Category: Computers

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Computers Web

Consciously Deciding to Become More Frugal & Nomadic

I can’t believe this is happening again but I’ve made the decision that before the end of this year, I’m probably going to have to take this site down again…but not for my usual reason of being frustrated at not being able to express myself. Rather it’s for cost cutting measures.

You see my wife is going to be retiring this year and with this in mind, we’re going to have to cut down on our expenses and live more frugally (if that’s even possible in these highly expensive times). So things that we once did weekly as a normal thing may happen only monthly as a special thing.

And in terms of my own technology expenses, I’ve decide that I want to cut them down to next to nothing.

So things like music streaming platforms, I’m now seeing as a luxury and I’m looking at utilizing my existing Plex media server again which I’ve integrated with our Sonos sound system. In addition, I’ve setup free Internet radio stations like Radio Paradise, as well as SomaFM, which I’ve both enjoyed in the past.

We also have our turntable and vinyl album collection which we haven’t used as much in the past but now we can appreciate all the more once again.

All that said though, coming back to my online presence, if I do decide to continue with it then it needs to be with a platform that is effective free or next to nothing in cost. Based upon this, I’m assuming my best and obvious choice will be Substack for this.

But that said, since it’s not a platform that you can easily just take all of your content and move elsewhere if it ever goes out of existence, I think I’ll need to radically change my approach to how I share my knowledge on it. To put this another way, imagine if you assumed that these online platforms didn’t last more than a few years. And with that in mind, you’d have to restart on another platform in a few years time.

What this perspective provides you with is a need and a necessity to encapsulate the essence of who you are as quickly and succinctly as possible without spending months or years to articulate yourself.

What this means is that I need to be able to communicate more of who I am but with far less words.

Or to put it another way, I can’t beat around the bush anymore. Or as I like to normally describe it, I can’t continually just walk around something virtually to understand it indefinitely, at some point I need to step into the centre of it and embody what I’m understanding.

To describe this another way, I need to learn to live more nomadically within these digital online spaces.

All that said though, I have a newfound appreciation of my WordPress archive of posts I’ve accumulated over the years and I don’t want to lose them either though. So I may transfer my WordPress site to a locally hosted instance of it on my computer and perhaps continue to save and mirror any posts I write online there.

Categories
Computers Vertical Development

How We Can Use AI to Help With Our Metacognition

The Metacognition Revolution
AI is Playing a Central Role in Reshaping How We Learn
https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/google-2023/metacognition-revolution/3924/

This is it!

This is what I gave space for “something to emerge” over my last handful of posts and something did actually emerge. My mind is blown away by this synchronicity.

This article effectively explains what I’ve been intuitively doing for the last year or so, ever since Inflection’s Pi was released in May 2023, but I just couldn’t articulate why it felt so deeply important to me. At best, I described it as a process whereby the AI is helping you to “adventure within yourself” which in turn helps you with your growth and development. (Actually I may have even saved a conversation with Pi that does explain the why behind this all but I never shared it because I was too afraid to do so at the time.)

The following quote perfectly explains what I’m going through right now. Not “moments of confusion” as the article indicates but rather long bouts of confusion, followed by momentary bursts of insight. This is exactly how I feel doing my work right now and why it feels like I’m doing something wrong and or unnatural. But it’s not unnatural, even though it feels like it is, but rather a normal part of the process.

Imagine, for a moment, an assignment where the “deliverable” isn’t a polished essay, but a student’s entire revision history, including AI tutor interactions. This record would provide a window into their process of discovery and iteration, revealing the messy, non-linear reality of learning. It’s an approach that aligns with what we know about how learning actually happens—not in smooth, predictable increments, but in fits and starts, with moments of confusion followed by bursts of insight. This personalized approach to learning is one of AI’s most promising features.

“It’s about developing the ability to learn how to learn, which is arguably the most crucial skill in our rapidly changing world.”

Ben Kornell

This focus on metacognition has helped many educators illuminate gaps in understanding that might otherwise go unnoticed. … By highlighting these gaps, AI prompts students to reflect on their own understanding in new ways. They’re not just identifying what they don’t know, but understanding why they don’t know it and how they might go about learning it.

