The American Ethos of “No Man Left Behind” During COVID19

OpinionLeave a comment

The American ethos of “no man gets left behind” is an enduring one. There are countless stories and movies built around that very theme: in America, no one gets left behind. No challenge is too great, and no price is too high, when it comes to making sure that our brothers and sisters come home safe. It’s amazing then, to consider how quickly many Americans are willing to sacrifice “a few hundred thousand people” for the sake of the economy. How do you get from “no one” to “a few hundred thousand people” as Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert opined …

No Man Is An Island

LifeLeave a comment

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. — Poem by John Donne, published 1624

This is Just a Dress Rehearsal

COVID-19 / OpinionLeave a comment

As we struggle with #COVID19, emotionally, financially, socially, & with our lives, we should consider that this pandemic is a dress rehearsal for something bigger, and we’re failing. Old, bad, ideas need to be retired. Spoiler alert: we have a lot of those old bad ideas to retire. America has shown that its desire to make a buck on everything by refusing to adopt Universal Healthcare, is killing its own citizens and making a dreadful disease worse for the entire world. For profit hospitals, health care, education, justice, etc, is hurting us all. Ayn Rand and her idiotic ideas be damned, …

Linux, Open Source, and Civil Disobedience

Linux/Open Source / OpinionLeave a comment

When I was still arguably a kid, there was an old TV show that my friends and I all watched called, “Baretta.” In the show’s theme song, “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow,” voiced by the great Sammy Davis Jr., we hear the words, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” The show starred one Robert Blake, an actor who, as it turns out, would later be charged with murder. He was acquitted but later charged with “wrongful death” in a civil suit which he lost, despite the criminal murder acquittal. But I digress . . . …

Microsoft Buys ReactOS for $12.3 Billion US!

Humour / Linux/Open SourceLeave a comment

I was just remarking to my son that it’s going to be tough to write an April 1st (aka “April Fools”) story that is actually weirder than what we are living through right now. I mean, we are in the middle of a global pandemic, people around the world are in lockdown, or in isolation, everyone that can work from home is working from home, and the economy is tanking. Seriously, how do you beat that? Then, I started thinking about the most successful, meaning most convincing, April Fool’s article I ever wrote. There were tons of comments at the …

Creating Virtual Worlds for Mozilla Hubs

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mozilla Hubs is a completely open source social VR experience that allows you to build your own worlds, craft avatars, have meetings, watch videos together, and more. Here’s where it gets really exciting. HUBS doesn’t require a VR headset. You can access it from any desktop, using a Web browser. In fact, people joining a HUBS session can interact with people using phones, tablets, laptops, or virtual reality headsets. To those who use headsets, the browser sessions look as though they are also participating in the VR experience. I invited a friend of mine to join me in a world I …

Fighting Isolation in Virtual Reality

UncategorizedOne Comment

It’s weird living in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s frankly surreal, on so many levels. One of those ‘levels’ is the forced isolation that many of us are having to get used to, and that can be hard. We are, after all, social animals. Yesterday afternoon, I dropped in to a small group meeting in AltspaceVR using an Oculus Quest virtual reality (VR) headset. I mention this because you or your kids may have one and you’re thinking of it as just another thing for playing games. Trust me when I say that it is, and can be, …

VR Conferences in the Days of COVID-19

UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve had a fair bit of experience with VR conferences and meetings of late (including the “Educators in VR” conference mentioned in the linked article), and I’ve used several different platforms, including AltspaceVR, Mozilla HUBS, VRChat, RecRoom, and others. There’s a real future in VR and it’s just going to get bigger. I even recorded an episode of my podcast with Evan Leibovitch in AltspaceVR. Expect to see, hear, read, and experience a lot more about this in coming days. Over at FORBES online, they have an article on that very topic. You can find it by clicking here.

COVID-19 Community Update

UncategorizedLeave a comment

As I write this, the World Health Organization has officially declared COVID-19 (aka the Novel Coronavirus) a global pandemic. If you have been paying attention to the news today, then you also know that the Prime Minister held a press conference this morning addressing the current crisis and what will be done to mitigate the widespread impact. Now, I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on television, but I’d like to pass on some information on the (I almost hesitate to use the word) crisis. While our public health agencies, here in Canada, tell us that the immediate …

My Open Source Journey

Cooking With Linux / Life / Linux/Open SourceLeave a comment

Way back, in my late teens, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I had created myself a geek’s paradise in my basement. I had a chemistry lab, with equipment sourced through my high school, a microscope, a telescope, and an electronics lab built with equipment from Radio Shack. I was also starting to experiment with various computers and, in time, would have at least three different Commodore computers, a TRS-80, until eventually moving to a state of the art 286 IBM PC clone. Later, I’d expand the memory on that PC’s main board to a staggering 1 MB of RAM. …

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