Look at Post #9. This is how to correct an annoying bug with the high contrast themes in Ubuntu 11.10. Then you can use the high contrast themes for screen grabs in training material, they reproduce much better than the lower contrast ones, especially if you are using monochrome printing for paper materials.

Finding a simple language to teach people who might be interested in learning programming is not easy these days. BASIC isn't around, and most languages have advanced features, which get used fully in production code. The Khan Academy is going for JavaScript.

Nothing new under the sun. The partition of tasks between the client and the server, new 21st century edition

Better than a ribbon bar... I think

Haskell tutorial. Still can't get my head around xmonad.

"Instead of presenting step-by-step instructions for, say, scanning a photo using Simple Scan, we could provide instructions and tutorials on creating a great-looking birthday card that incidentally requires the reader to learn how to scan the photo, touch it up (to remove red eye, crop it to the appropriate size, etc.), install a funky font, pull the photo into Inkscape, lay it out on the page, set up her printer to use the special card stock she bought just for the occasion, etc."

Sounds like "Do everything with Ubuntu" approach. The Ubuntu Manual is a less product oriented more task oriented publication. And a very impressive one as well.

"But Tufte, through his own Graphics Press, is the book’s publisher, and he doesn’t do the usual quick month of hard promotion before heading back to his desk. He keeps going on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year. That may be why there are 1.4 million copies of his titles in print—a staggering figure for self-publishing. (The top seller, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a reliable mover since 1983.)"

Or perhaps the books sell well because they are excellent? Word of mouth, recommendations by lecturers, book lists

Another Zed Shaw book this time about the command line

"It’s essentially the poor man’s text message: a free way to nudge another person or company, but which comes in just one flavor."

'The street finds its own uses for things'

Asus EeePC rapidly becoming unusable with Ubuntu 11.10 due to kernel panics, so using this script to switch off the wlan power saving which appears to be part of the problem. See if this holds up...

"Most of the design decisions at RIM are made by 50 something engineers, otherwise highly accomplished and credible in the field of engineering. But since they've lived most of their lives in the rural areas of Southern Ontario, and don't have any real background or even social sensibility for culture, design and such issues, they're woefully unqualified for the task of aesthetic judgement."

Well, I'm 50 something as well, and I rather like my Blackberry 9300. It does what I need. Love the e-mail.

Really nice implementation. A version of this for GCSE Maths would be wicked.

Nice idea

Mentioned in a post on Ubuntuforums by effenberg0x0. Might explain why the Kingston Traveller's won't ever produce a useable bootable usb.

"The problem, however, is that HCD has developed as a limited view of design. Instead of looking at a person's entire activity, it has primarily focused upon page-by-page analysis, screen-by-screen. As a result, sequences, interruptions, ill-defined goals — all the aspects of real activities, have been ignored."

Beta channel for Firefox

"The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior."

A practical example of a persona being used

Via Hacker News. Sketching for thinking through problems (in this case user interface designs) rather than as final product

Asus EeePC has low frequency kernel panics on 3.0.0.14 so trying 3.0.1-rc kernel to see if it has been addressed or gone away. This bug links issue to the wifi driver, but not sure about that as I was getting panics just on this machine on 3.0.0.11

Old school editor tutorial. Good hints and the Web page uses a very nice style for keyboard characters <kbd>

Another python html template library. Like buses, none for ages then three come along at once. From Hacker News discussion.

Read this for the code

"What happens is that when you order a Kindle Fire - which differs from the Kindle reader by allowing users to browse the web, play games, video and music - it comes with your Amazon account information preloaded, along with "1-Click" ordering. That means anyone who is holding that device can place an order, whether it's their account or not. No prompts come up to confirm the purchase or ask for a password."

Someone *really* thought through their user personae when they were designing this product. Via Daringfireball

(My electric ink Kindle needed some kind of registration with the web site but that could be because we are in the UK, or possibly because I did not have one-click enabled in the main account.)

"Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote."

Young people's understanding of copyright.

"Taking this a couple of steps further, the article points out that, to many people, Facebook's "frictionless" sharing doesn't enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless."

"There is no doubt that technology has made my life much easier. I rarely share the romantic view that things were better when human beings used to do the boring tasks that machines now do. For example, I do not think there is much to gain by bringing back the old telephone operators. However, there are reasons to believe social computing systems should not automate social interactions."

"In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression."

