Author Archives: Max Hemingway

Taking Scouting OnLine – 1st YouTube Scout Group

03 Friday Apr 2020

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ScoutsWith all that is going on in the world a the moment everyone is thinking outside the box to work differently and interact virtually. As some of you may have seen from some of my posts I spend some of my free time as a Scout Leader providing experiences and opportunities to young people.

Now that regular Scouting nights have rightly been stopped to help with the stay at home directives Scouting is rethinking itself and moving on line. As such initatives such as The Great Indoors have been created.

https://www.scouts.org.uk/the-great-indoors/

With the current situation in mind I was asked by a friend to help him set up and co-host an online Scouters meeting for all the sections (Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and Explorers). From our discussions, 1st YouTube Scout Group was created.

We have now run three sessions online and also had some guests on. The engagement of these sessions has helped young people earn badges towards their Chief Scouts and Queens Scouts awards which for each section are top awards they can achieve.

We will continue to stream each week and help keep your people engage and provide activities for them to do whilst at home. Parents are also joining in to help.

Stream each Thursday at: https://www.youtube.com/bigmaninthewoodsuk

Session 3

 

Session 2

This session was effected by some internet issues at the time

 

Session 1

 

 

3 Resources for Entertaining your Children whilst Working from Home

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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imaginationIn these unprecidented times everyone who can is staying at home. Firstly a big thank you to all those essential front line staff our Health Services and those key workers that keep the country working and support the national infrastructures around the world.

With Schools closed and Working From Home (WFH) becoming a normality for the time being, it can be hard to keep young people entertained, so here are some free resources to help that are work a look.

Reading

World Book Online have made over 3,000 ebooks and audio books available for children of all ages and can be searched by age.

https://worldbook.kitaboo.com/reader/worldbook/index.html

Zoo Cams

13 Zoos have WebCams to view a selection of the animals online

https://www.holidaypirates.com/travel-magazine/13-zoos-that-offer-live-streams-see-giraffes-koalas-pandas-tigers-penguins-more_35765

Virtual Museum

Take a trip around Pitt Rivers Museum and look at the artifacts in a virtual museum

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=ns3yCKpUzSq&help=1&fbclid=IwAR2gx2M7UoASHQ9Fy6cIns7oAIQEe-r2yvrq7rD2V4ECcXHyNrPmiExKI80

STEM Activity 2018-19

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

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STEM-Ambassadors-30-hoursHaving just received my STEM Badge for 2018/19, I was very pleased to be awarded a “30 Hours of Engagement” badge.

Over the year I have visited schools, events and other youth organisations such as Scouts to promote STEM, run and take part in activities and show why STEM subjects are important for young people to learn in School, College and University.

Being a STEM Ambassador is an important role and and its not just the young people that gain from sessions but teachers as well learning how businesses are using these skills for students in their possible future careers.

Here are a couple of videos and pictures from some of the events I have helped with.

Stemettes Hack Chorley with DXC and Stemettes

Chorley Hack with Chorley Council

 

Coding with Scouts for their Digital Badges

 

The Distraction of our Digital Eyes

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Wearable Tech, xR

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Digital EyeAs the world evolves our need to consume information grows at an exponential rate. Since the advent of the screen our  for appetite for smaller, better screens to display information has increased.  Developments in Virtual and Augmented Reality have provided a way of displaying information in different formats.

We have in recent times been distracted by the mobile phone and the ability to view information 24×7 on what we want and need. This has become a distraction to many whilst walking , eating and unfortunatley whilst driving!

Recent developments in technology have introduced smart glasses that can project information from your mobile device on to the glass such as Focals 2.0 by North which will soon be available as version 2.0. If glasses are not your thing then contact lenses maybe and Mojo Vision recently announced a smart contact lens.

Used in the right way and environments these advancements will bring great benefit to us, such as giving work instructions, directions whilst walking, words to a speech whilst presenting. The list goes on.

The risk of using these technologies with things we should not is already known in some cases, such as Mobiles and Driving.

Tracking of eye movement is also becoming more main stream and are being added to cars to check our ability to look at the road and also control things. Companies such as SmartEye is developing solutions that are looking at identification, alertness to sleepiness for vehicles.  Within business use the latest version of the Hololens uses eye tracking to help display and select items within the headset. Perhaps this type technology will detect the use of Smart Eyes technology in the future and not start a car until removed.

Heads Up Displays are being used to project information to glass in the car to allow the driver to maintain road contact with their eyes whilst seeing vital information such as speed.

