I’ve written an introduction for a forthcoming new edition of John Sundman’s mind-bending and beautiful novella Cheap Complex Devices, which anticipated ChatGPT and its issues about creativity and sentience by 20+ years. It’s also a uniquely lovely and properly confounding book.

But that’s not the Sundman book you should start with, much as I love it. His others are more conventional tech-sf novels — more conventional but not conventional.

Here’s his bibliography:

• Acts of the Apostles: Mind over Matter – intro by Cory Doctorow
• Cheap Complex Devices: Mind Over Matter– intro by me
• The Pains: Mind Over Matter – intro by Ken MacLeod
• Biodigital: : A Novel of Technopotheosis – intro by John Biggs

The first three are a trilogy of sorts.

He has a new one coming out this fall: Mountain of Devils, coming this fall. 

John is a very interesting person. He’s got tech chops that go all the way back to the early days of microcomputers. Until recently, he was a volunteer firefighter and writes compellingly about that as well. (Disclosure: John’s a friend.)

For updates on this project and more, check out his substack https://johnsundman.substack.com/

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[Please note important boldface corrections in this post – Feb. 1, 2022]

Just in case you’ve started getting notifications on your Mac that “Software from ‘Fei Lv’ added items that can run in the background. You can manage this in Login Items Settings”, here’s an explanation that I could not find anywhere on the Internet.

This seems to be coming from NordPass [Nope. Coincidence.], which I have been trying out as a replacement for 1Pass. a password manager. I like 1Password and it is a well-regard and trust password manager, but it’s UI has been getting overly complex for my tastes, mainly because I’ve entered too many redundant, broken entries. I recommend 1Pass and will probably be going back to it. But NordPass was offering a great intro deal, and I’ve been a satisfied user of NordVPN for years now.

I started getting the annoying Fei Lv notifications, and struggled to find what app, piece of software, or sneaky malware was causing them. Apple does not make it easy. It’s relatively easy to find in the log that the notification is happening, but not which app “Fei Lv” applies to. Neither did Google or Bing searches.

Trial and error, however, worked well. It looks like it’s NordPass [Nope]. So, if you’re hearing from the mysterious Fei Lv, try turning off NordPass through System Preferences and see if that does the trick. [It won’t] It did for me [For a few days].

i’ll consider turning it back on if NordPass reassures me that Fei Lv isn’t some malware that snuck on to my computer. [NordPass is not the problem. I still don’t know what is.]

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While I’m waiting for Western Digital to replace my external backup drive — it lasted for 9 months, so that’s pretty good, right? — I’ve been finding comfort in using borg (free) (documentation) , wrapped in the LaunchControl UI ($18) to do hourly incremental backups to my flush Transcend SD card.

LaunchControl is still a little too techy for me, but I got it working pretty quickly. Recommended! And the Transcend is fast enough that I my Mac doesn’t hiccup when it’s being backed up to.

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[SPOILER: Nope. Not the way to do it. Except for the sentence in green.]

My Windows PC has died rather dead. It does not recognize my boot drive, nor does it boot from my two back-up external drives or from the boot USB I prepared a year ago. Thus continues my 30 year streak of never having made a Windows backup — on any at least four different types of media –that I could successfully back up from.

I thus have to make a new USB boot drive but from my Mac because it turns out that I don’t know anyone within driving distance who uses a PC. And, in truth, I only use mine for games.

There are bunches of pages that tell you the Mac terminal commands that should teach you how to load the Windows installer from Windows , but one of the best I found is by Quincy Larson at FreecodeCamp. Be warned: the process is sloooowwww.

My PC booted from the USB stick, after telling the PC, via the BIOS, that that’s the drive to boot from.

The next step is two spend 2.5 days repeatedly trying to get Windows to install onto a hard drive. My directions are: try everything randomly, learn how to use “diskpart” so you can use trial and error to come up with the right partition and formatting for the receiving drive, memorize by heart and then by muscle memory the keyboard shortcuts for walking through the preliminaries of the Windows installation process, convert the receiving drive from MSR to GPT and back again as often as you can all so that at last …

… you can repeatedly be told that there are no partitions on the receiving drive, and Windows has no way of creating or formatting partitions on the disk that you know that you just partitioned and formatted, even if you politely press the “Delete” button first.

