Ode to ipad

I’m sold on the iPad.  I want one.  Despite my disdain towards buying the latest and greatest, is anyone interested in buying a lightly used kidney?  All of my households laptops are dependent upon their lifegiving power cables, or for whatever reason disfunctional.

 

CC/Flickr User tehboris

One possibility about the ipad is setting up a VPN with a desktop computer (Grand central station)- which would be super necessary with the 16 gig model.  Admittedly, I don’t know anything about using a VPN, but I’m sure I could figure it out.  I’ve never needed to transfer data between devices because even my dino-laptop has 60 gigs of storage. 

 

The ability of the ipad to function as an e-reader appeals to me very much.  While I have never been a fan of the kindle or the nook, the sony pocket e-reader is pretty cool.  But, if I’m goign to drop $100 to buy an e-reader, I might as well save up to get the super cool pdf shuffing ipad.  The ability to view, mark, and use pdf’s in an e-reader format is ultimately what sells me on the ipad.  I printed off hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff for my undergraduate research project, all of which is still sitting on my very overloaded booksehelves.

Computing in the Clouds

The other day, my desktop PC caught one of those nasty viruses.  Not the easy ones…but the grand mal virus.  This might have been disastruous but for cloud computing.  Basically, I don’t store anything on a hard drive without having it floating in a cloud somewhere.  The reality of that is all of my data is sitting in one of Google’s giant storage rooms.  So, here’s to cloud computing.  (Side note:  Reformatting my computer did not cause me to have to reload my documents or programs as I expected it would.  So, cloud computing wasn’t exactly necessary.)

CC/Flickr user KevinDooley

For storage I use Gmail.  This system, if inelegant, is very effective.  I am also very keen on Google Docs, this blog post was typed into Google Docs.  I still use Word for all of my major stuff, but my blogs don’t involve much in the way of complicated formatting. 

 

What’s a better way to cloud compute?  What do you use, I’d like to know.

Computer Monitoring in the Classroom

Yesterday I taught a Digital Data Input Class (That’s keyboarding to all of us normal people).  This entailed making sure that 30 or more students stayed on task, and not playing games.  Even though the computers were faced approximately towards the teacher desk, it was impossible to see all of the screens.  This is where LanSchool saved the day.

CC/Flickr User anonymous9000

LanSchool allowed me to view all of the screens of each student, to make the screen go blank, to send messages, to restrict internet usage or application use and a variety of other nifty tricks.  The students still managed to find games using some brilliant Microsoft Excel trick.  But, they were off of the internet, so, it was no harm really.

I opted to reprimand students playing the aforementioned games verbally instead of using the built in chat function.  Sending chat messages to individual students just seemed a bit creepy to me.  As I am not *that much older than my students; I just didn’t go there.

All in all I really enjoyed the ability to monitor all of the students simultaneously, and moreover just the ability to block them all from the internet which I deemed the biggest potential threat.  And I know, its at school, but the part of my brain concerned with ethics kind of questioned the program.

What are your thoughts on computer monitoring programs?  What are your ethical concerns about their use?

Of Google and Greenville. Oh, and April Fools.

Google might not have invented the internet, but it sure has improved it.  E-mail, Earth, document sharing- Google has its hands in just about everything.  Most recently cities have been clamoring to be Google’s super-high-speed broadband guinea pig.  In order to not sound presumptuous I’ll mention that Google wants to revolutionize broadband internet.

Greenville, SC is no different.  Members of the Greenville Social Media Club and others put together a campaign to woo the technical giant.  The campaign featured internet video and a mass of people spelling the word “Google” with glow-sticks in Granville’s super photographic Falls Park.

Michael Bergen

In other news, Google has changed its name to “Topeka”,  or perhaps that’s just another, in a long string of April-Fools Pranks.  However, it does seem a bit telling (Hint:  It’s more than telling) that Google chose to “re-name” itself after a city.  It seems that in a bid to get Google’s attention Topeka changed its name to Google, so…Google is returning the favor.

Singing the Praises of Google Documents

I am finally a fan of Google Documents.  It took about three months of daily work to gain a more than a cursory appreciation.  As I’ve said before, I love the archiveability and the ability to collaborate with others are the biggest factors.

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I’ve been backing up every thing that I write so I don’t have to worry about carrying around a flash drive.  It is nice to be able to work on any document from any internet capable computer.

I still find the word processor a little bit clunky, but over all, I have learned to compensate and appreciate its qualities and to work around flaws.

Avoid Wasting Time on the Internet

Let’s face it, anyone who uses their computer for more than an hour or two wastes valuable time absentmindedly surfing the internet.

