yonkeltron

Palm would benefit from adopting Android for so many reasons!

• Stop funneling profits to Microsoft
• Get enthusiastic Android developers from the community
• Support free software and change the business model enough to ensure future solidity. How long before someone does a *really* good clone of HotSync? Why not just move to an open standard like SyncML and monetize the transition?
• Focus on kickin hardware and stop worrying about the OS. Remember the fiasco with PalmSource?
• Contributing the upcoming Linux-based new Palm OS to the community would be a kickin way to give back, a great PR stunt and it would free up talent assets to work on the coolness that is Android

Just one person’s opinion but I remember my old Palm hardware and wouldn’t think twice before dropping some cash on a Palm device that ran Android.

Great article about twenty reasons to switch to Linux.

Ten tips to make Linux administration easier.

Erick Schonfeld wrote a positively brilliant piece over at TechCrunch which took one of the best shots so far at detailing some of the major issues. I get This isn’t the first time that the idea of a Digital Bill of Rights has been discussed but it’s good to see another step forward. Also, see the text over at DigitalConsumer.

With all of the beneftis bestowed upon us by modern email systems such as Gmail, I get really annoyed by people who have inboxes overflowing with email messages. So, in protest, I play this little game with myself where I try to keep my inbox as empty as possible by dealing with messages as soon as I can and filing away those messages which I’ll need for later. Seeing an empty Gmail inbox advising me to check the news on Google Reader makes me feel very good.

Just the other day, I found this productivity theory called Inbox Zero created by Merlin Mann who is a major-leage GTD fanboy. The whole premise is that if there are emails remainging in your inbox, it represents that which you haven’t dealt with yet. I watched the Google Tech Talk video which was seriously excellent and the presentation available on slideshare is useful as well.

While I have been aware of this particular program for some time, only recently have I had another use for it. Metapixel is a program for generating photomosaics which produces spectacular results. Basically, it (the metapixel-prepare utility) recurses through a directory filled with photos and processes them into a special collection of prepared images with a very large index file. Then, you can specify an input image to be made into a photomosaic according to a multitude of parameters.

This is the original shot

Here is the show as a photomosaic!

The examples page does a pretty good job of showcasing Metapixel’s configurability and the results produced by several sample configurations. It’s also rather fast, I made 16 large photomosaics from a db of around 7300 photos and they were done in under 10 minutes on my 1.83Ghz Core Duo.

A recent blog post on TechCrunch discusses their plans to try for the construction of a $200 tablet for light browsing with a modified Firefox 3 (in a special kiosk mode) and VOIP thanks to Skype. Now, we’ve heard rumblings of low-cost, touch-based computing devices before. Remember concept stuff from the XO-2 which was supposed to be the second OLPC? The idea was to have it be an ebook-style device with dual touchscreens and a sub-$100 price tag. Shortly following the announcement by the OLPC guys, some researchers from Maryland and Berkeley showed of a prototype ebook reader that responded to hand-generated movement like opening and closing the leaves to advance the displayed pages.

While the dream of a lightweight, $200 tablet seems a little far-fetched, the blog post does show that some serious thought went into this. They are very insistent that the proposed device run a stripped down version of Linux that will boot right into Firefox instead of a traditional desktop. From there, the plan is to have a special start page with “large buttons for bookmarked services” linking to sites of great interest and/or utility.

With this in mind, it stands to reason that SproutCore would be an excellent way to build this start page. By designing the startup page as a SproutCore application, the whole experience can be constructed in a completely customized way while still maintaining whatever parts of the traditional application experience are desired. Furthermore, SproutCore apps can be cached can be automagically and transparently upgraded as well as cached on the client so that basic functionality can be maintained even in the absence of a WiFi link.

After a little bit of thought, I think that the main interface (with the big buttons) should be a draggable grid of icons so that a user may reposition applications according to their preferences and usage patterns. Additionally, there should be a basic configuration interface allowing users to add or remove sites from the startup page. After that, anything else seems like an added complication even if it’s really, really interesting.

My family loves to read and recently, my mother has discovered the joy of audiobooks while commuting to and from work. She currently subscribes to one of the many for-pay services (Simply Audiobooks, in her case) which Netflix style, mails her a set of CDs for her to play before sending them back. For awhile now, she’s been after me to figure out if there is a source of decent, free audiobooks online because the CDs aren’t always in the best condition and the subscription fees are sort of annoying.

