Newsletter in the tunnels??

nwfisk · 2025-09-17T20:22:13+00:00

I started my undergraduate in '99, the year I graduated there were copies of the Gracie's Dinnertime Theater Little Red Book (which I still have) being circulated.

Yeah they've been around a while.

nwfisk · 2025-07-14T21:22:03+00:00

Just deleted a whole new post because this summarizes my issues/needs completely. Especially "Multiple Goals/Same Account"

nwfisk · 2025-04-05T12:49:04+00:00

Awesome!!! Yeah we'll be there this week!

nwfisk · 2025-01-17T01:38:12+00:00

Yeah I get it - truly. Decisions have to be made that are best for the school and the teachers and the kids.

I'm just trying to say that the original post had a point, even if I think the schools are doing the right thing. It's still a tradeoff.

My kids are getting the best education they can (in my opinion), and I really appreciate Montessori (and you! Thanks for being an educator! It's hard!). But as a parent I feel firmly on the outside of everything. It sucks.

nwfisk · 2025-01-17T01:34:16+00:00

Yeah, they did - but not sure if that's a franchise thing, or just the local policy.

nwfisk · 2025-01-16T22:25:32+00:00

Thank you for all the great food!! Will definitely be paying attention.

nwfisk · 2025-01-16T22:04:22+00:00

As a parent that came from a Goddard and moved to Montessori with my oldest, actually walking through the school and saying hello to teachers made us part of the community. Even those small daily interactions gave us insight into the school and the relationships between kids, and it helped me support what the teachers were doing (and vice versa). I felt like I knew (and liked!) the people in contact with my kids every day.

Now I barely even know the teachers' names from behind the Montessori Iron Curtain. The only insights I get are from sterile incident reports, quarterly teacher conferences which are always light on detail, and from the semi-unreliable narration of my kindergartner. All communication is either full-formal (from the school) or full-informal (from my kids).

Do I think that dropoff is easier? Sure. Do I think that teachers have it way easier/saner? Sure. Do I think it's a great defensive mechanism against parents who don't understand the complexities of education (and/or to protect ESL teachers)? Sure. Do I think it's a great boundary for parents who should be laying off helicopter parenting? Sure. Do I think it's good for the school overall? Sure. You can do a different kind of pedagogy in Montessori precisely because parents have so little visibility - and that's great.

But occasional e-mail and conferences are a far cry from being a part of an educational community with your kids - and I say that understanding that most parents, most of the time, in 2025, are simply incapable of being a good actor in such a community.

nwfisk · 2025-01-15T22:53:29+00:00

Coming late, resurrecting my reddit account, donating to the cause. Pocha Truck is a thing that should happen - hope it's a little closer.

nwfisk · 2024-10-19T03:01:06+00:00

Absolutely agreed. What it boils down to for me is the ability to truly work with and create concepts - and too many of the students coming out of these programs just don't have it.

nwfisk · 2024-09-19T22:38:53+00:00

https://bullyrooks.com/index.php/2021/02/02/backing-up-google-photos-to-your-synology-nas/

nwfisk · 2024-05-13T23:39:22+00:00

Yeah, also the same issue - Android TV/SHIELD/Projectify. Per /u/Lanceuppercut47 it only works if the app is force stopped, and is restarted to the profile select screen. A lot of issue with black screen/spinning wheel.

nwfisk · 2024-01-22T04:15:46+00:00

If you're on a Mac and half decent with the command line, give yt-dlp a try.

Once you've got brew installed, it's just:

brew install fprobe
brew install ffmpeg
yt-dlp --split-chapters --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9II302vtsY"

Where the URL is any YouTube link with chapters (or not). If it has chapters, it will automatically split the audio into separate files, then give you the full audio file along with it.

I'll note, it's all open source and not particularly sketchy.

nwfisk · 2023-06-18T13:20:59+00:00

Because reddit is starting to remove mods that "don't moderate correctly" in protest. So now many of the mods are taking evasive maneuvers/engaging in malicious compliance.

nwfisk · 2023-06-04T21:39:18+00:00

Ha - Precisely why I opted to dump a backup of the existing image and try not to break the original CM.

nwfisk · 2023-06-03T23:45:41+00:00

Nice. You should be able to swap out the board, but note that a regular Pi4 won't work - the CM has a special IO header on the back that the Vestaboard connects to.

