Rob the Geek

Technology, Open Thinking, Community & Education…

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You may have noticed that I took the main page of this site offline yesterday and replaced it with this one as part of the Anti-SOPA protest… this post is not related to that action. Following a conversation yesterday, the social networks, communities and “non-standard” contact channels that I am active in will now see [...]

From Google, and the various Linux community forums, this is a fairly common problem so, in an effort to be more useful than those who simply post a link to the GRUB man page, or an article which spells out how dumb it is to install Windows AFTER Ubuntu – I thought I’d drop my [...]

21st Century Parenting – Challenges and Solutions Lee Chisholm, Operations manager, NetSafe This was an obvious choice as a session for me to attend, and it opened with an attention grabbing quote… “Three times as many smart phones every minute are activated than there are babies being born” – Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson This [...]

Privacy Issues for business in the new digital age Marie Shroff (Privacy Commissioner) This session started with a fizz and a whimper, I think based more on the usual audience for the Privacy Commission than the subject matter itself. I did enjoy the comics though Customers are starting to take an ACTUAL interest in their [...]

Session Lead by: Brian Calhoun, Independent Consultant and co-chair of NZRise Inc  “I see a gradual slide toward corporate and government control…by control I mean content” The session started with a discussion of TOR / BitCoin / BitTorrent – all created specifically to circumvent control systems that were already in existence. The question then posed [...]

Digital Citizenship – Combating Cyber-bullying & Harassment Stream led by: John Fenaughty (NetSafe) Perhaps the most notable example of standing up against bullying of recent times is that of 16-year old Australian Casey Haynes story (YouTube “Fat Kid takes on Bully”) a video that went viral both online and via traditional prime time media. When asked, 33.2% of youth [...]

Digital Citizenship – Cybersafety Stream led by: Martin Cocker (NetSafe) – NetHui Digital Citizenship Forum Martin started off the session by outlining there things are in New Zealand, as well as providing a context for the terminology which would follow. In this regard, Digital Citizens were defined as those using technologies to have: Greater productivity (via use [...]

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 [...]

Chris McDowall is a very, very clever person. In addition to all the other cool stuff he’s done in the NZ data space, he has just released this post on taking the Maxx public transport data feed of movements over a day, and plotting it out on a map. It’s hypnotic and astounding in the [...]

This video by Harvard Professor Youngme Moon has been sitting in my open tabs for a couple of weeks now as a irreverent reminder of the safe-play bingo phrases which find their way into so many meetings… My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.   I’ve got *my* personal favorites (being one of the [...]