There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • The Netbook Summit 2010

    I just got back from the Netbook Summit in Burlingame, CA.  I was skeptical about attending at first. I mean seriously, a summit just to talk about netbooks?  But after two days of meeting new people and listening to where vendors think these devices are going, I’m glad I did.  I think the organizers of the event did a great job of opening it up to Educators and thanks to Jim Klein, Andrea Bennet and CETPA for arranging the Educator Discount.  Netbooks are getting a lot of traction in Education, primarily because of the features that make them netbooks; cheap, portable, durable and long battery life.

    I came away confident that netbooks are here to stay and that the platform is only going to get better.  The video capabilities of chips like the NVIDIA Tegra and AMD Fusion are going to bring HD Video to netbooks in a big way.  Tablets are coming and were talked about in several sessions.  It seems that a lot of people think that computing is moving into the mobile space and that the days of the Desktop are numbered.  I would tend to agree.  I don’t want to buy Desktops for my school anymore, in fact I want to go 1:1 (discussed more in depth in my podcast – Small School, Big Tech).  But even at netbook prices, finding the money to make that happen is a real challenge. I’m really waiting for sub $300 pricing. Hopefully we’ll see it soon.  We’ve managed to hit the $280 mark on our recent netbook purchases by buying the previous generation models of Acer netbooks.  Since Acer upgrades their models every few weeks, this hasn’t been too hard to do.  But I can only play that game for so long before I miss an upgrade cycle. To be sustainable, prices need to come down (or we need real tech funding in education). And not to leave out tablets, the iPad was mentioned but at $499 I don’t see it as a viable 1:1 solution for education.

    Really what I think is missing from netbooks, iPads and Android tablets is a real focus on Education.  Not just a device but an entire ecosystem of connected devices build around the classroom.  The market potential is huge.  Intel has the classmate (Intel was absent from the summit), but I’m not sold on the features or the price.  I think too often tech for Enterprise and Consumers in shoehorned into the Education space without truly addressing the unique needs of the classroom environment.  I don’t count microbial resistant keyboards and rubberized shells as innovations for Education.  The little light on the Dell 2100 that shows when a student is using a browser (is that only for IE I wonder?) is a gimmick.  I mean wouldn’t you expect your students to have that light on all the time?  There was one purpose built device on display being marketed to education that combined an E-Reader with a touch based android tablet.  I’m sorry but it looked too fragile to survive a day in a classroom.

    The tablet is an interesting form factor, but kids are still going to need to type.  A portable tablet with a KVM (keyboard/monitor/mouse) charging doc seems like the perfect paring to me.  Some $200 touchscreen device that kids can take with them wherever they go, like a portable library, interactive response system and camera and a lab full of docs where kids go to type papers.  Even better, make a second doc with a GPU built into the monito for hard core multi-media that the kid’s touchscreen can plug into and pair with.  Of course, this isn’t something we’ll see anytime soon, not for lack of imagination but mainly because the currently Operating System paradigms don’t really support this model of computer.  Maybe Android and Apple iPhone OS will change that.

    Of course my thoughts on all this may change tomorrow after iPad training and I take one home and really see what it can do.

  • How Intrusion Prevention killed my Backupify .eml Downloads

    A few weeks ago I wrote about Backupify.com, a cloud backup service that backs up data from your cloud apps into other parts of the cloud (or is it to different clouds all together?). To recap, I ran into a problem at work accessing my gmail backups. Backupify makes the backup of individual emails available as .eml downloads. I was getting 0KB files that were empty shells with no email data at work but at home it was working fine.

    Turns out one of the security modules (Intrusion Prevention) in our Untangle security appliance at work is set to block (or in this case strip content from) .eml files downloaded via http. I discovered this after a helpful email from Untangle support suggested I turn off security modules one by one to determine the culprit. There are half a dozen different security modules in Untangle for everything from SPAM to Ad blocking and of course it was not until the last one was flipped off that I was able to download the .eml file. As soon as I knew it was the Intrusion Prevention module I was able to look at the log and see the specific rule that was causing the problem (#1233: WEB-CLIENT Outlook EML access).

    And actually I think blocking .eml downloads from the web is a good thing so I will be leaving that particular rule in place. If I need to restore an email I can do it from home. It would be nice to be able to download my backed up email in a zip file or some other format that is not commonly identified as a security threat but I really can’t complain about a free service that is protecting my cloud data from the possibility of spurious dissipation.

    If I want to think about deploying Backupify to my staff to protect their Google Apps accounts, now that is another matter.

  • Toshiba nb200

    Melissa from IVS was nice enough to send me a Toshiba nb200 netbook for review last week.  I’m comparing it to our Acer D150 and D250 netbooks currently in use on campus.  The first thing that I did was install Jim Klein’s ubermix Linux for education since that is all we run on netbooks here.  I am happy to report that everything worked and it was up and running in under five minutes.  Not surprising since it uses the Atheros chipset which works great with the Ubuntu based ubermix image.  My benchmark is the Skype test call and with Headphones and mic plugged in, I was hearing the upbeat English accented voice of Skype’s test recording.

