Month: July 2019

  • “Learning” and “Path-following”

    I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways. Early on he connects learning and path-following:

    The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, lto get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets ofProto Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning ‘track’). (To learn’ therefore means at root ~ at route – (to follow a track’. Who knew? Not I, and I am grateful to the etymologist-explorers who uncovered those lost trails connecting ‘learning’ with ‘path-following*.

  • Music: No Pussyfooting by Fripp & ENO

    Music: No Pussyfooting by Fripp & ENO

    It’s 45 years ago that the musicians Robert Fripp and Brian Eno recorded the material which became the album, No Pussyfooting.

    It’s an album I picked up in the late 1980s/early 90s and still listen to from time to time whenever I’m having an ambient phase. I’m sure I got into it and other Eno/ambient stuff after listening to – and being pretty perplexed by – Lee Ranaldo’s album, From Here to Infinity. I was hugely into Sonic Youth at the time and remember being shocked by how abstract Ranaldo’s solo music was. It took some reading and listening around to find my way to early Eno and No Pussyfooting.

    To create the music Eno and Fripp set up two Revox reel-to-reel tape recorders as a looping system. Fripp played electric guitar which was recorded, manipulated  and looped back by Eno, creating multi-layered textures. The outcome was two tracks: “The Heavenly Music Corporation” a fluid, rolling, deep piece and the contrasting “Swastika Girls” which is whispy, spiralling, lighter.

    (Crazily, it’s claimed that John Peel played one of the tracks from No Pussyfooting on his radio show backwards – and the only person who realised this was Eno!)

    I’m not sure that Fripp and Eno invented this type of looping music. There’s certainly examples of experimentation with taping and looping going back at least a decade before this. It does seem to me to be an album that points towards the solidification of Eno’s ideas about ambient music, though. Eno’s famous sleeve notes for Music for Airports (1978) describes ambient music as “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint”. Something “intended to induce calm and a space to think.” Later, in his notes for On Land (1982), Eno goes further in attempting to create music that creates its own “psychoacoustic space” or “aural frame” in which mechanical and electronic echoes and delays are used evoke abstract, memory-woven landscapes.

    Remarkably, Fripp and Eno’s collaboration still sounds very modern to me. I’ve just been playing the album on a dark, cold February afternoon. I’m in the house on my own watching the rain through the shutters stream down the windows. Forty five years away, Fripp and Eno were recording this. Incredible.

    * I rescued this post from my old blog before it was no more. Probably written in January 2018 or thereabouts.

    

  • Tech Froth: SSD Upgrade and Dual-booting Sierra and Mojave

    My MacBook Air is seven years old. I’ve looked after it pretty well and to the casual eye would still look brand new (the magsafe cable is the only thing that has worn a little). Though I increasingly use my iPad for day-to-day stuff, I rely on the Air all the time. I resisted upgrading OSX for about three years. Deliberately so.

    There are a number of apps I use that I know will stop working if OSX upgrades. Some of the apps have moved to subscriptions that are prohibitively expensive and I can’t afford to use them. On the other hand, there are newer apps I use on iOS that won’t install on Sierra, the version of OSX I’ve stubbornly kept using.

    I’m aware, too, that the next version of iOS (13) and OSX (Catalina) are going to introduce features that continue to integrate the two operating systems. It’s already pretty good and I rely on being able to work on something on my iPad or iPhone and then immediately be able to open it on my Air when I get home. iCloud integration has become so good that I seldom use Dropbox or Evernote for storage.

    I’ve known for ages that if I’m going to continue using the Apple ecosystem then I have to upgrade my Air… but don’t want to lose those apps. So what have I done?

    Well, after a lot of research, I found that it’s possible to cheaply upgrade the internal SSD hard drive of the Air and dual boot it so that I can use Mojave, the current version of OSX and swap to Sierra when I need to use the old apps (which isn’t all the time).

    What I used:

    • a full installation copy of OSX Mojave
    • Superduper!, a drive cloning app
    • an M.2 NGFF SATA to A1466 adapter
    • an M2 to USB adapter
    • a Western Digital 500gb M.2 SSD
    • T5 and P5 screwdrivers

    The SSD replacement was surprisingly quick: 20 minutes to install the OSes, 10 minutes to physically remove the old SSD and install the new one. The longest time – around an hour-and-a-half – was spent tweaking Mojave and installing the apps I use freshly. iCloud did most of the work.

