The special coding Wikipedia has developed for its user-edited pages is powerful. Some shortcuts are simple and elegeant — you just put [[square brackets]] around words to make them into links, and clicking on the link will automatically either take you to an existing page, or let you create a new one. But as Wikipedia…
While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic. Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2…
Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon’s Kindle. Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It’s surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it…
Guardian (UK): Police forces should issue comical caricatures of the criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people’s memories. Similar:How the printing press changed “you”: when reading changed, so did writingThis was before the printing press, so b…BooksCameras and…
I really like the interface I stumbled across on the Evening Standard website. The version here on my page is just a static screen grab, but on the real site when you mouse over a title, the item drops open to reveal the photo and the caption… it feels far less distracting than a popup,…
Mike Edwards, a civilian instructor at West Point, reflects on the academic reaction to a new army field manual that plagiarizes large swaths of complex material, sometimes verbatim, from published sources. Part 1, Part 2. The scandal, though, is this: according to anthropologist David Price, the published version of the Army’s FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency…
Well, Google didn’t say “glarbifulous” on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word. In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press’s preference for “Web log” is far less popular online than the traditional “weblog,” I did a quick Google search. 12,900,000 Google hits for…
Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats.…
In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles. The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it’s mostly made up images… I didn’t find any text that I could copy…
Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he’s really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since…
For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I’ve picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming. Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students…
Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com. Similar:Allergic to Grammar ErrorsSource: Cyanide & Happiness (Explosm…AmusingOur family has seen David Whalen in…
TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server. I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn’t able to edit…
A Yahoo! developer reflects on the missed opportunities caused by the economic demands of the recording industry: If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and…
Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like. Similar:Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little KidsFelt writey. Because reasons. The other…CultureAn afternoon with Ben Franklin. Culture‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack After finishing his synopsis, Reagan…Cyberculture7 web design…
The marketers and programmers at Google’s Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem. The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. Here’s a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page. Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs! Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact! Take a tour! Name your blog! Okay,…
Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing “I will not think outside the box” on the blackboard 100 times. Imagine a conference in which every presenter spoke for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Is it heaven, or is it a pecha-kucha night? That would leave a lot…
Sean McBride: The problem I discovered was that one of the thin walls between the holes had broken and bent down, forming a ramp. When I plugged the DVI adapter into my computer, two of the pins went into the same hole, and the projector could no longer understand the output from my computer. However,…
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Elia Powers: Housing officers divided students into living groups, based upon major, age and other factors. So students who saw their list of 25, 50 or 75 (depending on the group) potential roommates already knew that those included would likely live on the same floor or at least in the same residence hall. It was…