Leveraging Our Quantum Mechanical Advantage

I attended the Organization of American States’ Regional Initiative for Cybersecurity Education & Training (RICET2025) in October in beautiful Montevideo, Uruguay last month and was surprised to hear everyone there describing quantum technologies as the next big thing. This is typically how quantum is described, but hearing this from digital professionals was surprising considering most of what constitutes digital is based on quantum mechanics. When I asked anyone to name quantum technologies operating in the conference room during our panel I was met with silence.

2025 is the international year of quantum because it’s celebrating the 100th anniversary of our discovery of quantum mechanics, and we haven’t been waiting for quantum to be the next big thing in the past century. We are surrounded by technologies that leverage quantum mechanics to operate, but few people seem aware of this.

From the LEDs that light our screens to the solid state memory that saves our data to the billions upon billions of transistors operating at scales we can barely comprehend inside the smartphone you may be reading this on, we are awash in quantum engineering.

On the plane ride(s) home I took a swing at describing the incredible quantum evolution our electronics have taken that has produced the digital world we’re living in:

Leveraging Our Quantum Mechanical Advantage

A look at the transistors you’re surrounded by and how they have led us into the quantum realm!


It’s the 100th anniversary of the discovery of
quantum mechanics in 2025. The UN is celebrating it with the International Year ofQuantum, yet many seem to think quantum engineering is the next big thing
rather than what has enabled digital technology to become a revolutionary communications medium. Every digital device you use and many other common technologies
leverage quantum mechanics in some way. We wouldn’t have smartphones,
microwaves, space-based (ie: laser) communication, GPS, or numerous other
everyday technologies without quantum
mechanics.

Carl Sagan’s famous quote came to mind a few weeks ago while I
was on another cybersecurity panel in front of about a thousand years of I.T.
experience in Alberta. When I asked the room, who couldn’t stop flexing their digital
knowhow, to name any quantum devices operating in the room there was a
deafening silence. From the laser enhanced digital projector to the trillions,
yes, trillions of transistors operating in that room, and the gigabytes of solid-state memory recording it all, the amount of quantum engineering in that room
was simply staggering, yet the I.T. crowd who manages it all were oblivious to the science that created it. The Sagan quote that came to mind was: “we live in a world
enabled by science and technology in which almost no one knows anything about
science and technology.” The two things are interlinked and inseparable.

Sagan We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

In 1925 a breakthrough happened. Up until then we were
happily working with Newtonian mechanics, and it did a fantastic job of telling
us when eclipses were going to happen or how to build rudimentary steam engines, but as our instruments improved we began to see problems with
Newton’s causal universe
. Where we thought of even the smallest things as tiny versions of our own predictable
solar system, we suddenly found ourselves looking at particles and wondering
why they seemed to sometimes act like waves. In fact, the closer we looked, the
more it seemed that the world we knew was an illusion largely based on our
scale.

I consider myself a technician turned teacher, so I can honestly say that the details of the science aren’t
front of mind for me, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know what our
best guesses are about how reality works, especially when it predicates the digital technology I teach. I’m hoping you feel the same way
after reading this.

I’m probably going to maul it, but in the interest of
understanding the quantum mechanical advantage that we’re leveraging all around
us (you’re using it right now to read this), I’ll start with the fundamentals
and focus something we’re surrounded by: transistors. You’re using billions of them right now to read this.

In the early Twentieth Century we were working with vacuum
tubes to control electricity flow. Early computers like Colossus used
vacuum tubes—devices that allowed electronic control of electrons for
computation and it worked well enough to decipher Nazi Enigma codes. To give
you an idea of the size and efficiency of this technology, if we were to
somehow to build a vacuum tube iPhone equivalent to current ones with nearly
twenty billion transistors in them, it would have to be bigger than Sweden and
would use more energy than the entire human race generates!

Figure 1 an impossible vacuum tube iPhone
equivalent would be bigger than Sweden and use more electricity than humanity
generates, just to be an iPhone!

But things were about to get smaller and more efficient.
It’s this transistor evolution I want to take you on a journey through as it
has been happening throughout your lifetime and is the reason you’re surrounded
with all this baffling digital technology. Transistor evolution also brought us to
quantum scales of engineering in less than 75 years and has been leveraging
quantum mechanics to work since the end of the 20th Century.

Shortly after the war (in 1947) Bardeen, Brattain, and
Shockley invented the first transistor at Bell Labs using germanium and they
were the size of a small matchbox. It was a huge step forward. Comparing it to
the orbital Swedish vacuum tube iPhone mentioned before, one built with these
early transistors (which you could comfortably hold in your hand) would have to
be bigger than a city block and over fifty stories tall!