Then, when you’re at you’re breaking point looking at the Windows error message that tells you to read system logs that you can’t find and wouldn’t understand if you could, go back to DISKPART, clean (erase) your disk once more, and either create a partition but do not format it, or don’t even create a partition. At this point I honestly can’t remember. Install Windows onto that disk and you’re good to go…

…where “good to go” means to start reinstalling every bloody program because Windows’ Registry is a jealous god.

Thus does Windows continue it’s long of tradition of being great so long as everything goes well, and being a freaking nightmare when anything goes wrong.

Just ask Clippy.

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I move my laptop from my home office to other rooms of the house after I realize, as I do at least twice a day, that my office looks like a hoarder’s storage locker. Rather than cleaning it up, I decided to make it slightly easier for me to make those moves.

The problem is that if I move my MacBookPro (2019) out of bluetooth range of my Apple MagicMouse, the trackpad doesn’t accept input. And that means I have to trudge the entire 15 feet back to my office to get my mouse. That obviously is simply not acceptable, so I instead spent several hours writing a shell script that I can run in a terminal that will toggle my mouse (or any other bluetooth device) on or off.

It requires you to install blueutil, an open source set of command line tools for managing your bluetooth connections. (Thank you, Ivan Kuchin). To install blueutil, in a terminal type “brew install blueutil”. If you don’t have Homebrew installed, you’ll get an error message, in which case install Homebrew. It’s very useful.

You also will need to know the bluetooth ID of the device you want to control. You can find that by going to your Mac’s Settings and clicking on the bluetooth icon, or by running blueutil in a terminal with the parameter “–paired.”

To use this script, copy and paste it into a text editor and save it with a “.sh” extension. To let your Mac know that this is a text file that should be run, not just read, you need to go to a terminal and change its permissions to 755. (For instructions on how to do that and how to run it from a terminal, check here.) (I have bound the crl-alt-com B key to running it, thanks to KeyboardMaestro.)

Note that I am a bad writer of shell scripts. I had to look up just about everything except how to write a comment. Have some compassion, people! And if not that, how about some pity?

#!/bin/zsh
# Toggles a device's bluetooth activity on and off.
# Useful for when you move out of range of your bluetooth
#   mouse and your Mac's trackpad becomes 
#   unresponsive. For example.
# Requires installing Blueutil:
# https://github.com/toy/blueutil/blob/master/README.md
#
# I post this as Creative Commons Zero, i.e., public domain. 
# David Weinberger, Sept. 24, 2020 [email protected]

# Add your device's bluetooth ID here.
# If you don't know it, run "blueutil --paired"
# in a terminal window to find out.
ID="04-4b-ed-d2-ef-23" # Just an example

echo "Toggles bluetooth device. Requires blueutils be installed.";
echo "USAGE: bluetoggle. No parameters";
echo "Device ID: ${ID}"
echo "--------";

# is the device connected?
# Run blueutil and returns the text.
STATUS=`blueutil --paired`

# is the ID mentioned in the status?
# If not, then it hasn't been connected, so there's
# nothing for this  script to do
if [[ $STATUS != *"${ID}"* ]]
then
    echo "Device not found. Edit bluetoggle.sh to add device's bluetooth ID. Exiting."
    exit
fi

# Look for the ID followed by ", not connected"
if [[ $STATUS == *"${ID}, not"* ]]
then
    echo "${ID} is not connected. Connecting..."
    CL=`blueutil --connect ${ID}` # Create command string
    NEWSTATUS=`${CL}` # Run the command
else
    echo "Disconnecting device..."
    CL=`blueutil --disconnect ${ID}`
    NEWSTATUS=`${CL}`
fi

exit

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Just over twenty years ago, computer scientists were racing the clock to fix a possibly devastating error brought about by an over-estimation of the pace at which tech becomes obsolete, which is an over-estimation of the pace of change itself. It turns out that one of the two popular solutions to the problem made the same mistake. And now we’re paying for it, but mainly through some annoyances, not the sort of world-stopping calamity that the prior error threatened.

The problem twenty years ago was that software developers had with some frequency thought that storing the year could be done with two digits, so that 1970 would be saved as 70. After all, the program wouldn’t still be used in 2000! Would we also still be driving around on earth-bound cars, or giving poodles ridiculous haircuts? Ridiculous!

But, if those apps were in fact still be used as the new millennium began, then the two digits internally representing the year would be taken internally as 00, which would be likely to confuse a computer that would assume – based on the way numbers work – that 00 (2000) comes before 70 (1970). And 2001 would look like 1901, etc.

