Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve American Creative Works

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games,…

Text to Speech

—Text to Speech (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s…

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference. Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For…

Will you, won't you… Blackwell's Quadrille

Will you, won’t you… Blackwell’s Quadrille (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?” — Lewis Carroll’s “Lobster Quadrille” I just tried to order an examination copy of a book from Blackwell Publishing, and when I got what looked like an error message on the final screen (or…

The civil war in four minutes

—The civil war in four minutes (YouTube) Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet…

Mastering podcasts with Audacity

Open source software makes podcasting easy — too easy. Listening to a playlist of first-timer podcasts can leave your ears ringing from sudden changes in playback volume. The problem is audio mastering. Recording sound is simple, but mastering that sound — compressing volume differences, maintaining a decibel ceiling, and similar operations — is anything but.…

Atari Candleholder

—Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko) Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn’t find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn’t link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.) Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's…

Olympus DS-50 Voice Recorder

Olympus DS-50 Voice Recorder (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Two brand-new Olympus DS-50 voice recorders just arrived at SHU. I’ve ordered two DS-40s as well. My students have been learning podcasting basics with some older voice recorders, but the virtue of that older equipment is that it’s very easy to understand. The DS-50s are state-of-the art, but I…

Digital tools were potential life savers during Va. Tech massacre

The Mercury News posted an Associated Press package that included a video news story, accounts from witnesses and a disturbing home-made cell phone video that recorded dozens of gun shots and angry and disturbed screaming, presumably from the gunman. Perhaps most troublesome was that whoever was shooting the cell phone video, actually moved toward the…

Star Trek Bonanza

—Star Trek Bonanza (Something Awful) Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…For the Uniform #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 13) Sisko pursues former Federat…The Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo…

Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies

Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with…