Cool Toy of the Day

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Transit of Venus

Today's sites come to you courtesy of Shannon Murphy, also known in
various online venues as Aquillam. Shannon is a UM person who
specializes in astronomy and has been intimately involved with such
events as International Year of Astronomy, The Universe - Yours to
Discover (LS&A Theme Semester) regular outings to the planetarium for
viewing nights, and more. As you might guess, her plate is rather full
right now with preparations for various local events surrounding the
approaching transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, which
(coincidentally) has truly amazing viewing forecast basically where we
are in real life.

Now, the idea that Venus has only crossed the face of the Sun 53 times
in recorded human history makes this all pretty special without adding
anything else. There is more, though. There is a citizen science /
science education component to this. Astronomers Without Borders has
made an app to allow the general public, from students on up, to
collaborate on a modern replication of early experiments to verify the
size of the solar system.

In their words:
"In centuries past, explorers traveled around the globe to time a
transit of Venus to determine the size of the solar system. We invite
you to inspire international collaboration during the 2012 transit of
Venus by enabling a digital re-creation of those global expeditions.
A web-based phone application would allow citizens around the world to
witness this rare phenomenon and to contribute their observation to a
collective experiment. This will literally be the last such
opportunity in your lifetime."

Now, how can you resist that?

Transit of Venus (Gov):
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/transitofvenus/

Transit of Venus (Org):
http://transitofvenus.org/

Mr. Eclipse (NASA):
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html
Mr. Eclipse on the Venus Transit:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/transit12.html

Venus Transit (app):
Site: http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/getting-involved/phone-app/
iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/app/venustransit/id502494620?mt=8
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=awb.tov

Astronomers Without Borders: Transit of Venus Project:
http://www.astronomerswithoutborders.org/projects/transit-of-venus.html

(download)

Click here to download:

Cool_Toys_Pic_of_the_day_-_Tra.zip (1.92 MB)

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Noun Project

Noun Project:
http://thenounproject.com/

I'm in love with the Noun Project. I thought I had already blogged it
here, but it looks like I never actually did it. What I did do was
spend HOURS searching through the site, exploring concepts and
graphics, deciding which graphic representation of a concept fit my
idea of what it should look like, downloading SVG copies of the
"logos" or symbols, and ... well. Let's just say I really truly spent
so many hours digging through the site that I never actually blogged
it.

So, why am I excited about this? Part of it is because I love words,
and I love symbols. When I was growing up, my dad had several books of
symbols and symbolic logic that I loved to play with and explore. I
guess this reminds me of when I was a child. Of course, I am often
found of things that are FREE or which use Creative Commons licenses.

From the Noun Project Terms of Use:
"By using this Web site you agree to follow the licensing requirements
listed in each image’s information box. All images available for
download on this Web site are either in the public domain, or use a
Creative Commons licenses."

However, I do have practical uses for this. My family will be hosting
an exchange student next school year. They will be struggling with
English, and we won't know much of their language. There will be a
period of time where it might perhaps be helpful to have an
alternative. Pictures sound very nice right about then. I'm thinking
of labeling various drawers and cupboards with these symbols to help
show where to find things in the house. The symbols are attractive
enough, I could see making the labels permanent! Or printing them on
label paper and sticking them to the drawers. The are so attractive, I
can easily see making these a design element in my house.

I could also see using these to create flashcards for a wide variety
of purposes. Create a challenge for design students to either create
and submit new graphics for nouns that are not yet in the collection,
or to improve upon the entries that already exist for a common
concept. Use them as topics of conversation about symbols and
cognitive structures. Why does a certain symbol work to describe a
concept? When is a visual symbol culturally dependent or independent,
and why? Oh, I (and hopefully you) could have lots of fun with this!

