(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: Write On

July 30, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Let’s face it — English was not everyone’s favorite subject in school. Some people loved it, but others found daily classes about grammar rules, spelling, punctuation and all that little type-y stuff as about exciting as watching Windows 95 defrag itself. Sure, voice calls and video chat are modern forms of communication here in the Internet broadband era, but even then, a lot of interaction between people still takes place in written form.

If you feel insecure about your writing and grammar skills — maybe English wasn’t your thing in school or maybe English wasn’t even your first language — there’s help online. Take, for example, new Tech Writing Handbook, courtesy of the gang at iFixit.com.

The Tech Writing Handbook is divided up into 11 chapters and one appendix. The manual guides the reader through the process of writing documentation — starting with research and building from there. The book also discusses adding photographs and other visuals to accompany and enhance your writing. Even if you don’t actually do any writing yourself, the manual is worth a look just for the logical steps it presents on how to explain a topic or task. In exchange for your contact information, you can also download a printable PDF that you can also keep on your tablet for those offline moments.

Need more help in wrestling the English language to the ground? Consider:

Purdue Online Writing Lab
Brought to you by the English Department at Purdue University, the main Online Writing Lab page rounds up 200 free resources that cover writing (and teaching writing). You can also find information on research, grammar and mechanics, using style guides and more. You do not have to be a Purdue student to use the site.

GrammarBook.com
Although it’s linked to a $15 offline grammar book, this site is a useful for its explanations of grammatical rules, including punctuation. It also has links to a blog and online videos explaining grammar usage.

Grammar Girl
Need short, friendly tips to help your writing and find answers to questions like, “can I start a sentence with a preposition?” or the whole “who and whom” quandary? Call on Grammar Girl and she’ll help you out.

Grammarly Instant Online Grammar Check
Have something you’ve already written and want it proofread? Grammarly is an online scanner that claims it can find and correct over 250 types of grammatical mistakes. It’s a paid service with fees currently starting at $30 a month, but you can try it free for seven days. If you don’t have a proofreader or copy editor reading behind you, Grammarly could come in handy.

These are just a few of the resources out there. You can find many other sites to help you out, like other grammar guides and online dictionaries — and mobile app versions as well.

Need a break from your studies? Chill out with a little classic Schoolhouse Rock.

Podcast

Episode 57: When El Kaiser Speaks, Hollywood Listens

July 25, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

Another Comic-Con International is in the books but despite it being held in the City of Motion it was Tinseltown that grabbed the headlines at the convention. In the news, Netflix added 630,000 subscribers but Wall Street is still disappointed; the United Kingdom moves to block online pornography; a German security expert is warning of a flaw in SIM card technology; the Leap Motion controller finally begins shipping; Apple confirm that people are indeed still listening to podcasts; researchers get one step closer to building Replicants and a Holodeck; and you can donate the spare processing power from your Android device for a worthy cause.

Episode Links

Episode 57 News: Research, In Motion

July 25, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Summertime, and the TV is binge-worthy. Netflix added 630,000 subscribers during the second quarter (perhaps due to an influx of Arrested Development fans who giddily signed up to watch the first new episodes in years. (However, investors were hoping for more like 880,000 to 900,000 new customers. Picky, picky investors.)

It wasn’t all bad for Netflix, though. The company snagged 14 Emmy nominations earlier this month for Arrested Development and the political thriller House of Cards, its new original series, Orange Is the New Black, is getting greeat reviews and plans for documentaries and stand-up comedy specials are in the works. And should Facebook go to a paid subscriber plan? In a blog post last week, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone suggested that The Social Network offer a premium option for say, $10 a month, that gets rid of all that annoying advertising all over the site.

Meanwhile, over in Europe — and not from the Royal Baby News Network — the United Kingdom is moving to a new policy where the government automatically blocks online pornography unless users specifically request to opt in through their Internet providers. Things are a little less top-down up in Finland, though. The Finnish Parliament will soon be discussing the Common Sense Copyright Act, said to be the first law crowd-sourced by the public.

A German security expert is warning of a flaw in SIM card technology that could allow criminals to steal cash or eavesdrop on calls. The researcher said he discovered a way to hack into the SIM card by sending it a text message with a bogus digital signature from the carrier network, which could allow an intruder to upload malware to the card.

Let’s hope nobody jumps in with malware for the Leap Motion controller for PC and Mac computers, which finally began shipping this week after a lot of early buzz and production delays. Developers have created about 75 apps so far to work with the controller so far.

