zarify

Pretty sure the abuse is what happens to the victims, not the perpetrators.

(Not any sort of implication about whoever Mr Rogers is [I'm not an American], but man the phrasing of this sentence stuck at me.)

I can believe someone taking 10 sick days off a year and no more. You take the paid time off if you're sick without much hesitation, and after that you weigh up whether you're sick enough to cost you a day's pay.

People should use their sick leave - that's what it's for. This "no raise for using sick leave" argument is no better than the overwork culture that's been discussed at length lately.

Mind you, I'm not an engineer, I'm a teacher. Unless it's seriously contagious or I'm basically unable to function I don't tend to use my sick leave because it's more work to prepare lessons for a replacement teacher than it is to come to work and teach.

The new folios work really well on your lap (and are quite pleasant to type on as well, once you get over the emoji key and lack of escape key).

I paired a bluetooth mouse to mine on the iPadOS beta and have been using it for work for a couple of weeks. Much nicer to use than my work-supplied Surface Pro which isn't saying much, since they are awful at using on your lap).

I think Adventure Mode and also the stuff available in Education Edition might make Minecraft a bit more of a long-term prospect there. You can make stuff for your kids to explore or do (either on rails or unguided), and there's quite a decent body of work out there shared in the education space.

I personally love Education Edition for the coding interface, but there is some other neat stuff in there as well.

Mind you, my first daughter is coming up on 2 years old, so there's a ways off until I get there. I'm just speaking as a teacher who uses it. My daughter is fascinating though - it's really interesting watching her figure out skills like sorting, and also discovering all the little ways my wife and I have unconsciously confused her with our use of language, which she then picks up without us realising it.

Speaking as an Australian, a “Freedom” prefix makes it sound like yet another cheesy American grab at patriotism.

(This may come across as snark, but it seriously isn’t. “Freedom” anything has been polluted, IMHO)

I've been doing this for years with Gmail but the issue with breach notification services like HIBP / Monitor is that you can't add wildcards into your search for notifications, so unless I plug in every me+service@domain email variant in, I could be missing being notified.

Monitoring doesn't have to be tech. It could be something as simple as computer use happens in family areas during formative years.

Also if kids are comfortable talking to you about what they do because parents are understanding rather than judgemental ("how dare you watch X" etc) then they're more likely to tell you if they do come across something like that accidentally.

(My kids are <2 and <0 right now, but I teach teenagers about technology for a living and kids self-report dodgy stuff all the time.)

I use them both at my school (7-12) and at the Coder Dojo I mentor at (mostly kids years 4-7-ish) and they are an absolute hit.

I've been having a blast looking at different concepts and projects which I can use when teaching Digital Technologies (the Australian learning area for CompSci types of ideas).

Personally as a teacher they've also done a world of good for me in learning about the basics of electronics and getting a better understanding of embedded programming (had some fun optimising MicroPython code to do what I want).

Some of the projects I've built with them (some for myself and some for teaching): - https://headtilt.me/dowsing-for-radio/ - https://headtilt.me/microbit-haunted-house/ - https://headtilt.me/designing-a-microbit-robot/

And a bit about some of the common components I use with them: https://headtilt.me/year-8-microbit-robotics/

The Siralim games are some that capture some of what Pokemon is for mobile (although the controls aren't really optimised for touch with on-screen D-pad and virtual A/B buttons), although I suppose it's more like some of the old Monster Hunter games (capture, breeding as well as a bunch of other mechanics too).

Whilst the facial recognition aspect of this and the Chinese tie-ins with total monitoring of its populace are one aspect, in schools (at least in Australia, and I assume many others) large amounts of centralised data on behaviour, performance, etc are stored about students by their teachers already.

One of the comments here makes it sound all so personal, as if that information never leaves the classroom and is only the domain of the teacher, but it isn't - it's shared with other teachers, heads of year, deputies and principals, school psychologists, government departments, and to some extent (usually in the aggregate) with parents.

Throw some automation in the mix for scale (along with all the issues with correct facial identification - which as teachers we're not immune to either!) and we have the same thing.

I miss Fireworks too, but Affinity Designer has become my go-to for all things vector design.

Not really that surprising since there seems be a lot of focus on things like Minecraft Education Edition, which isn't Java based.

(Which, as a teacher, I am finding a fantastic tool for both introductory programming and other topics)

Affinity’s Designer and to a lesser extent Photo. They’ve done a great job at reducing the complexity of illustration and photo editing and making it just really pleasant to do (particularly compared to Illustrator for example).