Some kind of equilibrium needs to be found for these new kinds of interaction. It took a generation to get the hang of coffee houses...

"Without the ZaggFolio, I used the iPad mostly for reading and light productivity. I’d happily type brief e-mails on it, but never anything as long as a meaty blog post or article. But Zagg’s no-compromise keyboard made typing every bit as comfy as it is on a notebook. All of a sudden I could write hundreds of words on the iPad. Or thousands of them."

Well, yes, if you produce words for a living, what you need is a full size keyboard. Then anything becomes a production platform, even a 486 running a command line!

"What makes the iPad 2 and keyboard combo so effective for my writing is the “one app at a time” nature of the tablet. The running app takes up the entire screen, and thus my focus. There are no distractions presented while writing, just inputting words on the screen."

Er - a netbook off ebay for fifty quid, Ubuntu and PyRoom. Job done. Alternatively, an Alphasmart Neo.

The Hemingway Trick works for prosaic worksheet writing as well as stories!

"By default, I boot into raw console mode. No Xorg. No graphics. It keeps me focused and writing, keeps me away from a web browser. I think my best work is done in this mode."

I suppose I could use TeX and gs to do the graphics... Text only is fine for writer types. I just use a laptop and go somewhere without wifi, or 'forget' to switch the router on or something.

Gnarly coodinate transformations coded in rpn syntax. Amazing. Directly code mathematical illustrations in PostScript. Could be useful to motivate the creation of functions in Python to draw basic types of chart, symbol & and export them as .eps files

A 30 page handout with a series of activities designed to walk you through the Ubuntu Unity 2d desktop features. Based on an install of the Desktop CD.

Fat fingers

Scanners and searchers

"Quick, what's full of security holes, constantly needing to be patched, piggish enough to make your laptop sound like a jet engine, and yet probably installed everywhere?"

Begins with F

Thinkfan instructions work for the T60 - hacked a config file that quietens the fan down a little.

Ubuntu have a developer page for QML but not too much there yet.

"In Wales, local authorities have powers to make empty houses available to those in need of homes. Conway council is the latest local authority looking to make use of these powers."

Near where I live there are three huge Victorian villas boarded up, one with fire damage. No action as owners (development company) bankrupt. We need this regulation in England.

"Japanese uses different writing systems, for example there are Kanji (about 50 000 chars) and Kana (about 100), where the Kanji represent meanings while the Kana are more like western letters, but representing syllables. Kana are divided by two subsets: Hiragana and Katakana, where Hiragana is the most used part of."

Clearest summary of Japanese writing systems I have come across. In a comment.

"I went to the Qt Developer Days conference with a simple question: could someone write Angry Birds in QML. In other words, can you write a fun, vibrant, visually attractive game in the high-level, managed environment that is QML."

Looks like the answer might be 'yes'

"Interestingly, some kamishibai masters from the 1950s noted that their young audiences became less engaged and were more passive as TV became popular. Kids became used to just sitting in front of content rather than engaging with it."

Students now do *interact* with their Blackberries, so maybe I need kamishibai for phones...

...hence you won't see them using infrared but you can using UV. Nice 'cool' bit of science.

"DRM is snake oil; ultimately the reader has to be able to read whatever they bought, which means shipping a decryption key along with the encrypted file. And once they've got the key, someone will figure out how to use it to unlock the book."

Charlie's got it (although I pay for my Kindle books).

data centre details. Its all about hot air.

"Our grandparents grew up with very little. They valued every possession. I know this because I live in my grandparents’ old house and I’m still finding balls of odd-lengthed twine in the basement. In fact, we humans evolved with very little. We were always starving for food, short of objects, desperate for information."

Essay about the role of libraries and what they should be archiving for the future.

nice simple page style. Terminal hair shirt linux

One html page with self-contained js. Could hack the headings and turn it into a simple task tracker.

"We find that things we look at -- even in a casual, off-hand manner -- are the things we think about. We also find that as we see things, we work on them in our mind in the background. We make a lot more progress letting our subconscious mind work on things while we're busy with more important stuff, like technology development."

So we teach people in rooms painted flat white. New Building Syndrome has to be resisted.

Ubuntu is going for world domination with their Unity interface. PCs in education tend to have weak graphics and be a few years old. Here is a 1 hour lesson exploring Ubuntu default install as you could run of a USB stick.

First draft. Workspaces section needs a little looking at.

