 | awk '{printf "#"$0", "}'

#275, #276, #277, #278, #279, #280, #281, #282, #283, #284, #285, #286, #287, #288, #289, #290, #291, #292, #293, #295, #296, #297, #298, #299, #300, #301, #302, #303, #304, #305, #306, #307, #308, #309, #310, #311, #312

You can also use jot to generate random or redundant data, mainly for development or testing purposes.

CLI-powered open source organization

A well-organized open source repository is a well-maintained open source project. Save this post for handy reference, and use your newfound CLI superpowers for good! 🚀

Ian Robertson found one solution in Paris.  From Euroactiv:

In Paris, as in many European cities, the number of cars is declining, which is leaving a vast amount of underground car parks empty. With its start-up project called “La Caverne”, Cycloponics is reclaiming these urban territories and using them as a way of growing plenty of organic vegetables. …

At Porte de la Chapelle in Paris, the two have set up a 3,500 m2 urban farm located underground, in a former car park. …  Gertz and Champagnat responded to call for tenders from Paris, whose empty car parks were squatted by consumers and crack dealers. It’s been more than two years now since ‘organic has replaced crack’, and about fifteen jobs have been created. …

Small packets of water-soluble, sterilised and packaged straw are hung from floor to ceiling, and the mushrooms grow through tiny holes. Everything is calculated to ensure their optimal growth. The air is saturated with moisture, the endives grow in the dark, and the mushrooms get a few LED lights.

But the car park has definite advantages over the limestone cavities usually used to grow mushrooms, as there is a permanent and precise control of the weather, as well as better thermal stability. …  Farming in car parks also makes it possible to better resist the climate crisis. Parasites and other insects, for instance, are rather rare in the subsoil, even if endive tubers and straw bought outside can also be vectors of diseases, such as sclerotinia, which destroyed part of this year’s endive harvest. …

“In Paris, as in many European capitals, people no longer have cars, there are too many parking lots, especially in the poorest districts. But we also visited unused car parks on the Champs-Elysée. It would be possible to do something about it!” according to the entrepreneurs.

Full article here.

Through a reference by Julian Elvé, I read Doc Searls’ talk that he gave last October and has now published, Saving the Internet – and all the commons it makes possible.

Internet Open, image by Liz Henry, license CC BY ND

First he says of the internet as commons
In economic terms, the Internet is a common pool resource; but non-rivalrous and non-excludable to such an extreme that to call it a pool or a resource is to insult what makes it common: that it is the simplest possible way for anyone and anything in the world to be present with anyone and anything else in the world, at costs that can round to zero.

As a commons, the Internet encircles every person, every institution, every business, every university, every government, every thing you can name. It is no less exhaustible than presence itself. By nature and design, it can’t be tragic, any more than the Universe can be tragic.

He then lists 9 enclosures of that commons currently visible, because enclosure is one of the affordances the internet provides.

See, the Internet is designed to support every possible use, every possible institution, and—alas—every possible restriction, which is why enclosure is possible. People, institutions and possibilities of all kinds can be trapped inside enclosures on the Internet.

1. service provisioning, for example with asymmetric connection speeds. Asymmetry favours consumption over production. Searls singles out cable companies specifically for wanting this imbalance. I’ve been lucky from early on. Yes until fiber to the home, we had asymmetrical speeds, but I had a fixed IP address from the start and ran a web server under my desk from the mid ’90s until 2007 when I started using a hoster for this blog. I still run little experiments from my own server(s) at home. The web was intentioned to be both read and write even at the level of a page you visited (in short the web as online collaboration tool, in a way like Google documents). For most people the general web is preceived as read-only I assume, even if they participate in silos where they do post stuff themselves.
2. 5G wireless service, as a way for telco’s to do the same as cable companies did before, in the form of content-defined packages. I am not sure if this could play out this way in the Netherlands or the EU, where net neutrality is better rooted in law, and where, especially after the end of roaming charges in the EU, metered data plans either have become meaningless as unmetered plans are cheap enough, or at least the metered plans themselves are large enough to make e.g. zero-rating a meaningless concept. 5G could however mean households might choose to no longer use a fixed internet subscription for at home, and do away with their own wifi networks, I suspect, and introducing a new dependency where your mobile and at home access are all the same thing and a singular choke point.
3. government censorship, with China being the most visible one in this space, but many countries do aim to block specific services at least temporarily, and many countries and collections of countries are on the path to realising their own ‘data spaces’. While understandable, as data and networks are strategic resources now, it also carries the risk of fragmentation of the internet (Russia e.g.), motivated ostensibly by safety concerns but with a big dollop of wanting control over citizens.
4. the advertising-supported commercial Internet. This is the one most felt currently. Adtech that tracks you across your websurfing habits, and not just in the silos you inhabit
5. protectionism, which Searls ties to EU privacy laws, which I find a very odd remark. While GDPR could be better, it is a quality instrument with a rising floor, that is not designed to protect the EU market, but to encourage global compliance to its standards. A way of shaping instruments the EU uses more often, and has proven to be a succesfull export product. The cookie notices he mentions are a nuisance, but not the result of the GDPR, and in my mind more caused by interpreting the (currently under revision) cookie law in a deliberate cumbersome way. Even then, I don’t see how privacy regulation is protectionism, as it finds its root in human rights, not competition law.
6. Facebook.org, or digital colonialism. This is the efforts by silos like FB to bring the ‘next billion’ online in a fully walled garden that is free of charge and presented as being the web, or worse the internet itself. I’ve seen this in action in developing countries and it’s unavoidable for most if not all, because it is the only way to access the power of agency that the internet promises, when there’s is no way you can afford connectivity.
7. forgotten past, caused by the focus on the latest, the newest, while at the same time the old is not only forgotten but also actively lost as it gets taken offline etc. I think this is where strong opportunities are arising for niche search engines and also search engines as a personal tool. You don’t need to build the next Google or be a market player even, to meaningfully erode the position of Google search. For instance it is quite feasible to have my own search engine that only searches all the blogs I subscribe and have subscribed to (I actually should build that). At the same time, there is a slow steady and increasing effort of bringing more of the old, just not the old web, online by the ongoing digitisation of physical archives and collections of artefacts. More of our past, our global cultural heritage, is coming onto the web every day and it is really still only at the start.
8. algorithmic opacity. This one is very much on the agenda across Europe currently, mainly as part of ethical discussions and right now mostly centered around government transparency. The GDPR contains a clause that automated algorithmic decision making about people is not allowed. At the very least having explainable alogrithms, and transparent usage of them is a likely emerging practice. Asymmetry of decision making also plays a useful role. This one too is closely tied to human rights which will help bring in parties to the discussion that are not of the tech world. At issue with what we currently see of algorithms is that they are used over our heads, and not yet much as personal tool, where it could increase our networked agency.
9. the one inside our heads, where we accept the internet as it is presented to us by those invested in one or more of the above 8 enclosures. With understanding what the internet is and how it is a commons as a public awareness need.