Figure 2 a 1947 iPhone using the first germanium transistors would be bigger than a city block!

When we discover something new like transistors we tend to
pile on, trying different materials
to see what works best. What we discovered in the early sixties was that
silicon had excellent properties when it came to letting charge through tiny,
engineered gaps, but we didn’t stop at silicon. In another material science breakthrough,
we discovered that thin oxide coatings allowed us to shrink things down to
molecule thin layers, which led to Intel’s breakthrough in the 1970s with the
first microprocessors and integrated circuits containing millions of
transistors in a silicon substrate. And now you know why Silicon Valley isn’t called Germanium Valley.

At this point we weren’t harnessing quantum effects, but an
understanding of quantum mechanics was necessary to enable us to create quantum
aligned designs. This early nanotechnology engineering also confirmed the quantum mechanical theories were correct and kept pushing us further. This is a good example of how science drives technology which
drives more science and so on.

The problem with our rapid miniaturization was that we were starting to
approach classical (Newtonian) limits where electrons were leaking in strange
quantum ways, which happens when you’ve got barriers only a few molecules wide.
What might boggle your mind is that were there in the late 1970s and 1980s!

Once we hit this classical limit engineers began
intentionally designing devices that leverage quantum mechanical behavior, like
high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with quantum wells that confine
electrons in 2d structures. It was said on the Uruguayan panel that we don’t have a good grasp
of quantum mechanics, but we were designing engineering outcomes that leveraged
quantum effects in the 1980s! It’s our lack of awareness that creates these confusing ‘quantum is the next big thing’ headlines.

The latest smartphones can have upwards of twenty billion metal-oxide-semiconductor
field effect transistors (MOSFETs) which leverage quantum effects to run more
efficiently and at smaller scales than classical transistors ever could; this
is quantum engineering!

We’ve considered orbiting Sweden sized vacuum tube iPhones, and
first transistor city block sized iPhones. If our imaginary old-tech iPhone was
built using the last classical transistors from the 1970s it would be the size
of a skyscraper. We’ve plumbed the quantum depths exploiting the strange
effects we find there to miniaturize things down to the device in your hand. We have a pretty good grip on quantum. It’s been the next big thing for the past fifty years.

a modern iPhone in the hand of a human

Figure 3 The thing in your hand that you can’t
live without is a wonder of quantum engineering and a key driver of the modern
digital world

Field effect transistors are the foundation of our current electronics, but once
again we’re running up against the problem of managing electron flow at incredibly small, quantum scales. I was told at the
conference I’m flying back from as I write this that we’re at the end of
Moore’s Law and there is nowhere else to go, but that’s classical thinking. Moore’s
Law was defined in the age of classical scaling, but quantum engineering gives
us new paths for advancing digital technology beyond traditional limits.

When you’re working at scales this small, electrons can
tunnel through energy barriers (even through solid objects) – at
quantum scales things don’t act causally like they do up here. Researchers are
working on leveraging these processes to create tunneling field effect
transistors that, instead of pushing electrons over an energy barrier to open a
transistor, use quantum tunnelling to pass right through, one electron at a
time. In my mind this is like the difference between a steam engine and a
modern Formula One car in terms of efficiency. Yes, your electronics are about
to get smaller and faster again.

Don’t assume we’ve stopped there. We continue to throw
material sciences at these quantum engineering challenges. These days graphene
electrodes are being used to manipulate electron wave coherence creating single-molecule
and quantum interference transistors. That’s a mouthful (I had to write it out
then check it twice), but this represents yet another step in our ability to engineer at quantum levels and it needs to be recognized or else we’re
left looking like confused monkeys confounded by the digital devices we live
on.


This research on quantum interference transistors
suggests even more efficient future possibilities. Meanwhile you can buy spintronics
right now that rely on the manipulation of the spin state of electrons (an
inherently quantum property) to store and manipulate information. The directions we will go in while advancing our engineering of quantum outcomes are fascinating to keep up with. Don’t be afraid to make that effort.

We’re not only leveraging our quantum mechanical advantage in
transistors. I picked them because they gave me a timeline to follow
that you’ll be at least passingly familiar with. As mentioned at the outset, we wouldn’t have lasers, LEDs,
MRIs, nuclear medicine, solid state memory and many other technologies you’re
surrounded by if quantum mechanics hadn’t pointed us towards them. The only
thing true about quantum being the next big thing is in quantum computing,
which is wildly divergent from the digital devices looked at here and deserves its own space to unpack.