"Talking to The Reg this month, Bachman reckons his dyslexia may have worked to his advantage: "I found reading harder than writing so I've always been in a situation where I was writing the forward-looking article because I didn't know what others were doing.""

IDS designer - how you process 275 Million transactions a day.

"At work I have a laptop stand made out of an old cardboard box, made by tracing/cutting around an existing cardboard laptop stand, and slotting it together. I pirated my laptop stand."

Brit uses Ubuntu and pirates his hardware

Via daringfireball. In the US at University level teachers write their own syllabii and define their own criteria for ordinal scale assessment 'grades'. Wallace's syllabii show an honesty about the teaching role and about the student role that is refreshing.

Via Hacker News: suggestion that end user programming was seen as disruptive to the market.

Film about digital tools and their relationship to creativity.

Can a change in UI design be described as a bug if it breaks a commonly used work flow? Interesting dialogue, and some examples.

My own use of computers in general is not sufficiently intense for this to matter much to me, I spend most of my online time in a Web browser, slightly less in an office package, and a lot less in a photo editor, audio editor and a drawing program. Finally well back in the long tail is some programming using maths related languages (pyxplot and R).

"But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT - a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing."

Yup, but LOGO back in the primary schools.

Book with a javascript console built in. Nice. Via Hacker News (ycombinator)

Runs on Ubuntu with a package for Fedora. Via Stephen Downes' blog.

Can I use any of these to help my students to spend more time doing maths, which we all know is the only way to understand maths and therefore pass the exams?

Caution from Weiten, quoted in an e-mail to the author...

"Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I suspect that empirical tests are nonexistent because the authors of self-help and time-management titles are not at all confident that the results would be favorable. Hence, they have no incentive to pursue such research because it is likely to undermine their sales and their ability to write their next book."

"The study does not prove that vitamin D is the cause of the effects seen -- other factors, like disease, could be responsible both for the differences in health and the differences in vitamin D levels, for instance."

Correlation != causality

Useful teaching case

"Researchers, however, have come up with an intriguing option for that wasted heat: putting it to good use in people’s homes."

Used to be swimming pools in the 1960s heated by mainframes...

"...prompts Kittler to formulate his general theory that the "entertainment industry is, in all senses of the term, misuse of military equipment" (GFT p.149), a viewpoint he then supports by tracing the post-WWI civilian careers of military wireless equipment and its surviving operators."

I'd always thought of RCA hiring out audio amplifiers to cinemas as the starting point of electronics in media, but I suppose seeing where the engineers went after the war is a good methodology.

Big list 'o links about Unity desktop and as always no curation so different versions mixed in, e.g. tab in dash has different behaviours documented. Section on correct terminology.

The official Ubuntu Unity guide which assumes that 3d graphics is working

You have to plug in and eject twice in quick succession to get your Kindle e-ink to charge properly on Ubuntu. No idea why!

Evaporation cooling in the Sudan.

Vote up your favourite bash commands. I love the linux community.

2560 dice, and the back of the portrait is a negative image.

Programmers in the enterprise application space talking about the little arrows between the boxes. I am actually one of the little arrows. I've spent a lot of hours this week reformatting information from one source and putting it in another place. Its internal inspection time again...

"One reason I make sculpture is that I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens that show only flatland representations of real things. I like to make real things and Iove the physicality of making sculpture that resides in the physical world of three-space and time."

This looks very interesting...

Just spent a bit of time working out why my Gedit plugins won't work even when I use the 3.x ones...

With the plugins in the right folder and these libraries installed, all is funky.

"Now, as we live in a world divided by opinions acquired via Twitter, it’s never been easier grab onto a clever 140-character quip and assume it’s the truth. The fires of ignorance burn wildly on these acts of intellectual laziness."

"However, often, I find it much easier to get into the zone when I’m just using the laptop unadorned. It’s something about hunching over the small screen, I think."

I'm noticing this as well for certain tasks (text entry) but not for others (anything that needs several windows).

Thought provoking and another data point that suggests I keep the site as simple and design free as possible

Just some words - crossword and shorter definitions

Not surprising to me at all. Simple, serial, linear fits most people's reading style. Tables should have a reason for being tables as they impose a cognitive load, i.e. categories across top and down side.

Old page about lecturing in University and other mathematical career reflections. Worth it for mention of Von Neumann's characterisation of the 50 minute lecture as a 'microcentury'. A microcentury is actually a tad under 53 minutes if you take a mean year as 365.2466 days.