Tag: LEARNING

Despite what some detractors say, torrents have plenty of legitimate uses -- one of which is helping organizations distribute digital content at little or no cost. That's especially important for a non-profit like Khan Academy, which is why its partnership with BitTorrent Inc. makes perfect sense. Khan Academy is a provider of free, online educational videos. A wide range of subjects are ...

With Microsoft busily pitching Live@Edu to learning institutions, Google continues to do what it can to make Google Apps an attractive alternative. Yesterday, the company announced the addition of a new Education category to the Google Apps Marketplace, which is designed to "make it easier for schools to have more web apps at their fingertips." Right now, the category includes around two dozen ...

I love learning new words. However, when I just read what a word means, more often than not I soon forget the definition. If I use the word in a number of sentences, though, it's easier for me to retain it – especially if the sentences are meaningful. Phrays is a nifty little Web application built on this exact principle. You're supposed to go there once a day and check out the word of the ...

Ruby is one of those trendy programming languages. It's supposed to be all "elegant" and stuff. 37signals uses it, and it has one of the craziest textbooks I have ever seen in my life. In other words, it's a language that's trying hard to woo my inner hipster, and I must say, it's kind of working. So, I started playing around with it. I made a simple script, modified another script and did all ...

It's a story that beggars belief, a true case of Goliath smothering David with his voluminous backside, but believe it or not... it's true! Get this: a group of ingenious spammers are being sued by Microsoft for abusing Hotmail's Junk Mail Reporting Program and Smart Network Data Services. The lawsuit claims that the defendants used millions of Hotmail accounts to label spam messages as 'not ...

As a relative newcomer to the world of web development, it sometimes seems to me as though there is a gulf in the field: The "pros" versus the "wannabe developers". As if there's a tight-knit clique of developers, all well-versed in arcane stuff like advanced user scripts, HTML5, or Ruby on Rails -- and then there's the "rest of the world", composed of mere mortals just trying to hack something ...

HeadMagnet has been on the "flash card" scene for a while now (since 2008), but I've only just recently heard of it. I've seen it done before: you build flash cards and the system drills you on them, then automatically spots the ones you really know versus the ones that needs a bit more repetition. It then lets you focus on what you need to review, rather than waste time on the stuff that's ...

Tired of using other people's lame tablature to learn how to play your favorite songs, if you can even find a tab at all? Would you rather just figure out the music yourself? Well then, Capo is the Mac app for you. Drop an audio file from hard drive into it, and it will slow down the music so you can figure out how to play it. Everything takes place with one simple, beautiful window. Capo has a ...

Last month Grant, Christina and I checked out a couple of screencasts from Pragmatic Programmers' Bill Dudney. Specifically, we watched "Coding in Objective-C 2.0." We took a look at part one mostly, which is an introduction to the Objective-C syntax and structure, culminating in a basic application. Part two covers memory management in depth. Since then they've added a part 3 on debugging, and ...

Having knowledge of more than one language (and to be clear, this is about spoken and written languages, not programming languages) is an increasingly important and valuable skill. The problem is of course, the older we get, the harder it can be to pick up another language. This is why the Internet is so awesome. It can make the challenge of learning a new language or even picking up a few key ...

If you're tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge. ColorCombos - nice color palettes to choose from. If there's a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their "Grab Website ...

Now that school is officially underway throughout most of the country, help your kids flex their brain muscles with these three terrific educational sites: NickNews - Yes, that Nick. The folks at Nickelodeon have done a great job putting together a news Web site just for kids. It covers everything from the presidential election to poverty in America in a way that teens and pre-teens can grasp. ...

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art ...

Learning a foreign language on your own can be frustrating, but it's much easier if you've got a good coach to help you out. Forvo aims to help out by providing a database of words pronounced in various languages by native speakers. Forvo is still growing, and currently boasts a user base of about 2,700 contributors and 22 editors. Anyone can register and submit new words they'd like to hear ...

Australian researchers have found that the human brain doesn't do a very good job of processing audio and visual information at the same time. But in pretty much every business meeting or school lecture you've been to in the last few years, you've probably found yourself struggling to listen to a speaker at the same time as bullet points flashed across a PowerPoint presentation. Rather than ...