Apple announced this week that it had one billion podcast subscriptions and counting. The company also announced — through e-mail — that its Web portal for third-party developers was hacked last week and went offline for an extended period of time. A Turkish programmer came forward to confess he was behind the whole hack after finding 13 bugs, and said the developer site went down shortly after he contacted Apple with his findings. (Also in developer news, Samsung is busting a move, putting a little air between itself from Google’s software and starting up its own developer’s conference this fall.)

In the world of science, researchers at the University of California Berkeley are working on a user interactive sensor network on flexible plastic, otherwise known as electronic skin. Disney Research is working on a haptic technology to help people feel virtual objects and experience textures. The system, called AIREAL, that uses controlled puffs of compressed air to provide tactile feedback to someone using a motion sensor to play a game, move through a virtual environment or control a computer.

Over at NASA, the agency is still looking into what caused an astronaut’s helmet to leak water and interrupt last week’s spacewalk up on the International Space Station. The space agency also released photos this week of the Earth — taken from the Cassini spacecraft 900 million miles away out by Saturn.

And finally, you can now donate the spare processing power from your Android device to one of six worthy causes crunching distributed data for research on math, physics and pharmaceutical projects with the BOINC app from the University of California-Berkeley. It’s volunteer computing and no, it won’t eat your battery or your data-plan bytes so your idle Android can help scientists study diseases and do humanitarian research, predict global warming, or discover pulsars.

No Android device — but a burning desire to help save the world? No problem there because you can also volunteer your desktop of laptop for the greater good.

Episode Links, Movies

Appointment Viewing

July 24, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

The Comic-Con International: San Diego event wrapped up this past weekend after about five days of nonstop hype and news blasts. The event — which throws Hollywood marketing people in with comics fans, animation lovers, cosplay kids, science-fiction and fantasy enthusiasts and all genre aficionados in between — saw a number of announcements.

Here are a few of our favorites:

The name of the Avengers sequel will be called Avengers: Age of Ultron and it’s due out in 2015.

George R.R. Martin said he would be open to writing a prequel to the action in the Game of Thrones series, although some fans have pointed out that he hasn’t finished the two remaining books in the current Game of Thrones saga.

Game of Thrones favorite Peter Dinklage will be playing Bolivar Trask in the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past movie.

Fans for to see the entire pilot episode of this fall’s Agents of SHIELD television show and WIRED was among the sites that loved it.

Also in preview mode, Walking Dead, which showed about four minutes of Season 4, the first half of which starts October 13^th.

Doctor Who fans got a lot of love as Comic Con as well, with a panel discussion with the show’s creators and stars — and a very special sneak peek at the trailer for this fall’s 50^th anniversary special. Fan favorite Karen Gillan, (“Come along, Pond”), also showed off her shiny new shaved-head look for her role as Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Gillian Anderson turned up for an X-Files panel and joked that there’s a lost Mulder-Scully sex scene out there from the old show, which sent some fans into a frenzy — although she actually said later she’d been kidding. But she wouldn’t mind doing another X-Files movie some day.

And Batman and Superman are going to team up for movie in 2015. Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill are set to return as director and hero, Batman needs to be cast since Christian Bale hung up the cowl. The film is expected to pave the way for a Justice League movie that teams up even more DC superheroes for 2017. No sign of casting calls for Zatanna, Elongated Man, Martian Manhunter or the Hawkcouple, but please, someone needs to get crackin’ on a Wonder Woman flick. Like, now.

If you need more Comic-Con 2013 news, click here or here or here for roundups — and start clearing your schedule for 2015.

Episode Links, Software

Don’t Sleep in the Subway, Baby

July 24, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Sure Yahoo’s been on a spending spree, but Apple has been doing some shopping of its own this summer. Last week, it acquired two location-oriented companies, Locationary and HopStop.

HopStop, for those who haven’t had it save the bacon in a strange land, offers up door-to-door transit, walking, biking, and taxi directions in over 300 cities worldwide. No word on what Apple plans to do with the service (besides nuking the Windows Phone app version), but here’s hoping the transit directions get folded into the Apple Maps app so we all don’t have to refer to other apps to figure out our train plan. So go download the app or check out the mobile site now.

But if HopStop isn’t your thing, what else can you use to navigate the labyrinth of a major metropolitan mass transit system and not get lost for days?

