Month: February 2011

Tots Corner – A Magical Place

When my wife and I first learned we were having our first son, we asked around our friends in the childcare industry for recommendations for pre-school care. The answers unanimously came back “Tots Corner” they all gave glowing accounts of the staff and the atmosphere there and, when we had our first look around we couldn’t help but agree.

Fast forward five years and #1 son has moved on to Primary school, while his younger brother is busily enjoying his time at Tots.

The staff are fantastic, the atmosphere is welcoming and the kids are loved, cared for and taught in the most amazing ways. The teaching methodology is the Reggio Emilia Approach which I am hugely interested in after seeing the incredible effect it has on our boys problem solving skills and thirst to discover. We feel like we are part of the Tots Family and, once I got over the shock that these guys had no internet presence, I decided to register the domain totscorner.co.nz and, since then – we have set them up with domain based emails and a website.

I still have much to learn from the wonderful people at the center – how they engage, the teaching method and their reactions to the introduction of an online presence. I hope to write more on this as we all learn.

Running Macbuntu on Ubuntu 10.10

Macbuntu DesktopI was having a chat to some people on Friday on why some devices were successful and some were… not.

Essentially what it came down to was the user experience and, while the hardware plays a part in this experience, the interface was the major driver of intuitive and efficient use.

To that end, I decided to have a bit of fun with some fan boys and, over the weekend I installed a Mac theme/overlay for Ubuntu called ‘Macbuntu‘

It’s a surprisingly simple process, for Ubuntu 10.10 users it’s 4 simple lines in terminal as follows (thanks Lifehacker):

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/macbuntu/macbuntu-10.10/v2.3/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz -O /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz -C /tmp
cd /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10/
./install.sh

Choosing the default options all the way through will leave you (after a reboot) with a desktop which is fairly close to that of Mac OSX.

On my EEE netbook the eye candy costs me ~20% more CPU but it served its purpose today when I put it in front of a couple of Steve Jobs diciples and saw them bug out that an open OS could indeed deliver an experience close to that of their beloved Macs.