Go read the entire thing, where Doc Searls describes what the internet is, how it connects to human experience and making the hyper local key again when there is a global commons encompassing everyone, and how it erodes and replaces institutions of the 20th century and earlier. He talks about how the internet “means we are all authors of each other“.

At the end he asks What might be the best way to look at the Internet and its uses most sensibly?, and concludes “I think the answer is governance predicated on the realization that the Internet is perhaps the ultimate commons“, and “There is so much to work on: expansion of agency, sensibility around license and copyright, freedom to benefit individuals and society alike, protections that don’t foreclose opportunity, saving journalism, modernizing the academy, creating and sharing wealth without victims, de-financializing our economies… the list is very long”

I’m happy to be working on the first three of those.

Walled garden, image by Ron Frazier, license CC BY

This graphic from WakeMed shows the areas most often missed while washing hands. It’s based on an old-ish study from 1978 by Taylor LJ that evaluated handwashing techniques by health professionals. I’m guessing (hoping) that technique has improved since then.

Also, if there were a diagram based on data collected from the men’s room, the hands would just be completely colored red. Wash your hands, please. It’s kind of important right now.

Tags: handwash, hygiene

• An app can be a home-cooked meal
  "And, when you free programming from the requirement to be general and professional and SCALABLE, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, one that persists as you use the app together."

  This is great. I am always bewildered by the direct equivalence of learning-to-code and learning-to-make-money. Instead, learning to cook for yourself – just well enough for you and the few people who need you – is a nice metaphor, as is cookery itself.

  Also: oh for something like "Hypercard for iOS", and oh for an end to code-signing and developer accounts and professionalisation-with-no-meaningful-alternative.

  (tags: development programming robinsloan coding amateur )

climate-changing:

blackswaneuroparedux:

The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

- Iris Murdoch

Before the bicycle came along, women were expected to progress on foot, in carriages, or on horseback, always while supervised and preferably with the utmost slowness and delicacy. How you traveled denoted your class; to be walking the streets was seen as a highly suspect activity, and was tightly moderated among 19th century women of the upper classes, who were meant to stay largely indoors or to venture outside only with chaperones and in acceptable public spaces.

Various inventions changed that, from the department store to the car — but the bicycle was likely the most crucial of them all. Inexpensive, easy to use and capable of high speeds, the velocipede, as it was then known (the women who rode them were known as “velocipedestriennes” at the time), would remake the world for women in the 19th century, and has done so ever since. Get on your bikes and let’s have some fun.

Bicycling didn’t just give women a way to get around freely; it also, surprisingly, played a role in women’s sexual liberation —  purely because some people believed that if women went around straddling something, they would start having orgasms all over the place  (which, needless to say, these people thought was a bad thing). Even worse according to some quack doctors it would lead to lesbianism.

Traditionalists fulminated against the idea of the bicycle as an instrument that would instigate a sexual awakening, whether personal, as many people expressed trepidation about a woman straddling a bicycle seat and experiencing the shocks and vibrations of the road, or socially, as bicycles gave women the freedom to escape the watchful eyes of parents and chaperones.“ Bicycles: The 19th century’s shocking vibrator-slash-Uber alternative.

However, not every 19th century sexist was entirely upset by the idea of women going out and getting exercise. It’s noted in City Cycling that some thinkers, hilariously enough, recommended the idea because the strength of cycling would make them “more fit for motherhood.” Women who wanted approval from their doctors for their cycling habit, though, also ran the risk that they’d be informed that the bicycle would rattle their innards and leave them vulnerable to everything from tuberculosis to gout.

They were also informed that “bicycle face,” the tense expression of concentration required for dodging traffic, would ruin their beauty, and that the whole practice would make them bowlegged from too much pedaling. Women kept pedaling regardless.

Biking can be so much fun.

The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

| Iris Murdoch

Google has released a Chrome 81 beta that includes WebXR support for browser-based AR and a new Web NFC framework.

