Tom’s Two Cents

Today I saw a tweet from Andy Carvin (of NPR fame) that got me involved in a quick Yahoo Pipes project to aggregate Gustav-related volunteering and housing posts from craigslist. I didn’t do much, but now there is a big long feed of housing offers and volunteering opportunities on the Gustav Ning site. If you are interested, join the Gustav Ning community to see what else needs to be done. Three years after Katrina, there are new tools we can use to help folks who will again be displaced by Mother Nature.

You can help too. Gustav wiki needs volunteers to edit pages on aid agencies/donations, govt contact info, etc: http://www.gustavwiki.com. They have migrated content from the Katrina wiki, but many things need to be updated. If you can adopt a page, please do — use the “talk” section of the wiki to claim your particular page and avoid duplication. This is a way you can help folks evacuating from affected areas get the info they need.

What if you don’t have Internet or a laptop? There’s also a mobile-based guide to Gustav resources and information here: http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08, for those in the path of the storm without internet access. If you have loved ones in the area, please pass this along.

So Barack Obama announced his veep pick via text message (although he was a bit late on Twitter). In many ways technology is changing the face of politics. My current favorite is blogging. I find it fascinating how stories from personal blogs bubble up to the top and become visible to thousands. Sometime we learn a great deal about the true colors of a particular civil servant. This was the case recently in Utah, where the Utah State Senate majority leader Curt Bramble verbally abused a pizza delivery girl. 20 years ago no one would have ever known. But this girl has a blog, and she wrote a post explaining what happened. It was linked to by another blogger who is part of utahbloghive.org. Then the story was picked up by The Salt Lake Tribune’s blog, and more recently by KSL Channel 5 News. This is the way things can snowball on the Net. You might think that one little blog post would be like a needle in a very large haystack — no one would ever find it, right? That’s where the Internet is different. All this Web 2.0, social networking, blogging mumbo jumbo actually works. People can find eachother. Ideas can be shared. The smallest voice can be heard. To me, this is what democracy is all about.

Glad to see the field getting a boost like this. This promises to be a really positive step for US education.

http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2008/08/new_national_center_for_edtech.html

This past week, President Bush signed into law a bill that will establish a new national research center for studying digital technology and learning. The center aspires be to edtech what the National Institutes of Health have been for medical research.

….

The Federation of American Scientists, which advocated for the creation of the center, has published a fact sheet noting that the center will take on projects such as:

• Research, development and demonstrations of learning technologies that could include simulations, games, virtual worlds, intelligent tutors, performance-based assessments, and innovative approaches to pedagogy that these tools can implement.
• Design and testing of components needed to build prototype systems. This could include tools for answering questions, for building and evaluating the construction of simulations and virtual worlds that could include sophisticated physical and biological systems or reconstructions of ancient cities brought to life with intelligent avatars (models of humans in virtual spaces).
• Research to determine how these new systems can best be used to build interest and expertise in learners of different ages and backgrounds. This will give educators, parents, employers, and learners the information they need to make informed choices.

I have decided to take the router back and use a regular land line for now. I still can’t pinpoint the problem, but I have found that re-flashing the firmware is a temporary fix. For some reason this works, but simply restarting the router doesn’t. So that’s what I have done every other morning for a week: Wake up… no blue light (no phone service)… “upgrade” firmware (for the n-th time)… blue light comes back on (phone works again)… then I just wonder how many calls I missed. This is one of those times when being an early adopter can bite you in the butt. At least I was able to talk T-Mobile into taking it back outside of the 14 day “buyer’s remorse” window. The whole idea that I would have to pay a $200 “early termination fee” is just silly. If a product doesn’t work after a few weeks I should be able to take it back for a refund. Period. 14 days is *barely* enough time to switch your number to T-Mobile and back, so you might want to test out your service with a number you don’t care about first. I know this has worked for others very well, but for some reason the Comcast + T-Mobile combination was a non-starter for me. Anyway, I’ll try VOIP again someday — in a year or so maybe.

