Links

WiiFit's Role on Game Design

What Activities That Can Be Turned Into Games? over at Lost Garden. Fascinating article, discussing the role of things like the WiiFit on expanding the horizons of game design in society.

The harbinger of game’s ascendancy to all aspect of the modern life is not some piece of evocative art or Citizen Kane-a-like. Instead, our future appears in the form of a glorified bathroom scale. Still, if we can improve people’s lives with a bathroom scale, just imagine how games can transform the rest of our world. (Danc at Lost Garden)

DailyLit

DailyLit is a system to receive books to read in small chunks via email or RSS. The basic idea is that as part of our day to day lives, we find it hard to find time to sit down and read, but we can usually find time to spend 5 minutes reading an email or post. So with that in mind, the folks at DailyLit took a bunch of books from public domain and creative commons licenses, and broke them into manageable parts, and allow you to receive these parts via email or RSS. They’re also experimenting with using Twitter, which is how I first heard about them. Very slick!

Detroit Book Depository

The deteriorating remains of the Detroit Book Depository. Jessica showed me this the other day, thought I’d share, as it’s really pretty impressive. The short version of the story is that they used to use a warehouse system for school books and materials, until a fire broke out, and decimated the building. Due to insurance settlements, they were never allowed to salvage from the building, and it was all left to rot.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that uses text that OCR scanning technology couldn’t translate as the random text:

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct. (reCAPTCHA Website)

Truly, we live in the future.

I’m now using this system for user registrations (which are required to leave comments). So go register, and help read books!

Microformats

This really deserves a fuller posting than this, but the gist of it: Microformats are a way to make your data more machine-friendly, related to (but separate from) the Semantic Web movement. There are several microformats out and seeing use, including hCard and hCalendar. Several more microformats are currently in draft form, such as hReview, and hResume. What’s really nice about this is that it makes your content readable for both humans and machines, and their extensive use of classes allows a built-in versatility in layout via CSS.

Of course, the drawback is that it’s more cruft to try and remember to implement. The folks spearheading the movement seem to understand this, though, and most of the drafts and specifications have online creators that you can use, and several plugins for popular blogging applications (like WordPress) are in development. I just used the hResume Creator to create a basic resume which I’ve posted here.

826 Valencia

I might be late out the gate on this, but I wanted to call attention to 826 Valencia, which is a non-profit writing and tutoring center started by the folks at McSweeney’s. There are seven branches around the country now, which each one running a unique storefront to help fund their efforts. The original location in San Francisco runs a Pirate Supply Store. The one in New York City is for superheroes, while the one in Los Angeles is for time travelers. Seattle is all about space travel (appropriate since the Sci-fi Museum is also in Seattle), Chicago is meant for spies, while Ann Arbor, Michigan offers a home for itinerant monsters, and Boston is home to cryptozoologists from all over.

So friggin’ cool. I wish stuff like this had been running when I was a kid.