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tech, pkm

Maintaining a #digitalgarden

Since the mid-1990s, I’ve maintained a personal web site of some sort. Originally my sites were constructed using Frontpage and Dreamweaver, then I used Blogger for a period until around 2010 when I moved over to keeping self-hosted WordPress sites. There was a period when I used it as a form of online diary and then Twitter and Instagram came along and I became confused about where to post and everything became a mess. At least twice I’ve had catastrophic losses of everything I’d written. More recently, I tried to use Micro.blog for about a year before I realised I…

blog, tech

Then we danced the dance ’til the menace got out

Positively pleased with my new Synology DS220+ NAS. Last week, part of my old NAS, a WD My Book Live, was remotely wiped. WD’s solution is to tell users to disconnect until they investigated the issue. It was clearly too late for me and I was worried that the other part of my NAS, a WD My Cloud, could be similarly affected. (An upgrade earlier this year had prevented the NAS from backing up in the way it had done for years and I’d procrastinated in sorting it out.) My last proper backup was in April so I’ve lost about…

blog, tech

Alas, Apple Watch I knew you well

At the end of June my Apple Watch stopped charging. I took it off and forgot to charge it for a couple of days and found that it just wouldn’t turn on – even after charging overnight and swapping cables and plugs. Up until then it’d worked fine. I tried all the resurrection techniques suggested on Youtube, Reddit and other places but it was clear that the battery couldn’t hold a charge. The watch is a Series One second gen that I bought about 4 years ago. When I think about it, the watch has lasted a fair amount of…

Education, tech

“Intelligent Education” or the Panopticon?

Terrifying article on Sixthtone.com about the use of “intelligent education” technology being developed in Chinese classrooms. The Chinese government is actively promoting an extensive AI programme, the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (NGAIDP), spending $150 billion to incorporate AI into every aspect of Chinese society. The article presents accounts of how cameras are being used in classrooms not only to monitor and analyse what children are doing (as well as their attitudes and emotional states) but also to read what they are writing. The degree of surveillance is quite astonishing. One particular system is called the CCS (Complete Care…

tech

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…