Blog

I just bought an old hair styling chair (not quite a barber’s chair) for my height adjustable desk. It can raise and lower the same spread as the desk. Unfortunately, it’s about 50lbs (22kg-ish) so moving it out of the way when I want to stand will be a challenge.

The funny thing is that I haven’t been in a barber’s chair since 1999.

I can now post things from the command-line! I’m using the Hugo blog engine and this is an example of archetypes. I’d love to figure out how to incorporate this to my fediverse (gxwalsh@hci.social) and bluesky (@gregwalsh.com).

Prepping a La Frite SBC AML-S805X-AC to Work for OctoPrint

Goal

In this post, I’ll show you how to get a Libre Computer La Frite SBC ready for using with OctoPrint.

Introduction

During the pandemic, I was looking for a web camera in order to outfit my family’s new work from home requirements. Somehow I stumbled onto the Linux Plumbers Conference Presenter’s kit at some online store. It included a 1080 Web Cam, two usb lights, a usb headset, a four-port USB hub, and a Libre Computer AML-S805X-AC (La Frite) 1Gb Single Board Computer all for $20.

Important elements of a Reflective Design Discussion

In order to run a reflective design discussion, we need to approach each problem as a unique case. The wrong problem is often identified by the students and we need to discover the features of the problematic situation. The problem is almost always a framing problem and not a solution problem. teacher gives an “artistic” performance of the complex knowledge and inventory and reframing. The process goes as follows listen to the student ideas, help reframe the problem, discuss a new frame for the problem, allow the student to make discoveries, and then allow the student present their ideas again and repeat this loop as necessary.

Exporting Content from Publii to Jeckyll

In this tutorial, we’ll export Publii data and put it into basic Markdown for use in Jeckyll.

About a year ago, I stopped [using my home grown blog engine]({% post_url 2021-10-14-the-archive%}) and switched to using Publii. I’ve been relatively happy with that tool but found limitations that blocked me:

  • local install made it difficult using it on multiple machines
  • lack of hooks to create my own writing tools, for example, on the go
  • no support for mobile
  • SFTP just didn’t work when I switched servers and required a ssh key.

I tried Grav but my server’s file permissions didn’t want to work with it. I considered going back to my own software but decided to try Jeckyll. Jeckyll is a flat CMS that uses markdown and renders it to a simple HTML site.

Design Thinking

Here’s a thing I recently wrote about design thinking.

“Design Thinking” has become the word of the moment in academic, government, and business communities. Before we can address how we’ll utilize Design Thinking in our program, we must define Design. When we introduce these topics, we are very clear with our students that Design is not Art. Often “Art” is confused with “Craft”. While similar in most people’s minds, our working definition, directly attributed to A.O. Scott in the book *Better Living Through Criticism*, is that art is criticism while craft is skill in making something. In this way, a craftsperson may be highly skilled but may not be making a statement while an artist may make a statement with limited technical skills.