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The Royal Wedding exposed to me

I hate to admit it, but yes I am on Facebook too much and yes, I play Cityville. I don’t know why I play such a silly game as this, but I did just find out it is the biggest game on Facebook to date.

It gets me a little giddy knowing that Cityville is going to update their game depending upon what events are coming up. For example, when it is winter, you have snow in your city. You even have the option to buy and build a big Christmas Tree when it is nearing the season. At summer’s crest, the snow melts and you can buy surfboard shops.

But now, for a limited time only, you can also cash in your coins and get four items pertaining to the Royal Wedding: The British Flag, Waving Royal People, Royal Guard, and the Royal Palace Gate. Sadly, I only have the flag and gate.

What does this lead me to talk about on a tech, design and education blog? Beside the fact that the game is played on a computer, which is technology, it also reminds me of elementary school when many, if not most of the projects and themes revolved around events that were current. I assume the demographic the game is appealing to is one of younger children. However, I would presume to say they are tapping into the kids inside us who are also loving the retro-feel we are getting because we are being taken back to this theme idea.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Cityville I might not have been as excited as I was to workout and watch the live feed on my iPad via Youtube on the Royal Channel in T-minus 1hour and 30Mins.

1 Comment

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 29, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Facebook, Games, Online, Youtube

Like this

25 Apr

The “Like” button.

It’s turning up everywhere. What did we do without it? It was first introduced through Facebook to replace the “Share” and “Become a Fan” button on February 9, 2009¹. As the designer of my Ning, I had Ning.com announce to me that it would be implemented throughout the site. As the writer of this blog, which I transferred from another hosting site, having the “Like” feature was one of the first concerns I had about plug-in availability. I wanted it. I needed it. I knew I could create my own “Like” button code here. All good, but what if someone doesn’t like the “Like”?

One day in the future, will there be empirical evidence that shows us that people through their pictures, posts, blogs, sites and everything else which weren’t “Like”d enough are demonstrating lower self-esteem, lessened abilities, and have considerably diminished capacities in life? Will there be comparisons of those who are liked and those who are not?

Juxtaposed to these thoughts, will people and entities with hundreds of thousands of trillions of likes get swelled heads or encounter other issues that are yet unknown to us? We know that online popularity can turn you into a celebrity and possibly even a very rich person, but what are the consequences? Will they be the same as people who become famous in real life? Is that possible anymore? Also, if they are “Like”d hundreds of thousands of trillions of times, can they put this on their resume? Maybe they don’t need to.

Another thought that comes to my mind is, how many “Like”s can counters have? The web continues to grow. Eventually will it become too saturated? Along those lines, what is going to happen with domain names and emails of the future? For example, will generations from now become those of 100 character email addresses. People who want Brad123@email.com will have to become Brad1234567891011121314151617181920@email.com. I am talking 100s if not 1000s of years from now. The best ones will be taken. How will the internet as we know it develop into something that we don’t?

For now though, choose to “Like” this article if you like.

¹“What’s the history of the Awesome Button (Eventually that became the Like button on Facebook)”

4 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 25, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Facebook, Like, Online

Are you mobile?

23 Apr

When we ask this question the first thing that pops to my mind is: “Do I have a mobile device, like a cell phone, PDA, tablet or computer with wifi?”

This article is not about that.

This article is asking, “What would happen if all or any of those devices broke down on you?” A better question to ask would be:

Is your content mobile?

If your gadgets broke down right now, how much of the information would you consider irretrievable? How much of that information do you really need? I bet that some of you would say, “A Lot, if not most of it.” Starting right now, if you haven’t done so already, get yourself some online storage:

Box.net (5 Gigs of Free Storage – 25megs per file – Mobile Access)
Dropbox (2 Gigs of Free Storage – with a referral program up to 8 Gigs for Free – Mobile Access)

Next you need to think about your bookmarks. There are two ways about it:

Store them to access them online – Delicious
Sync them with every computer web-browser – XMarks

Certain documents can be saved, stored and shared online,. A great website for this:

Scribd (Upload Docs and even sell them to others – great for eBooks)

To create and save Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings and Forms:

Google Docs

All of these online areas, plus a whole lot more I didn’t mention, are called the “Cloud”, or “Cloud Computing”. It means that you have access with the idea that it is somewhere up in the sky. Ideally, we shouldn’t need to worry about it because it is being backed up all the time, plus we usually have access to revisions of the same document through these methods. Now, if you hear the question, “Are you mobile?” I hope you think of it through a new perspective. Not only that, I hope also you are making it so that your content actually is.