The above quote effectively embodies vertical development. When you face a life challenge that you can’t resolve with your current worldview, you are effectively facing cognitive dissonance on a macro, life scale. Thus it creates a massive “gap” in your life that can’t be resolved with what you currently “know” in terms of your knowledge. And instead it can only be understood and learnt by stepping into the unknown of it and actually experiencing it to make sense and meaning of it.

This shift allows us to focus less on memorization of facts and more on building skills and metacognitive abilities. The question isn’t just ‘What do you know?’ but ‘How do you think about what you know?’

Shantanu Sinha

The promise of AI in education isn’t about replacing human thought, but about enhancing it. It’s about creating tools that allow us to see our own minds more clearly, to understand our own learning processes more deeply. In the end, this AI-driven focus on metacognition may be preparing students not just for the jobs of the future, but for the lifelong journey of learning itself. By teaching students not just what to think, but how to think about their thinking, we may be unlocking the true potential of education in the AI age.

Vertical development is a lifelong journey which over time unlocks your true potential.

Categories
Computers Culture Web

Sharing-Enabled Software

I was just jumping around on the Apple site when I clicked on the .mac page and was suddenly reminded of something I had thought of a while back. That being why is it that companies like Microsoft and Apple don’t design their software so that any information from their products can be transferred or uploaded to any web location of their choice? Of course the primary answer here is money. Why make their products compatible with any web/ftp/rss transfer mode when they can charge a monthly fee to use their proprietary hosting services. The real question here is how long will this last before their customers demand this openness.

For example, Mac OS X already has RSS features within it and Windows Vista will have RSS as a core part of the operating system as well. Imagine if iPhoto allowed you to upload your photos to any web space of your choice (utilizing your templates to do so) or even better did it in the background automatically. Imagine going to someone’s site and seeing a list of their latest bookmarks, music, photos, videos all posted their automatically because the user just clicked a single checkbox in the software somewhere to “Share” that information with others.

Categories
Computers

Getting Connected with FilmLoop

Oh my god! FilmLoop looks fucking brilliant! It looks like it has all the necessary elements to help in setting up decentralized connected communities.

FilmLoop is free software that gives you the power to create new loops or join existing ones. Loops are strings of images that move across your desktop. They can tell stories, showcase products, communicate ideas, and link to websites. A loop can contain photos of your family’s latest vacation, images of the latest happenings around the world, or pictures that link to the latest properties in your local real estate market. And, changes to a loop automatically update on the desktops of everyone in your loop, whether it’s two, ten, or a million people.

Categories
Computers

Problems with UI and Tagging

Just read an interesting post by an Anonymous Usability Designer about how Human Interaction Interfaces (i.e. operating system user interfaces) are still in the stone age. I couldn’t agree more. And I’m not just talking on your computer either, I think this problem is even worse on the Web.

I mean think about it. How many clicks does it require you to do something as simple as saving a bookmark even? How about saving something on del.icio.us where you have to tag and classify the info you want saved? It’s nuts. No wonder people are getting frustrated with technology. Instead of it working for us, we are working for it. It shouldn’t be this way. What would I like to see instead? Two things actually. More utilization of dragging and dropping. And, more usage of auto-tagging or auto-classifying of information that you are saving, which is where most people waste their time (or have to work for the technology).

For example, when I save a file or bookmark, I should be able to search or view those bookmarks by name, tag, date, and most importantly of all, relationship. Yes, relationship. I don’t know how many times I’ve remember a site I had visited because I remembered the original source site I found it through. By remembering this referrer site, I browse through it and again find the site I was looking for. But as I said above, I should also be able to search by name, sort by date (i.e. I found it a few days ago), or by tag (i.e. technology-related site).