You are surrounded by quantum mechanical advantage.
Celebrate this centenary of our discovery of quantum mechanics by recognizing
that it isn’t coming soon but something you’ve been surrounded by your whole life. Hopefully this approach will give you the context you
need to face a future that will only become more quantum.

We really should be
teaching this in schools.

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Stealing One in November

 It’s the best I can cobble together if I want to lean into some corners… miles of straight lines between them though.

Don’t often get rides in after Hallowe’en, so gotta grab ’em while I can. The Tiger remains flawless after the idle hack. It was a high of 10 degrees but I bundled up.

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The Long Way Up Home


Got an invite to speak at RICET 2025 in Montevideo, Uruguay on emerging technology in cybersecurity. I’m excited to head south of the equator for the first time, but it’s a Monday out, Friday back flight marathon. I’m thrilled to be going, but a Tim with more control over time would fly down and then take the long way up home.

Timing this to sync with the seasons would be the trick, but it would also slow me down. Ushuaia isn’t easy to get to at any time and if you’re going to do it you want to make it on the longest days of the year (southern hemisphere). If I wrapped up Montevideo October 24th and took the weekend to sort myself out and unpack the Tiger (ship it down in advance?), I’d be over to Buenos Aires for the end of October and ready to tackle Patagonia and the long ride south through November up to the mid-winter holidays.

New years at the southernmost point and I’d start the long ride up, working my way over to the Pacific coast. The ride north could be accomplished (with stops and without rushing through it) over 3 months, getting me into Buenaventura in Colombia at the end of March.


https://maps.app.goo.gl/wGXW5JrPTEF1ihWCA


There are lots of floating options for crossing the Darien Gap to Panama from Buenaventura, so that’d swallow another week of loading, boating and unloading. They call it RORO shipping (roll on, roll off). 


Then it’s on to the North American portion of the odyssey. I’m loving Cali’s ‘last bastion of the Constitution’ that they’ve got going on, so it’d be through Baja and up the PCH on a ride I’ve always wanted to do, getting me to Vancouver in May.



Timing crossing the Rockies would be the next trick because the weather isn’t a sure thing at that time of year, but a well timed May to June crossing Canada and ending back home would replace the 20+ hours of flying with an epic seven month odyssey up the Americas.

After RICET 2025 (I did last year’s RICET 2024 in the DR so I already know people), I imagine I’d have an opportunity to follow up with cybersecurity types across the hemisphere on the ride back home to Canada. My research buddy from Mexico City is also on the route. Rather than fly over it, I’d use the trip to Uruguay to get deeper into the places and cultures that would otherwise be present at the conference.

TMD was originally named after Chez Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries, where he rides across South America to understand what was happening through colonialism and early globalism in many countries. It’d be cool trace some of those roads, this time with cyber intentions in order to get a better understanding of challenges in the region.

I would, of course, take the old Tiger. It’s ticking along very well at the moment and I’d be
curious to see if the old Girlie can make the trip. It’d get the Hagon shock I’ve been thinking about and I’d go through it end to end for tires, inner tubes, bearings and the like to get it ready for over 26,000kms of riding.

I’d take the stock panniers and a roll back across the back and aim for lightness with a focus on staying with locals whenever I could.

I’d be dangerous if I had the money and time (money is time)…

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Tiger Miles and C14 Tight Trousers

 The Tiger is healed. I wasn’t sure of going off piste with the engineering when I first did it, but trying to keep to Triumph’s design demands when they themselves won’t support them with parts pushed me over the edge, and I’m glad it did. The how-to is here.

It now starts on the button, idles steadily at 1200RPM (I set it with a spacer nut on the throttle idle bolt on the intake manifold), and has become my go-to ride again. Take out the it-never-worked-right idle control plunger and you’ve got a functional Triumph 955i motorbike.

The end result? I’m putting miles on the bike again this summer and hope to have it within 5k of the 100k goal before the snows fall. Next year I’ll go over the top.










Many miles in many weathers on and off road. The Tiger’s solid… which prompted me to put the Concours 14 up for sale. I got a couple of nibbles but wasn’t feeling it so I took it down again. Why sell the Connie? It costs twice what the Tiger does in insurance each year and is half as comfortable (I’ve never been able to make it fit me right). My better half and I went out to Stratford for a play and it was rock solid.

When you have the hardware, you can show up in Stratford for a play dressed like a biker and turn into a well dressed theatre goer in moments!

