Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou

Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

  • This April marks Gmail’s 9th birthday, and as year ten gets underway, it’s a good opportunity to look at how much has changed: the curse of the Bambino was broken, Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar, and we stopped referencing Xena the Warrior Princess in our blogposts. And during that time, Gmail—and online communication as a whole—evolved too.

    So much of that evolution is a result of your feedback. In fact, Gmail was inspired by one user’s feedback that she was tired of struggling to find emails buried deep in her inbox. So we built a new email that leveraged the power of Google Search. You told us you were tired of spam, so we set to tackling that, and today your feedback makes it possible for Gmail to filter out well over 99% of incoming spam. You also said that you needed tools to deal with information overload, so we introduced Priority Inbox to help you manage your email (and we’re still exploring new ways to it even easier).

    Simply put, whether you’ve been a Gmail user for 9 years or 9 months, your input helps us continue to keep Gmail current and useful. Thanks for taking this journey with us, and onward to year ten!

    Gmail Infographic

  • Logos_Evolve1

  • Wayback Machine: Now with 240,000,000,000 URLs

    Today we updated the Wayback Machine with much more data and some code improvements.  Now we cover from late 1996 to December 9, 2012 so you can surf the web as it was up until a month ago.  Also, we have gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data.   (Want a humorous description of a petabyte?  start at 28:55)  This database is queried over 1,000 times a second by over 500,000 people a day helping make archive.org the 250th most popular website.

    live 2012 election coverageOver the past year we archived tons of pages about the United States 2012 presidential election.  You can revisit theNew York Times live coverage page from election day, the campaign sites of Republican hopefuls like Newt Gingrich andRon Paul, and mini-scandals like Romney’s car elevator or using aspirin as contraceptives.  The Wayback record of the 2008 election was recently used by the Sunlight Foundation to contrast how Obama’s team dealt with disclosing inauguration donors then vs. now, so hopefully the 2012 election content will prove just as useful in the future.

    city of heroes siteThe prolific volunteers of Archive Teamspent a lot of time this year archiving web sites on the verge of disappearing and then contributing those records to Internet Archive.  City of Heroes (including theboards with years of posts), Fortune Cityand Splinder were all saved from the proverbial wood chipper.

    The updated version does have at least one known issue – there is a small amount of older content missing from the index, and it will take us another month or two to sort out that problem.  In the mean time, you can still visit the previous version of the Wayback with that content.

  • https://popcorn.webmaker.org/

  • On Kickstarter, Michael McGregor  writes this on March 21, 2012:

    …. we would share an exciting stat: more than $100 million has been pledged to Games projects on Kickstarter, giving 1,476 new games the green light!

    Games Category Stats

    • Total Dollars: $107.6 Million
    • Successful projects: 1,476
    • Total Backers: 633,242

    In the past four years, more than 633,242 backers have pledged to more than 4,500 Games projects, nearly 1,000 of them in the past year alone. After the launch of Double Fine Adventure in February 2012, things really took off:

    Dollars Pledged to Games

    • 2009: $60,601
    • 2010: $546,362
    • 2011: $3,855,692 
    • 2012: $83,144,565
    • 2013: $22,423,264 (to date)

    For a good illustration of how times have changed, look at creator Adam Poots, who raised $1,741 from 28 backers for his Kingdom Death miniatures project in 2009, becoming one of the first successful projects on Kickstarter. In 2012, Adam launched another set of Kingdom Death miniatures, raising more than $2 million.

    Even better than the amazing sums projects are raising? The games they’re producing. To celebrate this $100 million milestone, we polled the Kickstarter staff to come up with the ten favorite Kickstarter-funded video games and tabletop games we’ve been playing over the past few years, along with links for where to play or buy. We hope you enjoy!

    10 Kickstarter-funded Video Games you can play right now (in no particular order)

    • FTL (Faster than Light) (2013 IGF Finalist), a space simulator aimed at recreating the feeling of cruising through the galaxy in a spaceship.                             
    • Kentucky Route Zero (2013 IGF Finalist), a magical realist adventure game set on a secret highway in Kentucky.                                                                                                          
    • Organ Trail (at PAX in the Indie Megabooth), a zombie apocalypse parody of the classic Oregon Trail.                                                                                              
    • Blindside (2012 IndieCade Finalist), a survival/horror adventure game with no graphics at all.
    • Guns of Icarus (at PAX in the Indie Megabooth). You are the captain of a steampunk airship in this post-apocalyptic MMO.
    • God of Blades (at Kickstarter Arcade), a sword-and-sorcery saga RPG for iOS.
    • Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, the 25th anniversary edition of this classic where you jump, dash and twist through a warped dimension. 
    • Strike Suit Zero (at Kickstarter Arcade), a fast and frantic space combat game for PC.
    • Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller,  a supernatural adventure game where you play an FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer.
    • Zombies Run, an immersive mobile game where you help rebuild civilization after a zombie apocalypse.
    • Sidius Nova, a combination of turn-based and real-time space strategy.

    10 Kickstarter-funded Tabletop Games you can play right now (in no particular order)

    • Miskatonic School for Girls, the first deck-building game where you get to build your opponent’s deck.
    • Sentinels of the Multiverse, an award-winning cooperative comic-book-themed card game.
    • Mobile Frame Zero, Lego mechs battling for control of your table.
    • Cards Against Humanity (at Kickstarter Arcade), a party game for horrible people.
    • Everything is Dolphins, an old-school RPG clone in which you play a dolphin instead of a dwarf, elf or human.
    • Zombicide, a zombie survival game featuring 71 amazing miniatures.
    • Tammany Hall, determine who really rules New York City in this boardgame about 19th century politics.
    • Unexploded Cow, a new board game by Cheap Ass Games creator James Earnest.
    • Gunship, dice, cards and boards collide in this tactical space combat game.
    • Ghost Pirates (at Kickstarter Arcade), a board game of ship-to-ship tactical action.

    Thanks so much to all of the creators and backers and the incredible gaming community that has made these projects happen. We hope to see many of you this weekend at PAX East!