technology – Page 2 – The Future is Open

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022

An intelligent approach to eggs

I’m not a fan of eggs in the morning so the rising prices will not effect my breakfast. But I am a fan of cookies, cakes, casseroles and breads that do use eggs. The rising cost of eggs will affect baking and many food items that use eggs. Many Americans are not aware that there are ingredients that can be substituted for eggs and the cost of the items they’re making will be reduced and maybe they’ll have lower cholesterol as well. Eggs are a wonderful ingredient but maybe there are other ingredients that are even better. I asked ChatGPT to supply a list of egg substitutes that can be used in baking and cooking. Here are five possible solutions to your baking woes:

Applesauce: This can be used as a substitute for eggs in many recipes, and can be used in a 1:1 ratio (i.e., 1/4 cup applesauce can be used in place of 1 egg).
Banana: Mashed bananas can also be used as a substitute for eggs in many recipes, and can be used in a 1:1 ratio.
Flaxseed meal: Mixing 1 tablespoon of flaxseed meal with 3 tablespoons of water can be used as a substitute for one egg in many recipes.
Commercial egg replacer: There are many commercial egg replacer products on the market that can be used as a substitute for eggs in cooking and baking. These products are typically made from a combination of starches and other ingredients, and can be used in a 1:1 ratio.

It’s important to note that not all substitutes work well in all recipes, so it’s best to experiment and see which ones work best for the specific dish you’re making.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been experimenting with artificial intelligence solutions to improve my own writing and research. I used ChatGPT and HyperWrite in this blog post.

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022

Using ChatGPT

Earlier today I decided to begin using ChatGPT. Curiosity got the best of me. I asked ChatGPT to draw a square with Python. I’m very familiar with the ‘turtle’ module in Python and regularly use it in classes I teach for middle school students. The solution offered by ChatGPT was not one I had ever seen nor demonstrated for students. I was impressed and shared this on Fosstodon.org . Later I asked ChatGPT to draw and ‘isosceles’ triangle. I expected that it might use the ‘turtle’ module again but instead this time it used ‘matplotlib.’ Another unique solution. A response to my post on Fosstodon stated that the AI powered solution was merely repeating information that could be found with a ‘Google search.’ I liked the response and didn’t disagree. Fast forward six hours and I used ChatGPT to draw a circle with ‘C++.’ The code appeared once again. This time AI provided two possible solutions. I asked it to give me a Python program that would write haiku. Once again the answer was a code snippet I would not have thought of.

import random

haiku = [
    "Autumn leaves fall gently",
    "As the cool breeze blows softly",
    "Nature's symphony"
]

print(random.choice(haiku))

I ‘Googled’ the same request and yes the answers were there but I had to sift through a couple of blog posts to find the code examples. I think AI is going to significantly change how we interact with knowledge from the internet and other databases that are connected to these learning engines. What are your thoughts?

March 10, 2022

Time for change

Gasoline is $1.53 a liter in Ontario adjusted for US dollars and Joe Biden isn’t president either. Gasoline has historically cost more in Canada and the rest of the world. According to my brother gasoline is $8.88 a gallon in Zurich Switzerland. It’s long past time to find other modes of transportation. If you aren’t a farmer or a construction worker you don’t need a 1/2 or 3/4 ton pickup truck with all wheel drive. That’s ego and it will always cost more. My parents lived through WWII when gas was rationed. In 1974 after the Yom Kippur War gas prices doubled and tripled. I had to plan my leave and liberty around the calendar because in NYS you could only buy gas on even or odd days based on your license plate numbers. The national speed limit was set to 55 mph. In the past 40 plus years we’ve listened to politicians and others who convinced us we could drive like maniacs,own SUVs and Humvees that got atrocious mileage and live large otherwise. It just isn’t realistic. Electric cars and sustainable fuels are the future. Don’t let politicians and pundits bullshit you into believing it’s not possible. We won WWII. We put people on the moon because we believed we could. It’s time to reimagine our world and worldview.

