Twine lets you create Internet-connected systems and objects anywhere you have WiFi. Compact, low-power hardware and real-time web software work together to make networked physical computing simple and versatile.
Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors.
Twine is a timesink of awesome. I want one. And then another one.
“Almost four million children in the UK do not own a book, according to a report by the National Literacy Trust.
…Poorer children and boys were less likely to have books, it added.
…About a fifth of children said they had never been to a book shop or a library.”
This weekend it became clear to my wife and me that the baby a bigger bookshelf. Sophie isn’t even two yet. She’s just learned most of her letters. We read to her every day, every night. On her own, without any prompting, she will go to the shelf and take down books and look at them. Sometimes she’ll do this for almost an hour.
She’s been to bookstores. She’s been to comic book stores. She probably has almost one hundred books of her own. Also a handful of comics.
I don’t say this to highlight what wonderful parents she has. I just want to put some context in place around how surprised and horrified I was by this BBC News article about the ever-widening gap between children and books.
Books were my refuge and my world as a child. They still are. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that some children might not have any books available to them at all.
Naive. Sheltered. Privileged. Yes.
Guilty on all counts.
It’s obvious. I hadn’t thought about it before now, but if you’re poor, you’re not going to have fewer books. You might never have books.
I know there are good organizations out there, people who are dedicated to doing what they can to correct this. At least one of them will be getting some money from us this holiday season.
I’ll let you know who as soon as I know, so you can do the same.
I just watched this last night. It’s wicked funny and you get a very fun performance from that nice Mr. Neil Gaiman as well…
(And you can watch it for free on Hulu. Because technology is awesome.)
comicbookGRRRL has posted a full transcript of her interview with the extraordinary gentleman Alan Moore in which he waxes on all sorts of excellent topics, including his next novel “Jerusalem” which sounds fascinating…
“And at the same time as this I’ve been working upon my novel Jerusalem which is at the moment on a pretty spectacular chapter where I’ve got a massive four dimensional hallway up above the world that is only above one area of the world geographically but it is above it in every particular moment of time. So it’s this immense hallway, two miles wide, a mile high, and running down it is a naked old man with a naked 18 month old baby girl riding on his shoulders, and they’re running down the length of time and they are seeing the big freeze when the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Gulf Stream stops, and then a bit further on there’s a sort of a more jungly area, where presumably the warming of the planet has kind of counteracted the cooling down that would happen in these latitudes if the Gulf Stream were to stop, and you’ve got post-humans, genetically engineered to survive in a world with less food, and then after a few more thousand years of pounding down this corridor there’s no more people any more. And then you start to get mega-fauna that have come up from the drying oceans, giant squids that are using their bodies as basically digital televisions, using the pigment cells in their skin to mimic their surroundings, and land whales that look as if they’re part goat! Because I found out that apparently when whales came up on to land for the first time, the thing that they were closest to genetically was the goat. So I’ve got these horned whales with hooves, dragging themselves through these clearings, you know, towards the end of time.”
I just finished rereading Moore’s first novel Voice of the Fire. It’s easily one of the top five favorite books on my shelf. I cannot wait to get my hands on “Jerusalem”.
Read the whole interview here.
Believe it or not, this is research for the next book I write after I finish my next book.
(Also, in case you’re wondering what I want for Christmas. Hint.)
…a fellow in a dream told me “He who dies…” but I woke up before he could finish what he had to say.
Tonight I finally heard the end of that phrase thanks to Boardwalk Empire.
So there’s that.
(Best show on television, by the way.)
…I think the iTunes Match service is a miss. It only uploaded or matched a small percentage of my total library. And it completely borked up the playlists and synchronization on my iPad and iPhone. A rare miss, but a miss nonetheless.
Google Music, on the other hand, had no problem with my library. It even grabbed all my podcasts. And it keeps synchronizing. But I’ll have to rebuild my playlists out there, though.
So, at this point, it’s Google Music for the win. Between that and Spotify, I’ve always got something good to listen to.
To be fair, I still use iTunes as my media hub. Music, movies, television shows, audiobooks, podcasts, apps . . . they all live there. Google just lets me access it over the network. And Spotify is just damn awesome for discovering new music, sharing with friends, etc.
(For what it’s worth, I still really like LastFM as well.)
…that is easily identified. You see it for what it is right away. In fact, you kind of enjoy it for what it is. It’s a guilty pleasure that you indulge in from time to time. But, soon enough, the irony starts to fall away and you find the crazy strangely compelling.
Soon enough, it doesn’t seem so crazy. At all.
For me, Conspiracy Theory is that kind of crazy. In fact, I don’t even like to refer to it as crazy. So many theoretical conspiracies have turned out to be true over time that, on some level, I don’t want to dismiss things outright just because they go against the conventional wisdom.
And, having said that, I recognize I’ve slipped over the boundary once again.
“Welcome back to Crazy Town, Mr. Camp. Let me stamp your passport. Don’t forget to visit the gift shop.”
Reading this post on the mind control meta-messages in the movie ‘Labyrinth’ at the Vigilant Citizen website is a great example of this in action.
At the outset of the article, I was a bit “Oh, I don’t know…” about the premise:
Like many other fantastic tales, the movie conceals within its symbolism an underlying meaning and, in this case, it is rather disturbing. Labyrinth describes the programming of a mind control victim at the hands of a sadistic handler.
Yeah. I have trouble believing Jim Henson is, intentionally or not, providing material for the MK-ULTRA program.
But it’s an entertaining read. The Vigilant Citizen always adopts a reasonable, even academic tone that sets them apart from other conspiratorial bloggers…
But like many of these delightfully twisted fantasy movies, there is more to Labyrinth than meets the eye. By understanding the occult symbolism and references in Labyrinth, the movie becomes a big allegory for mind control, where each scene refers to a particular aspect of the process. What appears to be a young girl’s quest through a Labyrinth to find her baby brother becomes a metaphor for the internal world of a mind control victim that is being programmed by a handler.
…and by the end, I’m not merely on a happy day trip to Crazytown. I’m meeting with the local realtor…
What appears to be the defeat of Jareth is actually a victory as he successfully programmed Sarah’s internal world. It can be used, in her words “every now and again in her life”.
Yeah. Sarah’s not the only one who’s been reprogrammed, pal. Thanks.
I’m going to have to take a much closer look at Elmo in Grouchland now.
(For what it’s worth, the photos of Bowie drawing the Tree of Life and posing in Crowley-esque Egyptian garb was where I felt my mind shift into going “Oh. Yes. I can see it all so clearly now.”)
