Month: April 2015

The End of College?

I found this interview with author Kevin Carey about "The End of College" to be very much worthwhile. He talks about shifting understandings of the value of higher education, the ways in which college replicates privilege, why college is so expensive, and what college might look like in a few decades.

Carey's main prediction is that a handful of very expensive and elite schools will survive in the traditional model while the rest of higher education shifts to online tools and offline experiences that aren't concentrated in a specific location.

Some sort of major shift seems inevitable. As I watch my own alma mater Earlham College wrestle with increasing costs against the backdrop of a highly competitive admissions landscape, I have to wonder if I would spend the money to send my own children to a place like it.

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Cron rsync with encrypted SSH keys on OS X

There are many online resources about using SSH keys to achieve passwordless, cron-initiated tasks like rsyncing some files around. Most of these assume your SSH key is either not encrypted with a password, or that you're running the related command in an interactive session.

What I couldn't easily find recently was a way to make sure that a script initiated via cron on OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) and that uses an SSH key that is encrypted with a password would have access to that key as managed by the current login session's ssh-agent.

This problem manifested itself with the following kind of output from my rsync command - being used to back up some files from a remote server - when it was executed via cron:

Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic,password).
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-45/rsync/io.c(453) [receiver=2.6.9]

If I ran the same command from the shell prompt it worked fine.

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Cloud email, contacts & calendars without Google

Tricky situationI like Google and a lot of the things it does in the world. When people ask me what free mail, calendaring and contact syncing tools they should use, I usually include Google's services in my answer. But I always explain that they're trading some privacy and ownership of their information for the "free" part of that deal. "You're the product, not the customer" and all that.

For me, I've always tried to avoid having my own data and online activities become the product in someone else's business model. There are plenty of places where I can't or don't do that, and I mostly make those tradeoffs willingly. But so far, I've been able to avoid using Google (and Apple and Microsoft) for managing my personal email, calendaring and contact syncing.

Here's how.

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