… and yet we both got off it after a couple of hours of riding limping. It’s a younger person’s machine and I think it’s time to let it go. Considering I stepped from a Fireblade to the C14, the next step is likely to be a (frickin?) Gold Wing, but that’s me aging gracefully. The combo in the garage is more likely to be the Tiger and some godforsaken recovery project I’m neck deep into figure out rather than the Tiger and a cruiser.


While in Stratford we stopped by Perth County Moto‘s Bike Night. The new location has piles of parking and the new store is enormous! Well worth a trip out, and we’ve proven that you can rock up to a play and transform into theatre goers when you’ve got a top box and two panniers.
A brilliant trip to Stratford has left the C14 is hanging by a thread. Being a competent sports tourer with hyper-ballistic skills isn’t enough anymore. 




PCM’s new (to us) digs impressed.


When I look in the garage, this is the one that still gets my attention. Sell the C14 and find the guy selling the 955i Tiger in Windsor last year for parts and see if he still has it?

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Tiger Mileage and an Atmospheric Ride

Most recent mileage data: 378kms using 19.5 litres of gas, which is 5.16 litres/100kms or 45.6mpg. The Tiger typically returned just over 50mpg before, so I’m seeing a minor hit in mileage. Triumph claimed it’d get 43mpg, so I’m close to that. Perhaps previously I wasn’t wringing it out like I am now that it’s healed.

Took it out for a ride on a June Saturday when it was supposed to get very hot. Instead it got very pop up rain stormy and I ended up cold. Love riding in the rain though, it consumes all of my attention…

No issues in the rain and I can live with a small mileage cut, though I’m still not convinced this fix has one. Perplexity agrees with me. 160kms in the rain and the bike purred like a kitten.

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Every Graduate In Canada is an Immigrant in their Own Country

“an image showing the effects of high youth
unemployment in canada showing angry
 young people from many fields of work in
front of a wilting maple leaf”

 The gap between education and work in Canada continues to grow. Many people are aware of the challenges immigrants face when trying to break into the Canadian job market, but young people, even those born here, face many of the same hurdles including in-built prejudices by the people hiring them.

A colleague recently told me her son cannot find a cybersecurity job even after finishing his college program in it. I’ve talked about cybersecurity a fair bit on Dusty World and it’s a mess. Academia wanted its pound of flesh and so rebranded computer science courses as cybersecurity specializations and further muddied the water, but cyber is a an applied skill set, like policing, nursing or teaching. You can sit in a cloud and theorize about it as much as you like, but the work of it happens in the real world every day and a Ph.D. in it isn’t the same as doing it. Yet requirements for entry level cyber jobs have become absurd with expectations of post-graduate degrees which do little to prepare a young person for the work itself any more than a masters in law would help a police officer work on the streets. This young man did everything right, studying cyber in an applied manner in college to fill a need Canada claims it has, and yet he finds himself out in the cold.

Last night I was at a mining industry event. Someone on our panel suggested that we could resolve the skills shortage by upskilling people local to the mines in Northern Ontario. This has the added benefit of them more likely sticking around because they’re already home. They also aren’t caught out by life in the north as those in Southern Ontario often are. Someone in the audience pushed back with the story of their son who grew up in Northern Ontario doing all the right things. He answered the call for skills trades and became an apprentice electrician in hopes of working the local mines where money is good and he can stay close to home. His applications to all the mines in the area were summarily ignored. We often hear these skills-gap closing suggestions and they sound great when you’re floating on a boat in Toronto harbour, but why isn’t a kid in a high-demand skilled trade finding work in an industry that claims to be desperately short of young talent?

Youth unemployment (ages 18-24) remain at
over double what everyone else faces. It was
even worse during COVID.

Canadians are cliquey by nature, even when it comes to their own children. You hear constant bleating from industry about shortages in skilled trades, technology, yet we seem to go out of our way to find a reason not to hire young people.

In the past year I’ve worked with cybersecurity, manufacturing and mining organizations on engaging students with career possibilities. The promise is a high-demand, good paying job with future readiness baked in, yet when it comes to landing that job the people hiring seem to go out of their way to find reasons not to even acknowledge these applications let alone accept them.

I’d always assumed this was a failure of education, but the problem runs deeper than that. Perhaps it’s Canada’s colonial history. Do we have an ingrained belief that we don’t have to develop talent or provide it with places to grow? Perhaps this is mixed up with our immigration policies as well. Why nurture local talent when you can cherry pick it from other countries? The next time I hear someone lamenting a ‘brain drain’ to another country I’ll laugh. Trying to grow a career in Canada’s stoney ground makes it less a brain drain and more of a brain catapult. Other countries aren’t stealing our talent, we’re rejecting it and they’re taking what we throw away.