Developers will now be able to have a way to bring AR to users across platforms without having to rely on native apps. Chrome 81 enables flags that already existed in the current framework of the software.

Enabling these flags is going to make AR available to users when developers begin using the new capabilities

“Chrome 81 adds two new immersive features to the web, both designed to support augmented reality. The WebXR Device API, first enabled in Chrome 79, now supports augmented reality. We’ve also added support for the WebXR Hit Test API, an API for placing objects in a real-world view,” Google wrote in a blog post.

The new test feature makes it easy for web pages to place virtual objects in the real-world through a camera.

Further, there is also a new Web NFC framework that allows web pages to read and write to NFC tags. Google says that this is going to be useful for museum exhibits and inventory management. Web NFC is still in the trial phase, which means that it could change overtime.

Chrome 81 also adds enhancements to security, and pulls support for the old TLS 1.0 and 1.1 protocols that secure HTTPS traffic.

Source: Chromium Blog Via: Engadget 

The post Chrome 81 beta adds support for AR and web NFC appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The v0.9 release of the Windows Terminal has arrived! This is the last version of the Terminal that will include new features before the v1 release. You can download the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Let’s dive into what’s new!

Command Line Arguments

The wt execution alias now supports command line arguments! You can now launch Terminal with new tabs and panes split just how you like, with the profiles you like, starting in the directories you like! The possibilities are endless! Here are some examples:

wt -d .
Opens the Terminal with the default profile in the current working directory.

wt -d . ; new-tab -d C:\ pwsh.exe
Opens the Terminal with two tabs. The first is running the default profile starting in the current working directory. The second is using the default profile with pwsh.exe as the "commandline" (instead of the default profile’s "commandline") starting in the C:\ directory.

wt -p "Windows PowerShell" -d . ; split-pane -V wsl.exe
Opens the Terminal with two panes, split vertically. The top pane is running the profile with the name “Windows Terminal” and the bottom pane is running the default profile using wsl.exe as the "commandline" (instead of the default profile’s "commandline").

wt -d C:\Users\cinnamon\GitHub\WindowsTerminal ; split-pane -p "Command Prompt" ; split-pane -p "Ubuntu" -d \\wsl$\Ubuntu\home\cinnak -H
See below.

If you’d like to read up on everything you can do with our new command line arguments, check out the full documentation here.

Auto-Detect PowerShell

If you’re a big fan of PowerShell Core, we have great news for you. The Windows Terminal will now detect any version of PowerShell and automatically create a profile for you. The PowerShell version we think looks best (starting from highest version number, to the most GA version, to the best-packaged version) will be named as “PowerShell” and will take the original PowerShell Core slot in the dropdown.

Confirm Close All Tabs

Are you someone who always wants to close all of your tabs without being asked every time? If you said yes, this new feature is for you! A new global setting has been created that allows you to always hide the “Close All Tabs” confirmation dialog. You can set "confirmCloseAllTabs" to false at the top of your profiles.json file and you’ll never see that popup again! Thanks to @rstat1 for the contribution of this new setting.

Other Improvements

Accessibility: You can now navigate word-by-word using Narrator or NVDA!

You can now drag and drop a file into the Terminal and the file path will be printed!

Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins are bound by default to copy and paste respectively!

You can now hold Shift and click to expand your selection!

VS Code keys used for key bindings are now supported (i.e. "pgdn" and "pagedown" are both valid)!

Bug Fixes

Accessibility: Terminal won’t crash when Narrator is running!

Terminal won’t crash when you provide an invalid background image or icon path!

Our popup dialogs all now have rounded buttons!

The search box now works properly in high contrast!

Some ligatures will render more correctly!

Top Contributors

We always love working with our community and we’d like to give out our monthly contribution awards. Check out the winners!

Contributors Who Opened the Most Non-Duplicate Issues

j4james

JekRock

jsoref

vadimkantorov

Contributors Who Created the Most Merged Pull Requests

j4james

german-one

Harmon758

vtabota

mkitzan

rholliday

iamakulov

Contributors Who Provided the Most Comments on Pull Requests

jsoref

j4james

german-one

Let’s Chat

If you ever have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to Kayla (@cinnamon_msft) on Twitter or file an issue on GitHub. We hope you like this feature-complete release of the Terminal before v1 and we’ll be back with another update soon!

The post Windows Terminal Preview v0.9 Release appeared first on Windows Command Line.

I wouldn't have worded it this way (I still want to say "knowledge is recognition") but I really really like this formulation by Nick Shackleton-Jones and would certainly say that he captures the essence of it. "People struggle with the idea that thinking is just fancy feeling – that thoughts such as a conversation or a book could just be an extrapolation of the barking sounds that a dog makes. But they are. People aren’t much moved by reason, they are profoundly illogical... But how can thinking be comprised entirely of ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’? Of course it is not. Open a dictionary. Each of those words describes a distinct sentiment."

Daughter got a new inflatable beach ball. The previous didn’t survive a game of ‘tennis’ that involved a stick as racket. This one is also a globe. When I came home she ran to me showing it and out of the blue said “it shows the entire world, it even has Great Britain.” Don’t know where she got it from or why it was important to her, but she very clearly articulated Groot Brittanië, which sounds like Great Brittaniá in Dutch.

Happy Valentines! A day that celebrates love comes, in my mind, second only to the one that celebrates giving thanks. I didn’t do roses or chocolate, but I made dinner for a couple of people I love; one of the dishes was improvised and came out well, so this recipe is my valentine to the world.