One approach developers took to preempt the Y2K (year two thousand) bug was to change the way the programs expressed date data, allotting four digits to the year. We shall call this “the right way.” But it’s more complex than it seems. For example, you may have to find every place in a complex, integrated set of programs where the date is referred to. You may have to recompile ancient code, unearthing compilers from ancient crypts guarded by three-headed dogs. It was a freaking nightmare for many organizations.

The second approach was to write a little code that looked for year dates between 00 and 20, and write an except that takes them as referring to 2000-2020. Most applications aren’t dealing with dates going back to the beginning of the 20th century, so that worked. Chris Stokel-Walter (twitter: @stokel) in his excellent, brief explainer in New Scientist, says that an estimated 80% of Y2K solutions took this approach, known as “windowing”, but which we shall refer to it as the “Please don’t do this” approach.

Well, now it’s 2020 and some indeterminate number of windowed apps haven’t updated the fix. Thus, some traffic meters have stopped working. As Chris writes, “The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived…”

So, exactly the same over-estimation of the pace of tech obsolescence has led to exactly the same problem. Surprise?

It’s not at all clear, however, who has made this mistake. The developers implementing the windowing patch were staving off an imminent, plausible crashing of globally crucial systems. Windowing was a reasonable approach to forestalling this crisis … but only if there was a system – a human system – to remember to allocate resources for fixing the problem that the patch postponed.

Conclusion: “Human system” is an oxymoron.

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My site has been down while I’ve tried to figure out (i.e., google someone else’s solution) to a crash caused by WordFence, an excellent utility that, ironically, protects your WordPress blog from various maladies.

The problem is severe: Users of your blog see naught but an error message of this form:

Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required ‘/home/dezi3014/public_html/wordfence-waf.php’ (include_path=’…/usr/lib/php /usr/local/lib/php’) in Unknown on line 0

The exact path will vary, but the meaning is the same. It is looking for a file that doesn’t exist. You’ll see the same message when you try to open your WordPress site as administrator. You’ll see it even when you manually uninstall WordPress by logging into your host and deleting the wordfence folder from the wp-content/plugins folder

If you look inside the wordfence-waf.php file (which is in whatever folder you’ve installed WordPress into), it warns you that “Before removing this file, please verify the PHP ini setting `auto_prepend_file` does not point to this.”

Helpful, except my php.ini file doesn’t have any reference to this. (I use MediaTemple.com as my host.) Some easy googling disclosed that the command to look for the file may not be in php.ini, but may be in .htaccess or .user.ini instead. And now you have to find those files.

At least for me, the .user.ini file is in the main folder into which you’ve installed WordPress. In fact, the only line in that file was the one that has the “auto_prepend_file” command. Remove that line and you have your site back.

I assume all of this is too obvious to write about for technically competent people. This post is for the rest of us.

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For some reason, Apple Keynote continues to ship with many more frames than it lets you use. (Frames are called Picture Frames when you click on the Border dropdown menu in the Format panel.) You can get Keynote to list these hidden frames if you’re willing to mess around with a file that might break Keynote.

Please nod your head to indicate that you’ve read and understood the above warning.

The first thing to do is to find the hidden files. For Keynote 6.6 (the latest version), they’re here:

/Applications/Keynote.app/Contents/Resources/Frames/

To get there you have to select Keynote in your Applications folder and right-click on it, or do what you have to in order to get the popup menu. Choose “Show Package Contents” and navigate to the Frames folder.

In that folder is a file named FrameInspectorLayoutInfo.plist. Make a copy of it as a backup and put it some place safe.

Nod your head to indicate that you have done that. I mean it.

Open the original of that file in a text editor of your choice. (If you’re comfortable editing plists in Xcode, use that. It’s easier.) This is an XML file that lists all the frames that will show up when you choose Picture Frame from the Border dropdown. (To see them, you have to click the tiny triangle to the right of the thumbnail view Keynote provides of the Picture Frame you’ve chosen.)

You can see the available frames in the Frames folder in Finder where you found the file you’re currently editing. To add a frame, you add it to the list called “Asset Scales” that is the first half of the file, and you add it again to the list called “Display Order” that is the second half. But you add it differently in each.

