“Online Discussion Tips from The Discussion Project - Google Docs”
“We Really Could Use Our Institutions Right Now - Just Visiting”
“Researcher danah boyd on how to protect the census and fix tech - Protocol”
“as days pass by — On ethical design, and the Ethical Design Handbook”
“Horizontally Scrolling Panes with clean HTML, modern CSS and no JS”
These sort of designs used to be so hard to do.
“Michael Tsai - Blog - Reverting From Apple News Format to RSS”
Apple News is a shit show.
“Square Brackets are the Enemy - hueniverse”
This is a really tricky (and interesting) JS security issue with, honestly, quite far ranging implications for server side dev.
“The Luxembourg walls that seem to shelter financial fraud at Sigrún Davíðsdóttir’s Icelog”
“Creating Secure Password Flows With NodeJS And MySQL — Smashing Magazine”
Windows does a really bad job of mapping euro keyboard layouts (where the default keyboard layout has 105 keys) to US hardware keyboards (which have 104 keys).
I’ve never had this problem in any other OS, all of which do sensible remappings.
Fixed it by remapping with SharpKeys
“Taking Our Eye Off the Ball – iterating toward openness”
“Affordability seems to have become the end goal of OER advocacy, instead of being an important step on the path to improving student learning.”
Rebus is conducting a study into the needs and priorities of academic users. We are looking for people who are willing to participate in ~60min remote interviews.
If that describes you, please see this page for more info www.surveymonkey.com/r/rebusin…
On those 'the cloud is bad for the environment' comments that keep cropping up
The Coronavirus outbreak has led to a renewed drive towards moving everything to the cloud: education, work, conventions, meetings, networking, etc.
This is potentially problematic for a variety of reasons (most companies don’t know how to do it properly, it takes practice to do properly). However, one type of pushback against ‘the cloud’ which has cropped up again is of the ‘what about the environment?’ variety.
That particular criticism is less relevant than it might seem at first glance.
Every single ‘moving activity online can actually be bad for the environment’ article I’ve seen so far uses calculations that assume that your devices, the devices you’re connecting to, and the datacentres are all using electricity from mostly non-renewable sources.
This is increasingly not true for datacentres. Both AWS and Google have invested a lot in renewable energy sources for their datacentres and the more sustainable they become, the lower the environmental footprint is for services hosted using their services.
If you are located anywhere in Canada or Europe, odds are that some or all of your electricity comes from renewable sources. 40-60% of the electricity in many Canadian provinces and many European countries come from renewable sources. In many regions, all of the electricity you consume may come from a renewable source.
Switching to using transport powered even partially by renewable energy is beyond the capabilities of many people. Electric cars are expensive. Scooters and bicycles may not be that useful for people with children. Airplane travel doesn’t even have the option.
If you switch to remote work or videoconferencing in lieu of travel, odds are that at the very least part of the infrastructure you’re using is powered using renewable energy. The switching costs are often negligable compared to transport switching costs.
If you are lucky enough to live in a city with good public transport or all of your meetings and workplaces are within a walkable distance, then, yes, switching to videoconferencing is probably less environmentally friendly.
If the choice is between driving and high-definition videoconferencing, then the ‘cloud’ will almost always be better for the environment. Esp. if you live in an area where the electricity supply is of the renewable variety.
And if the alternative is flying, then the difference is on the level of several orders of magnitude.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I can put up with all sorts of OS crap (including a Windows desktop machine that has never left Quebec randomly switching to GMT as its time zone) but the Windows keyboard layouts are just the worst.
Daylight savings always, always throws me off for several days.
Given that it seems all but certain that there will be a recession by the summer, this will be the third time a recession has struck just as I was planning an international move. (2000, 2008, and now)
I can get used to almost everything about Windows except the keyboard layouts. You can find great apps, tolerate the messy OS, and work around most of the differences.
But the keyboard layout? Trips me up every time.
If you need a concise history of what’s has happened with Web Publications, attempts to ‘webify’ EPUB and how it relates to the Readium OSS project, these two comments by Hadrien Gardeur have got you covered github.com/w3c/wpub/…