Best register-change I’ve seen in an academic book in a while: Hayot, Humanist reason
Posted: September 20, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »From Hayot, Eric. 2021. Humanist Reason: A History. an Argument. a Plan. New York: Columbia University Press. 9.
One could well begin a critique of the current state of reason by remarking on the genuine epistemological weirdness of scientific reason’s dominance, which in some respects seems to fail the test of reason itself. Is it not a bit strange, after all, that the culturally dominant idea of reason and truth with which we live stems from the steps forward made by a set of institutionalized practices that focused, as they developed this theory of reason, almost entirely on inanimate, nonconscious objects, or on non-conscious parts of animate objects? Read the rest of this entry »
Upgrading a new dell XPS-13 (2021)
Posted: July 25, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »A log of things I did in upgrading a new Dell XPS-13 (OEM Ubuntu Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (fossa-bulbasaur X54)) Laptop.
Contents
Gnome extensions not working in Ubuntu 21.04 (solved)
Posted: May 26, 2021 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »A couple of useful tools that I rely on a lot are caffeine (a tool for disabling the screensaver) and, especially, system monitor (a tool for tracking memory use, CPU use, and so on). With the rise in online meetings due to the COVID emergency, this last has been particularly important: Firefox and Zoom together can rapidly cause trouble and it’s important for me to see when I’m about to run out of memory or my CPUs are straining.
With my update to Ubuntu 21.04, Hirsute Hippo, I somehow couldn’t get either to work. I installed the Gnome Shell extensions add on to firefox, but no mater how many times I turned things on there, nothing happened in the system bar.
The answer in my particular case was that the place to turn extensions on is via the Gnome-Tweaks tool. That was it.
Read the rest of this entry »rescuetime doesn’t record windows on Ubuntu 21.04 (solved)
Posted: May 18, 2021 Filed under: Linux, rescuetime Leave a comment »Just upgraded to Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) and had RescueTime break on me. It basically only seemed to see when I was using Zoom.
Tried all sorts of things (adding exceptions to Firefox, asking for help, and so on), but nothing worked.
The problem, I was pretty sure, was that the three key commands that are supposed to work to enable RescueTime to know what you are doing on your computer were not working:
xprop -id `xprop -root | grep "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW)" | cut -d# -f2 | cut -d, -f1` | grep "NET_WM_PID" | cut -d"=" -f2 2>/dev/null
xprop -id `xprop -root 2>/dev/null | grep "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW)" | cut -d# -f2 | cut -d, -f1` 2>/dev/null | grep "WM_CLASS(STRING)" | cut -d"\"" -f4 2>/dev/null
xprop -id `xprop -root 2>/dev/null | grep "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW)" | cut -d# -f2 | cut -d, -f1` 2>/dev/null | grep "WM_NAME(STRING)\|WM_NAME(COMPOUND_TEXT)" | cut -d" Read the rest of this entry »Setting up Firefox after new install
Posted: May 18, 2021 Filed under: Computers, firefox Leave a comment »I just updated my operating system from Ubuntu 20.10 to 21.04. This was an upgrade, rather than a new install, but one of the things it did was replace my Firefox with the latest version.
I’d been having trouble a while ago with Firefox eating up all my memory and processing power and had made a number of changes that, while solving the problem, I forgot to write down. Installing the new Firefox deleted these leaving me with issues again.
O’Donnell Bio
Posted: March 4, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »The following is a bio that can be used for conference programmes and speaker notes.
Daniel Paul O’Donnell is a professor of English and associate member of the University Library Academic Staff. His original training was in the study of early medieval English language and literature. In addition to continuing research and teaching in this area, he has, in recent years, expanded his focus to explore the practice and dissemination of research in the Humanities and across the disciplines in the digital age, and the role and practice of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in academic research. His Google Scholar Profile is available here; his personal pre-print and off-print library is available at Zenodo.
O’Donnell has played a leading role in many of the most important international research projects in the Digital Humanities and Open Science of the last twenty years, including stints as Director or President of Force11 (FORCE11.org), the Force 11 Scholarly Communicati Read the rest of this entry »
English 4600a: Beowulf (Spring 2021)
Posted: January 11, 2021 Filed under: spring-2021, Teaching Leave a comment »About this course
In this course we will read the poem Beowulf in the original Old English. The principal focus of the course will be reading the poem above all else: it can be difficult to read the entire poem in a semester, though every class I’ve taught has managed in the end.
