A collection of thoughts and tweets and photos and videos from Maker Faire, May 19-20 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds.
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MapsTD – Tower defence on Google Maps
MapsTD, or Maps Tower Defence, is a game built on Google Maps. The aim is to protect your home from invading creeps by building towers, which attack the creeps.
It is the most successful project Duncan Barclay built from scratch, having had 100,000 unique visitors with 180,000 games loaded within 4 days of launching.
Technology
Given MapsTD’s use of the Google Maps API, the primary language used for development is JavaScript, with Mootools being used as a development toolkit.
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Introducing Mozilla Webmaker make. learn. hack.
Building a generation of webmakers
Mozilla Webmaker wants to help you make something amazing on the web. With TOOLS, PROJECTS and EVENTS that help you create, learn and connect. Our goal: move millions of people from using the web to actively making the web. Creating a new generation of webmakers, and a more web literate world.
Join the Summer Code Party
This summer, we’re inviting everyone to join us to meet up, make something cool, and learn how the code behind the web works. It’s called the Summer Code Party, and it starts June 23.
Mozilla is joining with dozens of other organizations to make this happen. Want to make a prettier template for your blog? Or level up your latest YouTube video? Or just learn a bit of HTML? We’ll have tools, tutorials, and activites to help.
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A Sky Full of Eyes
In a future QOD evaluation we will be talking about the impact of drones, swarms of UAVs, everywhere. It should be informative.
We will be reading this article, I Have Seen The Future, And Its Sky Is Full Of Eyes by Jon Evans . I have included a portion of the article here for class. Read the full article on the TechCrunch website and the related links and comments (only the school appropriate comments).
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Collusion
The advanced Web Class is working with the Firefox AddOn Collusion and going through a recent article at Lifehacker.
Firefox: We talk a lot about privacy at Lifehacker, specifically about how your activities are tracked on the web and what you can do to stop it. If you’re still on the fence or not convinced that the issue is as widespread as it is, Collusion is a Firefox extension that will show you in real time which sites are tracking you, where you picked up their tracking cookies, and what they can see.
Collusion provides a visual, interactive map of tracking services you’ve interacted with and the sites you visited with the tracking cookies and scripts on them. Installing Collusion doesn’t require a restart, and once installed, the add-on opens a tab and begins to draw a map of how you’re being tracked as you browse the web. You’ll find most sites use some kind of tracking cookies (ours included) for ads, stats, and social media, but even after a few minutes of web browsing, the tracking map can grow alarmingly large. Hover over any point on the map to see who the tracking service is, and which sites you’ve visited are connected to it.
Dots in red are services that PrivacyChoice has confirmed track you across multiple sites. Dots in grey are unconfirmed, and some of them are harmless (like Disqus, for example, which tracks you across sites so you can comment on articles,) but that doesn’t mean they don’t keep tabs on you. If you want a real picture of who has access to what information, just look at the list of sites associated with each dot. If you already have some tools installed to prevent this kind of tracking and want to quality check, Collusion can help you see how well they’re working. If you’re not doing anything and the sheer number of services tracking your activities has you concerned, check out our guide to making the web more opt-in than it is opt-out for some suggestions.