Asset Scales expects an entry of this form:

<key>Spiralbook Creme</key>
<real>0.59999999999999998</real>

Please note that I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THAT SECOND LINE MEANS. So I’ve just been copy-pasting it and replacing the name of the frame. It does not work for some frames (e.g., Venetian 3), which results in a blank spot in the menu of available frames…but if you click on that blank space, for some of them you get the frame anyway. In the sample file I’m providing, I have not included any frames with that problem. (Asset Scales probably specifies how to display the thumbnail version of the frame. It just doesn’t work for all of them, and I don’t know why.)

The Display Order list does what it sounds like: it controls the order of the layout of the thumbnails you can choose from. It does not have to be the same as the order of the frames in the Asset Scales list. It expects entries in this form:

<string>Spiralbook Creme</string>

Make a typo and you’ll have a blank spot where a thumbnail is supposed to be, and that blank spot won’t do anything.

Now save the file; it will likely ask you for permission first. Reload Keynote. Enjoy your new frames.

I’m posting a version of the replacement file here. I’ve only added about half of the frames so far because I’m lazy. I’ll add more over time.

Nod your head if you agree not to blame me for screwing up your Mac.

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Walter Bender of SugarLabs begins by saying “What I’m all about is tools.” “The character of tools shapes what you can do.” He’s an advocate of “software libre” that lets the user be the shaper. That brings responsibility, which Walter wants to celebrate.

He’s going to talk about http://turtle.sugarlabs.com

He goes back to Papert and Cynthia Solomon who in the late 1960s invented Logo. Fifty years ago. Then Jobs and Gates gave us babysitting: sw was there to be used, not an environment for creating ideas. You have to be given the tools and the knowledge.

In 1971, Papert and Solomon wrote “Twenty things you can do with software.” Walter today is going to give us a sense of the breadth of things you can do with software:

• Using Turtle Blocks to draw interesting shapes, or create a paint program or paint with noise or attach pen size to time. “Once it belongs to you, you’re responsible for it it. And then it has to be cool, because who wants to be responsible for something that’s not cool?”




• Challenges and puzzles




• Add sensors, cameras, etc., create aa burglar alarm that photos the burglar




• measure gravitational acceleration




• Continent game written by a third grader




• Build a robot




• Model math




• Collaborate across the network in a multimedia chat program

You can even extend the language. You can export your program into another programming language. A child wrote an extension to the language to download maps.

Turtle Blocks tries to make the learning visible to the learner — statistics about what the learner is doing, etc.

It’s got to be easy enough that you’ll try it, but it has to be hard if you’re going to learn. Many tools have low floors to enable easy entry but they also have low ceilings.

“Debugging is the greatest oppportunity for learning in the 21st century.” (Walter ties this idea to Cynthia Solomon.)

What motivates people: autonomy, a sense of mastery, and having a sense of purpose.

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Renee Hobbs from the Harrington School of Comm and Media is giving a talk about teachers as makers.

The myth of the digital native has hurt teachers and students alike. Students come into classrooms feeling superior. Teachers think the students already know how to use tech.

The concept of literacy is changing. It means being able to go out in the world and do something. That means educators who have to learn concepts like open access, multitasking, transmediation, identity, curation, play. We have to think about who owns our data, how our community is represented, addiction, displacement, and propaganda. And there are more and more “stakeholders.”

There’s a big opportunity to connect culture and the classroom. E.g. minecraft. E.g., analyzing the news. Vital to make connections between school and the world. Popular culture is an important tool for connecting and relevancy. We need to make the “stand and deliver” method obsolete.

There is an art to creating a digital literacy learning environment. Renee has encountered several archetypes:

Teacher 2.0 helps students use media and tech to connect with and learn from others as networked digital citizens. Another teacher is a “spirit guide”: help students use media to support their social and emotional well-being.

So Renee’s group developed a “horoscope”: questions that show what sort of teacher you are, eg., trendsetter, taste-maker, watchdog. (see powerfulvoicesforkids.com), etc.

When teachers become media creators, they gain confidence. It’s important for them to learn how to use the relevant tools. E.g., a couple of teachers made a video about “how to solve a maht problem.” Another made a short video of children helping someone across the street. Another used Screencast-o-matic to capture interaction with a google doc to share a lesson plan. The teachers eventually got more playful and fun.

As teachers became more comfortable as media creators, they were better able to connect to students as creators.

“The same way that music is not in the piano, learning is not in the device.”

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