The main ingredients are salmon and leeks; thus “Sally Leekie”.

Ingredients

1. Salmon: We use wild frozen-at-sea Pacific Sockeye, usually obtainable in Vancouver. 750g fed three generously.

2. Leeks: A couple of big ones.

3. Garlic: Confession: For this dish, I used minced garlic out of a jar that I bought in a supermarket; a couple of heaping teaspoons-full.

4. Seasoning: Oregano, Fennel, and black pepper, all served liberally.

5. Oil: Now this is interesting. I started with olive oil because it was at the front of the cupboard, then thought “Leeks? Everyone knows you cook them in butter!” so I added some of that too. It came out nicely.

Process

1. I covered the bottom of a sautee pan with oil, tossed in the garlic and seasoning, and heated it to not-quite-bubbling-or-smoking for ten or fifteen minutes.

2. While this was happening, I chopped the leeks and salmon. If you haven’t done leeks before, you have to cut them lengthwise then take them over to the sink and wash out the mud and gunk that tends to occur; leeks are just not hygenic vegetables. Salmon into bite-size chunks.

3. I turned up the heat to the point that a few bubbles were occurring, and put the chopped leeks through in three batches. Watch out; they cook down tremendously, so you want to start with more than you need. Maybe five minutes a batch; until they’ve lost their curl but not their color. I used a bowl in the warming drawer under the oven to accumulate the leeks and keep them warm.

4. Once the leeks were done I dropped the salmon into the garlicky spiced leek-flavored oil and sauteed that for maybe ten minutes, till all the sides were sealed and it was getting ready to eat.

5. Finally, I took the leeks out of the warming drawer, tossed them in with the salmon, turned the heat up so there was a bit of smoke, and tossed the mixture together.

It looked neat, the salmon pink contrasting with the leek green. There were no leftovers and sincere compliments.

This is a written version of a talk that I gave at WaffleJS in February, which itself was an expansion of a Twitter conversation from October.

Okay, so it starts with my delayed math education. As part of my Computer Science program, I had access to world-class math professors, access that I mostly wasted. I didn’t like math: the topics were so removed from practice, and I was already frustrated by the highly theoretical, and – I thought at the time and mostly still do – out-of-touch CS program.

Unfortunately, a few years after graduating, I got the hunger for math. Seeing how I could apply just a little bit of math knowledge to great effect in my work & hobbies had me inspired. But I had no clear way of learning it.

So I started Simple Statistics in 2012 as a way to learn math, and ever since then, I’ve expanded and maintained the project. It now includes a lot of different algorithms, is one of the most ‘starred’ JavaScript math projects, and presumably is used by people.

But I started it in 2012. In tech years that’s a really long time ago. Between then and now, there have been 8 LTS releases of Node. JavaScript and its environments have radically changed. 2012 was before the introduction of React or the first commit to Babel.

So what I noticed over the years was that tests kept breaking when I updated Node. I’d have a test like:

t.equal(ss.gamma(11.54), 13098426.039156161);

That would work in Node v10 and break in Node v12. And this is not some complex method: gamma is implemented with arithmetic, Math.pow, Math.sqrt, and Math.sin.

Arithmetic

So I know what you might be thinking: arithmetic. JavaScript, on Twitter, gets a lot of heat for this behavior:

0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004

As I wrote in JavaScript wats, dissected, this is the behavior of every popular programming language, even stodgy pedantic ones like Haskell. Floating point arithmetic might be weird, but it’s very consistent and well-specified: the IEEE 754 specification is rigorously implemented. So it’s not arithmetic: addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication are pretty set in stone.

Math

What it was, was Math. In particular, all of the methods that come after Math.

Methods like Math.sin, Math.cos, Math.exp, Math.pow, Math.tan: essential ingredients for geometry and basic computation. I started isolating changes in basic function behavior between versions. For example:

Calculating Math.tanh(0.1)

// Node 4
0.09966799462495590234
// Node 6
0.09966799462495581907

Calculating Math.pow(1/3, 3)

// Node 10
0.03703703703703703498
// Node 12
0.03703703703703702804

To make matters worse, it’s not just Node’s behavior that’s changing: so are browsers and other places you use JavaScript.

So this led to the question: what is math?

Trigonometry methods are easy to show: given a unit circle and a few months of high school, you know that cosine and sine will get you coordinates on the rim, and that they’ll draw little squigglies if plotted on X & Y. Actually deriving those methods is what you’ll learn in advanced classes, but the method that you use - the Taylor series - relies on an infinite series, which would be rather laborious for a computer to solve.

“There is no standard algorithm for calculating sine. IEEE 754-2008, the most widely used standard for floating-point computation, does not address calculating trigonometric functions such as sine.”

-Wikipedia

Computers use a variety of different estimations and algorithms to do math, things like CORDIC and various cheating algorithms and lookup tables. This heterogeny explains all of the ‘fastmath’ libraries you can find on GitHub: there’s more than one way to implement Math.sin. Famously, Quake III Arena used a faster replacement for the inverse square root method in order to speed up rendering.

So math is implemented as algorithms, and there are multiple common algorithms – and variations of those algorithms – used in practice.

Instead of telling implementations to pick an algorithm, the JavaScript specification grants them a lot of wiggle room in terms of how they implement these basic functions.

The behaviour of the functions acos, acosh, asin, asinh, atan, atanh, atan2, cbrt, cos, cosh, exp, expm1, hypot, log,log1p, log2, log10, pow, random, sin, sinh, sqrt, tan, and tanh is not precisely specified here except to require specific results for certain argument values that represent boundary cases of interest.

