I’m setting up a room which will be for reading, listening to music, drumming, and watching the fish. I wanted to give it an identity so I’ve decided it’s a non-screen room, ie no screen based activities are allowed in here (I’ll permit reading on a kindle). I need to get some more items for it, bookshelves and some nice pieces. Just like people have started going on holiday to places where they will deliberately not have internet access, so it seems a good idea to deem a place in your home screen free. I’m lucky in that I’ve got a spare room I can do this in. I’m quite strict with myself – not even phone is allowed in.
Category Archives: tech
Memories
My old iomega external 500g hard drive and the new Mac external 1T external drive. The former whirs like De Havilland starting up, and the other just plugs in smoothly.
Dial M for …
My parents bought one of these old phones. It is an original but has been refitted to work with a modern telephone system. It takes forever to dial a number, but has that very satisfying whirring sound as the dialler spins back.
Maybe it would be dial M for MOOC nowadays.
Armadillo mouse
Got a nice bluetooth keyboard and mouse for my Mac today so now have a fully health and safety approved workstation at home.
New addition
I blipped a while back that my daughter has a Bose mini Soundlink. At the weekend I git the bigger brother to this, the soundlink 2. I haven’t had a proper speaker since I went all iTunes and end up playing music through a compute or ipad. I tend to listen to music while running mainly, but since having this I’m enjoying listening to whole albums again.
Mapping OER impact
So today we had one of our ‘sprints’ on the [url=http://oerresearchhub.org/]OER Research Hub[/url]. We have developed a cool[url=http://oermap.org/] impact map [/url]for plotting evidence from OER Research against our 11 hypotheses. [url=http://mashe.hawksey.info/]Martin Hawksey[/url] did the development and it has lots of nice features, including [url=http://oermap.org/evidence-flow/]Sankey diagrams[/url] and[url=http://oermap.org/geo-map-view/] heat maps[/url] and [url=http://chaos.open.ac.uk/hypothesis/578/hypothesis-a-performance/]summary pages[/url]. This week we are trying to aggregate all the evidence we can find from other work onto the map. There is surprisingly little actual research about OERS. Lots of projects saying that they have released them, lots of beliefs about how they have the potential to change things, but not much hard evidence of them doing things like improving performance.
Under the pylon
I think taking one of these looking up through a pylon type shots is a standard for many blippers. But it does make lots of pretty lines. And I scratched my leg fighting past the brambles to get it, so, you know, stop complaining.
Big sound, little speaker
My daughter has one of these Bose mini soundlink, bluetooth speakers. It packs a real punch, and we are often treated to the bass thumping from her bedroom. It amazes me that when she leaves home she’ll have this speaker, a phone and a laptop and that’s all she’ll need. I had yards of records, a hi-fi system, tapes, books, videos…
Yes, this was a “oh I’ve got to blip something today, what is lying around” photo.
Manphone
So, my old [url=http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3917176]iPhone got wet[/url], and had to be repaired. At IET they had a spare Otter Defender case which was described as “army proof”, “rugged”, “tough”. It reminds me of the batmobile in the Christopher Nolan Batman films. It’s all a bit macho for a phone, and doubles the size of it, but hopefully will prevent any more water accidents.
ricePhone
I went out for a run today and took my phone with me. It was in a case, inside a plastic bag, inside a waterproof coat, but such is the extent of the rain in the UK that even this was inadequate protection. It got wet and died. Much panic, but I have read online that putting it in a tub of rice, which acts as a desiccant, for 48 hours can fix it. Others have reported jumping in swimming pools with their phones and reviving it after the rice trick, so fingers crossed.