3 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 23, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Cloud Computing, Mobile, Online, Online Resources, Technology

Safer passwords online

16 Apr

This article isn’t just about banking. It is about any computer transaction where you need to type in a password.

Suppose that you have a virus, one called a key-logger. (Oh no! Boo!) This is a program that infests itself on your computer, runs in the background without you knowing, and copies down every stroke that you have ever typed. It can be run by someone who has access to your computer, or worse yet, can be run remotely, which means that it sends the information back to a user automatically when you connect to the Internet.

In order to fight against things like this, try these things:

Don’t type your password in order – If your password was “hello”, then you might type “lo”, then place the cursor at the beginning of the string, type “el”, then place the cursor at the beginning of the string, and type “h”. A key-logger is going to capture the letters, but not the order. Hopefully the password field will also be showing password dots, like this: ● ● ● ● ●

Use different computers and Change your password frequently – Do these in conjunction with each other. Don’t always change your password on the same computer, in case it is the one that is infected. Also, read above and type your original password out of order. (This could take some planning because passwords often have to be typed twice)

Look for the “s” – As shown in the accompanying image to this post, look for the “s” at the end of “http”. It means the connection has heightened security. Any time you need to input your credit card number or something else that is worth money, this is one security measure you want to see. Along with the “s”, in many browsers you will also find an image of a lock, usually located in the bottom right-hand corner. This “s” and lock mean that you are most likely connecting directly to the site, rather than through an insecure route that may allow middle-man eavesdropping.

Don’t use a simple password – Hopefully these days this goes without saying, but don’t use something that is easily guessable. A good password has lower and upper case, numbers and letters and even punctuation. Many sites are forcing you to create a password like this with character detecting. Your password should look something (un)like this: tJ76/lP$

Don’t use swear words as passwords, as they are very popular and guessable. The top 4 passwords are: “123456″ “password” “12345678″ “1234″ and the fifth most popular is a bad word. To find out more poorly chosen passwords, click here

Don’t use more than one anti-virus – More is not better, in this case. The reason for this is because one anti-virus detects other anti-viruses definitions. Anti-viruses download virus definitions to know what the latest viruses are, in order to detect them. Other anti-virus programs see these and think it is the virus. They are detecting false viruses. You dont want this.

Use Avast on a PC, Mac Os, Linux, or Ubuntu – A FREE and top-rated anti-virus that I prefer to use is Avast. It does boots from DOS, which means that no other viruses can already be running when you are installing it. It updates automatically and regularly. It seems to take up less RAM than Norton and it seems to be continuously rated well.

If you have the option to use Mac, Linux or Ubuntu as your operating system you are also much less likely to have a virus. However, you many have problems with programs and drivers working. This problem seems to be diminishing due to the fact that more and more support is available for alternative Operating Systems.

Don’t use Free Wifi – There are thousands of free softwares available that allow a person to see what you are doing and typing on shared open access wifi. Do yourself a favor and don’t open your computer up to this type of vulnerability. Read more about it here.

…

Hopefully your banking institutions are employing these methods:

Multiple security questions that change each time – The institute asks you to answer different questions that you know the answer to each time you log on. This way you are not key logging the answer right away. The next time you log on the the bank site it will ask another question looking for a new answer.

OTP – “O”ne “T”ime “P”asswords are an option that is enabled with your phone. When you log on to the website, you are asked to press a button to send a password to your phone. You are SMSed a password that works only one time, which you need to input in to the site to gain access to your account.

It is quite genius, but it means that you have to have your phone on you at the time, you cannot change phone numbers without updating your bank, and you cannot access your accounts from outside of the country.