With technology work I find Need is more of a spawner of Invention than Desperation (or Necessity). Not only did a need for a screen timer for the Open Education Global Conference spawn some productive play with OBS, earlier in the planning I came across another need where the pursuit added some new tools to […]
I know nothing of karate beyond what I have seen in movies, but I would guess that one of the philosophies behind it is “simpler = better”. My karate non-knowledge did not stop me from using the metaphor in a post where I thought I was being clever to using some Google Spreadsheets to extract […]
My chops may not be elegant, but it sure was fun this week to tinker with some Google Sheet formulas to deal with a tricky task. Not that this tweet explains it any more, but to me, it’s better meds than demon sperm. Does this tweet say enough for a blog post? Never. First, some […]
… with all the acting pistache of maybe… Steven Seagal? Sure I can futz around cpanel and run some command line stuff (on a really good day maybe vi) but it’s far from my wheelhouse. But I can stretch. Last fall Clint Lalonde came bearing some much needed contract work for BCCampus and his new […]
There’s some textbook theory of design as a thing where some entity identifies a need, some objectives, stuff is scoped, and handed in a neat handy packet to a developer. I had that happen. Sort of. Once. That’s not even a fun process; the ideas I like most and work from are unanticipated, and often […]
Y’all may be fine with dead links and broken sites, but if they belong to me, I am bothered. I was dusting off some portfolio items, and noticed one small, tiny project, maybe not even used anymore, was… busted. Blank screen. Maybe four or five years ago, my friend and colleague Michael Kelly asked if […]
There you go, try guess the nature of this blog post from a word heavy vague title. Better yet, just go first and try the thing I will be ‘splaining right here. Well, are you back? Did anything happen? Because one of our students in class (she too a teacher) asked as well as my […]
There’s no lack of boastful articles about the benefits of open source software; I have not come here to bury them (or praise). They can do wonders and sometimes they just can burn your energy. I’m still a fan. But it takes work. In a current project I am responsible for setting up three open […]
“Who ya gonna call?” “CODEBUSTERS” No. But the metaphor of Ghostbusters crossing the streams was inversely appropriate to a little bit of code action over the holidays (of which the actual action was nil). But this was fun. This nice tweet from John Johnston (who spawned the idea) reminded me of a WordPress plugin I […]
There’s something to be said for making your own tech tools; you certainly know quickly if something goes awry (though you cannot complain much about the tool provider). Something I made first almost 10 years ago is the flickr cc attribution helper. If you take on the task some think too arduous to give credit […]
