Posts

A couple of weeks back I saw a link on Twitter to a post on Laura Bain’s blog about data transmission with year 4 and 5s. Go read the post, since it’s nice and short, but it’s basically kids sending binary data representing black or white pixels to each other using a OneNote Class Notebook. I was starting some of my students off on an activity that used a similar idea to (try to :) teach my kids about image data, and look at why algorithms are important while I was at it. ...

The Backstory Before Christmas I was noodling around with Affinity Designer in an attempt to be a bit better at design. Part of this has been getting more familiar with the tools by working through a bunch of the tutorials at Tuts+. Tuts+ hosts some tutorials aimed at Designer, but working through the ones aimed at other software like Illustrator has been an interesting exercise in figuring out Designer’s tools. While I was making a robot face, I was trying to make wires by putting a gradient on a stroke, but it seems Designer won’t allow you to have a gradient which follows parallel to the stroke. Instead it will apply the gradient to the stroke colour in the same manner as filling. ...

After using the new MBP for a week, I’m coming to appreciate the apps that do a good job with their Touch Bar behaviour. I wrote about Affinity Designer before. Pixelmator uses a similar approach, although it seems to be a bit inconsistent, since it allows you to choose tools, but not all of them. Pixelmator: Touch Bar tool options The real heroes that I’ve found so far are Terminal, Preview, and whatever the app is that takes screenshots behind the scenes based on ⌘-Shift-3/4/6 keyboard shortcuts. The default (and optional) buttons for these mostly seem to have been provided to give actual value to a software button, rather than just be there to show that there’s support. ...

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. ...