Colorful Touchscreen Stylus Bundle: Cheap Is Good

Even though I got it for free, a Bamboo stylus is not cheap, meaning that I worried about the cost of replacing it if I lost it, so may have used it less frequently. Deciding whether the convenience of using the stylus is worth the risk of losing it ets up even more mental effort.

So it would seem then that the solution should involve either becoming more careful, which would require more effort, or getting a supply of cheaper backups, so that losing any one stylus is less of a big deal.

This Colorful Stylus Bundle is priced at about $1 each.

[caption width="300" caption="The little stubby ones are awkward, but better than a finger. They work just as well as $20 models." align="aligncenter"]14 colorful styluses for me to misplace.[/caption]

Ideal Homeschool Summer Day: Studying Latin, Justifying Nilla Wafers, and Making a Duct Tape Skirt

Today, I managed to get in a couple of hours of web development and PR/social media work that is stretching my skills a bit. The new pack of iPad styluses I ordered from Amazon has shipped. I’m caught up in the online faculty development class I’m taking. My inbox is brimming with opportunities to collaborate and connect…

Writing Computer Games with Inklewriter

If brass lanterns or slathering-fanged grues mean anything to you, you might want to look into Inklewriter. I teach a text-adventure (“interactive fiction“) unit in my “New Media Projects” course. My mainstay for that unit is Inform 7, a robust tool with loads of examples and a user community that I know well (through my…

Social Plugin: Publish Blog Posts to Facebook and Twitter; Aggregate All Responses as WordPress Comments

Although I do use both Twitter and Facebook, I often regret putting time and energy into a walled garden, sparking and contributing to conversations that happen elsewhere, and not on my blog. In many ways, hosting conversations on Twitter and Facebook are superior to letting people post comments on my blog (because I get literally…

Testing the WordPress plugin Social.

Working on a project that involves using WordPress as the starting point for publication to Twitter and Facebook. From what I can see, the Holy Grail of WordPress, Facebook and Twitter integration is the plugin Social, offered by MailChimp. With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers,…

Relative Number of Tweets containing the terms “church” or “beer” aggregated to the county level, June 22-28, 2012

But what about tweets containing “church” AND “beer”? So in honor of the 4th of July, we selected all geotagged tweets[1] sent within the continental US between June 22 and June 28 (about 10 million in total) and extracted all tweets containing the word “church” (17,686 tweets of which half originated on Sunday) or “beer”…

Justin Bieber, Hollywood drawn to steampunk movement

Do we really need Justin Bieber to make this story relevant? They’re steampunks, part of an international movement that’s a mashup of do-it-yourselfers, ahistorical recreationists and science fiction aficionados who are happily reliving a past that never was. The Victorian era was “a wonderful era when people were still being surprised by the world,” says…