Monthly Archives: January 2018

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Tried and True Technologies, Part 2: Google

In August, I posted the first of this “Tried and True Technologies” series. That post focused on how you can use mail merging in Word to make life a little easier. This time around, I figured we should just go for a big one: Google.

Google has a ton of apps—not just Mail, Docs, and Sheets either. They have a full repertoire of tools, called the “G Suite.” From this suite, there are few tools that I love and find incredibly easy to use. In this post, I’ll cover a tool I find to be underused: Google Keep.

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Ockham’s Razor and Online Learning

Rube Goldberg's Self-Operating NapkinI’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.

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Spectre and Meltdown and The Art of Communicating Bad News

Newspaper headline "Bad News"In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: Wells Fargo continued to grapple with the fallout from fake accounts. Equifax compromised data. Apple slowed down phones.

And to kick off 2018, there are vulnerabilities in computer chips that will affect “almost all computers, servers, cloud operating systems, and cellphones made in the past two decades.” Disheartening, no?

I’ve been thinking about the nomenclature employed in this case. Calling the two vulnerabilities “Spectre” and “Meltdown” accomplishes a couple things. Taken together, the names seem appropriately technology-adjacent, but I was most interested in Spectre, which evokes something elusive, ghostlike, and therefore understandably difficult to detect—which explains how the vulnerability went undiscovered for more than 20 years.

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