Category Archives: Fun

My favourite radio show/podcast goes independent

New York Times: This American Gamble. “Ira Glass’s ‘This American Life’ Leaves PRI”. By Cara Buckley, July 2, 2014.

“On July 1, “This American Life“ became independent, leaving its distributor of 17 years, Public Radio International, or PRI.

That change is partly technical. The program is no longer delivered to local stations through public radio’s satellite system, but instead over the Internet through the online platform PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

But the big impact is financial. Gone are a distributor’s financial guarantees, which in the case of “This American Life,“ reached seven figures. Instead, Mr. Glass will now be responsible for the show’s marketing and distribution, as well as for finding corporate sponsors.”

Here‘s the link to the live show mentioned in the article: This American Life Live at BAM.

Tool Unlocked: Equilateral Triangles

Euclid is a game of geometry played in your browser.”

Link via MetaFilter.

If you’re a math teacher, you don’t just waste time playing math games online, you test it thoroughly for using in a lesson. By that definition, I’ve been working for the past 30 minutes or so, completing all the levels (20 so far) of Euclid: The Game.

I think I’m going to have my students play this game in one of the final lessons before the summer holidays start, when motivation usually is at an all-time low. It’s in English, but the vocabulary shouldn’t be too hard to pick up.

Good old times…

Back in the late 1980s my father bought his first computer, a Commodore PC20-III. I remember playing “Reflections” on it, a game in which you had to direct a laser beam using mirrors, splitters etc. to hit several light bulbs. I just found a flash version of the game: Laser Reflections. Of course, back then there was no cheating by looking up the passwords and solutions for each level on the internet because there was no internet, but at least it was one of the games where it didn’t matter much that the monitor was just black and white. ;-)