I am not a super technical person, but I have come to realize that most technical questions have already been asked at least 1000 times before. So when I wonder about how to do stuff, I turn to Google…

Question 1: Is there a file system that I can use for both mac and pc? (Short answer: Yes, it’s called FAT32, but it’s not very good for large drives.) If I had the need to go between Windows (NTFS) and Mac (HFS+, aka Mac OS Extended), I would probably create a small-ish third partition (FAT32) as a go-between. FAT32 can be read and written to by either OS. But if you don’t like that idea, here is another answer. Basically, you install MacFUSE and then NTFS-3G, which allows macs to read and write to Windows/NTFS drives.

Question 2: Can I make a Time Machine backup bootable? Answer: Yes - sort of. I can copy my OS X Restore DVD directly to the Time Machine partition to be able to boot directly to the external drive and restore files without my mac. It’s not the same as a clone of my system because I can’t boot directly into my backup drive and continue working. But at least it keeps me from having to fumble around for my OS X Leopard DVD if I need to restore something directly from the backup drive. Here are the instructions.

If it’s important to be able to boot directly from your backup, a nice complement to Time Machine is some cloning software called SuperDuper! It not only allows an entire system to be cloned, but you can also boot directly to the cloned copy from any other mac (Intel or PowerPC). This means you could work uninterrupted from another machine while yours is being fixed. You have to buy the full version to get the backup scheduling feature, otherwise you have to keep your backups up-to-date manually. Here’s a little more about it. I don’t usually buy utility-type software, but at about $28 this one is tempting. (Even the free version is very nice for easy cloning. From my experience it works much better than Carbon Copy Cloner.)

Question 3: How do you make a Mac OS Extended (aka HFS+) partition bootable? This is important if you want to copy your Leopard DVD to a bootable Time Machine backup (see question #2). Run Disk Utility (in Applications –> Utilities folder) and select the desired partition. If Volume Format lists it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then it is already bootable. If not then click the “Enable Journaling” button. Presto! (This can be done anytime with a Mac OS Extended partition - even if you already have files on it.)

If you get cankers easily you should avoid the ingredient sodium laurylin sulphate. This substance is in many mouthwashes and almost every toothpaste (to make it foam). But sodium laurylin sulphate can cause cankers, especially if you are already prone to them. The only toothpaste I have found that doesn’t contain this substance is Rembrandt, but I’m sure there are others.

If you are trying out T-mobile’s HotSpot@Home VOIP home phone service, there is a setting you may need to change. T-mobile is still figuring this out so their technicians will invariably blame it on your ISP to get you to hang up and go away. I usually like T-mobile, but they have had this VOIP service out long enough to have figured out these types of issues. By the way, this article is only useful if they gave you the Linksys WRTU54G-TM router (this is the model they are currently handing out with this service).

I have Comcast as my ISP, and I was having the same problem others were having (no blue light — no phone service). I also got the same error message as others (W006.1 ISP Error. Retry.) I have found that the default firewall settings on the WRTU54G-TM router are too strict. I am not an expert so there may be a less drastic fix, but turning off firewall rules solves the problem. To do this, log in to your router via a computer connected to it (type http://192.168.0.1 in your browser to access it). As has been mentioned before, the default user name and password for the router are both “admin” (without the quotes). You can change this later. Once you have logged in, click on “Security” and then “Firewall.” Change “Enable” to “Disable” and click “Save.” You may need to restart your router (just unplug it, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in). Once it has time to start up the error message should be gone now and the blue light that indicates a phone connection should be back on. (To check, log back into your router and click “Status” –> “Voice” –> “Error List.”) You should be in business!

Here is a link to the Linksys forums where I posted this as well:

http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=VoIP_Routers&message.id=2931

If you want to check for firmware updates, here is the place (although currently there is only Version 1).