There is a lot of momentum in Canada right now to build an economy that can function internally without everything going through the US, as it so often has, but we’re not going to build that economy unless we resolve our talent supply chain first. And we’re not going to resolve that yawning school to work gap unless we not only build the programs to support it, but also change our minds and get out of this colonialist mindset.

Whether it’s a gap between post-secondary institutions and employers or some deeper cultural mindset Canadians are prejudiced with, finding work in Canada remains far more difficult than it should be for young people, even if they follow all the advice and spend a lot of money training themselves in the high-demand careers everyone keeps telling them Canada so desperately needs.

The advertising is one thing, the reality another.

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Reframing Digital Literacy: what it is and how to teach it

I did a research piece for Canadian School Libraries last winter that looked at how you might develop the complex, multi-disciplinary digital skills you find in cybersecurity in a relatively short period of time. When I first put it together I found myself spending a lot of the time at the front of the paper trying to define the digital skills we find ourselves lacking. I came to the conclusion that adopting high abstraction digital tools such as those you find in cyber, A.I. and other emerging technologies makes for an impossible leap when we don’t have the basics in place.

How we’ve missed this in education is a good question. Anyone with a background in the field knows that there is no such thing as a ‘digital native‘ and that this myth, which has caused so much damage as it prevents education from building meaningful digital pedagogy, kicked off what has become a multi-generational skills shortage that is doing real damage to both the economy and students’ future prospects.

Digital technology has worked its way into everything in 2025, so being unable to make productive use of it damages our ability to compete in a digitally connected world. That we continue to hum and haw about what digital fluency is and how to build it suggests that we’re not going to resolve this problem any time soon in Canadian classrooms.

We’ve seen coding and computational thinking finally worm their way into education curriculums, but this is the tip of a much bigger iceberg when it comes to understanding what digital skills are and how we should approach them.

Originally created for this post on why education is seemingly unwilling to address a persistent digital skills shortage (from 2023).


I’ve been pushing the boundary of what constitutes digital skills ever since I first got knocked out of digital technology by the compsci grads who had claimed the keys to the kingdom. It took me decades to recover and come around to the approach I have now that nurtures my hacking mindset rather than dismissing it.


A few weeks ago I attended a STEM space technology event put on by a partner of ours in Mississauga. Moonshot was designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of STEM careers – something we go out of our way to avoid in our departmentalized schools. If you’re building space technology as an electronics engineer your job doesn’t end where the wires stop, it also involves collaborating with all the other teams to ensure the electronics are working in conjunction with mechanical, communications, logistics and many other systems. Why do schools insist on siloing subjects like they do?

That siloing is also hobbling digital literacy development. The current coding/computational thinking fixation is just the latest in a long line of compsci blinkered approaches to addressing digital technology literacy. What would it look like if we represented the true breadth of digital and taught that wider scope of understanding in our classrooms? We use this technology daily to do everything from operate our schools to deliver learning across all subjects, but then avoid teaching how it all works at all costs.

At the Moonshot event I was introduced to the CEO of MineConnect, an organization that represents and works to promote the mining industry in Ontario. Our chat at Moonshot led to introductions with Science North over their Mine Evolution game. I’m hoping to get a web based version of that running on UBC’s Quantum Arcade – perhaps with a quantum add-on as quantum sensing is going to drastically improve s in how we mine in the next decade.

What does this have to do with digital literacy? The fact that you’re asking this question shows how little most people understand about where digital technologies come from, and that understanding should be a part of their literacy, don’t you think? If you look up ‘digital supply chain’ you don’t get what we need to build digital technologies, instead you only information on how to ‘go digital’. Even industry goes out of its way to ignore what digital technology is… except in rare mineral mining, hence my work with Mine Connect and Science North.

It’s incredible to me that this late in our adoption of this technology that we still go out of our way not to teach what is needed to make digital happen. The current wholesale adoption of A.I. in education is a great example of this ignorance, as was the rush to the cloud. There is no cloud (it’s someone else’s computer) and A.I. isn’t intelligent, but we’ll grasp at digital straws with willful ignorance if we think it’ll make our lives easier.