I hope that the future should see the next level of developments bringing interaction with the environment or things we are interacting with. For example the ability for a device for our eyes to switch off automatically whilst driving or at least display information in a Heads Up Display format from the car.

Intergration will be key between these types of systems going forward to increase the usefulness in the right environment and reduce the distraction elements in the wrong environments.

 

 

 

 

 

Sageous Advice from Daily Stoics

03 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Productivity, Tools

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See Hear SayFurthering my Personal Journalling I have decided that for 2020 I would give the “Daily Stoic” book and journal a go.

I am doing this along side my normal daily journaling and keeping the two separate for now at least.

I’m up to Journal number 28 with 4380 pages written so far and still going strong.

A couple of colleagues have tried the Daily Stoic before and gave it good reviews. The books basically take passages and quotes from Philosophers/Stoics  Epictetus  55 – 135 AD, Seneca 54 BC- 39 AD and Marcus Aurelius 121-180 AD and provide translations into modern life.

Stoicism is a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world – Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

3 Days in and its going well so far starting my day with the relevant dated page in the book, followed by writing down some Morning and Evening reflections into the Journal. It will take all year to complete the book so will need some habit forming to do this morning and evening. I can see times where this is not practical and would need some planning as carrying the books around is not something I really want to be doing too much. This is where some of it may end up as a digital entry added in at some point in the future.

The advice so far has been on self reflection on choices, learning and saying no to get to those things that matter. You could say it is common sense, but for me its getting the right mindset using some guidance.

Is it worth doing this? At the moment I would say its a bit early in the journey and writing to decide, however so far I have found the advice to be good and the use of the reflection time to be worth while. Writing down notes on what I have read/learnt is a great method of remembering and does reinforce my thoughts. It will be interesting to see if I am still doing this in a few months time and look back against what I have written.

I would like to hear if you have used these books and your thoughts.

Links

The Daily Stoic Website

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius

The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living

 

Personal Knowledge Management System – Revised for 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Productivity, Social Media, Tools

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As the new year has begun, its time to review my Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) on how I consume information and knowledge, I have blogged about this before and have updated for 2020.

I still split and keep apart my personal and professional lives on Social Media, although occasionally they may cross where appropriate.

Since the last time I wrote about this the amount of information and data that is available has grown and multiplied on a huge scale. Keeping track of what you need to drink from the fast flow of the firehose of information is itself something that needs managing. This is why I have set up my feeds in the manner illustrated below.

PKMS

Personal Life

Personal Journal

Journalling in both a Personal and Work life is a useful tool to keep notes on your thoughts and ideas. In my personal life I still opt for recording these in a Moleskine – See my blog post No batteries required for further details. I find the Moleskine a great notebook to use and the pocket version a good size to use.

Social Media

I separate from my work life from my personal life using things like Instagram and Facebook for friends and family with appropriate security settings in place. Even with those settings you still need to consider that once something is online, it could be public in the future. Wikipedia lists 186 Social Media Websites and this list is out of date. I choose a few mainstream that I am comfortable with. 2020 may see me have a look at some of the others to see if there is any benefit or other data I am missing.

Professional Life

Research

This is split into several areas and these are a few of the inputs that I use to grab information, feeds, data from:

  • Podcasts
  • Audio subscriptions
  • Videos
  • RSS Feeds
  • Web Searches
  • Blog Posts

Podcasts cover both Audio and Video casts that I watch/stream online or download to my Media Player (Audio and Videos) to listen to on journeys (Audio). The mobile is a great device for using as a media player across these casts.

Flipboard

Flipboard provides another stream of data that I consume bringing in news feeds from many sources around a series of topics. It does work well on a mobile device allowing you to flip the pages through the articles.

Feedly

Feedly provides an aggregation tool which I use to collect the stories from blogs and web sites I regularly pull information from.  This provides a list of stories that can be scanned tin a few minutes on a single screen without going via multiple sites. Clicking on a story will bring up a snippet from the source site and provide the link to read the source article if required. Using a series of key strokes you can read the headlines, then move down the articles at a reasonable speed, stopping and opening when needed.

Sources can be categorised to allow an all view or just whats new in a category.

IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) provides a level of automation to my lists from saving articles to creating alerts on topics and triggering different actions as needed to my devices. I would like to automate more of this PKMS to bring the information I need, but it can also help to scan other information to help innovate and see other points of views.

Thinking / Learning Time

This is where view the data streams through the tools and assimilate and think about what has been reported/said. I also use this time to learn and take courses.