Because we will be reading Beowulf in the original Old English, the course has a mandatory prerequisite: English 3450 (Introduction to Old English) or an equivalent course or preparation. You must already know how to read Old English in order to take this course.
Learning goals
The goal of the course is to read Beowulf. By the end of the course you should be
- familiar with this early medieval poem
- an accomplished and quick reader of Old English poetry Read the rest of this entry »
English 3901a: History of the English Language (Spring 2021)
Posted: January 10, 2021 Filed under: Current-Interest, spring-2021 | Tags: history of english, Teaching Leave a comment »About this course
Why don’t we spell knight n – i – t – e?
Where does ‘silent e’ come from?
Why is it book and books but not sheep and sheeps?
Do we say somebody is six foot or six feet tall?
All of us have asked questions like these about the English language. This course will teach you how to find the answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Bulk converting and moving docx files to pdf
Posted: December 19, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »The issue I had was a set of student assignments downloaded from Moodle. Most were in Word format (.docx), but to grade them quickly I wanted them in pdf.
The Moodle download was a zip file that expanded to a series of directories of the format “studentName/randomwassignmenttitle.docx.” So I also wanted to collect all the files one directory higher up BUT add the student names to the files.
So to put in steps:
- I wanted to convert all . Read the rest of this entry »
Joining a Todoist project
Posted: November 9, 2020 Filed under: Computers, todoist Leave a comment »This is a quick reference for people joining a project set up by me in Todoist.
1. You’ll get an invitation from me
You’ll get an invitation by email to join the project. After you accept it, tasks can be assigned to you.
You can email tasks to the Board
One of the great strengths of Todoist is that each project (in fact each card) has both a URL and an email address. You can email tasks to a project and comments to a card.
When you email a task to a project,
Read the rest of this entry »Crash course on translating OE verb, adjective, and noun inflections
Posted: September 17, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »This page is a crash course for translating Old English verb, adjective, and noun inflections. It provides some really quick Present Day English equivalents so that you can “hear” what each case sounds like in PDE. This is only meant to get you started in the first week or two. We’ll return to them more formally and analytically later.
Old English Cases
Old English has four main cases (and a fifth that is very limited in distribution that we’ll deal with later):
| OE Case | PDE function | Example | PDE translation | PDE Personal Pronoun equivalent [ignoring gender] |
| Nominative | Subject | dæg | the day | he / they |
| Accusative | Object | naman | the name | him / them |
| Genitive | Possessive | stanes | The stone’s | of him (i.e. his) / of them (i.e. Read the rest of this entry » |
How to uninstall Shift from a linux computer
Posted: August 24, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »Shift is an app that allows you to combine several productivity apps in a single package — email, calendars, and so on. I hope to use it to combine my union and university accounts.
I’m having some problems getting it to work, however, the various tech people keep asking me to uninstall Shift before or after doing something. Unfortunately, unlike a lot of applications, Shift doesn’t come with a handy uninstall.sh to match its install.sh installation script.
It does have relatively clear uninstallation instructions on its website, though you need to find them (I didn’t see any direct links from any page dealing with installation) and there’s an error in the Linux instructions. Since I have to keep finding this page and then rediscover the error every time, I thought I’d record the corrected instructions here:
Read the rest of this entry »When I was a child… An interesting acknowledgement of scholarly immaturity in Ogilvie’s Books known the the English
Posted: July 25, 2020 Filed under: Research-and-comment, research-communication Leave a comment »When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (1 Cor. 13:11)
I just bought a copy of J.D.A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066. Well actually not just “a” copy: the fly paper tells me it used to belong to R.H. Rouse, the famous UCLA historian and part of the great team with M. Read the rest of this entry »
Using multiple signatures in Microsoft Outlook OWA (Web version)
Posted: July 6, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Contents
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Like many academics, I have a number of different positions on campus, nationally, and internationally.
I am a professor in my department, an Associate Member of another department on campus, and of the graduate school and various institutes at Lethbridge and elsewhere, Principal Investigator of a couple of projects, editor of one journal, associate editor of another, and Vice President and Chief Spokesperson for my faculty union. If you’ve seen signatures of other professors, you’ll know that this is not a particularly lengthy list.
Not all of these positions are independent of each other. Read the rest of this entry »
The “Anglo-Saxonist” Controversy
Posted: September 9, 2020 | Author: dpod | Filed under: fall-2020, Research-and-comment | Leave a comment »Here is a beginning bibliography on the recent “Anglo-Saxonist” controversy in Early Medieval English Studies (Thanks to Barbara Bordalejo):
tags:
Read the rest of this entry »