The Whimsical Web
A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun. This site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.
pinboarded
Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr
Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.
Style Stage from Modern CSS Solutions
A modern CSS showcase styled by community contributions
Awesome IT-films - List of movies, documentaries and TV series about hackers, geeks and IT in common, sorted by IMDB rating.
A curated list of awesome movies, documentaries and TV series about hackers, geeks and IT in common, sorted by IMDB rating. If you know some good films which do not contain in these lists just fork it and send a pull request.
Kaltura - MP4 Direct Link (UW-Madison)
This tutorial shows Kaltura video owners how to generate a direct link to MP4 video files for their uploaded media. This link or URL allows you to use your videos within other contexts like inside of an H5P interactive video
Littr.me
This project represents a new attempt at the social link aggregator paradigm. It leverages the ActivityPub web specification for social networking and uses federation to prevent some of the problems that exist currently in similar communities. The main reason why link aggregators lose their appeal is the increasing number of users, which more often than not, do not share the existing group’s interests and philosophies. As the number grows, the topics start to expand over a larger spectrum, people get flooded with irrelevant content, while what is relevant gets buried. This is why the main component which will be missing in this implementation is the concept of using the same instance for merging multiple interest groups and replacing it with the different instances themselves. This way every community will be able to create one of their own and enforce (or not) their own moderation rules and topic preferences. At the same time, through the federation mechanism between instances, the users can subscribe to other streams and will receive updates from them. As a plus, due to the interoperability that ActivityPub brings, they are not only limited to link aggregators, but can also interact with other AP capable services.
How to View Youtube Thumbnail Image in High Resolution? - Orbiting Web
You can easily view (and download) the thumbnail of any Youtube video in high or default resolution
Add a quick dial icon to your iPhone home screen - CallMeIcons.com
Add a quick dial icon to your iPhone or iPad home screen
WindowSwap
Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it's going to be a while till we travel again. Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while. A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.
Fall Teaching Solutions: OBS Livestreaming vs. Zoom for Dynamic A/Syncronous Teaching | ANTH101
I love asynchronous teaching, and my online students love asynchronous learning. But this Fall is different. I will suddenly have nearly 400 students who have signed up for synchronous face-to-face learning who will be thrown into online learning. They will bring different expectations and desires than the student who signs up for online learning. So what to do? But the asynchronous mode misses out on those wonderful moments of spontaneous emergence that can sometimes happen in a live interactive discussion. So I set out to find opportunities to add some synchronous elements to my online course that could help create a stronger sense of community, energize our interactions, and provide a space for those emergent moments to occur.
Ruffle | Flash Player emulator written in the Rust programming language
ruffle is a Flash Player emulator built in the Rust programming language.
The rise and fall of Adobe Flash | Ars Technica
Few technologies have yielded such divisive and widespread passion as Flash. Many gush over its versatility and ease of use as a creative platform or its critical role in the rise of web video. Others abhor Flash-based advertising and Web design, or they despise the resource-intensiveness of the Flash Player plugin in its later years. Whichever side of the love-hate divide you land on, there's no denying the fact that Flash changed how we consume, create, and interact with content on the Web. For better and worse, it helped shape the Internet of today. But now, after roughly 25 years, Flash is finally nearing its end. In less than six months—December 2020—Adobe will officially end support and distribution of Flash Player, the browser plugin we all associate most strongly with the technology. And already, months ahead of this end-of-life switch, Flash has been disabled in most Web browsers (often flagged as a security risk should you choose to override the default settings). Even Google Chrome, long the browser of choice for Flash content, will soon remove Flash Player.
