Of course information wants to be free. But information (and entertainment) providers have to live too. And they want to be loved. Recognition is a powerful motivator, and with a little effort can also be a bit financially rewarding, which is why I signed up with Flattr.
Some very smart people have been having a right old ding-dong over how big a phone is and how small a tablet is and this mythical creature called a phablet. Little of which I can relate to, as I don't have a tablet and my phone is a fine size for me. But I certainly can relate more generally.
For my sins, I have to read, or at least scan, a lot of stuff written by caring, sharing people who work in international development. Like many of them, I fully subscribe to the notion that we don't have all (or any?) of the answers and that we need to help people to help themselves. But why is it necessary to bludgeon those ideas upside the head with prose like this:
Once again, technology is getting away from me, and it is my own fault, if anyone's. Software is something I'm interested in and like to understand, but it isn't my work, paid or otherwise. Which makes it just so hard to keep up. And that's frustrating.
The immediate problem is a slightly ill-thought-out attempt to "redesign" a couple of my websites. And the scare quotes are there because I didn't actually do much thinking about the design. Just looked at a bunch of templates and saw one that looked kind of what I wanted. So I paid for it, and it was indeed almost what I wanted. But not quite. I poked about under the hood, because I have a tiny bit of ability in that department, made a couple of adjustments and then, realising wearily that my abilities have once again been left in the dust, gave it up and resolved to make do with almost. For a while.
Would you give a three-year old child a knife to play with? Well, maybe not to play with, but to work with? Definitely. Nathanael Johnson at Grist rounds up the arguments in favour of teaching children knife skills, as part of cookery skills, which, of course, are survival skills. Johnson thinks that the lack of overt hostility to an article by Sarah Elton advocating just that "signifies a tipping point in American culture" (conveniently annexing Canada for the sake of his argument).