In the CSL research I created a pyramid that showed how I taught digital awareness from the ground up in my rural high school. The assumption is that ‘kids nowadays’ know all of this, but that simply isn’t the case. If you want to disable a ‘digital native’ it’s as easy as flipping a switch they don’t usually use. If you want to send a room of them into a panic unplug the Wi-Fi router (assuming you know what that is and where to find it).

Start with the physical substrata and work your way up into the more abstract realms of digital technology; starting digital fluency at coding is like starting literacy at poetry. 

In grade 9 I got a lot of digitally engrossed students who thought they knew it all because adults who lack even basic digital familiarity have been telling them that for years. Revealing that this perceived expertise is merely familiarity with a couple of devices and specific software doesn’t take long. In many cases these kids had owned a series of game consoles and phones and that’s it. Familiarity with software is limited to games and social media. Very few knew what an operating system was let alone the firmware that kick start it; this is literally how all computers work yet almost no one seems to know it.

Last week I was in Ottawa doing an introduction to OSes on our cyber range. The grade 5s didn’t know what an OS was, but by the end of our 90 minutes they certainly did. They also learned the boot process any digital device goes through from firmware start-up to OS loading to where most users think computers start – when the desktop appears. They also got to interact with Linux as well as Windows on their Chromebooks (we use a cloud based cyber range so you’re not limited to the restrictive OS on your local device). None of the students knew what Linux was, but they use it everyday because their Chromebook ChromeOS is Linux based. By the end of our afternoon they were navigating the settings in multiple OSes and understood how you could interrupt boot sequences to gain control and interrupt processes.

That we hand students tools like these without any understanding of what they are or how they work is a great failure in modern education, especially as we are only accelerating our use of these machines in classrooms. Considering how widespread their use is now, digital skills have become an ignored foundational literacy.

***

How did I tackle this ever widening digital divide in my program? We started by making our lab DIY. My seniors and I built the first iteration out of e-waste and then kept improving it as we found resources. In 2015 I returned tens of thousands of dollars in board run desktops which then got converted into half a dozen chromebook carts for other classes to use. In that first year our DIY conversion saved the board over tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2016 I contacted AMD and asked if they’d provide CPUs for our next upgrade, and they did! Our board’s SHSM program provided additional funding and for a fraction of the cost of a board run computer lab we had significantly better hardware and control over installing our own OSes and software, which allowed us to provide digital learning opportunities others couldn’t reach.

By 2018 we had a mix of AMD APUs that could handle the graphic modelling we were doing in our game-dev class. This meant they were also more than capable of running any other software we needed to build digital fluency from scratch. In the process my one teacher department went on to win multiple national awards across a staggering range of digital domains ranging from coding and electronics to IT & Networking, 3d modelling and cybersecurity. DIYing is essential if we’re to build digital skills without those compsci coding blinkers on. Even worse is buying a ready-made ‘edtech solution’ which does it all for you and doesn’t teach anyone (staff or students) how technology works. It also tends to trap you in a single brand rather than striving for agnostic digital comprehension.

Having a flexible digital learning environment that we built ourselves allowed us to create unique student projects. In grade 9 that means starting with Arduino micro-controllers. Not only did these open source electronics allow us to develop an understanding of the circuits that all digital technologies depend on, it also offered a tangible approach to programming where the lines of code would produce direct outputs like turning on lights or making music. By the end of the Arduino unit students were confident in building circuits and for many it was also their first opportunity to code in text as opposed to blocks.

As you can see by the gif, getting into Arduino in grade 9 means that by grade 10 students are building customized electronics solutions to everything from the PC temperature system you see to various robotics and digital art installations. One of my seniors worked out an Arduino based fuel management system for his pickup that he then sold to others. Understanding the electronics substrata that digital operates in is imperative for well rounded digital literacy.

From that basis in electronics and introductory coding we moved to information technology and networking – two subjects studiously ignored in schools even though every one of them depends on both to operate every day. We begin I.T. by walking students through PC parts in our recently delivered Computers For Schools desktops. After covering the safety requirements for tools and working with machines that can contain enough electricity to knock you out if you don’t treat them with respect, we dug in.

The biggest point I make in PC building is about static management. As long as students respect the delicacy of the electronics (which they already understand thanks to Arduino), they quickly gain confidence and are never again tyrannized by this technology. After this unit no one calls a desktop PC a “CPU”, because that’s just one part of a much bigger device. Calling a desktop a CPU is like calling a car an engine.

We typically spend a week taking a part desktops and putting them back together. Getting them is no problem because no one wants desktops these days and CFS has piles of them they’re aching to give to classrooms. When we wrap up the IT unit anyone who wants to take their computer home can – you’d be surprised how many students (and teachers) don’t own a home computer. The best part? If it ever goes wrong they know how to fix it because the built it from the hardware up.