TruUcde Rabbithole Plugin and Unit/Integration Testing Series – Blowin’ Smoke
Welcome to my blog series on the creation of a simple WordPress plug and the setup, configuration and process of running unit and integration tests on this plugin. I hope you find reading it as useful as I did writing it. This series started with the first article as a stand alone piece. As my list of WordPress development project grew it became apparent to me that the addition of code testing was necessary to ensure the proper operation and quality of the code I was writing. People depend on the that code. Lots of people. As I undertook the tasks of adding user and integration testing to my process I mostly found two types of resources on the internet. First, program and package documentation. Great for answering ‘what’ but often a little thin on ‘why’ and ‘how’, especially since most of the testing tools are meant to run in a self chosen and assembled suite. Second, great articles on a one slice of the testing process. So I wrote the other eleven blog posts for two reasons: first, it greatly helped to organize my thoughts and reinforce and buttress my development process; second, I thought that other people who were looking to get into testing their WordPress stuff might find a basic, but comprehensive, examination of these topics useful. I include some cul-de-sacs I needed to back out of in favour of different approaches along with some mistakes I made along the way. This is the nature of development and I thought it more authentic to include some of these. (I didn’t include them all though. I make tons of mistakes and it would have been very fractured reading if I included them all.)
New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com
The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I was having fun. So here goes. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And—to borrow from Sherlock Holmes—the game is afoot.
Thread by @DrewCoffman: Currently watching a playthrough of ‘The Manhole’, the HyperCard game by Rand and Robyn Miller (of Myst fame!), and nothing could have prepa…
Currently watching a playthrough of ‘The Manhole’, the HyperCard game by Rand and Robyn Miller (of Myst fame!), and nothing could have prepared me for what this dragon sounds like.
Huffduffer
Have you ever wanted to put together a podcast of audio files that you’ve discovered on the web? It isn’t as easy as it should be. A podcast is an RSS file and making an RSS feed by hand is a pain. Huffduffer takes the pain out of podcasting found sounds. The word Huffduffer derives from a technology called Huff-Duff that was used to triangulate the position of radio transmissions. Huffduffing on the web is a way of pin-pointing interesting MP3 files. Here’s how it works: You find an MP3 that you’d like to share with the world. Use the handy Huffduff it bookmarklet or huffduff it directly on the site. That file is now added to your podcast.
Milton Glaser | The Work
Examples of the design genius of Milton Glaser, "the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. His presence and impact on the profession internationally is formidable. Immensely creative and articulate, he is a modern renaissance man — one of a rare breed of intellectual designer-illustrators, who brings a depth of understanding and conceptual thinking, combined with a diverse richness of visual language, to his highly inventive and individualistic work."
Mark Up the Margin: AnnotatED Workshops at OLC Innovate : Hypothesis
The Online Learning Consortium’s Innovate 2020 conference is over, but we came away filled to the brim with ideas about innovative teaching tools and research. Our big thanks to the OLC team and its vibrant community of educators dedicated to making online education a highly effective, engaging, and ever-evolving practice. To kick off the annual conference, Hypothesis held a free workshop on collaborative annotation with members of AnnotatED. This engaging, hands-on event sparked great ideas and generated practical takeaways for using collaborative annotation in the classroom. The reports we heard from practitioners in the field and the live annotation sessions with OLC Innovate keynoters Maha Bali and Martin Weller were truly outstanding. Thank you to the huge number of people who attended the workshop! See below for recordings, presentations, chat, and links from both workshop sessions — even if you didn’t make it to the workshop, you can dive in to any part or the whole thing. Watch the full workshop recording below or on YouTube and get the workshop slides. Follow links below to specific parts of the recording, and browse the lively chat from both sessions — we’ve pulled the links shared in chat out below so you don’t have to go hunting for that reference you missed.
muaz-khan/RecordRTC: RecordRTC is WebRTC JavaScript library for audio/video as well as screen activity recording. It supports Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Android, and Microsoft Edge. Platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows.
WebRTC JavaScript Library for Audio+Video+Screen+Canvas (2D+3D animation) Recording Chrome Extension or Dozens of Simple-Demos and it is Open-Sourced and has API documentation
Visual Programming | Bubble
You don't need to learn to code or hire engineers to make your next idea a reality. Bubble enables anyone to design, develop, and host fully functional, powerful web applications.