Most avid computer users aim for optimum efficiency in their web browsing. Some common methods of increasing efficiency are creating shortcuts on your desktop, making tabs, or using the favorite option.

Here are some tips I’ve found to help cut back on idle surfing.  Bear in mind that the point of this post is to increase productivity by cutting back on idle browsing; not to increase efficiency (i.e. reducing amount of clicks).

Creative Commons

For the last year or so I have had my favorite websites strewn across the tab bar on my Firefox browser. Unfortunately, such easy access to my favorite links caused me to perpetually check my email/news ticker/twitter account, close the window, and then check my email again (you’ve all done it- don’t judge me). Recently, I created folders of shortcuts on my tabs bar. Adding these folders has added one extra click to getting to my preferred links and caused me to cutback on my idle surfing.

Some people use timers to be more aware of time spent on task and to ration break time.

More severe sufferers of idle surfing can be helped using web based applications.  Leechblock is an application for Firefox that allows users to specify cites that they which to block and for how long they are blocked.   [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476]

How do you prevent yourself from surfing the web all day?

New Apple Tablet Steals the Market

The Onion lampoons the iPad saying that Apple CEO Steve Jobs stayed up the night before the presentation sticking iPhones to a cafeteria tray.  Jobs’ said that 75 million people already know how to use the ipad, those iPone, and iPod touch users.  With that in mind the similarities between the iPad and the iPhone cannot be denied; as I see it, scale is the major difference.

Creative Commons

The thing that intrigues me about the iPad is not what it can do, its what the competition cannot do.  The Kindle e-reader that Amazon released in late 2007 has likely met its end, at least in the four hundred dollar category.  Barnes and Noble’s Nook, another e-reader, priced at two hundred ninety-nine dollars, will likely fare the storm against the five hundred dollar iPad.

If price is no issue, no other gizmo really comes close to the iPad’s versatility.  ten hours of battery life, 3g capability, lots of applications, and gobs of accessories make the iPad the new everything tool.  However all of this versatility does seem to cut Apples market a bit.  How many apple products does one need?  I certainly do not expect to see someone with a iPhone, an iPad, and a macbook pro.  I will be interested to see comparisons of relative sales between the products.  Truly, the iPad could replace all of these.

With all the hype, and the excellent release Apple and Jobs have given the iPad, I’m wondering if it bakes cookies? (I’m sure there is an App for that)  I will save final judgment for when people start getting these gadgets and discovering if they do in fact fit the bill.

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Wikipedia Needs Your Help

An appeal from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales

Today, I am asking you to make a donation to support Wikipedia.I started Wikipedia in 2001, and over the past eight years, I’ve been amazed and humbled to see hundreds of thousands of volunteers join with me to build the largest encyclopedia in human history.

Wikipedia isn’t a commercial website. It’s a community creation, entirely written and funded by people like you. More than 340 million people use Wikipedia every month – almost a third of the Internet-connected world. You are part of our community.

I believe in us. I believe that Wikipedia keeps getting better. That’s the whole idea. One person writes something, somebody improves it a little, and it keeps getting better, over time. If you find it useful today, imagine how much we can achieve together in 5, 10, 20 years.

Wikipedia is about the power of people like us to do extraordinary things. People like us write Wikipedia, one word at a time. People like us fund it. It’s proof of our collective potential to change the world.

We need to protect the space where this important work happens. We need to protect Wikipedia. We want to keep it free of charge and free of advertising. We want to keep it open – you can use the information in Wikipedia any way you want. We want to keep it growing – spreading knowledge everywhere, and inviting participation from everyone.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization I created in 2003 to operate, grow, nurture, and protect Wikipedia. For ten million US dollars a year and with a staff of fewer than 35 people, it runs the fifth most-read website in the entire world. I’m asking for your help so we can continue our work.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s where we’re headed. And with your help, we will get there.

Thank you for using Wikipedia. You’re part of this story: please make a donation today.

Jimmy Wales

Founder, Wikipedia

Mark Zuckerberg Open Letter

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

Cyber Monday

Creative Commons

Yesterday, all of the advertisements were flashing “Cyber Monday Blah Blah Blah”.  In case anyone was wondering Cyber Monday is a marketing term devised by www.shop.org based on the fact that 77% of online retailers report an increase in sales on the first Monday after Thanksgiving.  This phenomenon was first observed in 2004 and brought to light in 2005 when the New York Times reported that Americans were returning to work and the high-speed Internet connections.

I’m more inclined to think that consumers are sheep.  If you give a day a name, and tell people what other people are “doing” then that person is likely to join in.

Here’s an interesting movie that talks about consumption.