The Noun Project Mission:
"FREE
The symbols on this site are and always will remain free. We believe
symbols can not be effectively shared with the world if they are not
free.
SIMPLE
Everyone likes simplicity. We want you to be able to come to our site
and effortlessly find and obtain what you are looking for. Simple as
that.
FUN
We think a language that can be understood by all cultures and people
is a pretty amazing thing. We also think our symbols and the objects
or ideas they represent are works of art worth celebrating.
HIGHEST QUALITY
We get excited about things like scale, proportion, and shape. We are
committed to design and quality in everything we do."
http://thenounproject.com/mission/

Cool Toys Pic of the day - HelloFax

HelloFax:
http://hellofax.com/GoogleDrive?ref=52a06a57

I received a message about HelloFax from someone I know. I usually
trust these things more if they come from someone I know distantly who
has a reputation as a geek, so my gut reaction was, "Uh oh. I better
check it out, but I really don't want to." Now, for the record, I have
all the fax services I need through work, and no need of this service.
When this might be useful would be if I wanted or needed to send a fax
that was not remotely related to work. Hasn't happened in years, but
it is possible. Not a bad thing to know about options, just in case. I
could see this being especially useful for folks looking for a job,
starting out as consultants or creating their own small business.

As you can see from the screenshot, the first thing it did was ask me
to log in with my Google account. Yeah, right, sure. They offer free
samples and potential prizes. Frankly, that makes me even MORE
nervous. So I did a little more digging.

First step: check the privacy policy.
http://www.hellofax.com/info/privacyPolicy

Hmmm, well this sounds ok:
"JN PROJECTS INC does not rent, sell or share personal information it
collects about you to or with third parties. Information collected
from you is only used to complete and support your purchases from and
use of the JN PROJECTS INC Site and to comply with any requirements of
law."

The Cookies management also sounds reasonable. So far, so good.

Second step: check the About Us.
http://www.hellofax.com/info/aboutUs

Ah, good, they have one! And it has names and pictures and what they
do! Even better, I recognize some of the names. Much much better.

Third step: check the pricing.
http://www.hellofax.com/content/pricing

Choose plan. Reasonably priced options for a small or medium business,
and the free option is of course my choice. They include an FAQ on the
same page with the pricing. Not common, and VERY nicely done! No
contract. Easy cancellation. 30-day buyers regret option. Easy option
for if you go over the number of pages for your account — 10 cents
each page. My favorite question/answer: "Are there any setup fees?
Nope! That'd be absurd. We never charge setup or cancelation fees."

Alright, I trust them enough now to log in with my account.

Step 1 of 2:
"HelloFax is requesting permission to:
- View basic information about your account
- View your email address
- Manage your contacts"

That seems reasonable. They are faxing the documents from your Google
Drive account, so they would need access to get at what you want to
send, and they also need to know who you are sending things to, so
contacts seems reasonable. Ok, I'll go along with this.

Step 2 of 2:
"Install the HelloFax app at the Chrome webstore"

The Chrome webstore gives you a lot more detail about the HelloFax
app, including screenshots, details, reviews.

You can send documents from Google Drive to either a fax machine or an
email address, and if someone sends you a fax it is directed to your
email as a PDF. They accept / deliver 30 filetypes. Installing the app
creates a HelloFax folder in your Google Drive for your faxes.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - The 24 Project

The 24 Project:
http://the24project.tumblr.com/

I have such mixed feelings about this project, and it is almost over,
but I wanted to share it with people. The vision of the project was,
briefly, to in a 24 hour period of time and collect submissions of
creative content; serve them on the web for 7 days, then delete the
collection. I'm sure you can guess where my mixed feelings come from —
"delete the collection." Other than that I love it! Here is how they
described the project at the beginning.

In their words:
"Dear friends:
The 24 project is a pop-up arts journal/social media experiment. For
24 hours (00:00 14 April GMT – 00:00 15 April GMT) we will be posting
poems, short fiction, pictures, recordings, videos… anything you make
and send us.
I am a student on the MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of
Glasgow, and this project is exploring the possibilities offered by
social media for creative collaboration in an (obviously) limited
amount of time. Can we make an amazing journal in 24 hours? You
decide…
- David

Submit your work, a brief bio and any links (e.g. to your blog) to
submit24project@gmail.com.

