Obligatory New Toy Post Because I have no self control, I managed to justify to myself that I needed an update on my 2012 13" Macbook Air, and bought a 13" Macbook Pro with Touch Bar (hats off to Apple for making the product names roll off the tongue on that one, by the way). 512GB SSD because I spent the last two years trying to juggle space on my Air, and 16GB of RAM because I’m not an animal. ...

Preface: Since there’s so much seemingly conflicting information out there, I’ve quite possibly gotten it wrong. If so, please let me know so I can correct this! End Use License Agreements are confusing. Most people don’t read them, even when they occasionally embed easter eggs, (according to this site, most designers don’t regularly read them when it comes to the typefaces they use), and when they do probably don’t understand them (or else why would sites like ToS;DR exist?). ...

The Australian Curriculum has been going through the “everything is changing” part of the ten-yearly cycle recently. As a teacher of technologies[1] it’s been both exciting (and gut-wrenching) to see how the draft curriculum has evolved to the point where it is required for implementation in 2018. I won’t go into the design of the digital technologies curriculum itself (you can see the details at the ACARA site) but did want to look at some of the ways people have been talking about implementing the mandatory section (up to and including year 8). ...

I teach a lot of different students this year - the entire year 9 cohort, most of the year 7s and 8s (spread over the year), and a few classes of year 10s. Seeing all of them regularly gives me a pretty good look at how they use technology (with the exception of mobile since, like many schools, students are prohibited from using their phones during the day), which makes for some interesting conversations. ...

So there’s a certain element of hyperbole coming up. Just saying. Google Allo (which of course makes me think of the classically cheesy ‘Allo ‘Allo) was outlined in the recent Google IO keynote. One of the features which bears some consideration is Smart Reply which suggests replies to messaging and learns from your responses over time (and I assume also does learning on the aggregate, playing to Google’s strengths in large scale data analysis. ...

I’ve written about my Pebble before and the things that I like about it. This week a new firmware and app version got pushed out and I noticed that after tracking health data for some time (steps and sleep), the iOS app finally got a reporting screen for it. I thought it was worthwhile looking at, since it has a really nice reporting graph. Rather than simply reporting the number of steps and sleep hours, it gives an area plot showing current and typical data. ...

My wife and I recently returned from Honeymoon Part 2 on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. This isn’t a travel post though (although it’s a lovely, if somewhat rugged place to go!). When booking the holiday back in February I looked around for car hire and noticed that one outlet was advertising electric cars. Since Telsa (spoiler: we didn’t get a Telsa) has been in the news for ages and I wanted to learn more about plug in electric vehicles, I figured we’d hire one for a few days and see what it was like to drive one. I went to the trouble of looking at how many charge points there were around the island (one per town on the eastern side of the island, for a total of five) I went ahead and booked a Nissan Leaf. ...

I shuffle my attention between four devices: a (beloved if aging) 2012 13" Macbook Air iPhone 6S+ iPad Air 2 Work Surface Pro 3 Because I split my attention between them all, it can be a struggle to manage the list of things that are interesting to me so that when I’m in a time which is suitable on a device which is right, things that I care about are easy to reach. ...

This morning I woke up to an email from Smile Software titled “TextExpander 5 Lives!” and I was a little sad inside. Now I still think that their original plan of moving to a subscription pricing scheme was the wrong decision, but I really wanted to see that they had a plan for it. As tech pundits left and right have said, Smile has been around for ages, they should have a good idea about how the business works. ...

I remember someone else talking up Slack’s release notes before, but looking at them side by side with Box’s lately… I honestly don’t know why Box bothered with more than the first line since the other three dot points mean exactly the same as the single first dot point, providing no additional information at all. Slack does a great job of what is arguably the job of release notes: information about features, and which bugs have been fixed. More importantly, they do it in such a way that you might actually read the release notes because they are entertaining, not just because you might be frustrated with a problem in an earlier version and you want to know if it’s fixed yet. ...