May 1, 2020

Relearning Moodle

I’m going to write an article about how Moodle can be used by teachers forced to be socially distanced from their students during this pandemic. Eleven years ago I set up a Moodle server which I used in a class on digital citizenship. I can’t remember what version of Moodle that was. I liked Moodle because it fit the curriculum I was teaching and the students could access the server from home. It was a virtual machine that I downloaded from Turnkey Linux. My latest install of Moodle is also a VM but it’s running in Virtualbox on a MacBook Pro. I’m running it within my home network.

I wrote an article several years ago about MoodleBox which was a implementation of Moodle with a Raspberry Pi. It was a great implementation of Moodle. One of the new developments for me is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to download ready made courses for Moodle anymore. That used to be a feature. If anyone reading this blog can point me in the direction of pre-made Moodle content I’d appreciate it

I’m also looking for good videos that explain the nuances of Moodle Administration and content creation. Please feel free to comment.

April 27, 2020

Linux Mint on MacBook Air

I have an early 2015 MacBook Air that developed problems a couple years ago when it’s battery gave up the ghost after an upgrade to MacOS Mojave. Then last fall the SSD drive gave out. I ordered a new battery and installed it and ordered a 240 GB NVMe drive for the unit and installed it also. I couldn’t get MacOS reinstalled on it. An internet search revealed that I needed a firmware upgrade. Interestingly enough Linux recognizes the SSD without difficulty.

I experimented with Ubuntu 19.10, Fedora and eventually settled on ElementaryOS which worked the best. I wrote an article about how to “Give and old MacBook new life.” Since then I have used the machine as a test platform for various projects including another article about “Why I use WordPress.” I set up WordPress in a virtual machine on that box.

Fast forward to last week when Ubuntu 20.04 was released. I wanted to see how this latest version of Ubuntu would work. I downloaded the ISO on my daily driver which is a System76 Darter Pro running Pop_OS and created a bootable USB with “Popsicle” which is a great tool. I tried a live session and determined that out of the box the new version didn’t support the BroadComm 4360 wireless chipset in the MacBook Air. I did some research and decided I’d try the full install and add the Broadcom software after the fact. I connected to the ethernet port and performed the installation. All went well and then I added the Broadcom drivers later. All seems to be working well now except the FaceTime camera.

Much to my chagrin the next time I started the computer it just would not get past the startup screen and after a number of trials I decided to try Linux Mint XFCE . I had already installed Mint on another PC in February and had the ISO already to burn. I used Popsicle again and then installed Mint on the MacBook Air. After the install was complete and I had rebooted Mint found the Broadcom 4360 in the MacBook and invited me to install the drivers. Linux Mint quickly found my HP printer and installed the necessary software. If anyone reading this blog has suggestions for how to solve the FaceTime camera issue I’d appreciate any suggestions. Once again Linux has extended the life of a five year old computer.

April 23, 2020

Linux News

Today was a big day in the Linux community with the release of Ubuntu 20.04. A long time friend of mine reached out to me a couple of days ago asking me to familiarize him again with how to create a bootable USB drive so that he could update his laptop with the latest release of Ubuntu Linux. I sent the directions and today he sent me a text to let me know that the install went great and that he’s very happy with it. You can download your own copy of 20.04 which is called Focal Fossa. My friend Dave said it made his computer faster. What’s under the hood of this latest release. I’ve been a Ubuntu user for fifteen years now. I got my first copy of Ubuntu 5.04 at the Portland Linux User Group (PLUG) while I in Portland on business. I’d been a solid Fedora user up until then. I left the world of RPM for .deb files. At first it all seemed a bit foreign .

$ sudo apt-get install. Now, that’s changed to $ sudo apt install and Fedora is using sudo too. A lot has changed in fifteen years in the Linux community but one thing hasn’t and that is the rock solid reliability of the kernel and the innovation of the communities that support Linux distributions.

Tonight I was working on an installation of WordPress in VM with Virtualbox. I downloaded the .iso from TurnkeyLinux. and built a test WordPress server. I’m writing a “how-to” for H5P which is a great plugin that supports creating, sharing and reusing interactive content in your browser. I was having some problems getting H5P to work properly on this machine. I had to update and upgrade the PHP on the Debian image to get everything working properly. My experience as a Linux Sysadmin came in handy and now H5P is working well.