DISCLAIMER:

This journal will be deleted after seven days. We will not retain any
copies of your work.
If necessary, we can remove anything as soon as the 24 hours is up –
just mention in the email. "
http://the24project.tumblr.com/post/21100806965/the24project

So what happened? They announced the project on April 14th. I heard
about it sometime in the first 12 hours, but I'm not sure when in
there. I know it was the first 12 hours because they posted updates
periodically through the collection day, and when I saw it there was
one the original blogpost. It was counting in UK time, I've been
working on my own #NaPoWriMo project and was really exhausted, so I
decided not to try to submit something at that time and to report out
on how the project worked. That's this, of course. They received over
170 submissions, mostly poetry and stories, but including videos,
audio, music, cartoons ... The submissions included pieces from an
enormous range of types of people — 16 year olds in school, university
faculty, and well known established authors. I was delighted to see a
piece by Ivy Alvarez who is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and
was impressed by the number of published authors included in this
decidedly un-curated collection. Personally, I suspect that some of
the reason for the high quality of the submissions was the generous
intellectual property rights granted by the publication.

In their words:
"A collaborative pop-up online arts journal, collating submissions
from all over the world. Only accepted submissions between midnight
14th April GMT and midnight 15th April GMT. Submissions are now
closed, so now it's time to enjoy all the talent on display!

This journal will only be up for 7 more days, and all work will be
free for publication elsewhere after that period.
All copyright remains with the artist.
Also, if reblogging, please give credit to the artist.

Send any queries, questions or even just a friendly email to
submit24project@gmail.com. We have published over 170 incredible
pieces of art, literature, video and music here. Please enjoy,
respect, and share it; you only have a week with it.

We are: @sophmackintosh and @GMGreb, and we like you.
About: http://tmblr.co/Z-aVWvJfjCCr "

I absolutely love it as a proof of the power of social media to
support creative collaboration. I love the success of the project. I
loved the actual creative projects. I loved the poems so much, that I
couldn't bear to lose them as a collection and spent a chunk of today
copying every single poem out into a text file so I could find them
again later. I discovered many authors I didn't know about before
whose work I definitely want to follow. A tremendous project. Sorry to
see it go.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Dream:On - Citizen Scientist, Research Subject, or Customer?

You've never seen a gap in posting here this long before. This
happened because my posts via email were bouncing all of a sudden,
which meant troubleshooting behind the scenes instead of posting. No
idea what caused the problem but it is gone. I may be doing double
posts for a while because there was so much I wanted to share this
past week. And with that, back to your regularly scheduled
programming.

Dream:On App:
http://www.dreamonapp.com/

"We have created a new way of carrying out mass participation
experiments. We still know relatively little about the science of
dreaming and this app may provide a real breakthrough in changing how
we dream, and record and track those dreams." ~ Professor Richard
Wiseman

That line, right there, blows my mind. Wow! A science researcher that
created an app to generate and collect data for his experiments, on a
massive scale. This comes with a real payoff for the app customer,
a.k.a experimental subject.

The idea centers around controlled dreaming. I was interested in
controlled dreaming when I was younger, had a fair amount of success
with it then, and taught the skills to my children as strategies to
put them in control of their childhood nightmares. There is a certain
amount of benefit to the idea just from extending awareness of these
concepts and skills.

The iPhone app extends this by gathering data from the dreamer,
sensing (from movements?) when they are entering or leaving REM sleep,
prompting them to enter brief data tidbits, like a dream diary. It
rewards the dreamer by generating an audio soundscape at certain
points in the dream cycle to influence the dreams, with the intent of
making the dreams more positive and pleasant. It even has Facebook
integration! The 300,000 plus people who've already downloaded the
app evidently think there is either value in the dreams (customer) or
in contributing their data in the name of science (research subject).
What I don't know yet is if there is a citizen science component
beyond contributing data, perhaps allowing the dreamer to generate
plots of their own dream patterns over time? Or allowing people to
create dream communities within friends or families to observe
possible connections or patterns?

