Well, this is a day that I really wasn’t quite expecting. I had high hopes that I would be able to use OpenBSD for quite a while before moving on to another OS but, alas, that was not to be. I am writing this on Linux Mint, having returned to that after my experiment. To say that I’m a bit sad about this state of affairs is an understatement.
I’ve read quite a number of articles recently about the use of AI in education. Specifically, there’s be a good bit of discussion around whether students should use AI in completing assignments. Strangely, it seems there’s a fair number of folks that believe that it’s perfectly fine for students to do this. I disagree.
School work, whether homework or in-class work has one goal: to help the student to ingest and process information in a way that aids them in recalling and using that information later in life or in other situations. In order for this goal to be acheived, it is imperative that they use that information, recalling it, applying it to different scenarios, looking for links to related information, and so on. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, in their book make it stick (ISBN:978-0-674-72901-8) points out that using information in ways that matter is the key to effective, long-term learning. Using AI to complete a task bypasses that process so that in the end the student learns nothing, despite earning an “A” in the class.
So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be.
After some digging around I found a solution:
Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh”
Roughly six months ago I documents my efforts to install FreeBSD on a Lenovo X250 that I bought for that purpose. In that post I noted that the one problem I had with FreeBSD on that device was that the suspend/resume feature did not work. Since this was a laptop and my plan was to use it as a dedicated writing machine that I could take with me on the go, the inability to suspend and resume the device made the whole process a no-go. Yes, I could shutdown and reboot as needed, but I’m lazy and that just didn’t work for me. Moreover, often times I’m just shutting the lid for short periods of time and so the shutdown and boot up for those short periods seemed a bit much.
I have watched Youtube videos for many, many years. Not only that, I actually created a Youtube channel and created videos for a while. Recently, though, I’ve begun to reassess my relationship with Youtube.
Youtube can be a great source for learning. Just about anything you want to learn you can learn on Youtube. There are, in fact, entire courses available to teach you anything from philosophy, to math, languages, and, of course, a metric ton (or two) of courses on technology. I love that I can learn what I need to learn using Youtube.