Posts about tech topics.
I’ve been thinking about making the move to Fedora Silverblue since at least 2020, and this summer I finally went ahead with the change. To grossly oversimplify, the Silverblue approach is to make the entire operating system immutable – there is nothing the user, an application, or malware can do to edit most of the…
It is hard to believe that it has been ten years since I completed my graduate studies at Kent State. It feels like it can’t possibly have been that long, but at the same time in reviewing my old portfolio, I know that I have grown a great deal as a higher education professional since…
It feels like it’s been ten years since I’ve updated the blog, but it has in fact been just over one. As everywhere in higher education, this new year has had its ups and downs, but I’ve been most impressed with the adaptability of our students, faculty, and employer partners to our temporary new reality.…
I will publish a longer write-up when I get a chance, but so far I am thoroughly enjoying my time at the Cincinnati WordCamp conference this weekend. Great discussion and networking! Tomorrow morning I’ll be at a few sessions on theme and plug-in development, really looking forward to learning more about the topics!
It’s Hacktoberfest again, so I submitted my first of four pull requests towards the Amahi documentation site, which was incidentally the first repository I ever used git for, a few years ago, when I was first getting started.
I recently read a great article designed to let aspiring developers teach themselves Javascript in 5 months, and in July I decided to give it a shot for myself. The curriculum seems sound, and useful, but completing the curriculum as it is listed would require subscribing to like two different online course providers for 2-3 months, so I’m actively trying to substitute free resources and resources I have already purchased through StackSocial for the classes that are described each month, with the possible option of going back at the end and subscribing for one month to each service and taking all those classes at once.
I had a great time at WordCamp Kent in June, where I was inspired to do new things with this site and other websites that I run. This WordCamp was quite affordable (just $40) and included plenty of speakers presenting on great WordPress topics, great conversations between sessions and in the hallways with presenters, vendors, and other attendees, and plenty of great food. As an alum of Kent State University, it was also wonderful to be back in Kent, see how some parts of the downtown and the campus has changed and grown since I graduated, and visit some of my old stomping grounds again.
Tablet sales have been going down for some years — but what would it take for you to buy a new one? Here, we discuss the current state of the market.
In a recent Android Authority article, author Scott Adam Gordon asks, “What would it take for you to buy a new tablet?” He concludes that the reason tablet sales are on the decrease is because people don’t buy new tablets for spec bumps… he sees 6 scenarios in which someone might buy a new tablet:
The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?
In the linked interactive feature, the New York Times posed the question:
If an evil monarch forced you to choose, in what order would you give up these inescapable giants of tech?
The first is an easy pick for me. Apple, the seller of shiny, overpriced products, powered by a buggy cloud, with a mobile operating system on which things are either dumbed down to 5-year old simplicity or completely impossible. I have owned Apple products in the past, including an iPod Touch I still use occasionally, but in my personal opinion Apple operating systems are inferior to other options and build quality of Apple products is not significantly above that of their competitors to justify the incredible price markup. I hate iTunes with a burning passion and frequently will not purchase music I intend to purchase if it is not available from Amazon or Google Play.