Once we got the hardware figured out we installed operating systems. This involves interrupting boot processes and learning how to navigate BIOSes and other types of firmware. Everyone gets to the point where they have Windows and Linux installed, but some students want to build an epic stack. This can involve adding extra hard drives and going through install processes on up to a dozen OSes. By the end of week two we’ve got OSes installed and students have explored many more than the one that came on their phone or game system (which are often Linux based). We’ve even had our share of Hackintoshes in the lab.

Our final step in the IT/Networking unit is to connect the desktops together on a local network and figure out IP addressing and all those other connectivity details most people have no concept of even though they use them daily. Building a network like this takes it out of theory and into tangible practice, as does the PC building. By the end of the week no one is calling connectivity ‘WIFI’ any more. Ethernet is ethernet and wireless is wireless and everyone knows how to configure and troubleshoot both. The motivation is that once we’ve got our network up and running on a domain where everyone can see each other we cue up a LAN party and everyone plays networked games on their DIY systems.

Our wide ranging and borderless approach to digital skills created interesting opportunities to mash up different technologies that are typically taught in siloed departments (if at all). In this case a student leveraged Arduino electronics, PC building and networking with robotics to build a whimsical LAN party robotrain.

We do eventually get to coding of course, but starting that far up the tech pyramid is absurd. High level coding languages (the only ones schools teach) are resource heavy because they spell out commands in easy to understand English (easier for humans = harder for machines). We did HTML and associated languages in grade 9 so the internet didn’t baffle anyone anymore. In grade 10 it was Python simply because it’s in such wide use. In the senior grades students choose their own coding focus, but not before I drag them through an introduction to low level ‘machine language’ programming so they have an appreciation for all the work those high level languages are doing for them. After you’ve had to do your own memory addressing, it changes you.

Leveraging this digital literacy, my seniors helped keep the tech in our building running smoothly. This not only saved money but also gave students invaluable public facing support experience. Perhaps the best example of this was our Chromebook graveyard. We would take in broken machines and then repair them with bits from others. After a couple of years of service most high schools in our board had lost over a quarter of their Chromebooks to abuse and accidents – we enjoyed a 90%+ active rate meaning more computers for more students at no extra cost.

The ‘that’s not your job’ thinking that most boards operate under prevents this kind of innovation and cost savings. I always am left wondering to whose benefit.

The other benefit was that our digital fluency made us resilient. When COVID struck and everyone else folded up their classes and went home early, the digitally fluent students in my program didn’t want to lose their semester’s work and we went online, created our own Discord and landed it remotely. It took a bit of re-culturing because the students needed reminding that this isn’t a gaming Discord – you’re at school, but they quickly adapted and were sharing 3d models, Unity code snippets, circuit designs and network details back and forth to build complex demonstrations of their skills. In many cases they were doing it on the PCs they’d built when they were in grades 9 or 10 because many parents thinking digital technology is a toy.

So what’s stopping us from graduating digitally fluent students with a wide range of skills who are ready to go into any field they choose because every one of them these days involves some kind of digital technology? I come from a time when home computers were brand new and no one had worked out how to ‘do them’ yet. In that primordial binary goo I hacked my own software and learned how to build my own hardware. My millwright apprenticeship turned to IT because of my familiarity with this new technology but I never came at it as a scientist might, but rather as a mechanic would. Hacking isn’t bad, it’s humans finding ways to approach digital technology as agents rather than consumers.

This is from a decade ago. FB has faded from
relevance, but every ‘tech’ we use follows
the same approach: your attention is the
product being sold.

If we’re going to tackle complex interdisciplinary digital technologies like artificial intelligence with anything other than willful ignorance, we need to start building an understanding of digital from the ground up so students and teachers can see beyond the box tech companies want to keep you in. If we’re putting children on it, we should be showing them how it works so that they become more than what most of us are: consumers.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but cybersecurity offers a unique approach to tech that other subjects lack. Cyber is inherently about edge cases and encourages a ‘meta’ mindset when approaching digital environments. You’re not a component inside the system, you’ve recognized its limitations and are working beyond it where being human is not only a benefit but essential. With all the ‘AI doing it for you’ going on these days does being human matter? Other approaches seem easier and wear ‘academic credibility’ better, but what is academic credibility but another system meant to contain your thinking? If we keep our current status quo we will, at best, produce another generation of passive consumers. We’ve tried that and it isn’t going well. Time to hack this problem by putting students back in control of the technology we are using to control them. It’s time to embrace your inner hacker.