Courses

Coursera is a great site to used, but there are lots of others from Industry and Vendors to open learning sites that I use as needed. Relative exams and certificates are then added to my LinkedIn pages.

Blogging and Being Social

From thoughts and research I will write about things through my blogs and publish these into Social Media streams such as Twitter and Linkedin.

I have also been producing a few podcast episodes with other technologists and will look to do some more in 2020.

I have been using GitHub to mainly support some courses but its there as an option to publish data and code in the future.

Do you have a Personal Knowledge Management System or using tools not mentioned above?

Knowledge Fit for 2020

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

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learnHere we are at the start of 2020 and the time of many New Years resolutions and good intentions. A good proportion of these will be about dieting and getting fit, but what about getting a learning plan for the new year and boosting your knowledge.

Depending on your life, career path this can be something simple as reading more books on a topic or taking some courses to learn a new skill. This is something you dont have to set at the start of the new year and could be set at anytime, however we normally feel more motivated at the start of a year to set these goals.

Keeping to them can be challenging as when we fall back into our normal cycles, however this is something in your control that can be changed so you can have time to do some learning and boost your knowledge.

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.”

― Epictetus, Enchiridion and Selections from the Discourses

I have written about having a growth mindset in a previous blog which may help you with planning your 2020 learning plan and the infographic helps understand the concept.

The term Growth Mindset comes from the study and theory of Dr Carol Dweck that intelligence can be developed. This can be applied to every person young and old to reach higher levels of achievement.

Adopting a Growth Mindset by taking every opportunity to experiment, embrace failure, learn, change and seek challenges will enable yourself to realise potential and success.

Below is an info-graphic from Dr Carol Dwecks work and theory:

Carol-Dweck-Two-Mindsets

 

Set a schedule of learning for a few hours a week and stick to it by putting time in your diary and blocking it out.

What will you plan to learn for 2020?

 

Some further reading from previous blogs

Further Reading

Six Lessons on Bouncing Back

07 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Scouts

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Occasionally I have written about supporting STEM and Scouting in my blog around computing and science, however this piece from Bear Grylls in the Times newspaper in response to a Young Peoples survey has swayed me to write about it.

At a recent Scout meeting the context of this survey was explained to the Scouts, then I read out the article.

Bounce-Backers

We then went on to explain how we were meeting each of the six points at our group.

The response was amazing from the Scouts as they all reflected on what they had done in Scouting that related to each of these points.

I wanted to share this incase you havent read it.

Encouraging Young People to join youth organisations is a great way for them to gain experiences and learn new things.

Its not just Young People, Adults can join as leaders or helpers. Youth organisations need adult volunteers in order to run. Don’t worry if you feel you don’t have the skills that are needed. You learn these on your journey as a volunteer.

These are Six great lessons for anyone – not just Young People.

Yes even spending a night under the stars. A great time for reflections.

 

A night at the Museum – Late Session

08 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by in Security

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latesI recently had the opportunity to help run a stand at one of the Science Museum in London, Lates sessions with some colleagues.

The topic of the table was “Privacy vs National Security”. This was a drop in table to provoke discussion around this topic. The main point of this topic was to engage with the general public and understand their view points whilst discussing things in the news and the consequences that happen.

The brief was “Where does privacy start and end? How do you protect privacy and also provide national security? How do you monitor the bad guy? What do you think?”

The discussions ranged from the recent stories around the facial recognition cameras at Kings Cross, London to GDPR Post Brexit and is Alexa listening to everything I am doing?. A wide range of discussions. The discussions were going on and engaging that we still discussing as we dismantled the stand and left the Museum. the topics covered were discussed at length and I will write some future blog posts on some of these.

As well as the discussion I had a Raspberry Pi 4 and a USB Camera running Tensorflow and OpenCV to perform a level of people recognition displaying on a large screen in the Museum. This also helped generate conversation on the night and bring people onto the stand.

By the end of the evening we really did have a Night at the Museum, but without the exhibits coming to life.

If you are in London on a last Wednesday of the month I recommend that you visit the Lates sessions at the Museum. Book early as spaces do go quickly.

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/lates

If you have any thoughts on the topic, please add comments on this post.

Transforming operations with mixed reality – Future Decoded 2019

03 Thursday Oct 2019

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liveThis year at Microsoft Future Decoded 2019 I joined Microsoft on the Live TV with a colleague to discuss “Transforming operations with mixed reality”.

Here is the video:

 

The full days playbacks from the event can be found at https://futuredecoded.microsoft.com/content/live