Daily Archives: 2020-11-15

My Week Ending 2020-11-15

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Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.

Readings 

You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week.

Sunday

  • George Bush could do it but Donald Trump can’t bring himself to do it yet. Maybe never.
  • Canada can be a weird place at times. Here are some examples.

Monday

  • If you feel like you need an extension to capture part of your screen in Google Chrome, here are some suggestions.
  • I’ve always had a dog from the Humane Society and they’re awesome. Good choice, Biden family

Tuesday

  • Every year at this time, I’m reminded of the Edmund Fitzgerald and look for research about it.
  • Hamilton-Wentworth gets ready for another closure of school buildings

Wednesday

  • If you’re interested in the latest of STEM toys for kids, check these out
  • The fact that so much interest and money is spent on stopping students from cheating should make all educators rethink the value of exams

Thursday

  • Detroit public schools decide that they’re not going to keep their buildings open and move to online
  • I was victim of the great YouTube outage this past week. It’s really strange when something that you rely on goes bad

Friday

  • I am intrigued with anything that features a dark mode. Next up, Elementary OS
  • In the TDSB, if you ran into problems as a young person, it may not get stricken from your record

Saturday

  • If you’re curious about Diwali, here’s some information. I like that this has really made news on this day
  • It may not be all that noticeable, but the UI for Chrome OS is a dog’s breakfast – can’t believe I just quoted my elementary school principal

Blog Posts on
doug … off the record

My daily contributions to this blog are linked below. If you’re looking for a week in review for doug–off the record, you came to the right place.

#FollowFriday – November 13, 2020

https://wke.lt/w/s/JI67z9

voicEd Radio

On this week’s show, Stephen Hurley and I chatted about treaty awareness, photography and storytelling, October, online tools, and an update from Peter.

The show is available here: Treaty Awareness, New Ways of Seeing, Celebrating and Being Together in Learning | voicEd

Tamara Bolotenko – @TamaraBolotenko
Jessica Outram – @jessicaoutram
Will Gourley – @WillGourley
EduGals – @EduGals
Peter Cameron – @cherandpete

Intro Song:

All of the podcasts are archived here. The show is broadcast LIVE almost every Wednesday morning at 9:15 on voicEd Radio.

Technology Troubleshooting

Sometimes, it just takes an update!

Regular readers who know that I had had issues with Microsoft Edge and WordPress a while back. To that end, I just took it out of my regular rotation.

This morning, I was eligible for yet another update to Windows so I took the leap. A reboot later and I guess there was an update to Edge. I’m taking a challenge, writing this post with it and so far so good.

Video of the Week

The COVID rules in Ontario change again.

People, let’s stop the nonsense and do the distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing.

Photo of the Week

If you read yesterday’s point, you’ll know where I went on Tuesday and took this picture that I’m so proud of. And, you get to see it every visit.


Thanks for reading.

Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting for you. I honestly and truthfully appreciate your few moments reading my thoughts. Time willing, this summary appears every Sunday afternoon.

Be safe.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.

Whatever happened to …

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… computer names?

A big shout out to Alfred Thompson for this morning’s topic.

From his original Facebook post, some of his followers had chimed in.

  • KORAT::
  • Merlin
  • Gandolf
  • Stovokore
  • Jake
  • Elwood
  • Hal-9000
  • Colossus.TFP
  • Darwin
  • marykate
  • ashley
  • coffeepot
  • dishwasher
  • eggbeater

So, why name a computer? Well, I suppose it does humanize it but when you’re managing a network with machines in various places, it’s just a little easier to track them down if they’re named as opposed to their IP address.

I remember when we moved the Bring IT, Together Conference to Niagara Falls with the promise of great internet access sitting in the control booth and the IT Manager gasping when all these educators connected to the network. Not just once, but with multiple devices and so many of them were named.

In our household, I have all the devices named as well. It’s not like we live in a place where I would expect hackers on our wireless but it’s just so impressive to go to the hub and look at the devices that are connected. I see my PC (dougpete), my MacBook Pro (DazedandConfused), my phone (Hacker-dont-trust-me), etc. I can see the network they’re on, their signal strength, their internal IP address (which is actually the identifier for each that really matters), and so much more. I’ve never had to troubleshoot but I could if I wanted to. <grin>

Things are actually not all that dependent on names but typically you’re given the option to name a device when you set it up. So, why not?

So, for a Sunday, your thoughts…

  • do you name your devices? do you have any interesting names to share?
  • did you put the name on the outside of the computer case?
  • if you’re in a school, have you ever watched your technician track down an issue?
  • POP QUIZ: What was the name of these computers
    • the computer that was in 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • the computer that was in 2010: Odyssey Two
    • the computer that was a winner in Jeopardy
    • the computer that was in the Star Trek Episode “The Return of the Archons”
    • the computer was was in the Star Trek Episode “I, Mudd” (bonus is you remember its number)
    • the computer from the Doctor Who episode “The Green Death”
    • the US computer from “The Forbin Project” (bonus if you remember the Russian computer)
  • do you have remembrances of any other computer that appeared in media?
  • have you ever discussed computer and artificial intelligence with computer names in class? Why do we personalize these things?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post appeared on:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com

If you read it anywhere else, it’s not the original.

OTR Links 11/15/2020

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.