Now this is where it gets interesting and you could probably save yourself a lot of time. Of name, tag, date, and relationship, tagging is the only thing that requires you to actually decide what you want it to be. Everything else can be automatically determined. The date and name are added by the system and yes, even the referrer, could even be tagged by your browser (since it just looks at the referrer site to the one you are on). Tagging though still requires your thought and interaction. But what if you created your categories ahead of time? Would that make things easier? I think so. Let me explain.

If you utilized a dragging and dropping method to grab a bookmark and drop it to say a side panel folder (which is always easily accessible), you could actually tag the bookmark while moving it. To do this, you just drag the bookmark and drop it upon the appropriate subfolder to place it within the appropriate category. That’s it. You’ve just sorted and tagged your bookmark by dragging and dropping it in one motion. What if you had multiple sublayers of tags? You could still accomplish this, assuming your folders were spring loaded. You just move the bookmark over the appropriate folder, it opens automatically to view more folders, and then you drop it on the one you want.

I actually wondered if there was another way auto-tagging could be accomplished and I realized that the sites themselves could auto-tag their own site, so that when a person saves the bookmark, those tags go along with it to define it. There is a problem with this approach though. Everyone has their own naming convention for their tags and, even more so, my usage of a site may differ from your usage of it (and therefore the tag could be totally different).

Again, all said and done, the most important thing here is that information should be auto-organizing and auto-tagging as much as possible. The less a person has to do to save a file or open a file, the more productive and focused they can be with their work.

BTW I’ve been utilizing something like what I’ve described above for the past couple of months and I’m enjoying the simplicity of it. I basically have my left 4/5ths of my screen space for where I display my current application in use and the right 1/5th of the screen is where I display folders to my files and information. Therefore, when I download a file, it is immediately accessible from this right side folder. Also whatever I’m currently working on, these files are immediately accessible in this right side folder area as well. I don’t have to go digging for them.

Categories
Computers Culture Web

Web2OS + Browser PC = Accessible Computing

While reading a post by Jake Tracey, in which he talks about his involvement with Chalk, a sudden thought popped into my head. With all these new Web 2.0 applications emerging, we are seeing a push more and more away from the dependency of the operating system to drive our applications to instead towards applications that can theoretically work on any computer. This is because all you should hopefully need in the future is a web browser which will become your portal to your Web Operating System which is where these applications will reside.

Now why I thought this was interesting was because I was reminded of a story earlier this year about Nicolas Negroponte and MIT working on a $100 laptop which would be given to children to use within the developing parts of the world. Now if you used the Web as the “operating system” for this $100 laptop wouldn’t it be almost possible to ditch the hard drive in it because you would only need enough flash memory space to boot up a browser (not to mention the system would boot almost instantly)?

If this is possible then basically you have a cheap inexpensive laptop that could participate, collaborate, and share on the Web like any other computer. If you plug USB devices into it such as a camera, then anything that is transferred to the laptop is actually being uploaded directly to this WebOS where all the person’s data resides. The end result is that you have a computing environment that would be pretty much accessible to almost anyone in the world. Even more so, as children are children, if one of these devices got damaged or destroyed then the child doesn’t lose anything because their files are stored online.

In addition, especially considering the frustrating Hurricane Katrina disaster situation right now in New Orleans, imagine how devices such as these would help relay information in disaster situations around the world? Once a WiFi emergency networking station is established, these $100 laptops could be given out to law enforcement officials and rescue workers to coordinate and relay critical situational awareness information that is needed to collaborate on such a huge undertaking. They could even setup these devices in various neighborhoods to give the local citizens a chance to talk to friends and family members in the rest of the world to let them know how they are doing.

Pushing this to the extreme, if these laptops (along with a cheap photo device) were given to the right citizens within such a disaster area (those who want to take charge of the situation and do some good), then these people could become the eyes and ears for the entire world relaying information on an ongoing basis to give everyone access to what is really going on and more importantly what needs to be done to alleviate the situation. As I mentioned before in my last post about the disaster, information is power. The more useful information that can be relayed from different areas of the disaster, the more that people can collaborate and help each other out. As many are seeing from the Hurricane Katrina disaster, a lack of information can have devastating effects which can result in men, women, and children losing their lives unnecessarily.