Sharing

Scoop.it

Not interested: I use Feedly instead. RSS readers are a bit different that scoop.it, sure, but I am less interested in seeing a feed of things curated by topics (a la scoop.it, pinterest, even tumblr) than I am getting a feed of new things from a specific news source.

The days of RSS may be numbered and I may end up switching to one of these new services. Before Feedly I used Safari's RSS feed support, but then they got rid of that in order to push users of RSS towards their newer concept of system wide "following" of sites where you get notifications as pop ups (which is similar to an addon called Growl, but also to how notifications work on a phone). So I moved to Google Reader. But then Google shutdown reader to move users to Google+ and following sites through that (do you see a trend?). Even now I am thinking of leaving feedly because they have switched to a "Pro" system where all the new features require you to pay a fee and there the interface is cluttered by annoying ads for these new features.

But I digress.

There is nothing wrong with scoop.it. My only issue would be that by default you get messages with suggestions every day and I have managed to forget my password and now have to sort all of that out and disable my account.

But I did my two "things": I signed up and then I tweeted something that I found via the site: this link to an article about Minecraft Servers.

I didn't use the "post to twitter" button as suggested. I just copied and pasted the link. I don't like all of my online accounts having access to all of the other ones (on my home computers that is even disabled because I use a browser extension to limit sites from communicating with social media) and I don't see the time savings in pressing one of those buttons. Oh digressions.

For the EXTRA COOL THING portion of this: one of my schemes would be to get a raspberry pi and set up Calibre on it with a locally stored copy of the entire collection of out of copyright books at Project Gutenberg. Then you could have an eBook terminal in the library where people could move over non-DRM out of copyright classics onto their devices even if the internet is down. And a copy of pretty much every significant work of writing from pre-1900.

Multimedia

It has been awhile since I have done my 23 things training. It has just been busy around here with the departure of some staff and March break activities. But here we go once more. Embedding a youtube video in blogger is very intuitive and straight forward. I will probably end up messing around trying to get the alignment of the video to the left and the spacing around it just right, but format pickiness is one of my weaknesses. I have it close enough for now, so I'll move one.

This is a video of one of my favourite historians, Howard Zinn, discussing the topic of a just war. This is the idea that there are "good" wars that are worth fighting. Zinn himself fought in the Second World War, which is generally considered the easiest to justify. I can't actually watch this video at work, but I have read a fair amount of Zinn's writing and I assume that the content is fairly similar.


So that`s that.

In terms of professional development resources, I am currently going through the introduction to computer science course videos from MIT. The course teaches computer science concepts using Python, which would be handy to know if we start using RaspberryPi computers at work as part of a markerspace since it is the recommended language for that platform. I'm using an older set of videos, but here is a link to the newer ones. I have not really had the time to watch more of them recently as I have been working more on day-to-day things and on improving my French, but learning Python is one of my goals for 2014.