If you have an iPhone, you can get free maps and directions for 12 major transit systems with Embark for iOS. Boston, Chicago, London, Long Island, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC and most importantly, New York are among the cities serviced here. And Embark does not require an Internet connection so you can use it when you’re on a platform underground trying to figure out which train to take when the one you need is out of service. There’s also a free version for the Embark NYC Subway for Android.

But if New York City is the town you wish explore, our own Metropolitan Transit Authority Web site has a huge collection of links to mobile apps for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and mobile Web. It’s a mix of official and third-party developers, but you can find 68 iPhone apps, 34 iPad apps, 33 Android apps, 8 BlackBerry apps and 8 Windows Phone apps listed.

Lest we forget, Google Maps for Android and iOS. The old reliable app includes transit guides for many cities and all kinds of navigational bells and whistles like audio turn-by-turn directions.

If you’re traveling or just want a really good pocket guide for your own hometown, check your phone’s app store and search for transit apps and local guides for specific cities. And while you’re loading up your phone with your transit app of choice, don’t forget to throw a few appropriate tunes on there as well. Safe travels, yo.

Episode Links

Episode 56 News: The Dogged Days of Summer

July 18, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Forget the Avengers and the Justice League: this season’s rootin’-tootin’ action team-ups include several major companies — including AOL, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — are banding together with a new plan to fight digital piracy, that ongoing problem for media-makers in this modern age. There is also a coalition of groups coming together to sue the National Security Agency for all that recently uncovered “unconstitutional dragnet electronic surveillance.” Meanwhile, staffers at Facebook and Buzzfeed are having a public squabble over a Buzzfeed story last week that was based on a Stanford University study and called “The Number Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See.” This prompted a Facebook engineer to fire back and say the story was “just plain wrong.” And so it goes.

Other academic studies are also popular this week. A recent one from researchers at Northwestern and MIT’s Sloan School of Management takes a look at just who writes negative product reviews online. The study, called Deceptive Reviews: The Influential Tail, presents evidence that many product reviews on a private-label retail site were written by people who did not actually purchase the product in question. As for croaking and squawking of another kind, researchers from the University of Puerto Rico are using iPods to automatically record endangered species. All this automated data acquisition is part of the ARBIMON system— which stands for automated remote biodiversity monitoring network and you can hear samples of some of the audio it’s analyzed here, including the musings of the cute little coquí frog.

The Verge site is reporting that Microsoft is still working on its prototype smartwatch and has moved the project over to the team behind its Surface touchscreen tablet computers. Speaking of small computers, there’s another tiny model that’s joining the ranks of the Raspberry Pi and other barebones PCs. CompuLab’s Utilite computer is about the size of a pack of index cards and starts at $100. Also getting smaller: the price tag on a BlackBerry Z10. BlackBerry CEO said it was the right time to adjust the price on the Z10, now that the newer Q10 model has arrived. Things are not so booming for Intel’s Thunderbolt technology either, as Acer is the latest laptop maker to ditch the high-speed communications port for the slower but less-expensive USB 3.0 jacks.

Need entertainment? If you find yourself looking up actors, movie trailers and other cinematic tidbits on the IMDb site, you can now follow through and buy tickets right in the mobile app for Android and iOS. Apple, perpetually rumored to be working on a TV-type product to enhance or build on its Apple TV box, may be working on a feature that lets viewers skip commercials for those who prefer to stay in front of their screens at home at chill without the shill. (Not to be outdone, Google is also said to be talking to media companies about getting content for its own online TV service.)

On the mobile front, two unfortunate smartphone incidents have recently occurred. Apple is investigating reports of an electrocution that happened when a woman in China answered a call on her iPhone 5 when it was plugged into the charger. This follows reports last week of a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone that spontaneously exploded in the pocket of a Swiss teenager and causing third-degree burns.

As for security news, the annoying fake FBI Ransomware that locks up Windows computers and demands payment has oozed over to the Mac. The Malwarebytes blog has full documentation on the nasty little JavaScript code and advice on how to ditch it; there’s a Q&A page as well.

And finally, out in space, NASA’s Hubble telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the planet Neptune, and a small moon at that. Goodnight, moon!