Obviously, a little Googling did the trick and I found out about Project Gutenberg’s audiobook collection which is constantly being expanded. Basically, they rigged a text-to-speech engine to automatically read the texts and generate sound files. The page describes it as a bit buggy but it’s a cool concept all the same.

The more promising project seems to be LibriVox, which uses an ever-growing group of volunteers to read and record for them. The collection is pretty impressive and features texts in multiple languages. All works are public domain and most seem to be from the Guternberg Collection, though I wouldn’t be so surprised if they had some random stuff from places like the Aozora Bunko (Wikipedia article which I just recently heard about from someone who is really into Japanese literature) or Project Runeberg.

I’m very lucky that my girlfriend, Sarah, likes my cooking. So, it’s no surprise that we like to cook together and explore new foods. There is something very satisfying about preparing a meal with someone you love in order to serve it to people you care about. In addition, those meals provide an excellent captive audience with whom to try out new recipes.

Given how much we like to explore new foods, Sarah sent me a link to this great food blog called 101 Cookbooks which features some really awesome recipes. I made this rockin’ quinoa recipe for my mother and can’t wait to try these banana cookies with Sarah. Furthermore, the blog has numerous categories and even features a whole section on gluten-free dishes! Also of note, the garam masala tofu scramble and skinny omelletes.

After much tweaking and messing around, Planet Plug has finally gone live! It doesn’t have many active subscriptions right now but that should change as more people sign up. If you’re a member of the Philadelphia Linux community, you should get onto the #plug IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and ask to have your feed added. Hooray!

Link to it with this button:

One of the more in-depth papers that I’ve recently encountered is a really cool paper on the many things that go into figuring out and improving upon technology-enhanced learning. It’s really a very good discussion not just on learning, but about educational thought in the context of design, technology and the sciences. The paper, Design approaches in technology enhanced learning is available from the arXiv as well as from Telearn. It was written by Yishay Mor (blog) and Niall Winters who seem to be two very intelligent scholars from the London Knowledge Lab (which has some really cool stuff going on).

The entire piece left me feeling really intrigued by the challenges of effectively integrating technology and education. The paper is very well researched and although I can’t articulate it,  I reached the last page of this paper feeling really good. Maybe it had to do with the enlightened view taken by the authors. Their writing is crisp and their outlook seems appropriately upbeat given the richness of the material and subject matter covered in the paper. The document bursts with elegant and thought-provoking stanzas:

Design based research is a methodology for the study of function. Often referred to as design research or design experiments, it is concerned with the design of learning processes, taking account of the involved complexities, multiple levels and contexts of educational settings. The primary aim is to develop domain-specific theories in order to understand the learning process.

Such succulent gems of insight are plentiful in the opening sections as Mor and Winters set the stage for a comprehensive reflection on the essences of design, science and learning. They are realistic about how “The complexity of classroom situations does not lend itself to the procedures of laboratory research” as they ask “To what extent are we driven by a pure quest for knowledge, and to what extent are we committed to influencing educational practice?”.

The paper continues into a very stimulating overview of design patterns and their application in the many areas of education. Though I have always liked the idea of design patterns in software, I have never been so enthralled by a discussion about the essential elements of design patterns. Also, this is the first time that I’ve heard of design patterns being used as a tool for analysis instead of construction and planning:

An important characteristic of a design pattern is that it has three facets: descriptive, normative, and collaborative. It is an analytic form, used to describe design situations and solutions, a meta-design tool, used to highlight key issues and dictate a valuable method of resolving them, and a communicative tool enabling different communities to discuss design issues and solutions.

The esteemed writers are careful to explain their thought processes without letting their comprehensive coverage become tangential. They expertly work in a mentioning of the political agendas of design pattern construction for city planning and network routing protocols to help illustrate their observations of how values influence design.

This paper is awash in fascinating pointers to further exploration and while I fully intend to follow up on some of their citations, something of immediate interest is a link to a very cool site called the Pedagogical Patterns Project which established a repository of educational design patterns. I need more time to explore but what they have seems to be very cool. It’s clear that I’ll refer back to this paper frequently as I strive to better understand the interactions of education and computing.