I'm not quite sure what I think about it, and I haven't tried it out,
but the idea of it is purely fascinating and highly innovative.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Image Oriented Food Apps (Evernote Food & Photo Cookbook)

Photo Cookbook:
http://www.thephotocookbook.com/

Photo Cookbook - Quick and Easy
iOS: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id374473999?mt=8
Mac: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id426385882?mt=12
iPhone & iPad
$4.99, expandable through in app purchases.

Photo Cookbook - Baking:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id405959208?mt=8
$4.99

Evernote Food:
http://www.evernote.com/food/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/evernote-food/id481893372?mt=8
iPhone only, iOS 5 only
Free

Various folk have been talking to me recently about both of these. You
know an app had some real impact when folk bring it up at Easter
dinner! What seemed to attract people to each of these was similar -
the emphasis on photos and pictures. With Evernote Food you take the
pictures yourself; with Photo Cookbook, they are built in. The
emphasis on a visual interface and the way this is becoming so popular
makes me think of Pinterest and how that has taken off.

Photo Cookbook is designed to support exploring new ideas and learning
new techniques, designed rather like a tutorial. Evernote Foods
supports your personal explorations, notes, and journey through
gastronomy. I like that Photo Cookbook content is also available in
print format, although from the information in the app description, it
was decidedly challenging to locate the print books. Evidently, from
what I saw in Amazon, they change the titles and covers on these
annually, and release new titles fairly regularly. I don't know how
long this link will be good, but for today, I found the set here.

Step-by-step fast & easy; Step-by-step baking; Step-by-step Asian;
Step-by-step Italian
http://www.parragon.com/us/books/category/cooking/step-by-step

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Playtype Typographer's Glossary

Playtype: Typographer's Glossary:
https://www.playtype.com/about/typefaces/glossary

I've always loved fonts, but I never knew the lingo. All I knew was
crossbar, ascender, descender, and loop. I still don't know most of
the lingo, actually, but there is hope for me, if I spend enough time
perusing this most excellent explanatory page. I know now that the
anatomy of a typeface reads much like the anatomy of a human, ripe
with legs, shoulders, eyes, ears, lobes, spines, and tails. What is
the difference between a Humanist and a Grotesque? What is the
difference between Ripped and Round? Not as much as you might think.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Delicious Stacks

Delicious:
http://delicious.com/

I've been using Delicious a LONG time, at least in social media
lifespan. Over 5 years? The first time I posted slides online for a
class I'd taught about Delicious was in 2007, and as I recollect, I'd
been teaching workshops on it for a couple years at that point.

Social Bookmarking: Delicious, a Personal and Professional Productivity Tool:

Well, time moves on. Services come and services go. Something that was
cutting edge at one point in time becomes de rigeur, and then
passée. Recently, there has been a whole flock of new tools
that go in new and different directions from social bookmarking to
what are being called curation tools. The one getting the biggest buzz
lately is Pinterest. Lots of folk REALLY like Pinterest. At the same
time, Delicious is getting a bad rap because of the problems with
Yahoo when they were mismanaging it at the end of their control, and
then the mass exodus of people uncertain about its future when it was
sold. Somehow, I was never worried about it at that point. I had
multiple tools, multiple backups, kept similar data in many places,
exported fairly often.

So the world has been changing, people love Pinterest, people don't
care so much for Delicious anymore. Why Pinterest? Why not Delicious?
I was asking some colleagues about that last week. The gist seemed to
be that Pinterest is so incredibly visual, and Delicious isn't. I was
doing this "but ... but ... but ..." thing, finally asking, "But have
you tried the NEW Delicious? It's visual!" And that's why I'm writing
this post.

Delicious doesn't let you choose which image will serve as the
highlight for a particular link in the normal list display, as
Pinterest does, but now it usually will display some sort of image for
the link. In creating a stack it becomes much more visual. Here is an
example of a stack.

