Okay, freshly downloaded app…
Okay, freshly downloaded app, If you are actually going to force me to upload a profile photo, this screenshot of your error message will be my profile photo.
Facebook Should Pay All of Us
The trick is that most people think they are getting a good deal out of Facebook; we think of Facebook to be “free,” and, as marketing professors explain, “consumers overreact to free.” Most people don’t feel like they are actually paying when the payment is personal data and when there is no specific sensation of…
Introduction to Twine (Tutorials by Vegetarian Zombie)
I will always love Inform 7, but I chose to develop a journalism training game in Twine (because it will be much easier to teach Twine to my students). To prepare for my game, I spent about 6 hours (during my son’s last chess tournament) roughing out about 20 lexias. Since then, I’ve spent about 6…
No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games – Offworld
Several times I assigned Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Entrepreneur, which described the rise and heartbreaking fall of her girl-centered, girl-positive gaming company, Purple Moon during the 1990s. My own daughter (who is 13) has enjoyed man more opportunities to be both girly and nerdy — something that seems to have been a lot harder 20 years…
iMovie Glitch: Unplug Removable Media before Using iMovie
I spent a few hours today working on a video for Stage Right. I usually use Screenflow for my videos, but today for some reason I thought I’d try iMovie. Big mistake. Of the eight video clips I wanted to use in iMovie, seven seem to have imported properly, but the eighth has this little…
Rebooting “Rossum’s Universal Robots” for the 21st century
“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
Television is Now the Second Screen for Kids with Tablets
Of course, not all kids have tablets, and at least some of what the kids are doing on their tablets is watching videos. There’s only so much one can draw from a survey-based study, and much more that could be learned from a controlled experiment that actually gives kids the choice and reports what they…
Facebook Updates News Feed So Your Favorite Friends Rise to the Top
Now, News Feed, at its most basic level, is defined by secrecy. Facebook doesn’t reveal exact details of the algorithms that determine what you see (and what you don’t) based on the company’s ever-evolving, ever-more-granular analysis of your preferences. And not just the preferences you explicitly set. Your likes, comments, clicks, even how long you…
80 Days: “1872, with a steampunk twist. Phileas Fogg has wagered he can circumnavigate the world…”
I stayed up way too late last night playing 80 Days, a choice-based interactive fiction romp from Inkle . I had read all the glowing reviews, but kept putting off the purchase until I really had time to enjoy it. I started my first play through at about midnight, and was up past 3am. (I…
Headline Capitalization Generator!
Headline Capitalization Generator! Simple concept. Type your headline in a box. Invisible typing fairies will capitalize your words for you. One of the settings is for AP Style. You should probably actually learn the rules for capitalizing first, but this is a useful tool for checking.
The Problem with Quotes on the Internet
A Robotic Dog’s Mortality
Fascinating video journalism from the New York Times. They didn’t shed, chew the sofa or bite the postman, but for thousands of people Sony’s Aibo robotic dog was the closest thing to a real canine companion. So when the Japanese company stopped servicing the robots last year, eight years after it ended production, owners faced…
Clickbait Tactics Drive the Writing of Headlines on ABC News
I probably should not be surprised, but when I saw this run of several headlines on the ABC News website, I was struck by how deliberately uninformative they are. I added some useful information that could have been in the headline. A print journalist writes a headline for someone who’s already holding the newspaper, so…
Actually, this post really *is* about ethics in journalism.
People – journalists and non-journalists – who want to interact with others about the topic of journalism ethics should be transparent, courteous and civilized. One person should never harass, threaten or demean another.Also, people in the U.S. are not forced to read, view or listen to stories from news organizations. If a person believes the information…
Warning: Don’t Download Software From SourceForge If You Can Help It
Looks like SourceForge has backtracked on this particular issue, but I’m happy to pass along the warning that SourceForge has engaged in these tactics. GIMP is the free, open-source digital editing tool that I use (a replacement for PhotoShop). In 2013, GIMP’s developers pulled the GIMP Windows downloads from SourceForge. SourceForge was full of misleading…
That “Top 5” countdown listicle stuffs 5 pages of runners-up between #2 and #1.
Relaxing in bed on the first Sunday morning of my summer break, I web-surfed across the name of something I was interested in, on a “Top 5” list. I host some “Top #X Whatevers” pages on my website, but I put all the items (writing tips of some sort) on one page, and include a…
Technology won’t fix America’s neediest schools. It makes bad education worse.
[N]o matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that…
Time article with clickbaity headline: Web users annoyed by marketing tricks
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever
“If you want to know how the game was played in 2014, you will need documentation about how the game was played in 2014,” Lowood said. “Having the game available to you in 2064 so that you can play it yourself won’t tell you anything about that. It just tells you how you, 50 years…
One Man’s Mission To Keep AOL’s Legacy Alive
“Hi. I’m Jason Scott, and I am trying to collect every AOL CD variation ever made.” Scott works for the Internet Archive, which is kind of like a museum for the Internet. And to him, these CDs are precious artifacts. “They are, in some ways, little time capsules about what online life was and why we wanted…