    I was genuinely surprised how easy it was. Naturally, I was concerned about damaging the Air or losing my current installation of Sierra. Nothing at all caused an issue.

    First I slotted the new SSD onto the USB adapter and partitioned it so that I had three drives (so I can dual boot and, later maybe tri-boot with another OS): Mojave (260gb), Sierra (130gb) and “Spare” (110gb). I then used Superduper! to clone the existing Sierra drive to its partition on the new SSD.

    The M.2 SATA adapter was then connected to the new SSD (it needs this to plug into the Air):

    I used the P5 screwdriver (Apple use special screws) to take off the bottom of the Air. I made sure I disconnected the battery. Inside it was very dusty, so I gave everything a quick clean:

    Once reassembled, the Air booted into the “old” Sierra and from there I could install Mojave into its partition:

    Again, I’ll use the word surprisingly to describe how quickly Mojave installed and was up and running:

    Of the entire operation the thing that took the most time was typing in account details into Filezilla and Unison (I couldn’t get them to export the info). Everything else went smoothly.

    It’s the first time I’ve done any tech stuff like this in years. I used to build and tinker with desktop PCs years ago and used to get frustrated with the problems I had. (Though I did grimly enjoy the problem-solving I had to do.) I’d expected problems but (so far) things have just worked.

    My only regret is that I settled for a 500gb SSD rather than a 1tb just in case. With a bigger drive I could have enabled a quad or penta-booting macbook…

  • Nothing disappears from the internet

    It’s strange! I was just reading a Blogger site, saw that I was logged in and rediscovered – to my delight – that my old Blogger comics review site, Livid Comics, is still live. I maintained it between February to November 2013 when I was collecting Adam Warlock comics and reviewing them. Looking back, the commentaries I did on Warlock were fine. I collected a longbox full of Warlock appearances and have every issue he’s appeared in from the later 1960s through the 1970s and 1980s. It gets a bit patchier after that and, for some reason, the later appearances are more expensive (e.g.. Annihilation) which became a disincentive. I’m pretty much broke these days, so I’ve more or less put my Warlock collecting on hiatus.

    I’ve been reading Chasing Amazing, a great site by Mark Ginocchio where he chronicles the progress of collecting of every issue of Amazing Spider-man (including #1!!!). Finding the old Warlock stuff certainly entices me into considering a similar blog and tracking down all those remaining issues.

    Anyhow, my old Livid Comics blog is here.

  • TES English Podcast: How to improve writing in secondary

    My notes from recent TES Podcast where English teacher, Chris Curtis (Learning from My Mistakes blog and new book How to Teach English and former Whovian) offers some great advice teaching writing. The TES gives an overview of his ideas in the podcast.

    • Encourages a degree of emotional detachment as a teacher (eg. conversations about mistakes; “if we live in fear, we’ll never push the boundaries”

    He identifies three issues confronting the teaching of writing:

    • “beige writing” – students write very standard answers. Students default to “waffle mode”, a comfortable form of writing. Needs to be challenged.
    • fluency – some students don’t have writing fluency and aren’t able to write quickly.
    • blank page – students don’t know what to write and panic.

    He offers some solutions:

    • 200 word challenge – a weekly writing task that changes each week. His department have been doing this for 5 years. (Example of these challenges from Curtis’ blog.)
    • “sexy sprouts” – starting writing with an emotion in mind. He describes this as “transformative”. (From idea about how to make a reader feel different emotions about sprouts!)

    On students’ accuracy:

    • He won’t correct student’s mistakes. He circles mistakes and gets students to self-correct. “Channeling” students to see mistakes, not fix them.
    • We have to expect a better quality of work from students. Students need to take ownership.
    • Every lesson has to be an opportunity to improve accuracy.

    On grammar:

    • Avoid teaching discretely.
    • Move away from “This is a grammar lesson.”
    • Believes you can have creativity and grammar rules.
    • Need to be explicit about grammar rules.

    On analytical essays and formal analytical responses to texts:

    • We’ve become convoluted about analytical-style writing. Everything is being thrown at an essay with the hope that it’ll sound good. Not making the clarity of ideas the priority. Good analytical writers are “pared down”. Simplify.
    • Better to start big and zoom in (when responding to texts).

    Tips for the end of term:

    • Find something that works and do it with every class.
    • Reading aloud to classes. Students listening to a teacher telling a story.
    • Find texts that “teach themselves” (that’s why the classics work).
    • Find systems that work for you.
    • Write with students. Make it a social experience.