Delicious Stack: Late 19th and Early 20th Century Art:
https://delicious.com/stacks/view/KrkcW1

This one was published April 2, 2012, just a couple days ago. You can
see how visual the use of images is, and how appropriate for the
topic. What you can't tell from the screenshot is how rich the subject
content is, mostly pulled from the page. The social media metrics and
interactivity are also great — how many Delicious users have saved
that link, go to the link, add the link to your collection (like
repinning), favorite or star a link, and comment on it. You can also
follow that collection of links, see how many other people have
followed it, how many views it has, and get updates when the original
author makes changes. Beyond that you can also create a collection in
response to someone's original collection on a topic. Are you wowed
yet?

As someone who has made Pinterest pages and Delicious stacks, I find
it easier to make a Delicious stack. I am collecting more and more
stacks other people have made that impress me. You can be introduced
to highlighted ones by visiting the main Delicious page. You can also
search, or browse by category. Since I focus on higher education, I'm
going to just give the link for that category.

Delicious: Stacks: Category: Education:
https://delicious.com/browse?category_id=12

See what you think. I'm not saying this will drag folk away from
Pinterest, but I am saying don't assume that Delicious is done yet.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - RhymeZone

RhymeZone:
http://www.rhymezone.com/

It's #NaPoWriMo again. That means it is April, National Poetry Month
(NaPoMo) (which seems to have been adopted internationally), as well
as National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). These days, most poets
don't tend to use rhyming in their poems, but for some reason I seem
to be stuck on a several year kick of writing sonnets and villanelles.
That means rhymes. Rhymes are also handy dandy tools for creating
memorable song lyrics, parodies, and is useful in some dramatic
writings and jokes.

Rhyming dictionaries are also useful when trying to distinguish
between homophones, words that sound similar but have different
meanings. They aren't bad to have around when playing Scrabble,
either! In the screenshot you can see a selection of the range of
search features available within the RhymeZone tool: rhymes, near
rhymes, definitions, quotations, homophones, match selected letters,
match consonants only, and much more.

So, now, having established at least partially the utility and
relevance of rhyming, Rhyme Zone is one of those tools that makes my
writing life a LOT easier. I hope some of you also find it useful.

Cool Toys Pic of the day - Plus One Collection

Plus One Collection: 

http://plusonecollection.com/

Plus One Collection: Photography book created by Google+ community for charity:
https://plus.google.com/103072807246388063461/posts

I'm a bit of a Google Plus fan. Not that they don't have issues, like every social networking space I've seen, but they are still quite worthwhile. Here is a project that is an incredible illustration of what makes them both worthwhile and different.

The Plus One Collection has been making the rounds in Google Plus for very good reasons. (1) It was made there. (2) It features people from there. (3) It is for philanthropic purposes, appealing to good hearted folk in general (proceeds going to Kiva). (4) It is just purely gorgeous.

The backstory. Google Plus has turned into a major image sharing site, integrating Picasa with rich sharing, tagging, commenting, conversing features. Beyond that, the photography community has also been using the Google Hangouts features to share photoshoots with others (check out Virtual Photo Walks) as well as to have geeky conversations about the nitty gritty tech photographers love, design conversations, lessons for beginners, and more. Here is video from a hangout from the Photo Talk Plus community as an example of some of the conversations that go on.

Photo Talk Plus, Episode 11, With Special Guest Ivan Makarov

There is plenty more where that comes from. As you can tell, it is part of a series. I found out about all this from this post by Ivan Makarov.

I love the collaborative aspect of the book. I love that the book made it from concept to press in  THREE MONTHS. I'm especially impressed that in the introduction to the book they talk about how the photographs from amateur photographers were just as excellent as those from the professionals. Yes, I bought a copy. It really is gorgeous, as well as an amazing example of new tech applied in creative and productive ways.

Heck, if you really want, you can even check them out on Facebook.

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/PlusOneCollection