-ECMA-262, 10th edition, section 20.2.2 aka “JavaScript”

I don’t know the inner workings of the standards committees, but I imagine they wanted to make sure that just in case Intel or AMD introduce super-fast new math instructions in a new processor, JavaScript wouldn’t have a compatibility crisis.

Because there are a lot of JavaScript interpreters that are commonly used, because JavaScript is often used via web browsers and there still is some competition between web browsers, and because even popular JavaScript implementations are under pressure to evolve quickly to be the most performant… because of all that, this matters. You actually will encounter, on a regular basis, differences in math.

This doesn’t matter as much in other interpreted languages, because they tend to have ‘canonical’ interpreters: most of the time you use the Python interpreter of the Python language.

Where math happens

Next let’s zoom into where these math implementations live. See, in JavaScript, there are three places where basic math can happen:

1. The CPU
2. The language interpreter (the C++ and C code that underlies JavaScript implementations)
3. In software itself, as a library

1: The CPU

This was my first guess: I assumed that since CPUs implement arithmetic, they might implement some higher-level math. It turns out that CPUs do have instructions to do trigonometry and other operations, but they’re rarely invoked. The CPU (x86) implementation of sine doesn’t get much love because it’s not reliably faster than an implementation in software (using arithmetic operations on the CPU), nor as accurate.

Intel also bears some blame for overstating the accuracy of their trigonometric operations by many magnitudes. That kind of mistake is especially tragic because, unlike software, you can’t patch chips.

2: The language interpreter

This is how most of the implementations do it, and they implement math in a variety of ways.

• V8 & SpiderMonkey use (slightly different) ports of the fdlibm library for most operations. It has been passed down through the generations, originally written at Sun Microsystems.
• JavaScriptCore (Safari) uses cmath for most operations.
• Internet Explorer used some cmath, but also used some assembly instructions and actually did use CPU-provided trig methods when it was compiled for CPUs that had them.

Historically, all of these implementations have shifted: V8 used to use a homegrown solution for math, and then used a port of fdlibm to JavaScript, before finally settling on fdlibm in C.

Why this is an issue

Here’s why this is a problem: it chips away at JavaScript’s ability to give consistent results to any problem including mathematics. And that especially hits data science. I want JavaScript to be a contender for data science in the browser, and – amongst some other issues, like number types and a confounding lack of a commonly-used data-frames library – an inability to produce replicable results means adding more crisis to the replication crisis in the sciences.

The third way

There is a way out that we can use today. stdlib is a JavaScript library that reimplements higher-level math using arithmetic alone. Arithmetic is fully-specified and standard, so the results that stdlib gives you are also fully consistent, across all the platforms.

This comes at the cost of complexity and speed: stdlib isn’t consistently as fast as built-in methods, and you’ll need to require a library ‘just’ to compute sine.

But in the wider view, this is pretty normal! WebAssembly, for example, doesn’t give you higher-level math methods at all and recommends you include a math implementation in your modules themselves:

“WebAssembly doesn’t include its own math functions like sin, cos, exp, pow, and so on. WebAssembly’s strategy for such functions is to allow them to be implemented as library routines in WebAssembly itself (note that x86’s sin and cos instructions are slow and imprecise and are generally avoided these days anyway).”

And this is the way that compiled languages have always worked: when you compile a C program, the methods you import from math.h are included in the compiled binary.

Using an epsilon

If you don’t want to include stdlib to do math but you do want to test math-heavy code, you’ll probably have to do what simple-statistics does right now: use an epsilon. Of the 5+ uses of epsilon in math, the one I’m referring to is “an arbitrarily small positive quantity”. It’s a tiny number. Here’s simple-statistics’s implementation: the number 0.0001.

You then compare Math.abs(result - expected) < epsilon to make sure you got within range of the desired value, with a little bit of wiggle room.

The moral of the story

Here’s where I was a little short on time in person and have some room to expand.

First, what’s under the hood is rarely what you expect. Our current tech stack is heavily optimized and a lot of optimizations are really just dirty tricks. For example, the number of hardware instructions it takes to solve Math.sin varies based on the input, because there are lots of special cases. When you get to more complex cases, like ‘sorting an array’, there are often multiple algorithms that the interpreter chooses between in order to give you your final result. Basically, the cost of anything you do in an interpreted language is variable.

Second, don’t trust the system too much. What I was seeing between Node versions really should have been a bug in the testing library, or something in my code, or maybe in simple-statistics itself. But in this case, digging deeper revealed that what I was seeing was exactly what you don’t expect: a glitch in the language itself.

Third, everyone’s winging it. Reading through the V8 implementation gives you a deep appreciation of the genius involved in implementing interpreters, but also an appreciation that it’s just humans doing the implementation: they make mistakes, and, as evidenced by the constantly-changing algorithms for mathematics, always have room to improve.

Addendums:

Precision: Commentators on Twitter have pointed out that the variation in example results is outside the significant digits of floating point. This is technically correct, and means that you could potentially come up with a slightly more precise way to compare them than using an epsilon. But practically it’s the same story – the trailing digits will propagate into results and create real-world discrepencies. Additionally, the examples I gave aren’t exhaustive: JavaScript interpreters can, without cheating the specification, introduce numerical differences in the significant portion of a result.