I suppose I didn't consider the amount of additives in current leathers. What are the production costs (environmental, rather than monetary) of the waterproofing? It would be a shame to have something that has very limited impact on the environment being used as a substitute for leather, only to find out the post processing is also quite damaging.

I wish one of their FAQ down the bottom was about water resistance.

Would this be open market where Google keeps killing YouTube compatibility with Amazon kit?

Considering Apple's constant shifting of goalposts with macOS, what counts as "significant" in your book, even disregarding user-facing features? And how significant is the ~$50 they want for it?

I know it's not the same thing, but I use TripMode on macOS for your last two points, which selectively blocks app access based on what network you're connected to.

I guess I don't really understand the point of it, but what is $1B "worth" of Bitcoin actually useful for? I saw one of the other comments link to daily trading volume, but I read those values as consisting of putting a dollar value on Bitcoin movement within the ecosystem, not crossing boundaries - am I correct?

So given the practicalities of shifting the value outside of the Bitcoin economy, the main value seems to be in speculating that this specific cryptocurrency is the future and will take on a dominant value in the real world in exchange for goods and labour, and its volatility seems to make that less likely lest everyone turns into the person who "paid X Bitcoin for a pizza on YYYY-MM-DD and now it's worth Y".

Am I missing something important here? I'm not an economist, and only have a broad understanding of the technology behind Bitcoin, but I don't see the point unless one day we start saying "$1 buys X bitcoin" and not the other way around.

Edit: It's telling that I hit post and then spent minutes obsessing over 'YYYY' and 'Y' being used in same sentence to mean different things :/

Nifty, I hadn't seen Calliope before. I'll check it out next time I buy some experimental kit for my classes.

You can hook up lots of the popular kit that works with Arduino to Microbits quite easily (servos, steppers, ultrasonic sensors, extended LED arrays, humidity and moisture sensors). Most of it will work with block code too.

Based on my experience the compass is the only part of these I haven't liked. I haven't successfully managed to accurately calibrate one yet, which has really put a crimp on how that feature is used.

I've been teaching using these for the last 9 months, using them for an introductory and tactile programming environment (being able to easily switch from block code to Python when they get the concepts is great), learning about how computers use a variety of external sensors, introducing some of the structure of wireless networking, congestion and attenuation and more.

And that's without using any of the pins to hook up external gear. My kids have just started hooking up continuous servos and creating remote control buggies with them, learning about protocols in the meantime.

They're probably one of the best pieces of kit I've used in 13 years of teaching (and cheap to boot).

But feel free to keep rubbishing them, that's your prerogative :)

Nifty, thanks for posting this. I've started using Jupyter Notebooks with my (high school) technologies students this year.

I can see this being particularly useful since our sector is shifting everything into the MS cloud, so we can re-use our school credentials, and I can also stop worrying about having to make sure programming environments are installed on student images and so on.

In terms of playtime I think offline mode does stop it being logged. My wifi was stuffed in my game box and about 20 hours of a game weren't logged by the time I got a new adapter and reconnected to Steam servers.

I use a Surface Pro 3 for work, with students currently being given the 4.

I don't remember noticing much difference between the covers on the 3 and 4, and I find the trackpad on the 3 is bordering on unusable for anything that requires a large range of movement.

I really like the Surface as a hardware product, but the type covers are just gross.

I haven't tried the Surface Book, but you're lucky if you can even fit three or more fingers on the trackpads on the Surface Pro. Maybe MS could show some leadership there as well.

Yeah I liked that bit about digital tools. I've spent the last five years or so at my last two schools dealing with issues with subscription based "eBooks" that don't play nicely with education department proxies, crappy Flash learning objects, or are just unresponsive.

All this makes me so sad since I try to evangelise effective use of IT in classrooms.

I doubt open sourcing something moderately complex is as easy or cheap as that though, particularly if there are other technologies involved that you don't own.

It's one thing to say it should be open sourced but to put further effort into something that's already losing you money just for the love of it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

My worry about something like this is it's essentially opening it up to be a remote access tool for anyone that can figure out how to trigger it while not being Apple.

I would personally prefer to just lose my phone and have robust measures to stop thieves from accessing my data than increase the possibility of bad actors/govt using it as yet another surveillance tool (or at least more than it already is).