Year: 2013

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My Twitter Digest for 09/13/2013

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Boston University School of Law Offers Students $250 to Blog

The Communications Office is looking for J.D. students with strong writing skills to blog about their experiences for In their own words: BU Law Student Blogs. These online journals give prospective students a better idea of day-to-day life at the School. Your posts may also be read by prospective employers, alumni, faculty, the media, and anyone who visits the site, so this is an opportunity to showcase your writing as well as your approach to law school and the legal profession in general.

via BU Law | News | Earn $250/semester as a BU Law student blogger.

This is a great idea that gives a voice to law students and provides the rest of us with some insight into what drives law students these days. This is a program that other law schools should copy. A network of school sponsored student written blogs where students write about their law school experiences would be wonderful.

If you’re at a law school and you don’t have access to a local blogging system, you could do this sort of thing on CALI Classcaster.

 

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My Twitter Digest for 09/12/2013

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Coder: Learn to Code in a Web Browser With This Version of Raspberry Pi

Coder is a free, open source project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple platform that educators and parents can use to teach the basics of building for the web. New coders can craft small projects in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right from the web browser.

via Coder for Raspberry Pi.

Just watching the video below is enough to make you want to get coding. This is yet another example of how the Raspberry Pi can change our relationship with computers.

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My Twitter Digest for 09/11/2013

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A Law School News Site: Diamond in the Rough or Beach Glass?

Recently while sifting through my project folder I cam across the bits and pieces of a law school news feed aggregator. I had started the code and gathered a dozen or so feeds with an idea of pulling together news from law schools around the country. Like many other weekend projects I had roughed it out and set it aside. The discovery of the code seemed like a nudge to do something with law school news feeds and so a site was born. I’m inviting folks to take a look and let me know if they think is some thing useful that should be further developed or not.

First a disclaimer: This is a personal project and is strictly “nights and weekends”. It is hosted on one of my personal servers. It is not related to any work project I’ve got going.

Let me introduce Law School News, a news reader for law school news feeds. The site gathers news items from the feeds of about 114 US law schools and presents them in an easy to read fashion.  Various pages provide lists of feeds and channels to get news on specific schools and topics. Basic search functionality is available.

The feeds included in the site represent about half the law schools in the US. I gathered feed URLs by visiting every law school website and attempting to locate an RSS or Atom feed. I used the links to law school websites found on the LSAC Law School Links page to get to each school’s site. Once on a site I looked for a RSS feed link on the homepage or checked the school’s news page. I did not make any effort to hunt down the feeds if they were not plainly visible. Many schools had more than one feed and in those cases I selected the one that appeared to be a general news feed.

Please note that if you look at the feeds list and see that a particular school is missing it is because either I couldn’t easily locate a feed or the link for the feed didn’t work properly. I have not made a list of schools without feed or with feeds that didn’t work properly. If I missed your school’s feed, let me know in the comments below.

As for the future of this project, who can tell. I would like to expand the coverage to all of the feeds that schools have and that would move beyond news into events, blogs, and library information. And I could certainly wouldn’t mind some help, especially with the tagging of feeds and items. If you’re interested in helping out, let me know in the comments.

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My Twitter Digest for 09/10/2013

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My Twitter Digest for 09/09/2013

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My Twitter Digest for 09/08/2013

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Did You Know A Swollen Battery Could KO Your MacBook Pro’s Trackpad?

Who would have thought that a swollen battery would knockout my MacBook Pro’s trackpad. Not I, but it is true.

Over the past few months I’ve been having odd issues with the trackpad on my 15 inch, late 2008 MBP. It would often start out a session fine but get less responsive until it just refused to click. Swipe gestures were fine, but clicking was like tapping on a counter top, nothing happened. The reassuring click was gone. This progressed until the trackpad no longer clicked at all. To make matters worse plugging in a mouse didn’t help. The USB mouse’s behavior was erratic and useless.1»

I figured I was looking at either some sort of costly repair or a challenging DIY project to replace the trackpad. So my Internet research began. A search for “macbook pro trackpad broken” yields all sorts of interesting results, most resulting in the replacement of the wonky trackpad. A few reports seemed to indicate that recent software updates to OSX were at issue and suggested software fixes. Those didn’t work. I figured I was looking at a pricey repair, but I kept digging mostly with an eye toward a DIY repair.

Then it appeared, a couple of mentions that battery issues could be the cause. Reports that removing the battery got the trackpad working again. Finally a post or two indicating that aging MBP batteries had a tendency to swell. Since the battery sits directly below the trackpad, the swell pushes on the trackpad and prevents clicking. The pressure is also registered as a continual hold on the pad causing unpredictable behavior or the computer and cursor and messing with input from external devices like a USB mouse.2»

I flipped my Mac over and took out the battery, plugged the MBP into the wall and booted it up. And the trackpad worked like it was brand new. Now I just need a new battery, not a couple hundred dollars of repairs.

 

I’ll note here that the MBP is not my primary computer these days. Most of my work gets down on a Linux workstation with the MBP use for testing and travel.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
The swollen battery will also pop the battery cover out of place. I had noticed this on my MBP over a year ago but assumed the cover was broken, not being pushed out of place by the battery.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5