Tucker Brennan

Each Saturday morning from 8 a.m. to noon, Carter Van Pelt and Vaughn “Allstar” host the foundation reggae show “Eastern Standard Time” on Columbia University’s radio station WKCR 89.9. (It also streams live online.) The program, which takes its name from Jamaican trombonist Don Drummond’s signature instrumental, showcases Van Pelt and Allstar’s encyclopedic knowledge and love of Jamaican music (not to mention their talent for getting the weekend started on a high note). [ more › ]

Where have all the jobs gone? Computer scientist, and many people say, visionary, Jaron Lanier (he supposedly coined the term “virtual reality” when he helped pioneer the field), has found the culprit: the Internet.

In his new book Who Owns the Future? Jaron explains why the Internet is destroying the middle class by killing jobs, wealth (except for the lucky few) and even - gasp - democracy itself:

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?” […]

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.

Read more in this interview with Scott Timberg of Salon: Link (Image: My Dream is to cut all ties with civilization but still be on the Internet)

Idle refers to a state a computer can be in. It usually means that the processor of the system is not being used actively or to a larger degree by programs running on the computer system.

In Windows, you can define some actions to be executed when the computer has been idle for a select amount of time. Example actions are to turn off the monitor or power down hard drives.

If you want other actions to be performed, you need to look elsewhere. One option in this regard is the free Watch 4 Idle program for the Windows operating system.

It enables you to execute actions when the system is idle and when it resumes from that state.

The program itself needs to be started with elevated privileges. To do so, right-click it in the start menu or its program folder and select run as administrator from the context menu that opens up.

The following options are available:

• Set the idle time that needs to pass before selected actions are executed by the application. The default value is set to 25 seconds meaning that all selected actions are executed after that time.
• Run any of the following actions: lock the PC, log off the user, shut down or restart the PC, or turn the screen off.
• You can also run a program or batch file.
• Set actions that you want to perform when the system resumes from idle mode: turn screen back on, execute a program or batch file, or show a message on the screen.
• Auto start the program with Windows.

The option to launch a program when the system is idle, and another when it comes out of the state are interesting features. You could run maintenance software for example, like defragmenting the hard drives or running a virus scan while the system is idle, or use a batch file to terminate those processes when the system resumes from the state.

You need to click on the start button once you have set up the program to enable the idle monitoring.  You can then move it to the system tray with a click on the button in the program interface.

The post Execute programs when your system enters and leaves idle state appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.

Most of us are on the Internet on a daily basis and whether we like it or not, the Internet is affecting us. It changes how we think, how we work, and it even changes our brains.

We interviewed Nicholas Carr, the author of, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” about how the Internet is influencing us, our creativity, our thought processes, our ideas, and how we think.

Vic - A short documentary about Vic Ruggiero of The Slackers by Marie Le Claire

Disney cartoon scenes superimposed on their real life models

“Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films.”

- Wikipedia

Google has added a new remote desktop feature to Hangouts. This means you can video chat, troubleshoot, and control a friend’s computer right in the same window.

Read more…

We talk a lot about automating tasks to make things easier on yourself, but when you go overboard and do it too much you don’t really get that much bang for your buck. XKCD’s handy chart shows you exactly how much time you’ll gain when you automate tasks.

Read more…

When you’re a hacker waiting to take the Disrupt Hackathon stage, you’re probably just making sure that your project actually works. One gentleman decided to scrap his project completely and use his sixty seconds to discuss his political views, attacking large corporations for using your data to make money.

The crowd was a bit surprised as he read a prepared statement from his iPad, but listened to what he had to say nonetheless.

“Do we really need a new way to share our shit?” he started his talk with, and it got people’s attention:

He urged the attendees to stand up against sharing all of their data, opting to sell their content for a price they set.

After the Hackathon resumed its normal tech show-and-tell, I met Todd Bonnewell, and we discussed what had just transpired, and I got to find out about the actual hack he scrapped to share his message.

There you have it, even a hackathon can get hacked.

Days are numbered for colleges that award degrees based on the amount of time students sit in a classroom. The U.S. Department Of Education approved financial aid for a new self-paced, online learning college, where students demonstrate competence, rather than earn credit hours in a semester-long class.

From the Chronicle Of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog:

“Unlike the typical experience in which students advance by completing semester-long, multicredit courses, students in College for America have no courses or traditional professors. These working-adult students make progress toward an associate degree by demonstrating mastery of 120 competencies. Competencies are phrased as “can do” statements, such as “can use logic, reasoning, and analysis to address a business problem” or “can analyze works of art in terms of their historical and cultural contexts.”

For instance, instead of signing up for an arts class, students are directed to online resources and are awarded the equivalent of arts credit by demonstrating mastery of the material through a presentation of a museum exhibit.

Southern New Hampshire college boasts that its Gates Foundation-funded College For America Program is “the first degree program to completely decouple from the credit hour.” Online Education pioneers, such as Sal Khan, have long advocated for a system that rewards students only for what they know, rather than for how long they pretend to learn inside of a classroom.

Humans don’t learn in pre-determined intervals, but as they progress from fact to fact and skill to skill. Khan, for instance, found that so-called “failing” students are often just stuck on a particular concept. Once they got over the hump, they raced to the head of the class, proving that not all students should learn the same material at the exact same time.

At Southern New Hampshire, “coaches” help students along the discovery process. It’s already attracted some big business partnerships, including Anthem Blue Cross and ConAgra Foods.

Keep these innovations coming, Department of Education. We’ll get education right soon enough.

Ted Balaker says: “A 30-year-old college student, husband and father of two, studying to be a paramedic says ‘fuck’ outside of class, and his professor gets offended. She threatens him with detention (he’s 30!), the administration boots him from the class and nearly ruins his career.”

“I was persecuted by my college for saying the word ‘fuck’ in conversation with another student after class.”

In 2010, Isaac Rosenbloom was a student at Hinds Community College in Mississippi. He was disappointed to receive a grade of “74” on an exam, and after class ended he walked outside and complained to a fellow student, “This grade is going to fuck up my entire GPA.”

After overhearing the comment, Rosenbloom’s professor, Barbara Pyle, berated him for cursing and threatened to send him to detention. Says Rosenbloom, “I countered with, ‘I’m 30 years old. This is college. There is no detention.’”

Rosenbloom didn’t get detention, but the husband and father of two children received something worse: Administrators booted him from Pyle’s class. The punishment jeopardized his financial aid eligibility and could have derailed Rosenbloom’s plans to become a paramedic.

Then FIRE got involved.

“If it wasn’t for FIRE,” says Rosenbloom, “I wouldn’t have a career. I would be delivering pizzas instead of saving lives.”

Student says Fuck outside of class, college nearly ruins his career

We finally have a release date for the ASUS Qube! After being announced and showcased at CES, we learnt that the Qube would be released during late Q1, 2013. March (the last month of Q1) came and went, but the Qube was still nowhere to be seen. Needless to say …

Dr. Tom Murphy VII gave a research paper called “The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel … after that it gets a little tricky,” (PDF) (source code) at SIGBOVIK 2013, in which he sets out a computational method for solving classic NES games. He devised two libraries for this: learnfun (learning fuction) and playfun (playing function). In this accompanying video, he chronicles the steps and missteps he took getting to a pretty clever destination.

learnfun & playfun: A general technique for automating NES games (via O’Reilly Radar)