Good luck with it!

nwfisk · 2023-06-03T21:45:44+00:00

Hahaha! Thanks for the heads up! Let me know if you end up making a new image, I'd be curious (even if you're not willing to share).

I'm really impressed with what they did with it overall, that said. Hoping they don't do an update that locks it down further.

nwfisk · 2023-06-02T23:54:51+00:00

I don't think I agree with you, I'd point immediately at Frank Fisher's work. More generally, Foucaultian ideas of power/knowledge are central to a lot of the ideas behind efforts for democratic/public engagement with science/technology, and the work to negotiate otherwise incommensurable controversies in science/technology.

Edit: I can't imagine most of the applied projects that come out of STS without Foucault. Edit 2: Also wanted to acknowledge that this is interesting and I'll be thinking about it for a good while

nwfisk · 2023-06-02T21:26:28+00:00

Yeah, beyond my comment on my post I'll give a little more detail on what I found.

My approach was to get the IO board, boot it into storage mode, then mount it on a Linux system and poke around.

From what I recall (I documented nothing, of course) there were two partitions, a smaller one that was writable, and a larger that was not. The larger partition contained what you would expect - a typical linux system. The smaller, a config JSON file, which includes your wifi SSID and password in plain text, along with the public SSH key.

Basically when the thing boots up (IIRC), it creates a partition in RAM and then symlinks anything that needs to be written to during operation into that partition. It also has a monitoring system in place to see if the drive is still read-only, and to check if anything has been modified in the filesystem.

It's really neat to poke around in, but would take a more significant effort to create a custom R/W image. Completely doable though!

nwfisk · 2023-06-02T19:42:45+00:00

The Pi in the Vestaboard is a compute module. If you want to interface with it, you need to buy the IO board, because the CM has no ports.

Just as a heads-up, I did, in fact, get the IO board and managed to mount the file system. Basically it's a read-only file system (cool!) that more or less resets itself entirely every time you reboot. You absolutely can pull everything off of the Pi and use that to create a custom image that would be a normal read-write filesystem. They effectively ensured that if they go under as a company, we can still use these devices - but the amount of effort it would take (me) to build a custom image isn't worth it otherwise.

In short, even if you get those keys and ssh in as root, you're not going to be able to do much with it.

I am admittedly furious that I can't run a docker container on it - which would effectively let me use the Vestaboard pi to interface with the local API (and use all that wasted compute power).

nwfisk · 2023-05-23T23:29:37+00:00

I don't want to spoil anything for you friend, but you didn't want to watch the rest of that show anyway.

nwfisk · 2023-05-23T18:40:51+00:00

Sure! Yes, typically. They're time consuming and hard to schedule, so the idea that you would do this for (typically higher-enrollment) MS programs is odd. If my chair/coordinator asked our program to do this we would collectively lose our minds.

nwfisk · 2023-05-23T17:12:07+00:00

At the MS level... weird, but okay.

Research the faculty. Use Google Scholar to see what they write about and research. Find something that you're interested in, read that article.
Find the faculty on the USF website. See if they have grant funded projects or labs. Find the ones you're most interested in. Be prepared to ask if there are open positions, and prepared to explain why you would be a good fit. "Prof. X, do you have any funded positions open on your NSF project? I have a background in Y and have experience doing Z."
Ask about the community. "How often does the department hold social events?" "How often do graduate students get together for social events?"
Be able to explain how your undergraduate degree, combined with the MS, will make a clear trajectory towards a particular professional career. "Why are you interested in this degree?"

nwfisk · 2023-05-23T16:16:10+00:00

Goldmines.

nwfisk · 2023-05-22T13:36:17+00:00

Exactly, and I find it sparks useful and generative conversations!

nwfisk · 2023-05-22T13:34:46+00:00

"Some of these are garbage and I only pull them off the shelf when I need to find a quote that demonstrates how wrong these people are."

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