Words To Avoid in Educational Writing | CSS-Tricks
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
Ooh! A documentary on Claude Shannon—exciting!
I just finished reading A Mind At Play, the (very good) biography of Claude Shannon, so this film feels very timely.
Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
I love this use of e-ink to play a film at 24 frames per day instead of 24 frames per minute.
Andy Parker kindly deposited a couple of books on my desk recently. One was The Martian. I had already read that one, thanks to Tim Kadlec’s recommendation. The other was the much-hyped Ready Player One.
I read it while I was travelling to and from Bulgaria. It was the ideal travel companion—an airport novel for geeks. It’s not exactly the finest prose ever written, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable popcorn entertainment. It reads like fan fiction and I mean that in a good way. It’s like Scott Pilgrim crossed with Snowcrash. It certainly passed the time on some airplane rides.
A fun little multiplayer game, all possible in the browser thanks to web sockets.
A nice-looking jQuery plugin for HTML5's audio element, with fallback to a Flash player. I might just end up using this on Huffduffer.
An experimental prototype that tracks the online buzz around BBC programmes (before they disappear down the memory hole of the iPlayer's time-restricted playback).
An even more speculative version of The Long Bet. Given a supposition (e.g. "What will the world be like when custom satellites are as easy to design and launch as your own website is today?"), you can add to a list of positive and negative outcomes.
A PMOG mission where players learn about the password anti-pattern.
Judging from the research information collected on Delicious, Flickr and Last.fm, this book proposal—tying together informatics, music and games—could blossom into a great read.
Now that the BBC iPlayer has been sensibly implemented in Flash, rather than as a proprietary Windows-only app, it turns out to be quite useful. Should I ever miss an episode of Doctor Who or, God forbid, University Challenge, I can catch up at my leisure.
But there are two major problems with the iPlayer:
Both of these limitations are unwebby but that second bit of self-crippling is particularly galling as the boffins at the BBC, in their attempt to appear more 2.0
, have added a “Share” button to every show on the iPlayer, prompting you to bookmark the current episode on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon. I’d be very curious to find out if anyone is actually making use of these links. I don’t know who should be considered more idiotic: the BBC webmonkeys for encouraging people to link to a time-limited URI or the people foolish enough to actually bookmark a resource that has just a week to live.
To quote Sir Timbo: Cool URIs don’t change
.