The Great Geek Manual

How Gaming Is Changing the Classroom:

By the time she’s 21 years old, a student will play nearly 10,000 hours of video games. But can kids play their way to learning? An increasing number of educators are recognizing that students aren’t responding to old-school lectures, and they’re looking to engage the gamer generation by bringing gaming into the classroom.

Since 2009, an entire school, New York City’s Quest to Learn, has used gaming-based learning principles to help students achieve. Instead of sitting kids in front of a screen all day, the school uses a gaming curriculum centered on systems-thinking. It helps students learn history and math by adopting the behaviors and habits of, for example, real historians or mathematicians. To top it all off, the students are also learning how to design their own games.

Via: GOOD

iPhones vs. the Police:

But things are different nowadays. Smart phones have cameras, and almost everyone has a smart phone. A court is therefore less likely to be ignorant of what actually occurred between the policeman and me. The policeman and I may have videotaped it. Bystanders might have, too. I am reminded of the utopia dreamed of by the eighteenth-century anarchist William Godwin, who hoped that someday everyone in the world would become so sincere and so expressive that all sides of every story would be fully narrated, and there would no longer be any need to deceive. Everyone would be his own narrator, and in the world that this sincerity revealed, perfect knowledge would include perfect forgiveness.

Japanese manufacturer NSK is developing a robot guide dog that can see and navigate its visually impaired owner through obstacles, including stairs, using a Microsoft Kinect controller.

This video introduces the concepts behind Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer, a new open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework. Starter Kits and modules are already available.

At Maker Faire 2010 New York, the .NET Micro Framework team and Microsoft Research (Cambridge) showed off their new device: the .NET Gadgeteer. It’s like LEGO for electronics.

In this video, Colin Miller explains some of the details on the board. The board itself has a multitude of connectors, and each is labeled with a letter. A sensor is then used to tell the end user which port to plug into, and all of this allows Collin to create a basic camera using only about three lines of code!

Colin did misspeak, however. He referred to the Device Solutions board as the Embedded Fusion board. That was the old name.

Tutorials

• Become a Good Programmer in Six Really Hard Steps

Tech News

• Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 File Sharing Verdict
• Europe’s Odd Anti-Piracy Stance: Send Money to the US!
• Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Amendment to Prohibit Prosecutions for Terms-of-Service Violations… Faking Your Name On Facebook Won’t Be a Felony
• Tougher online privacy rules for preteens proposed.
• Sunday, the German Pirate Party is expected to be voted into Parliament in Berlin.

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Utilities and Resources

• Codecademy – a free website that provides interactive lessons on coding for web development. Founders Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims have started the site with eight Javascript lessons, and plan to expand the coursework to other languages.
• Flipping Book Reader – a PDF Reader with an interactive interface where you can flip pages like in a real book. It provides a number of stylish and unique features such as the option to switch to a two page view, book shelf for all accessed documents, a thumbnail view of the table of contents, a customizable interface and the utility to scroll page up/down using the mouse pointer.
• NotiPage – a freeware app that alerts you when selected webpages are updated. Very useful for following forum threads and fix sites that don’t offer RSS.
• ShareMyPlaylists – a web service that makes it easy to share your Spotify playlists on Facebook and Twitter as well as with the ShareMyPlaylists community. It gives you access to a large library of user created playlists that you can browse in your browser but play in Spotify.
• ZenOK – a new cloud storage service that is offering 21GB of storage. It supports file compression, automatic versioning, and file encryption

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Utilities and Resources

• Color Scheme Designer 3 – allows a user to create harmonious color schemes using their choice of one of six customizable combinations from the color wheel. There is an option to show what a given scheme would look like to users with various types of colorblindness. The resulting scheme can be exported in several formats including HTML+CSS and Photoshop ACO, and a given scheme can even be shared as a link.
• Fresh WebSuction – a utility for downloading entire websites. Includes a comprehensive list of features to download website on your system.
• HotkeyP – a portable application to create macro commands and assign hotkey combinations in order to perform almost any kind of task, such as, open files, run applications, shut down, log off or restart your PC, change windows opacity, simulate mouse actions and so on.
• Watch2gether – a web service that makes it more fun to watch YouTube videos with friends. Instead of sharing links to the video, it lets you create a private session where you can watch them together.

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Being a productive geek has become even easier, thanks to advances in mobile internet and smartphone technology. Apple’s iPhone allows geeks to take care of their business wherever they have a mobile internet connection. Geeks who are always on the go and still need to get their work done should consider downloading these apps from the App Store to get the most out of their technology.

Skype

Contacting friends and clients through the highly popular voice over IP (VOIP) service, Skype, can be accomplished on the iPhone with this officially sanctioned app. Geeks can video chat, instant message and make international business calls just as they would on a desktop computer. Use Skype from any location where their iPhone receives mobile internet service.

WordPress

Updating a blog or website using the content manager WordPress is simple with this app for the iPhone. Geeks can keep their users up-to-date on the latest news while out of the home or office. This app is especially good for liveblogging events, allowing a blogger to get the information to their visitors before any other site while also improving their popularity.
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