JavaScript: This isn’t a critique of JavaScript. I think that the language made an appropriate compromise in the face of an uncertain future and lots and lots of platforms. And it’s really hard to compare any other language directly to JavaScript because the JavaScript ecosystem - lots of different interpreters of the language all coexisting - is pretty darn uncommon, and it’s also one of JavaScript’s biggest strengths. Also, to be clear, that this is totally different than JavaScript-the-language changing: that’s also a thing that’s happening, and I’m pretty excited about what’s changing in the language.

Stdlib or an epsilon: The practical solution in most cases is using an epsilon. Stdlib is fascinating and powerful, but the cost of including an additional library for mathematics is quite high – and in many cases these small differences in output don’t matter for applications.

It’s fair to say that this week was unexpected in its events. On Monday afternoon, I received a phone call from my son’s school, just as I was just finishing up a meeting. Like most parents, I’ve come to dread these calls, as it usually means something is wrong.

And something was very wrong with my son. I rushed down there, taking the car despite it being less than a 10-minute walk. When I arrived, he was bent over, and unable to move his neck. He couldn’t really feel his left hand and had reduced sensation in his left arm. At lunchtime, a friend had playfully put him in a headlock, squeezed, and they had both fallen to the floor.

I drove him straight to hospital. That hospital sent him by ambulance to a larger one with more specialised equipment. He had an MRI scan. At one point it looked very much like spinal surgery would be necessary.

Given my son had been knocked out on the school premises last year, I met with the headteacher to talk about their emergency procedures. On both occasions I had to drive my son to hospital. On both occasions they should have called an ambulance. Serious head and neck trauma always requires immediate help from medical professionals, especially with children.

At the time of writing, my son’s prognosis is good. He had the rest of the week off school, and was delighted that he was encouraged to play PS4 games to improve the sensation in his left hand. That’s returning, thankfully, and he has a greater range of movement in his neck. The spinal consultant told us in a follow-up visit on Friday that my son should make a full recovery. Just no sport for a few weeks.

There’s been a steady stream of my son’s friends coming around to visit, bringing cards, presents, and their best wishes. I was particularly impressed that the friend who caused the injury was the first to come around and express his deep regret. I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage or wherewithal to do that aged thirteen.

In life, I think it’s reasonable to expect the unexpected. Stressful events and worrying times befall us all, so it’s good to prepare ourselves for them. I was strangely calm throughout all of the events of this week, which is in marked contrast to when my son had his first febrile convulsion at the age of two.

Since then, I’ve read a lot of Stoic philosophy, become a more experienced parent, and gone through some therapy. As a result, while I’m obviously not unfeeling, I was able to separate my own emotions from the situation.

As I’ve shared before, there’s a particularly useful saying from Epictetus which is worth quoting again:

If you wish your children, and your wife, and your friends to live for ever, you are stupid; for you wish to be in control of things which you cannot, you wish for things that belong to others to be your own… Exercise, therefore, what is in your control.

Epictetus

That’s not to say that I was preparing for my son’s death. But it’s good to be reminded that there are some things that we can control, and some things we cannot. In fact, pretty much all of the teachings of Epictetus come down to this.

Everything else this week has faded into insignificance compared to the injury to my son. I worked two half-days on Monday and Tuesday for Moodle, as well as Friday. On Wednesday and Thursday I continued doing some work for the co-op in preparation for launching a community space for public sector leader. We also had some conversations with potential clients.

Over the last few days I’ve collated a bunch of quotations at Discours.es and published a Thought Shrapnel article with a particularly long title: There are many non-essential activities, moths of precious time, and it’s worse to take an interest in irrelevant things than do nothing at all. That’s a quotation from Baltasar Gracián.

This week’s microcast, Strategies for dealing with surveillance capitalism, was my response to an audio provocation from Stephen Haggard, and the link roundup, Friday feelings, contained some particularly interesting links, I thought.

I’d just like to take this opportunity, buried down here at the bottom of my weeknote, to thank my family for being so fantastic. My wife obviously found what happened this week traumatic, but was dependable and loving in equal measure.

My parents rallied around, taking my son out for walks and looking after him while my wife and I needed a break. And my daughter has got on with things like an absolute boss, being Star of the Week for her “perfect behaviour, hard work, and great attitude”. Thank you all.

Next week is half-term, so given we’re not going away, instead of taking full days off, I’ll be working half-days for both Moodle and the co-op. There’s another storm coming, apparently, so Team Belshaw will mostly be huddled inside, sheltering from the weather…

Image by Dhruv Weaver

Since my last post I’ve gotten most of the way through writing a book (i hope), gotten accepted to a PhD program, and have started a new position at the University of Windsor’s Office of Open Learning. I am now the Learning Specialist: Digital Learning Strategy and Special Projects. So far – I’ve been having a pile of fun in this role. One of the first things I was asked to do is put together a model for a summer education event. This I have done working with my colleagues here at the Office in Windsor.

The Future Challenges Institute is going to be held on the 11th and 12th of August in Windsor Ontario Canada. You are most welcome to come.

Futures thinking, if you’ve never gotten the chance to try it, is kind of like the opposite of a traditional academic approach. It’s in no way meant to replace it, but rather give a group of people an opportunity to look at the challenges they are facing from a new perspective. Instead of looking at all the research that has been done by your excellent colleagues, you take a look at what trends seem to be happening and ask yourself what would happen if those trends became pervasive. Here’s an example of a part of that process from a session I ran ten years (omg ten years?!?) ago. Also, a nice introduction by Fast Company.

