iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Matthieu Aikins underscored the need to protect the contents of your smartphone. If the potential to have your own information stollen or generally snooped through your stuff, please consider this story.

The British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister was in Syriashooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about the underground there. A few he had worked with were concerned about his general lack of care about his communications and protection of the identities of those in the underground he was working with.

In October, McAllister was detained by Syrian security agents. Well detained he could hear the cries of prisoners being tortured in nearby rooms. He was interrogated and had all of his electronics seized and searched.

Upon hearing that security forces had McCallister a few individuals who had been in touch with, including the main source of the article, immediately fled fearing the brutal Syrian regime now had information that put their lives at risk. Others in McAllister’s electronic records, like one Omar al-Baroudi, were never heard from again.

The article uses the example to point to the need for journalist and the organizations that employ them to become more aware of how to protect their digital information. I hope this stark example will encourage everyone with a smartphone to consider protecting the information on it and information available to it.

If not, please consider the potential embracement of a malevolent or mischievous individual finding your smartphone and posting to Facebook or Twitter on your behalf (though I would understand that it would be nice if someone update your Google Plus account).
Read more... (693 words, 2 images, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

Here’s my geeky and productive way to start off the 2012 Formula 1 season: Textexpander shortcuts for Formula 1 driver names.

I’ve blogged about Textexpander before: mattclare.ca/blog/2009/08/28/textexpander/ In short, with TextExpander installed on your Mac you can type short key-commands, like “ddate” which is automatically replaced with something like Thursday March 15, 2012 saving keystrokes and looking things up. I store handy E-Mail responses or marking responses in TextExpander shortcuts as well as things like HTML elements and other filler text.

There is also the compatible MS Windows option: PhraseExpress.

For the 2012 Formula 1 season I’ve taken the Formula 1 timing and scoring three letter short code abbreviations and turned them into a Textpander group. This should help me bang-out my tweets, blog postings, gripes and other comments about F1.

3 Letter	Driver	Abbreviation
ALO	Fernando Alonso	F1ALO
BUT	Jenson Button	F1BUT
DIR	Paul di Resta	F1DIR
DLR	Pedro de la Rosa	F1
GLO	Timo Glock	F1GLO
GRO	Romain Grosjean	F1GRO
HAM	Lewis Hamilton	F1HAM
HUL	Nico Hulkenberg	F1HUL
KAR	Narain Karthikeyan	F1KAR
KOB	Kamui Kobayashi	F1KOB
KOV	Heikki Kovalainen	F1KOV
MAL	Pastor Maldonado	F1MAL
MAS	Felipe Massa	F1MAS
MSC	Michael Schumacher	F1MSC
PER	Sergio Perez	F1PER
PET	Vitaly Petrov	F1PET
PIC	Charles Pic	F1PIC
RAI	Kimi Raikkonen	F1RAI
RIC	Daniel Ricciardo	F1RIC
ROS	Nico Rosberg	F1ROS
SEN	Bruno Senna	F1SEN
VER	Jean-Eric Vergne	F1VER
VET	Sebastian Vettel	F1VET
WEB	Mark Webber	F1WEB

Here is the TextExpander Group for you to either download or subscribe to.
Read more... (271 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

This weekend is the first race of the 2012 Formula 1 season. I’m excited and I hope you are too.

One part of the season that always gets me excited is entering my team, ZERO Racing, in Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing competition. I’m encouraging you to as well.

All you have to do is pick a team name and then a driver from all of six groups provided. The only prize is respect, and you should probably check back once and while to see how you’re doing, but if you let me know your team I’ll be sure to give you credit for besting mine.

Something else to look forward to is the new look I donated in the form of pictures and CSS to Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing. I hope to see it applied soon — once the guys are done starting the season etc. Here’s a preview:

During my four weeks of teaching in January I’ve been teaching with a tablet: the Asus Transformer Prime. When I teach I almost always have a digital device (beyond the presentation tool) with me to reference my notes and do all the digital teaching elements like recording marks and interacting with students digitally.

So far I’ve found my laptop to do all I need it to, but laptops have a limited battery, they can be less than portable and have the visual barrier of a vertical screen. My phones, specifically my iPhone, is too small to refer to and interact with while teaching.

Here’s my reflections from teaching with a tablet:

• I like the form factor – back to when all I’d use was paper notes…. well someone else teaching a class would have.
• The portability does allow me to be more engaged with my students both with with my location in the classroom and the removal of the laptop/monitor barrier.
• I can’t take notes as fast, but the notes I do make just sound less jundgemental than the clicity clack of a keyboard

Here’s the strangest reflection:

• When I refer to my tablet for something I feel like Moses reading a decree from his tablet. I feel as though each fact should be prefaced with “thou shalt..”. Perhaps its the read-only or consumptive not creative nature of the whole tablet form factor that makes my notes read or feel like decrees?

Here’s a word cloud for 2011 at MattClare.ca – mostly my blog (biased towards the end of the year):

Here’s my Twitter feed for 2011:

I think the insight there is that I use twitter to get a hold of Giulia a lot.

As my ThinkUp installation at mattclare.ca/thinkup gains way more data than my previous archives had I think 2012 will bring with it some real insight.