Are you a Linux user? Do you have any projects your working on? I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

April 18, 2020

A New Order Emerges

“Teilhard prophetically anticipated that human evolution would not take place without sideways forces of resistance and devolution, but he also saw that we would reach a decisive point of choosing either to evolve or to annihilate. We can destroy this world and ourselves in the process. We have the power to do so both in the form of weapons of mass destruction and the weapons of anger and hate.”

— A Hunger for Wholeness: Soul, Space, and Transcendence by Ilia Delio, OSF

The coronavirus maybe the agent of a new order. We can see the older order driven by fear, so called free market capitalism, xenophobia and ignorance flailing madly about trying to preserve the status quo in which the ultra-rich have benefitted. Covid-19 is deadly and only those who heed the directives to shelter in place are going to avoid its ravages. Maybe even those of us who are wearing masks, physically distancing, washing our hands religiously are still in danger.

I don’t think we are ever going back to the “way it was.” This pandemic is a prophetic moment and a warning. What happens in our community can have a global impact. We can chose to evolve or annihilate. The established order wants to maintain what was but that will never be and they are fighting tooth and nail to hold on. There is a new order emerging and who knows exactly how it will manifest. We are evolving. How will that order manifest?

March 28, 2020

What would you like to learn?

I’ve been involved with Linux and open source software for almost twenty years now. I’m writing this post using a Linux laptop from System76. I’ve been writing a lot of thought pieces lately which come my heart. Linux and open source is also from my heart.

I was introduced to Linux around 1997. I bought a book with a CD in it and tried to install on an older 386 PC. I could only get a command prompt. A year later I bought Red Hat 6.1. I installed it on an HP Vectra that had been upgraded to 233 MMX with a Cyrix chip. I got the GUI and it ran well. A couple of years later I built my first Linux server which was for web filtering using Squid, SquidGuard and later Dansguardian. One thing led to another and soon I built a web server, a network attached storage and began to try it on older laptops that were in sitting in closets where I worked.

I started distro hopping around then too. I moved from Red Hat to Suse to Mandrake and then back to Red Hat and later Fedora. I 2005 while on a trip to meet with K12 LTSP team in Portland, Oregon I got introduced to Ubuntu. We had been invited to the PLUG (Portland Linux User Group) and they were handing out Ubuntu 5.04 CDs. I took it home and installed it on a laptop I had been using. I didn’t like it at first but it did support the wireless card I had in the laptop.

Over the years I’ve run many different Linux distributions. I’ve run Centos, Red Hat, Fedora and Ubuntu on file servers and desktops. In the past six years I’ve been toying with the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian.

There are lots of great open source applications that I use everyday. WordPress is one of them. It’s my favorite blogging platform. I use GnuCash. I used to use a proprietary solution until I made the switch four years ago. I’ve learned Python in the past five years and although I’m just a beginner I’m keen to learn more and share with others.

Are you a Linux user? Would you like to learn? Let me know in the comments.

March 11, 2020

Free Software for Windows

I’m frequently called as I was this morning to support Windows computers. Many of those calls come from senior citizens as was the case this morning. The fellow was running Windows 7 and had recently purchased virus protection for it. He didn’t know how to install it and had called me to do that for him. That’s when I used Ninite to help him out. One of the Windows 7 options is to install Microsoft Security Essentials. Though Windows 7 reached end of life in January 2020 , MSE lives on and will continue to be updated. I told the chap that I wouldn’t recommend using the computer for secure transactions. I suggested that I could install Linux on the computer for him if he wanted to do that. I explained to him that I could easily install Linux on his computer and then short of hardware failure he’d have a viable desktop PC for the foreseeable future. He was tickled to be able to return the unopened antivirus software that he had purchased for $85 at a local store.

I recommend Ninite for much more than security software too. It’s a great collection of easily installable free software. Many of the titles are FOSS projects like LibreOffice which is my own “go-to” office suite.