As I started the research for this process, I was fortunate to come across the excellent futures work that has been done by SSHRC. If you’re not familiar with them, they are the research/granting agency in Canada that supports the social sciences and the humanities. In looking through their work we realised we could build on the work that they’ve done by looking at their societal challenges through the lens of education.

We are looking for up to 60 interested people to come work with us so we can think about what responsibility education has to address the challenges facing our society today. The four tracks we’ve decided to tackle are:

• The Emerging Asocial Society
• Working in the Digital Economy
• Truth Under Fire in a Post-Fact World
• Building Better Lives Across the Gender Spectrum

You’ll note that these challenges aren’t ‘challenges in education’ but rather things that education contributes to, in one way or another.

I’ll post more on this as we get closer to the event, but for now I just want to invite you all to put us in your calendar.

You can check things out at futurechallenges.ca

Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith und die Autorin Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons, The Promise and The Perils of the Digital Age. Jetzt auch in deutscher Übersetzung von Norbert Juraschitz und Anja Lerz.

Sensors are key for smartphones to interact and read data from their environment. They enable features like screen-lock during a call, rotating the display when you flip the phone or adjusting the screen brightness when you walk outside.

Our team has made good progress enabling the sensors of the Librem 5 in software. Here are a few of the recent changes.

Sensor improvements

Gyro support has been added to the mainline kernel. With the Librem 5 now aware of orientation, tilting the phone can be used as controller input or to read positioning. It could be used to create a sleep monitor app, a step counter, a simple motion detector or for gaming.

The Librem 5 now reports light level in a more accurate and standard way. This data can be pulled in by an application and will at some point be used to adjust the display automatically.

Thanks to community involvement/Guido from our team, screen rotation using the accelerometer and locking the screen via the proximity sensor are both in the testing phase.

The software stack around sensors is coming together piece by piece. It will take longer for all sensors to be working fully. Software updates will shortly bring features like auto-rotate and proximity screen locking.

Discover the Librem 5

Purism believes building the Librem 5 is just one step on the road to launching a digital rights movement, where we—the-people stand up for our digital rights, where we place the control of your data and your family’s data back where it belongs: in your own hands.

Preorder now

The post Librem 5 Gyro and Ambient Light Sensor Progress appeared first on Purism.

Parasite, which won four Oscars including Best Picture, is headed to Bell’s Crave streaming platform.

According to a post from Crave’s Instagram account, Parasite will arrive on the service in May. It’s not currently clear what the exact date is, as the Crave post was short on details.

Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, Parasite is a South Korean film that details the lives of a low-income family that cons its way into becoming employees of a much wealthier family.

View this post on Instagram

Best Picture Best Director Best International Feature Best Original Screenplay #Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s four-time #Oscar winning film, is coming to Crave in May.

A post shared by @ cravecanada on Feb 15, 2020 at 7:16am PST

It’s possible Parasite will come to Crave as part of HBO, considering recent rumours suggest the company is working on a series based on the movie. Since current and future HBO content will come to Crave, a future Parasite series would likely find it’s way to Canadian streamers that way.

Of course, that’s just speculation at this point. Either way, Canadians can look forward to streaming Parasite on Crave later this year if they aren’t interested in purchasing or renting the movie before then.

Source: Crave

The post Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ will come to Crave in May appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Every week, MobileSyrup goes over some of the most notable movies and TV shows to have recently hit Canadian streaming platforms.

This column typically focuses on content from Amazon Prime Video Canada, Crave and Netflix Canada, but other streaming services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ will be mentioned when relevant.

Additionally, we’ll highlight shows or movies that are made in Canada, involve notable Canadian cast or crew and/or are filmed in Canada.

Amazon Prime Video

The Farewell

After learning that their grandmother only has a short time left to live, Billi and her family try to spend time with her while keeping her diagnosis a secret.

The Farewell was written and directed by Lulu Wang (Posthumous) and stars Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians), Tzi Ma (Man in the High Castle), Diana Lin (The Family Law) and Zhao Shu-zen (The Story of Ming Lan).

Original theatrical release date: July 12th, 2019
Amazon Prime Video Canada release date: February 13th, 2020
Genre: Comedy-drama
Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes score: 98 percent

Stream The Farewell here.

Amazon Prime Video is included at no additional cost in a $79/year Amazon Prime subscription.

The full list of movies and shows hitting Amazon Prime Video Canada this month can be found here.

Apple TV+

Visible: Out on Television [Apple TV+ Original]

Through archival footage and new interviews, this docuseries takes a look at the history of the LGBTQ movement on TV.

Some of the featured celebrities include Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Neil Patrick Harris, Billy Porter, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Rachel Maddow.

Apple TV+ Canada release date: February 14th, 2020
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: Five episodes (around 50 minutes each)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 100 percent

Stream Visible: Out on Television here.

An Apple TV+ subscription costs $5.99/month in Canada. Find out what’s coming to the service in the first half of 2020 here.

Crave

Aisha Brown: The First Black Woman Ever [Crave Original]

Check out #CraveTV ‘s new comedy special tomorrow Friday 14th February: Aisha Brown (@Aieeesha )THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN EVER !!! pic.twitter.com/yjH0rYqiR9

— Just For Laughs (@justforlaughs) February 13, 2020

Toronto comedian Aisha Brown riffs on everything from clinical depression and racism to Donald Trump and her boyfriend’s penis.

