Two books in September. School has started back up, so my reading pace has slowed way down.

The Place of Tides - James Rebanks

his is the third Rebanks book I've read and I enjoyed it as much as the others. He took a chance to live on a duck station island on the Atlantic coast on Norway in an effort to see how people carve out these perfect, isolated lives. Rebanks realizes that this view is a fantasy and that he's missing out on the bigger picture.

The anecdotal storytelling is thoughtful and each chapter brought new insight from the quiet lives of the duck women.

Point B - Drew Magary

I've ready Magary's other books, The Hike and The Postmortal. Those both surprised me in ways that this one didn't. I think this had too many tropes for me to really get into the characters. I don't feel like I connected in any way with the group and it felt forced from start to finish.

That said, the book does explore some interesting ideas in how the world would change if teleportation really were possible. Written in 2020, it foreshadowed the (then, even more so now) tech surveillance that we all live with, whether we like it or not.

I have an aging Macbook Pro. It's older than my children and starting to show it's age. Before I remove Mac OS and replace it with Linux, I'm trying to squeak a couple more years out of her.

Insert comment about planned sunsets and hardware longevity.

Unfortunately, my model is one where the AMD GPU was poorly built and designed and will eventually fail. Luckily, the Mac has two GPUs on board and you can disable the failing AMD chip by default and run on the Intel chip also included. This is fine for me because I'm not doing any heavy lifting with that computer anymore.

There's already a site detailing the steps below, but as with all things on the Internet, I'm creating my own backup in case that site goes down.

Boot into single user mode with:

Command + S after the first boot chime.

mount root partition writeable

/sbin/mount -uw /

make a kext-backup directory

mkdir -p /System/Library/Extensions-off

only move ONE offending kext out of the way:

mv /System/Library/Extensions/AMDRadeonX3000.kext /System/Library/Extensions-off/

let the system update its kextcache:

touch /System/Library/Extensions/

sudo reboot

The system doesn't know how to power-management the failed AMD-chip. For that you have to either manaully load the kext after boot by:

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions-off/AMDRadeonX3000.kext

Automate this with the following LoginHook:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/LoginHook
sudo nano /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh

with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
kextload /System/Library/Extensions-off/AMDRadeonX3000.kext
exit 0

then make it executable and active:

sudo chmod a+x /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh

In the Terminal (or in single-user mode if you can't boot to the desktop in Safe or Recovery modes)

sudo nano /force-iGPU-boot.sh

Enter the following:

#/bin/sh
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"
sudo nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
exit 0

Now make that executable:

sudo chmod a+x /force-iGPU-boot.sh

The boot loop (or a boot hang) can be solved with a PRAM reset (Opt + Cmd + P + R, wait for a double chime), but this wipes the GPU modifications from memory. If you can't boot to the desktop, boot to single user mode:

<Cmd>+<s> after the first chime

And after mounting your boot-volume read-write to execute just:

sh /force-iGPU-boot.sh

This will reset the GPU settings to ignore the failing AMD chip. Reboot with sudo reboot in the command line.

Featured image is Spiral stair (21st century) by alasdair massie is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Source: The role of the faculty in the post-LMS world (opinion)

I don't work at a university, but we're in the process of moving teachers into using Canvas in our district, so this resonates. I see two groups of people:

• those who already had material online and are struggling to work backwards (essentially) to fit items into Canvas.
• those who have nothing online and are struggling to make sense of what works well digitally and what doesn't.

The LMS is a weird stepping stone. I've had materials online for years, so I don't like the constriction an LMS brings to what I've done in the past, but I _do_ appreciate the streamlined data I can grab from the system (I need to write more on using Outcomes in Canvas later...)

For the second group, it's a great intermediate step and I'm already seeing people look for more online on their own. They want to push the system now that they understand it more. They're seeing the benefit if using the Internet as a whole and not limiting their courses to the flow in Canvas.

Striking the balance between structure and variety is difficult. I'm not sure the LMS will ever completely go away, but I can see the influence waning as skills develop and alternatives becoming more accessible to teachers.

Since early this year, the WHO has been calling for international aid in response to a burgeoning crisis in west Africa. There had been a confirmed death and further infections due to Ebola virus. Initially, it’s mortality rate was above 65% for infected individuals. Fast forward six months and the death toll has topped 3,000 with five countries officially recognizing infected individuals.

It hasn’t been in the news much because the media typically covers “disaster moments.” NPR’s Planet Money podcast took an insightful look at why it is just coming to American’s attention. I decided to grab some readily available data from the CDC, the WHO, and other international relief agencies to put some of these numbers in perspective.