Video

An Important Message From The Portland Nerd Council

July 18, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

This was the clip from IFC’s sketch comedy series “Portlandia” that had me questioning whether I was a geek or a nerd. Apparently only my older brother considers me a dork…

Podcast

Episode 56: Proudly Flying Our Geek Flag

July 18, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

This week El Kaiser wrestles with an identity crisis and J.D. gives us the lowdown on how the micro-blogging service Twitter determines what is trending. In the news, taking down websites that offer access to pirated content by targeting their wallet; the NSA gets sued; Buzzfeed and Facebook have a slap fight; manufacturers ditch the Thunderbolt port; rumors heat up about a Microsoft smartwatch; Blackberry drastically drops the price on its flagship Z10 smartphone and Nasa discovers a new moon orbiting Neptune.

Episode Links, Movies

#TrendsOnTwitter

July 17, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

If you were anywhere near the bird-themed microblogging service last Thursday, you may have seen people tweeting about something called Sharknado. This campy mashup of marine-predator-meets-weather-disaster horror film was even announced as “trending on Twitter” Thursday evening.

This trend blip led a number of news organizations to take a closer look at the tweeting about the movie. The SocialGuide site, part of the Nielsen company, reported that Sharknado was the most discussed program on the air that night and generated more than 400,000 tweets, (even though the TV ratings urned out to be eh, not so much). But Sharknado made its mark on the trend lists and Twitter itself even blogged about the event.

So if you’re just a casual Twitter user, all of this trend business may seem a little confusing. How does a trend start? How do they count them? Is this just an advertising stunt?

Rest assured, trends are an official part of the Twitter service. In fact, when you’re logged into your account in the Web, you can see a little box of trends on the left side of the page and when you’re on the official mobile app, tap Discover then on Trends. There. You’ll see a list of keywords and hashtagged phrases. You’ll also see Promoted Trends, which are labeled as such and yes, those are advertising someone paid for. So, how did theses trends get there?

According to Twitter:

Trends are determined by an algorithm and are tailored for you based on who you follow and your location. This algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help you discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter that matter most to you. You can choose to see Trends that are not tailored for you by selecting a specific Trends location on Twitter.com.

So if you follow a lot of sports feeds, you’ll most likely see trending topics on that subject, like recent NBA trades if you have a team in your city. Hashtags are used in phrases, like #royalbaby to make the topics findable for people looking to search out all the tweets on the topic using that same hashtag. Trends also show world and local events.

If you want to see trends for other cities or parts of the world, click the Change link in the Twitter trends box to pick a different country or city and see what’s trending there. You can also type in “Worldwide” to get the global pulse.

When you click on a trend listed in the box, Twitter takes you to a page of search results for tweets using those keywords, phrase or hashtag. If you’re feeling like group activity, you can join in the trend by tweeting a new post of your own using the same keyboards or hashtag.

To avoid people gaming the system or trying to artificially inflate the importance of a topic, Twitter does have rules about trends, along with general rules for using the service.

As you can imagine, people love to see that topics are trending nationally or globally, and plenty of third-party sites that round up this info and present it in some sort of graphically pleasing form are out there. These include:

What The Trend, a site owned by the social-media company HootSuite. The What the Trend page displays a list of Now Trending and All Trends Today, plus a handy list of top trends by country. There’s also a What the Trend Top Ten page and HootSuite’s Twitter Trends of the Week.

The Hashtags.org site has page called Trending on Twitter that looks at the hot hashtags of the moment.

Trendsmap, a geographical real-time representation of what the popular topics around certain parts of the world. You can sign in to Trendsmap with your Twitter account as long as you’re doing it for personal, non-profit and research use only. Otherwise, you can sign up for Trendsmap Plus at $19 a month to get ad-free data you can filter by hashtag, keywords or users, faster updates and Vine videos.

If you’re a marketing or advertising person, you can also find paid services for analyzing Twitter traffic for your business.

And if you missed the original airing of Sharknado, Syfy is rerunning it this Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can find clips from the film around the Web (spoilers, darling!) if you don’t want to sit through two hours of giant toothy wind-propelled fish chomping their way through L.A. But then again, maybe you do.

Podcast

Episode 55: Just Jammin’

July 11, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

This week we bring the jam! J.D. offers up alternatives to Photoshop as El Kaiser tries to find something decent to watch on Netflix and answers listener mail. In the news, the U.S. Emergency Alert System might be vulnerable to hackers; Google patches a 4 year old vulnerability in the Android mobile OS; bookseller Barnes & Noble get out of the tablet business; and the Mars rovers continue to do their thing on the Red Planet.

The independent audio magazine devoted to mashing up pop culture, technology and more. J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado are your hosts. It's an Internet Radio revolution!