Features

Books | Culture | Humanities | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability | Writing

The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 01-10-12.  “From parchment to attachment.”

Leo Tolstoy is scribbling furiously in the light of a dimly burning candle. At such close quarters, its searing heat has covered his forehead in a permanent patina of sweat, making the great novel a true work of toil. Suddenly, in the middle of a particularly vivid war scene, he curses out loud and blows [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Technology | Usability

What I’ve Learned from Teaching with iPads – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Using the iPad requires more than just a change in mindset; it involves a cultural change, one that can be painful. One of the drawbacks I found this semester was that students used and discussed the iPad only in my class. That made my class unique, but it also meant that students defaulted to familiar [...]

Business | Cyberculture | Media | Technology | Usability | Writing

ASCII by Jason Scott / Kickstarter: All I Know

The content is great, but I’m really blogging this because I’m tickled by the writing.

Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal [...]

Books | Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability

Apple’s iBooks Improves Interface for Highlighting, Annotating

Apple just released an update of its very nice iBooks.

The Kindle still is my preferred ereader for personal reasons, but I prefer to teach with iBooks.

Last year when I taught a literature survey, I experimented with asking students to use out-of-copyright free etexts, and to annotate them in iBooks. The fact that iBooks [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Technology | Usability

Search using your terms, verbatim – Inside Search

With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as making automatic spelling corrections personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive]) finding results that match similar terms to those in [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Technology | Usability

Turnitin.com UI Woes: One-click, No-confirmation Deletion of QuickMark Sets

In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily.

Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting [...]

Cyberculture | Social_Software | Usability | Weblogs

WordPress updates iOS App

Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated.

Aesthetics | Design | Games | Science | Technology | Usability

50 Years Ago: The World in 1961 – Alan Taylor – In Focus – The Atlantic

A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one.

NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Journalism | Media | Technology | Usability

To this baby, “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work”

Aesthetics | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability | Weblogs

If HTML5 Kills the Blog Format, I Won’t Shed a Tear

The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and make readers want it. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie [...]