CogBlogged from ‘January, 2009’

I think I should read a book at Sunday breakfast rather than sneak peeks at twitter (actually I read for an hour on the porch this morning before even opening the laptop). I saw a tweet from Tony Hirst: This Mac Head could not resist, and then Tony asked for some sort of review by Monday? Crikie. Me and my big twitter mouth. So I did download iSofa, which turns an iPod Touch / iPhone into some sort of remote control, so you can do things on your Mac, while sitting on your Real Sofa. It is not a iTunes Store app- instead, it tweaks a setting in the underside of your Mac (which unknown to likely 90% of ‘mac heads” is quietly always running a local version of Apache). And what you get is a special URL you launch on your iDevice: which in Safari on the iDevice you [...]

In preparation for an upcoming presentation at the 2009 EDUCAUSE ELI annual conference, I’ve been noodling away at this question that may seem rather pointless or obvious. I’ve been at this very same blog since April 2003, so maybe it is “just what I do here”. cc licensed flickr photo by Earl – What I Saw 2.0 In the past, somewhere I’d muttered about it being a verb AND a noun (c.f. “a dessert and a floor wax”). I am not looking to wallow in definitions, but wanting to parse out once tendency to think of blogging as something you do in blog software and maybe another to think of it more broadly as “personal publishing”. The scene gets muddier as we see people doing blog-like things in Facebook, tiny bits in twitter, and all of it recast resyndicated remixed in places like FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc. I always like to [...]

Don’t ask what I was looking for, but in rummaging through some tagged links, I ended up laughing at this duck: coming from the LOL Diabetes site. LOLCats ain’t nothing compared to one sporting an insulin pump. Duck it all. File this one also in the “there is a web niche for everything” department. Side note- I am stumped on knowing any way to find the original flickr page from a URL for the static URL version? e.g. how do I proper link to the source for the image at farm3.static.flickr.com/2119/2400191078_cf40f117d8.jpg?v=0 UPDATE: Bob Cotter had the obvious solution- Google search on the part of the URL that is the photo id– 2400191078 — –the original photo’s flickr page is http://flickr.com/photos/11469447@N04/2400191078/ — Sounds like a Greasemonkey thingie worth doing.

Damn. I thought if I kept my head down low enough, I’d avoid being tagged by the “Seven things you don’t know about me” meme. My plan was working perfectly, and out of nowhere, whap! Rob Wall smacks me. Seriously, if there is such a thing around this blog taken as serious– I enjoy reading the way people I know or follow take this on. No I do not believe in chain letter like tragedies as a motivator, I am compelled to dig through the past and find something interesting. Oops not much there. First, I cannot repeat any of the Five Things I posted in 2006. Maybe the next meme will be six or eight or twenty-three. So for what its not worth, here it goes… The first car I owned was a frackin blue Pinto, 70′s vintage. My friends from high school drove more muscular Pontiacs and Novas [...]

I got something in the mail yesterday that moved me so much, it has taken another day to get to blog about it (is that slow enough for the slow blogging crowd). I have to weave a back story before I get to the punch line about getting something back (not tangible, but emotional) for giving to an organization. We should not be giving to get, but there are things we can get than will feed back into the giving cycle. If that is not confusing enough, my seven blog readers, then you must be skimming. Slow down and read. In August I wrote about a different way to make a WordPress plugin (to the four remaining readers, do not gloss over, this is not a post about technology). Joe Solomon had asked 10 educational bloggers to try out the Possibly Related Classroom Projects plugin. The plugin analyzes the text [...]

The New Office Backbone by cogdogblog posted 6 Jan ’09, 11.11pm MST PST on flickr Last night I re-wired my home network with a new Apple Airport Extreme — an 802.11n speed network hub, it is then hard wired to my older Airport (left) which serves the premises 802.11b/g speeds for the iPhone and guests (if you all devices running 802.11b/g to use the new Airport, it slows the speed down, so the new one is for n speed devices only- my laptop). Also new is the LaCie 2 Tb drive next to the Airport Extreme– it is connected to the Airport via a USB hub (so my printer is on the wireless as well) with a plan I can run Time Machine over the high speed n connection. swith 3 LAN ports on the new Airport and one on the old, I no longer need my NetGear switch (I [...]

What do they have in common? In the past I have sported one but would not be caught dead wearing one now. There is value, however, in sharing a list of the blogs you read or subscribe to, it’s just sidebar clutter is not really the best place. On some long frequency wavelength, I remember to update (maybe once a year). It is still a sad missing and some-cheap-intern-could-code-it-in-a-few-days feature that Google Reader lacks a way to syndicate a list of the feeds we have in there. You can syndicate/share what you have “shared” in terms of items form different feeds, but nothing to share the sources. Ah, but there is a 2 step end around. I use GReader’s export feature to save my feeds as an OPML. Then I go to my never-user-for-anything-else account on Bloglines. I then delete everything I have in my feed list there, and import [...]

I have to admire and respect the radical gusto with which Stephen Downes postulates What Not To Build — it matters not even if I agree or disagree (which I do), is that he puts out there no holds barred, as he has done for longer than some of you kids have known what a browser is. And I always learn things– My sort of environmental scan is a bit different from what you’ll get from consultants and venture capitalists. Don’t ask me what companies are developing what products, how industry stocks are performing, or where all the ‘smart money’ is going. I don’t know and I don’t care. What I can tell you, though, is what technologies are working, what technologies are flopping, and what technologies are fads. It’s practical, down-to-earth advice. For example, if you are a technology developer, you already know that you should not try to [...]

By sheer web search accident, I stumbled on to Andy M’s Yahoo Pipe for putting your twitter followers locations on a map: The numbers ar enot a count per country, but a number on the list of 100, and you can pop from one pin to the next in a cheap world tour. Note that it maps 100 of your followers, so no hopes Scoble et al for popping 25000 pins on a map. And I am not sure if these are the 100 most recent or just the random way twitter lists your followers. And although it says you can embed this in your blog, doing so with JavaScript requires plain text insertion of your username and password, a definite no no unless you like eating phish. You can make it a iGoogle widget. This is less of an interest in using this Pipe and more of a reminder [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by danielgenhart.com There is joy in Mudville this morning (=my inbox and some people claim it is not worth it to check email first thing, phooey), as in response to my battle with Icelandair a trace of humanity has been detected- they are offering to refund my money for unused tickets due to their delays (which they say still do not exist, but I shall no longer quibble…, well not too much). To quote: Dear Mr. Levine. I refer to our previous communication and apolgise for the delay in getting back to you. I am really sorry that you missed your connecting flight from Boston and I reiterate my sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and additional expenses caused. Having checked our records, flight FI631 blocked in at 6:13 on November 29 and we do not have any records of bags being delayed that evening. Please note [...]