    On the physical hardware side there are a few issues, the power button is in the middle of the unit on the LCD hinge and accessible when the unit is closed.  I am not sure I like this as I find myself accidentally pressing it when carrying the netbook around.  I also find that the power adapter, with its straight plug, tends to pull loose, unlike the Acer with the angled connector.  Besides those two minor issues, the Toshiba is surprisingly similar to the Acer.  I’ll need a few more days of use to tell if I like the keyboard.  I think I’ve gotten used to the chiclet keys on my Acer 1410.

    I would have liked to have demoed Dell, HP and Lenovo netbooks in as stress free and painless a process as IVS has made this Toshiba demo; but alas those companies don’t seem too concerned with making things easy for their customers.  Oh well, for now I’ll just have to spend my time putting the little nb200 through its paces.

  • CVCUE 2010

    Back from presenting small school, Big Tech at CVCUE on Saturday with Danny Silva (iteachag).  It was a blast and I really enjoyed seeing all the twitter folks in person.  We had some great questions afterward and I met some guys that are trying to bring Big Tech to their school so I hope they found the information helpful.  Danny also presented his Getting the most out of Google Calendar and I have to say, even though I was playing camera man recording his session, I still managed to learn some cool new tricks.

    Jon Corippo’s (jcorippo) session on Google Forms and Quizlet was inspiring.  If you’ve never seen one of Jon’s presentations live, I highly recommend them (any of them).  He’s a truly great presenter and I always come away from his sessions with my brain in overdrive.

    For anyone not in the know, CUE’s regional affiliates put on some great professional development conferences for Educators throughout the year.  This is my second regional conference and I have to say, you can’t beat the value.  I highly encourage anyone in education to check them out.  Yes they happen on Saturdays, but that just means that the folks that show up are super dedicated to their profession and are great to hang out with.  The next awesome CUE event has got to be Teach Like a Rock Star Summer Camp being hosted at the innovative new Minarets High School in Oneal’s CA, August 3-5th.  John Corippo is assembling a superstar cast of edtech educators for a three day workshop at the brand new campus.  I encourage anyone interested in learning from the best to check it out.

    And speaking of Minarets HS, how cool is a High School where the kids do a parody of The Office with the Principle and the math teacher?  Check out The Classroom!

    And just a side note, Danny and I finally launched our podcast last week.  Check us out at https://smallschoolbigtech.wordpress.com/category/podcasts/.  We are going to try to get one out every 2 weeks or so and hope to get guests on as soon as we work out the whole skype with audacity thing.

  • Backupify cares

    Well, someone read my last post on backups and restores using the online cloud backup service Backupify.  I reported a problem where I could not open my archived email files.  Rob from Backupify replied to my post and suggested a possible cause:

    Hi Andrew,
    We can’t replicate this error, and haven’t had a single user complain about anything similar, so you might want to send us an email with some more information so we can look into it.

    We’ve seen a weird bug with some versions of IE 7 where it downloads empty zip files that really have data, so you may want to include your browser info.

    Well, I did some more testing and found that downloading and opening the .eml files works fine on my OS X system.  Mail opens them right up, the spam and the ham, attachments and all.  So cool, it works, I can sleep at night.

    So what was the problem?  Either my Windows XP box is hosed (I suspect it is) or the Untangle box at work is stripping .eml file data.  I’ve been meaning to reformat my desktop and install Windows 7 at work and one day I will. Really.  In the mean time I’ve got a 27″ iMac inbound any day now and as soon as that comes in, I’ll check and see if I get the same result at work.  That will rule out Untangle.  Everything works fine from home and so I look at setting staff and students up with Backupify for their Google Apps accounts (something I am seriously considering) I’m fine knowing my email is being backed up and I can get to it if need be.

    Again, its restoring one email at a time which is sufficient should I accidentally delete an email and need to recover it.  I would love to see an archive download option that would allow me to download every email to my local desktop in a single, easy to move folder.  Maybe when the service comes out of beta…

    Blogger is also working now, although it was not on the two computers I tried from work and from home yesterday so I am guessing they kicked a server or too and knocked lose some dust bunnies that were sitting on my account settings.  I like it.  It’s a nice clean backup with all my posts listed in chronological order.  If need be, I could copy and paste them back into a blog.  I’d lose the dates and links (probably as bad as losing the data completely in the link based economy), but the content would be recoverable.

    This whole experience has left me excited about the cloud and blogging.  I’m guessing someone over at Backupify must have read What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis.  They obviously are on the lookout for customer issues on the Interwebs and responding to customers in a meaningful and authentic way.  Great to see companies that get it and I look forward to seeing Backupify’s services continue to improve over time.

  • Restorify

    After my glowing review of Backupify last week, I’m ashamed to admit that I forgot the golden rule of backups, if you can’t restore, then you haven’t successfully backed up anything. In checking some of the services besides twitter in my Backupify cloud backup account yesterday, I noticed that while I’ve been receiving nice emails about successful Gmail backups, when I went to restore my email (one at a time) all I got were empty .eml files. (Don’t get me started on that format either, seriously I need an email client to read restored gmail email?). This appears to be a problem with the backupify gmail service, which is still in beta after all.  But beta or not, I don’t think it should be cheerfully telling me that my email is backed up if I can’t restore it at all.