NoCo - code generation platform
The world of code and nocode needs a bridge. Noco is that bridge allowing designers and nocoders to work side by side with developers. With every new project or feature comes new designs, which take time to turn into clean, functioning code. Our tool lets a nocoder become a productive member of the dev team by allowing them to build new designs and new features and commit them to github, just like a developer. We envision a world where more and more of the application can be built without code and only the unique parts of the application need to be built by hand.
unote
Here you can easily create your own website from markdown! Here you can easily create your own website from markdown!
Invidious
Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube
The Mission (Geo)Impossible Scavenger Hunt | Petragogy
Mission (Geo)Impossible is a series of 19 quests that teams of students complete for extra credit. Why 19? I like prime numbers. 17 seemed to few, and 23 was too many. The first time around the optimal number of quests was one of many unconstrained variables. Why extra credit? Because when I make up the quests I honestly have no idea whether students will be able to do them. They are meant to be challenging problems, and are of a type that I’ve never seen as part of an assessment or activity. Students go into this knowing it will be difficult (I make sure they know), and do so by their own choice so I can feel a little less guilty about how hard they work.
EOL Learning + Education
The Encyclopedia of Life Learning + Education website (EOL L+E) is part of the larger EOL collaborative. EOL L+E works with educators, citizen scientists and partners to make this information accessible through free tools, services and resources found here.
Spicing Up Your Remote Work with Zoom and OBS | ryan straight, ph.d
Seems like everybody I know is now working remotely due to the virtual worldwide lockdown in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of folks that have little to no experience with it. And that’s okay! We’re all in this together. At this point, simple ettiquite and knowing how to mute your microphone should be considered passable skills. I shared a couple Twitter threads about teaching online but wanted to do something more tutorial-ish. So, if you are comfortable with working remotely and want to do something a bit more interesting than just, “Hey, look! I’m in a desert now!” well, this is for you.
Alquibots - Educational technology
Alquibots are didactic robotics kits that combine art and different technologies to stimulate integral development and sensory, logical and expressive experimentation. The project dives into didactic robotics , integrating elements of electronics and programming (such as arduino) with the building blocks of the Alchemetric collection , giving a technological character to the toys. The addition of electronic controllers allows to create dancing sculptures with music and light effects from the experimentation of techniques, promoting interactivity and the modular construction of projects.
Interactive E-Texts and Students: A Scoping Review – CJE
The purpose of this article is to explore the scope of available evidence regarding the use of interactive e-texts and their relationship to student learning experiences in post-secondary education. Following the framework of Arksey and O’Malley, this scoping review identified and reported on 33 articles. Study characteristics are presented alongside four themes that were found across the included articles: (1) the effect of interactive e-texts on student learning experiences; (2) the relationship between interactive e-texts and academic performance; (3) factors influencing student adoption and experience of interactive e-texts; and (4) roles, responsibilities, and recommendations. While the adoption of interactive e-texts is becoming increasingly common in post-secondary education, their effect on student learning experiences remains complex. This review emphasizes the importance of user-friendliness, affordability, accessibility, portability, and the role of educators. Using interactive e-texts shows promise, though future research should explore how barriers might be minimized and benefits might be maximized to have the strongest impact on student learning experiences.
October 1st, 2020
Data suggest covid-19 is spiking in some areas of the US, yet many universities have decided to remain open for face-to-face classes. You have been on campus for three weeks. You teach in the biology department at Most Distinguished University of the North. It is nearly the end of the week and you are trying to push through. You wanted to teach all your classes online.
Podcast Method
I’m Dan Benjamin. I started podcasting in 2006 and went full-time in 2009 when I started the 5by5 Podcast Network. I’m also the founder of Fireside, a podcast hosting and analytics platform I created to make podcast hosting easy, reliable, and fun. What follows are my recommendations for the best, most reliable, and best reviewed gear for several different types of podcaster (entry level, intermediate, pro, mobile, group, etc.). To make things as straight forward as possible, instead of offering many different alternatives, I've provided just one set of recommended gear for each level, representing my suggestions for the best and most affordable equipment available. My hope is that you find this guide helpful, and that it saves you from making the time consuming and often costly mistakes I've made along the way.