Josh Nunn’s Geekorium \ tag \ technology

Cartoon: The Big Picture.

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009.

Finally got around to watching this. If Google’s Wave takes off (and it will), it will change everything. This is better than email, better than IM, better than a personal wiki. Within months of this going live, we will have a million new ways to communicate. That they’ve made it open source makes it more likely than any other tool to change how we communicate via the web.

» Continue reading So… Google Wave. This changes everything.

I love technology. The thrill of new possibilities. The excitement of learning. There’s nothing that beats it.

Actually, that’s a complete lie. There is something that beats it. Beats it hands down. Without question.

I love my baby girl. The thrill of her potential. The excitement of seeing her learn. By gum it’s the greatest feeling I’ve ever experienced, to watch her discover her world.

Hax0r the interw3bz

I’m totally looking forward to teaching her everything I can about the earth. The people on it, the cultures, the life, the bizarre phenomena we just can’t explain yet. I know she’ll be just as fascinated as I am. And I’m hoping that she turns out to be a geek like her Dad.

» Continue reading Where my parenting meets the “Cleanfeed”

Image via Wikipedia

It seems to me that we (society/schools/the world) tend to rely on technology in two ways. The first is to rely on it to actually work – we expect our computers, email and Intranet page to be working first thing in the morning until 10 o’clock at night (or later). We expect it to work without glitch or bug or problem. Of course by ‘expect’ I really mean ‘cross our fingers and hope’. The way we work belies our hope—we back up, use save often and pray that nothing breaks when we try something new. Some of the more tech-savvy of us (or the more adventurous) quickly rely on technology more than we should. But when our USB device fails or our email service is down, we admit fault for expecting rather than hoping.

Then there is the other way we rely on technology. It began when we (and again I mean ‘we’ as a collective) first sat our kids in front of the television and went off to do our own thing. It has continued until today, but now includes DVD’s, video games, “the computer” and now the Internet. The reliance we have developed is more than just ‘expecting it to work’. We now expect it to fill a role it was never meant to fill, namely: taking over our children’s education and keeping them occupied. Technology-as-babysitter is giving technology far, far more credit than it deserves for being reliable. When our technology lets us down in so many other areas why do we continue to trust it with the minds of our children?

» Continue reading Reliance

Al’s class of miniLegends got me this wonderful gift on Monday to say thank you for fixing and running the school’s computers (it was SSO week).

Little yellow dog is watching me

» Continue reading Yellow Dog Cam

Update: 2007-12 My feed is superceded by the ACTUAL OFFICIAL triple j: new music podcast. Please subscribe to it! It includes links to the actual MP3s.

Update: 2008-08-29 I’ve deleted the feed from Feedburner, as it’s no longer necessary.

Triple J (an Australian youth radio station) has been putting free music up on their site for years for people to download in MP3 format. They don’t really seem to have a way of telling people when new music is up there though.

Well today I found a use for the wonderful Feed43 service that’s been sitting in my bookmarks folder, and I’ve created a simple feed that should keep track of the new music as it’s posted.

I’m making the feed public with this disclaimer: I don’t own the music and have nothing to do with the Triple J website. Use it at your own risk. If it breaks I reserve the right to not fix it. If I am told to stop it by Triple J I will. I have not included a direct link to the music to avoid as many issues as possible – please visit the Triple J website to download the songs.

Otherwise, I hope you find it useful!

The Internet is so fun, I love it!

Was uploading some photos to my PicasaWeb album and noticed that someone had managed to find my photos and had left a comment! Yay me!
» Continue reading The one where Josh communicates with someone in another language

Actually, it’s more of a love/frustration relationship. It’s so one-sided.

I’m a big fan of Google. About 3 years ago I realised that working between home and two schools, I’d have a lot of information that I’d need to share around easily. Web 2.0 had just hit its stride and instead of stowing everything I created, wrote or needed on a USB stick, I thought I’d see how much I could get online.

Google at the time was expanding rapidly, and had just added a calendar to its already successful online mail app. A little while later it acquired Writely – which luck would have it I already had an account at. All in all, Google was looking set to be able to take my data online and keep it all together in one big web-app.
» Continue reading My Love/Hate relationship with Google

They do what on the Internet?

I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper – but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.

“Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?!!”

they exclaimed.
As I was about to explain that actually the ‘net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.

» Continue reading Our job.

I’ve switched web hosts. This might not mean much to some, but it means a better, easier experience for me. What it does mean though, is that I had the opportunity to switch from one blogging program to another. However they are two entirely different beasts, and I’m manually moving most of my old posts to this new system.

So there will be a small transition phase. I’ll get the bulk of the comments over to this system too.

I still have my GodBlog, my regular blog, my dad’s blog will be back shortly and very soon I’ll be launching my archive of how-to documents that I’ve created in the course of my work. Check it all out!