Ramble

I forgot to put this into the previous post about content blocking. I was at a teacher networking meeting a couple of months ago and we had some Apple folks down to talk about education. They were looking at some of the stuff coming up in iOS 9, and mentioned content blocking. Through reading and listening to followup from WWDC this year, most people had put this squarely into an ad-blocking context, but the way they were talking about it sounded a lot more like it would be usful in an instututional setting where acceptable use policies would dictate that some content be inaccessible (e.g. the myriad of stuff which educational organisations block because they are “thinking of the children!”). ...

First of all, content blocking in iOS has a ways to go. It works in Safari and Safari View Controllers, and since as far as I know these new view controllers only got added this year, most apps which use web content won’t be using them and thus won’t be filtered by blockers. Since most of the web content I consume comes via RSS readers and social media apps like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ the content isn’t filtered until they decide they want to adopt the new controllers (if they ever do). I don’t really want to push every web link out to Safari because of the overhead of then having to deal with tab management instead of just reading and swiping backwards or tapping the close button to return to a feed. ...

“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.” “The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien This is going to be one of the rare times I write about education, but also technology. As a teacher, it can be quite difficult to get out of the rut of doing the same old thing. Pressures from trying to cover everything in the curriculum, making lessons accessible to a variety of types of learners, looking for new ideas from behind a bunch of marking, the need to keep parity with other classes so that assessments are relatively manageable to organize and consistent; basically planning for new things can be a struggle. ...

Since I got one of the original Pebbles which came out as a Kickstarter project I’ve been interested in the smart watch movement. Pebble did a lot of things really well (which I’ll look at shortly) despite the limitations placed upon them by the platform I was interested in (iOS). Since then (and probably prior to as well) there have been a slew of different devices which integrate with your phone. Broadly I think these fit into a couple of categories: fitness tracking, and phone interaction. ...

I got a RaspberryPi recently and have been wondering what to do with it. After looking at the comments of a recent HN post on making a magic mirror out of an old Nexus tablet, there was a link to Jasper, a voice control platform made for a Pi. I’m kinda keen on doing something similar now (“Mirror Mirror on the wall… what’s the forecast for this evening?”). I think the issues are going to be how to keep it as low profile as possible, and to reduce power consumption. There were a few suggestions of full size monitors to put behind a two way mirror in the comments, but those tend to be pretty thick and chew up quite a bit of power. Some of the modular displays for things like the Pi seem like a better idea, and having them tied to something like Jasper for activation, rather than being on all the time could further cut down on the usage. ...

A lot of what I think about seems to be sparked from podcasts lately. I listen to a lot of them as I drive between towns, while I walk or run, as I shop. A lot of them are about technology, with a few generally interesting ones thrown in (lots of the NPR podcasts are great - it’d be nice if we did more of this in Australia). Recently I’ve had a bit of an overlap between two podcasts that I listen to: Vector (about technology) and Planet Money (which I guess is economics, but really seems to cover just about everything - I’m sure the economists out there will say that this is just as it should be). ...

Just a continuation of my admiration of useful changelogs in the iOS App Store. Etsy’s latest release promises to maximise my happiness. I wonder if I have to be using their app to be happy, or if it’ll increase it with a background update.

I’ve written before about how I feel about trackpads on pretty much anything that isn’t made by Apple (spoiler: I hate them), which is why I have mixed feelings about the reports of all the multitouch stuff coming in with Windows 10 (link for an Ars Technica review). On one hand one of the features I really love about OS X is the way in which it handles application switching, which is why it’s great to see some of that finally coming to Windows without third party software. ...

Since the July school holidays closely follow Apple’s WWDC this is usually when I feel motivated to sit down and have a crack at some of the programming projects that have built up in my todo list. Despite the winter weather being unusually pleasant this year, and in amongst a couple of road trips around the South-West (mostly Ingress-related), I’ve actually managed to do a surprising amount of coding done (even though they’re mostly proof of concept projects). ...

There has been a bit of a trend (if you can call it that - it’s mostly by one company: Facebook) of late when release app updates in the [Apple] App Store, but presumably it happens elsewhere too. The convention is that when you release a new version of some software, you tell your users what is new about it. If it’s a feature update then they can decide whether or not they want to upgrade (especially if it’s a paid update) and if it’s a bugfix update then they at least know what has been fixed, and in an ideal world only submit bug reports for unfixed bugs (but who are we kidding, these days “bug reports” are just analagous to one star reviews). ...