    Now, formats aside, my Hotmail backup actually works. And yes, I have a hotmail account, have since before there was dirt and I am kind of partial to it. It was my first web based email and I still remember having to use pine at University too, so there.

    The twitter backup is still awesome, although threaded conversations would be nice.  Google Docs works as advertised, although again the format is all in Microsoft Office docs. It looks like they simply do an export as Office documents to their cloud. While I would prefer a zip archive option, this will work as protection against the accidental delete. My blogger backup currently says “Application Error” when I try and look at the Archive. I guess if anything happens to my Andrew T. Schwab blog I’m SOL.  But hey, its free and still in Beta so I really shouldn’t complain.

    Oh, and Backupify does work with Google Apps, I have it backing up one of my Standard Apps Gmail accounts.  So I’m an idiot, what else is new?  Now, where’d I put that iPad?

  • Comparing Twitter Followers

    Tool 22 from 30 Twitter Tools For Managing Followers is http://tweepdiff.com/ and I just used it to compare @iteachag (610 followers; my co-worker who started on twitter about the same time as me) to my twitter account @anotherschwab (447 followers).  I then proceeded to tweet out the following breaking news flash:

    Hey @iteachag we have 104 common followers and we follow 93 of the same people according to http://tweepdiff.com/

    This is interesting information for two reasons.  One it tells me that between the two of us we are seeing about 15-20% of the same stuff.  Now I don’t know if the people we both follow are producing a majority of the “high quality” tweets but I would suspect so.  Given such a small number of users and the immense value both of us get out of it, I can only imagine how it must scale.  I’m guessing at some point stuff starts to get lost in the noise but for now, for me, I’m very happy with the information and interaction I’m getting out of twitter.

    The second thing it tells me is that perhaps I need to branch out a bit more and start looking for some new people to follow.  Finding people that I might want to follow seems to be the major hurdle right now.  My twitter community was mainly built through participation in education technology events, following the active participants and then combing through their followers/following lists to find interesting tweets and following those people in return.  When lists were added I thought it might get easier to find people posting what I would find interesting, but it hasn’t really worked out for me that way.

    I browse through wefollow every now and again but even that is hit or miss.  Not everyone who says they are in IT or Education actually tweets about those things.  I guess in that respect Twitter is more like building relationships in real life than I thought.  You have to go to where the people are and join in on the conversation if you want to make contacts.  I guess there really is no way around the social stuff when building a social network, is there.

  • Backupify – A nice little cloud app

    Nice? Ok, so far Backupify is awesome.  I looked at my Twitter archive today and what can I say but Wow!  I mean, come on. It built an entire pdf book of my Twitter activity that I can download!  I also have it backing up 2 personal gmail accounts, my google docs and delicious bookmarks.  The interface is simple, its easy to use.  I understand the thing.  It just works.

    The email notifications of completed backups surely must be making me sleep better at night knowing that my cloud data is being backed up.  I did reduce the backup frequency from daily to weekly.  Since my cloud data is supposedly “distributed” and “redundant” anyway I felt super paranoid every day when the backupfiy email would arrive telling me my services had been backed up.  Once a week feels better.

    Now, if only they had something similar for Google Apps accounts I would be all over that.  As long as it was free, or nearly free.

  • Operating Systems Don’t Matter, But I Still Want a Mac

    I’ve become one mixed up computer user. For the past few months I’ve been running Snow Leopard on a hackintosh at home as my main desktop computer. I also have an old laptop running Windows 7 that I occasionally will drag into the living room and work on in front of the TV but more and more, my living room surfing is done on my iPhone.

    At work I am running Windows XP; mostly because I just haven’t had time to upgrade to Windows 7. I also have an Ubuntu Linux netbook that goes with me to meetings and what not.

    Just a few years ago, I would have found it impossible to jump between Operating Systems like this. Just keeping up with the application requirements would have driven me insane. But now I just open up my web browser (Firefox or Chrome mostly) on whatever system I am using and Bam! its all there. Email, Docs (we use Google Apps at school), Remote Desktop (yes I do need to access my Windows Servers), The Internet.  Everything I use on a day to day basis is cross platform or in the cloud.

    I guess if I stop to think about it I’m what you could call tri-lingual when it comes to Operating Systems.  It’s kind of neat; in a geeky sort of way.  Having said that I should be able to format my computer right now, reinstall Windows or even better (for my wallet) Ubuntu and be back on my merry way.  Except I don’t.  So if someone would care to explain why I continue to find myself inexplicably drawn to the most expensive platform out there I’d be much obliged.

    Because I still want a Mac.

  • Quick Note

    Catching up on grades and letting the brain swelling subside from the awesome CUE Conference last week. Hope to post some thoughts later when they have had a chance to percolate.