Stephen's Untold Stories

Is there such thing as too much good stuff? I don’t think so!

Hope you’ve had a good week!

• Google & Sprint-Nextel Partnering for Mobile WiMax Open Network
• Qantas Announces In-Flight Wi-Fi on the Airbus A380
• Wireless USB is Coming! Wireless USB is Coming!
• Wi-Fi naming: What your iPhone finds out about your neighbors
• Sprint bets billions on ‘Wi-Fi on steroids’

I spent Friday working with a couple of teachers in Fannin County (gorgeous place!), and they alerted me to a great resource.

Multimedia on a Shoestring

Welcome to your one-stop online source for FREE and low-cost resources for creating exciting multimedia content! The links below have been compiled as a resource directory for teachers, trainers, and developers. It is a work in progress–one that we hope will continue to evolve as we find new links and tools to add. We also welcome suggestions and contributions from our visitors. Please feel free to share your favorite resources so we can add them to the site. Have fun!

Some very cool stuff!

If you are a Firefox user (and you should be!) here is a great list of tools you should investigate.

I came across this interesting map. Those of us who live in Georgia are not likely to be surprised by this. For those of you outside our state, you can see that we are almost two separate states…metro Atlanta and everywhere else.

Very funny! Thanks to Wes Fryer for alerting me to this one!

The fun just never stops!

They just won’t stop!

60+ Online Collaboration Sites from Mashable

I missed doing this last week. Hopefully this week’s stories will make up for it!

• Duke exonerates iPhone from network outage charges
• Wireless iPod as TV Remote
• Sprint and Clearwire to Build National WiMAX Network
• Microsoft backing ad based municipal wi-fi service
• Google Weighs In On Wireless Open Access Debate
• London Gets Free WiFi
• Apple patent applications hint at Wi-Fi iPods, new mice
• Belkin Wireless USB Hub
• Google Set to Bid Billions for Airwaves
• RIM Launches Wi-Fi-Enabled BlackBerry 8820

Mashable comes through again.

Getting things done isn’t easy. In fact, it’s incredibly tough. In this article, we look at four ways to get through your work faster: running your life online, mastering RSS news feeds, aggregating your social networks and using keyboard shortcuts to save precious seconds.

Link to article

I have no no idea who these people are or even where this was taken, but I can’t stop staring at it.

I was always a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Maybe soon those will be reality shows that I won’t watch.

Seriously, it’s good to see that amputees will have better options.

Link to article

At last someone has spent the necessary amount of time and money to insure that a computer can’t be beat at checkers. Our long national nightmare is over!

Developed by computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada, Chinook vanquished human competitors at tournaments more than a decade ago. Now, in an article published today on the Web site of the journal Science, the scientists report that they have rigorously proved that Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose. An opponent, no matter how skilled, practiced or determined, can at best achieve a draw.

In essence, that reduces checkers to the level of tic-tac-toe, where the ideal game-playing strategy has been codified into a series of immutable rules. But checkers — or draughts as it is known in Great Britain — is much more complex, with 500 billion billion theoretically possible board positions; it is the most complex game that has been solved to date.

Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, set out on his checkers-playing quest in 1989, aiming to write software that could challenge the world checkers champion. He and his colleagues finished their computations 18 years later, in April.

“From my point of view, thank god it’s over,” Dr. Schaeffer said.

Link to article

That’s right. We educational technology types are already looking for ways to use these things to educate our kids. It’s just what we do!

This is a short five minute video from Elliott Masie after our first few hours of use and testing.  Elliott details the aspects of the iPhone that are high potential for learning (instructional videos, collaboration and more), some of the challenges (no current use of Flash Video) and a few trends in the mobile learning arena.

Link to site with video

Okay, imagine a YouTube clone that was entirely populated by geeks from the geekiest of all geek schools. Of course you have an EXCELLENT site for some great tech videos.

Link to MIT TechTV

Mashable continues to impress. Their toolbox series is simply amazing.

I’ve already used this a couple of times to help with some papers this semester. Definitely worth a bookmark!

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University, which houses writing resources and instructional materials, is provided as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist them with many writing projects, during any stage of the writing process.Teachers and trainers may use these materials for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

In addition, anyone is invited to submit brief, writing related questions to our OWL Mail Tutors.

For more information about services specifically for the Purdue community, including one-to-one consultations, ESL conversation groups and workshops, please visit the Writing Lab site.

The OWL at Purdue

The New York Times has a cool Flash animation showing the richest Americans who ever lived, adjusted for the time in which they lived. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the only two living members of the list.

According to the Wall Street Journal, blogging started in 1997. I began doing this in 2005, so I’m still somewhat new to the game. I do believe that blogging is one of the most important things to come out of the Internet, and I look forward to many more years of it.

We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

Link to article

UPDATE: Here is an example of why I love blogging. Robert Scoble (on his blog) points out that the WSJ has it wrong. He even links to a couple of other blogs to support him. Great stuff!