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Cross Canada Dreams

 After decades working in the next town over commuting to the same job year in year and year out I found an opportunity to travel with work. My current gig has me doing cybersecurity training and emerging tech outreach across Canada. In the past couple of months I’ve been coast to coast to coast in Canada, but because it’s still fairly new to me I’m not making best use of it just yet.

A good example is a trip I have to Vancouver next week. If I were crafty I’d have the Tiger shipped out to Vancouver the week before, pick it up for the week of work across Vancouver Island and then begin the ride home starting on Sunday morning. At sub 500km days I could do an eight day trek home:


Vancouver to home in 8 days.

A quick poke around suggests it would cost just over a grand to get the bike out there. Considering I’m paying about that for the rental car for the week, I suspect I could get that cost covered.


The tricky bit would be finding the time to ride back, eight days costs more than just dollars.

What’s nice about the one way nature of this is that you get to see everything once and soak it up. If I could stretch it to ten days I’d slow things down in the Rockies, perhaps spending a day doing a loop out of Jasper.

Later this summer I’m in Charlottetown and Antigonish, Nova Scotia. That’d make for an even better cross country ride… truly coast to coast. Doing this sort of thing would get the Tiger north of 100,000kms this summer!


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Tiger Test Ride(s)

 The Tiger rode like it has never had any fueling problems after I hacked the idle control system last time. Idle control is a common problem on 955i Triumphs and I’ve spent years trying to get mine back into spec even as finding parts for them gets more difficult. Turns out the solution is to remove it.

Ride #2: 40 minutes locally

Second ride this week and the bike idles rock steady and is as smooth as it has ever been, and the backfiring that had been getting worse is completely gone. Today it started on the button, ran from cold with no issues and took me on a 40 minute ride without a hiccup.

We live in an overcrowded little town now thanks to Southern Ontario swelling in size post COVID, so I took the Tiger through a lot of stop-start traffic to see if I could get it to hiccup, but it wouldn’t! Makes me want to move more than ever though.


No problems on the back roads.


Pickup up from stops, no problem. Cornering roll on throttle? Smooth as butter. Idle never wavers and I’d forgotten how much fun to chuck around the Tiger is…


So if you’re having never ending headaches with your Triumph 955i idle control system, yank the damned thing! Modulating the idle through varying the vacuum between the intake manifold and the airbox (the servo moves up and down revealing the vacuum passages for the three throttle bodies) serves some purpose (perhaps emissions?), but at this point in the bike’s life at over 90k and 22 years in, removing the lot and connecting the intake vacuum lines together offers a viable fix for what may be one of the last of these bikes on the road in Canada. I’d be willing to play Top Trumps with any other 955is on mileage too.

Ride #3: Going Long

The next run was a 275 km run up to Georgian Bay to look at a blue horizon. These days it’s also a reason to get out of our increasingly overcrowded and traffic jammy town.

The first 45 minutes are straight lining through farm desert, but the geography starts to get some character once you get into the Niagara Escarpment in the Gray Highlands. I didn’t throw the 360 camera on until we got to the less tedious bits.

At just under half a tank the Tiger took me 140 kms and two stops to a fuel stop between Blue Mountain and the big water. It was still showing most of the red on the fuel gauge and took less than 17 litres (it’s a 24 litre tank), suggesting that this mod isn’t hurting mileage.

After the fill up it was some twisty bits over to Creemore for a bite and then the long haul back through farm desert (with its big, juicy flies) and then lines of traffic to get back to my driveway. Through it all the Tiger was mighty.



Flesherton to Thornbury through Beaver Valley (41kms)





Thornbury Harbour to Creemore Brewery (77 kms)



Thornbury Harbour!


Just past the scenic caves on Blue Mountain.

Creemore for a late lunch.


Steady 100km/hr sections, twisties, as big an altitude change as you can find in Southern Ontario and we never missed a beat. Left at 10am, got home just past 4pm, multiple stops, always started on the button whether cold, or or somewhere in between.Temp was mid-teens leaving and mid-twenties returning.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard this on here, but I’m a happy Tiger owner.



1) Bin 2, 3 and 4
2) Remove the top of the servo (1) and leave it plugged in but detached from the airbox.
3) Block off the hole in the bottom of the airbox left by the removed idle control stuff..
4) Plumb the three vacuum lines out of the throttle bodies into each other through a T-junction.

Bob’s your uncle! No promises, but it did the trick for me.

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