While at the BlogHer 2010 session “Fight Spam and Hackers! Plugging Security Holes in Your Social Media Life” (audio), I Amy of Amiable Life asked a question. She said that she wants to understand security issues but that much of the reference material went over her head. She was wondering if there was any “WordPress for 5th Graders” or “How to Protect Yourself for an eight year old.”
This sparked an idea. I understand this technical stuff and pride myself on the ability to explain complex items in simple terms. So why couldn’t I take a subject like “How Does The Internet Work” and, perhaps using some crude graphics, explain how it works without delving into the details of TCP/IP, request headers and other topics that would cause peoples’ eyes to glaze over?
I still have some work to do before I can pull this off. The words will come easily, but I’ll need some graphics. And those might be trickier for me to do. So this might be a once every-other-month type of feature. My other concern is the selection of topics. How am I going to figure out which topics people want to learn about? Well, as this is an Aloha Friday, I bet you can guess how. I’m going to ask everyone out there!
My Aloha Friday question for today is: What computer/technology subjects would you like explained simply?
Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.
JSL and NHL love superheroes. From Batman to Iron Man to Spiderman to Ben 10, they love watching and acting out the exploits of various superheroes. So they both loved it when I introduced them to Hero Machine. They each had a blast creating their own superhero identity.
First, JSL made himself into Fire Guy:
He was quite adament that Fire Guy be blue and have a cape. Those were non-negotiable. I’m guessing his powers include the ability to throw fire around.
Next up was NHL. He came up with Disco Man:
When I asked why "Disco", NHL replied that it was because of his eyes. They looked like disco balls. (I pointed out a disco ball one time when we bowled a month ago. Good recollection!) He also declared that Disco Man had the power "to die sharks." I’m not sure how useful that power is in the day-to-day life of a super hero. If there’s an evil Shark Dude villian out there, he’d better steer clear of Disco Man.
Of course, I couldn’t let them have all the fun. I designed a superhero for myself and B. Now, we’re a superhero family!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe some evil needs to be vanquished! TechyDad, away!
I had a great Aloha Friday question all lined up, but it’s going to have to wait. As I was headed home, I got a call from B. She searched Twitter for #DisneySMMoms and found a tweet from a user named EsterlDode titled "#DisneySMMoms 2010 – A Not-So-Impossible" followed by a URL. Now, she recognized this as the beginning of my latest DisneySMMoms post so she clicked the link wondering what she would get. She was greeted by my webpage. Except it wasn’t my webpage.
It’s been nearly a month since the last installment in my Keeping History Alive series. There was a good reason for this, though. I’ve been busy trying out Ancestry.com. The folks over at Ancestry.com were nice enough to give me a month free to review the site and I kind of got lost in it. Not in the “it’s a maze where you can’t find anything” sense. Their website is very well put together. It is both easy to use and feature-rich, a balance that can be hard to strike. Instead, I got lost in the “there’s so much information here I don’t know where to begin” sense.
Yes, that’s the complete Sid The Science Kid Vaccine episode able to be viewed online. And no, it’s not a pirated version, but a fully approved version. Don’t think it could get better than that? Well, if you go to Flu.gov, you can download this Sid episode for free.
As you may know, I’m a big fan of online video. I stream Netflix movies regularly on my Roku (especially another Henson production, Farscape). I’ve also considered cutting the cable cord more than once. (If we did, I’d be glad that PBS Kids, and thus Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train would be available via over-the-air television.) Being able to watch a Sid episode on my computer via the Internet is great. (Note to PBS Kids: Please consider making a Roku channel to stream full episodes to people’s Roku boxes on demand. My kids would love this!)
The other day, I was watching Mythbusters on Discovery Channel, when one of their commercials came on:
It didn’t take me long to begin humming along. I thought I had remembered this commercial from seeing it a few years back. A little searching and I found the previous version:
I couldn’t stop singing "Boom De Yada" over and over. Just when I thought I had gotten it out of my head, I saw someone post a link to this video on Twitter:
Now I couldn’t stop singing this! "Will you let me go? Ma-na-ma-nah. I will not let you go. Let me throw. Ma-na-ma-nah. I will not let you throw. Let me blow. Ma-na-ma-nah. I will not let you blow. Let me joke. Do not like your jokes. Let me joke. Do not like your jokes! Let me joke!" Sorry, there I go again.
Anyway, my Aloha Friday question is: Besides these songs now (evil laugh), what other songs have been running through your head?
Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.
Yesterday, Revision3 announced that they will have a "channel" on Roku boxes. If you don’t already know, Roku is a small, $99 set top box that can play Netflix Instant Queue movies, Amazon VOD movies and even Major League Baseball games. Roku had promised 10 new channels announced by the end of the year. MLB was one of them. Blip.TV was a second. Revision3 becomes the third. However, during the video demonstration of Revision3 on Roku, I noticed something odd. Here’s a screen capture, tell me if you notice it too. (Click the image to enlarge it.)
Did you notice the Pandora and Flickr channels? If these are released, then you might soon be able to listen to your Pandora music and browse photos by family and friends via the Roku. These would be channels four and five. Add in a rumored YouTube channel and we might have six. It remains to be seen what other channels will come up, but I for one am excited at the future prospects of Roku!
Ten years ago tomorrow, I was just getting back from Rosh Hashana services. I wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep, so I decided to log onto Yahoo Chat and talk with a few people. Little did I know that B was in the same chat room. Actually, B didn’t even know she was in the same chat room. She thought that the window was closed. When she saw it was open, and that I was signed in, she checked my profile. A change I made a few weeks back – adding the text “Nice Jewish Boy looking for Nice Jewish Girl” – led B to contact me. Right from our initial chatting, we clicked. I didn’t know at the time that I would fall in love and marry her, but I definitely knew that there was something special about this “Angel Forever.”
My Aloha Friday question is: Have you ever met anyone in person that you had first met online? Do you feel that meeting people online lets you get to know them better than meeting them in person?
Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.
While browsing through various tweets, I saw this one. Intrigued, I clicked through. There, I was presented with a video explaining how, if I joined this website, I would get thousands of followers *AND* get paid. Of course, my “scam alert” sirens went off immediately. Here’s the basic run down. First, I would give them my Twitter username and password. (*siren blares*) After that, everyone who had previously joined the system would be automatically set to follow me and I would be set to follow all of them. Next, for each person that I convinced to join, I would be paid $10 per month per user you convince to join. (*siren blares*) And how much for this “wonderful opportunity”? Only $1. (*siren stops blaring but only because it has overloaded and exploded in a humongous fireball*)
With the economy the way it is, everyone is looking for ways to save money. For awhile now, I’ve thought about how much our cable TV costs us per month and whether/how we would do without it. We currently have Time Warner Cable’s All-In-One package (Internet, Phone and Cable) with two boxes. One is a DVR and one is a plain cable box. The phone line and Internet we would need to keep. (Ok, technically we could cut our land line and go cell phone only, but that’s a thought experiment for another day.) Switching to Time Warner’s “Surf & Talk” plan would save us about $65 per month.
Of course, our cable TV doesn’t go unwatched every day. NHL and JSL watch it. B watches it. I watch it. So we can’t just rip out the cable line and pocket the monthly savings. Some kind of entertainment is going to need to replace the cable TV loss at or below the cost of cable TV. In doing research on this, here are some of the options I’ve come up with:
