We have an Amazon Echo. It’s been a lot of fun and a bit frustrating and a bit creepy. My youngest loves walking into the room and saying “Alexa, play Alvin and the Chipmunks”. I like saying “Alexa, set a 10 minute timer.” And we use it for news updates and music playing. 7 features it’s missing: […]
Amazon Echo: 7 missing features Read More »
Back in college, my mom called me and asked if I could check on my sister. My mom lived 10,000 miles away and hadn’t heard from my sister in a while and just wanted to know if she was ok. These were the days of paper letters and long distance phone call charges. I made
“Are you ok?” in 2014 Read More »
Who – or rather, which company – is holding all your email? If you couldn’t login tomorrow, do you have a copy of your email? Many webmail services, like Gmail, make it easy to download a copy of your mail using POP or IMAP but if you use their web client, it’s an extra step
Who has your mail? Read More »
At Kids on Computers, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting computers to kids that have no access to technology. Many of these places (rural Mexico, Africa, India) have cell phones before they have phone lines or even power. (The second time you blow the power for an entire school trying to set
Devices as computers will change the world Read More »
At Philly Emerging Tech some girls from TechGirlz came into meet with me and Molly Holzschlag. I think we were supposed to be role models for them but two minutes into the meeting, I realized the girls were the role models! One of the girls was already writing a game in Python and had already
Who’s helping who? Read More »
So now that I work at Mozilla, I figured it was time to develop a “web app” just to make sure I understood it all. And since my team is working on educational resources for web developers, I wanted to see what it was like to learn how to use some of them using resources
Learning to write JavaScript Read More »
LinkedIn Maps takes your LinkedIn contacts and groups them. The result is not only interesting but rather pretty. You can mouse over the different nodes, see who they are and who else is connected to them. After a few nodes I was able to see patterns in all my groups but one … The group
LinkedIn Maps: How are your friends connected? Read More »
I found the coolest tool, Universal Subtitles. With Universal Subtitles you can easily transcribe a talk, add subtitles or captions or translate any video on the web. I’ve been trying to transcribe my Would you do it again for free? talk forever and I always give up – I can’t type fast enough to keep
Universal Subtitles Read More »
There are lots of posts on how to make a password protected WordPress blog. I followed quite a few unsuccessfully (like this one). Then I found a very simple way to password protect your self hosted WordPress blog: Install the Absolute Privacy plugin. The Absolute Privacy plugin lets only registered users of your blog view
How to make a password protected WordPress blog Read More »
My blog post about Kindle covers brought in enough revenue in December to pay for my Kindle. It now brings in enough every month to cover my Kindle reading habit. Granted, I could use that money for something else, but I like to think of it as my Kindle paying for itself. I mean, I
How my Kindle paid for itself Read More »