Here is a very cool news article about girls in engineering, from University of Toronto. Girls are smart, they work hard and have all the tools they need to succeed in engineering and computer science. We need to encourage them to do well in all technical subjects. Girls add a new dimension to technical fields, a new way of looking at situations, and a new way of reacting to new problems. Go girls! Big Weed makes her mark in the world.
Back at the University of Toronto, the children’s science course instructor, Michaela Tai, explains the dangers of incorrectly connecting a circuit.
Little Weed’s neighbourhood friend has an Acer Aspire 5742z-4403 that was not functional. It would simply continue to cycle the boot process. He had suspected that his hard disk was bad but did not know how to prove it. I had him bring it to our house. in the end I proved that his hard disk was defective, the machine did boot up with Ubuntu and was fully functional. After connecting to the network with an RJ45, with Firefox we verified the internet worked. Summary: The computer works fine, the hard disk needs replacement.
As a renter I get to try out a lot of new cars. This is somewhat disconcerting at times because if the UI is not intuitive, this causes me grief. I fumble around, trying to find a requirement, using my experience with other cars as my guide. This is common to not only cars but to any other object as well. One of the fancy features that almost all new cars have is the onboard entertainment system. Most have bluetooth connectivity. The car also have a myriad of independent computers, ranging from IR door unlocking to backup cameras. As a technologist I always wonder if these systems are secure. In the back of my mind I know they are not.
After installing Lubuntu on an old Dell, i was expecting a similar user experience from full Ubuntu with a Unity desktop environment, where I would need to spend many extra hours tweaking the install. Little did I know. Ubuntu is easier to install and use, by far.
My Lenovo w510 came with Windows 7, which I still want to keep. By adding another disk I could boot to the new Ubuntu disk, and then have a choice to stay in Ubuntu or boot to Windows. A dual boot install was required. There is a lot of help online about installing a dual boot using two disks.
Careless was I when I somehow inadvertently deleted Firefox from my old Google Nexus One, which has Android 2.2. No matter, go to the Google Play/Android market store and download it, right? Not so fast. It turns out as of Jan 2015 Firefox has dropped support for Android 2.2 and ARMV6 devices, and Firefox is no longer available for my Android version. Google Chrome for Android is only available for Android 4 and newer, so not available for me.
Mistaken I was, in blaming Lubuntu 14.04 for my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, for a very dim screen. It was so dim that I could barely see large white windows. I thought it was a Lubuntu 14.04 software problem, so I kept digging for answers, and receiving nothing but frustration and disappointment. Near 6 months later, I figured out that the laptop’s backlight was defective. Once replaced the screen lit up as normal.
My first thought was “What the hell”? My Win 2k 2000 Printer server has not been touched for a couple of years, and today it started acting up, with a “USB Driver not Found”. What to do?
My HP P1005 Laserjet printer connects to my Win2k PC using USB, which has worked very reliably for years. Today I got messages like “Use Printer offline”, and nothing would print. In device manager I could see the yellow caution sign for USB driver support. What the hell? I had not installed anything on this PC for years.
Kids will be kids, in that they buy stuff, play with stuff, and then eventually break stuff. My job is to repair the stuff they break. Which brings me to the Ripstik casterboard. There are three variations: Classic, Ripster, Ripstik G, and the DLX. My local group, which includes my Little Weed, rides on Classic, G, and DLX models. Two of their G models broke in the same manner, with two different boys, of different weights. My advice for Ripstik buyers is to steer clear of the G model. I apologize to all for y 6 month delay in posting this info, but I was distracted by work.
Little Weed has been in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Gifted Program for elementary school for a couple of years now. Overall it has been a great experience, though not without the occasional bumps on the road. I thought I’d write down some of my impressions, from one who is in the middle of the journey, to those who may be thinking about starting the journey.
Difficult as it may be, hard decisions often need to be made. The Toronto District School Board, Toronto, Canada, has seen an average of 4% falling enrollment for their students for a good decade or more. This is a well known problem, but has been highlighted recently because of funding shortfalls and possible scandal at the school board. The under utilization problem is very well known. There was even a Queen’s University study on the subject.Yet there is no political will to close schools, even in the face of an obvious decline in students and therefore, government funding. Elected school trustees seem to not be able to do their jobs.