Crave release date: February 14th, 2020
Genre: Comedy
Runtime: One hour
Rotten Tomatoes score: N/A

Stream Aisha Brown: The First Black Woman Ever here.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (Season 7)

Late night host John Oliver’s news-oriented comedy show returns for its seventh season right on time for the Presidential primaries.

HBO Canada/Crave release date: February 16th, 2020 at 11pm ET (first episode, new episodes every Sunday night)
Genre: Comedy, news
Runtime: 30 episodes (about 28 minutes each)
Rotten Tomatoes score: N/A

Stream Last Week Tonight With John Oliver here. Note that a $19.98/month Crave + Movies + HBO subscription is required.

The Souvenir

A young film school student struggles in a relationship with an older man who encourages her ambition.

The Souvenir was written and directed by Joanna Hogg (Unrelated) and stars Honor Swinton Burke (I Am Love), Tom Burke (The Musketeers) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton).

It’s worth noting that a sequel is currently in production.

Original theatrical release date: May 1st, 2019
Crave release date: February 14th, 2020
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 1 hour, 19 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes score: 90 percent

Stream The Souvenir here. Note that a $19.98/month Crave + Movies + HBO subscription is required.

A standard Crave subscription costs $9.99/month, with Starz costing another $5.99/month and HBO an additional $9.99/month.

The full list of movies and shows coming to Crave this month can be found here.

Netflix

Love is Blind [Netflix Original]

Hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, this reality show follows a group of single men and women who try to find love and eventually get married — all without meeting in person.

Netflix Canada release date: February 13th, 2020 (first five episodes; episodes six to nine premiere on February 20th and the finale releases on February 27th)
Genre: Reality
Runtime: 10 episodes (around one hour each)
Rotten Tomatoes score: N/A

Stream Love is Blind here.

Narcos: Mexico (Season 2) [Netflix Original]

Félix struggles to maintain control of the cocaine trade amidst the DEA’s investigations and conflict within his own organization.

Narcos: Mexico was created by Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard, and Doug Miro (Narcos) and stars Diego Luna (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and Scoot McNairy (Argo).

Netflix Canada release date: February 13th, 2020
Genre: Crime drama
Runtime: 10 episodes (46 to 66 minutes each)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 100 percent

Stream Narcos: Mexico here.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon [Netflix Original]

Based on Aardman’s claymation Shaun the Sheep series, Farmageddon follows Shaun and the flock as they try to bring a powerful alien back home while evading the Ministry for Alien Detection.

Farmageddon was directed by Will Becher and Richard Phelan (directorial debuts) and features the voices of Justin Fletcher (Something Special), John Sparkles (Peppa Pig), Amalia Vitale (Christmas Eve) and Kate Harbour (Bob the Builder).

Original theatrical release date: October 18th, 2019 (U.K.)
Netflix Canada release date: February 14th, 2020
Genre: Animated sci-fi comedy
Runtime: 1 hour. 27 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes score: 96 percent

Stream A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon here.

To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You [Netflix Original]

Lara Jean’s relationship with Peter becomes complicated when an old crush re-enters her life.

The film is based on Jenny Han’s 2015 novel P.S. I Still Love You, directed by Michael Fimognari (Doctor Sleep) and stars Lana Condor (Deadly Class), Noah Centineo (The Fosters) and Jordan Fisher (The Secret Life of the American Teenager).

It’s worth noting that Netflix has made the first film, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, free to non-subscribers until March 9th. Meanwhile, the series’ third film, To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean, is currently in post-production.

Netflix Canada release date: February 12th, 2020
Genre: Romantic comedy
Runtime: 1 hour. 42 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes score: 73 percent

Stream To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You here.

A ‘Basic’ Netflix subscription costs $9.99/month, a ‘Standard’ subscription (HD-supported) costs $13.99/month and a ‘Premium’ membership is priced at $16.99/month (4K-supported).

The full list of movies and shows hitting Netflix Canada this month can be found here.

What are you planning to stream? If you’re in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick or Saskatchewan, have a happy Family Day!

The post Streaming in Canada on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Crave and Netflix [February 10 — 16] appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A pretty regular week but ending with travel, which always inserts itself as a hard deadline for some work, and thus some otherwise unneeded hurriedness.

This week I

• Had a client meeting to work on the planning for the coming months in implementing an open data publishing platform
• Did a strategic interview for our research into European high value data sets, as part of the new EU open data legislation implementation
• Discussed ongoing actions with a colleague for our digital transformation work with a client
• Had a session on ensuring that in IT procurement sufficient attention is being paid to data sovereignty
• Worked on the first report for our European high value data sets study, to define the scope for our next steps forward. I’m leading two thematic areas, meteorological data and earth observation, and we need to define the scope to get to a manageable effort with a EU wide useful outcome. This was the bit that had a deadline.
• Had a fun workshop with the Dutch National Archives, processing the results of the conversations they held with different stakeholders to learn more about how to increase the reach and service of the NA for their open data. It also yielded a few low hanging fruit such as adding the 400k openly licensed photos to the Creative Commons search engine
• Discussed organising an unconference about civic tech later this spring
• Decided to not do an unconference for my 50th birthday in May
• Went to the dentist to check on how my jawbone is regrowing after having a molar pulled in December. Planned the next 7 months process to get an implant.
• Drove to dear friends M and H in Switzerland on Friday, continuing on together on Saturday to St. Sorlin d’Arve in the French Alps, meeting up with a larger group of friends. We all go back about 3 decades to our university years
• Spent a beautiful spring day in the melting snow with E and Y, while our friends went skiing

Our chalet in the French Alps the coming days.