Category: Program

Free Books!

Hard sell, right? I’ve recently been availing myself of Freebooksy’s daily deals, featuring free e-books from many an author. Though they mostly target Kindle users, other platforms do make an appearance; books are also organized by genre, making it easy to skip to the sections that you like. I’ve been especially delighted by the variety of cookbooks! Regardless of your taste, there’s likely something that matches them – if not today, then tomorrow. As long as you’re willing to peruse the list, of course.

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Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

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Duck… Duck… Not Goose!

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on mobile for a while now, since hearing about the feature that keeps your other apps from sharing your data with each other. Aside from that, DuckDuckGo is a browser and a search engine, without the targeted advertising of its competitors.

This is both their appeal and their business model: they don’t collect your personal information, and they don’t use it. The ads that they make money off of? Paired to be on-subject with what you’re currently searching, not some behind-the-scenes profile of who you are and everything you like. Truthfully, I’d have swapped them in as my primary on desktop a long time ago, if only switching browsers wasn’t so tedious.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t! Once I finally plucked up the courage to transfer my digital life, I found out that DuckDuckGo has an “import bookmarks and passwords” option, which did most of the work for me! Since then, I’ve discovered that the desktop version also blocks tracking attempts, pop-ups, and most cookies, and has an omnipresent fire button with which you can wipe out all cookies, caches, browser history, and permissions, except on websites you’ve specifically and deliberately fireproofed. (The mobile version has this too!)

I’ve been further and perhaps most delighted by Duck Player, however. Privacy and self-determination are all well and good, but can they hold a candle to watching YouTube videos without the ads?! The answer is yet to be determined.

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OmniSets

Happy holidays! Let’s talk about learning. OmniSets is a free digital study platform. There are a few of these, and I actually started on a different one, but when I came back to that in recent years I found it had paywalled its services, so I went looking for an alternative. What I found was OmniSets, and it’s been serving me well ever since.

The main tool is the digital flashcards. You can search the library for StudySets other people have made, or make your own! It’s really easy, and if you already made the set on another platform you can import it! (I thought I’d have to transcribe my 100+ flashcards individually, so this in particular was a delightful surprise.)

From there, you have several practice options. You can just use them as flashcards, plain and simple; you can Study, which provides a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and written response questions until you’re consistently correct; Quiz functions as a practice test; Match is, of course, a matching game; and Spell is purely written response. You can also pick and choose which types of questions you get in Study, and Favorite cards to if you want to just study those! The only caveat is that Match works much better with smaller StudySets; it uses your whole set, so when that’s 370 cards like mine, it’s kind of clunky. That’s on me for not splitting it out at all, though.

The rest of the site really centers around making the sets as helpful as possible: you can customize how your sets are sorted, decide whether they’re public or private, decide whether they can be copied by other users (“forked”), and set StudyPlans that account for factors like when your test is to best help you memorize everything! I can’t speak to the efficacy of StudyPlans, because my flashcards aren’t for a class, but I do think it’s awesome that they’re an option.

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Archive of Our Own

Also known as AO3, the Archive of Our Own is host to a truly staggering amount of fanworks, mostly fanfiction, but also fanvids, fanzines, podfics, etc. For a concept of the scale, the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom has over 511,000 visible works! (Though some are only visible if you have an account, so the number you see may be lower.) There are other sizable fanfic platforms, but I like AO3 best, because of how wonderfully navigable it is.

As I suggested before, you can browse works by fandom, but also by tags! Tags are one of the features I like best, because they give you more information about the actual contents of the story. These include the characters, major relationships, content warnings, and whatever else the author wants to add! The content warnings I’d especially like to see spread to the wider publishing industry, as they label heavier topics such as graphic depictions of violence, major character death, and rape, which many audiences would prefer either to avoid or to have advance warning for. Those are Archive Warnings, which means they’re expected to be labelled and appear in bold when they are, but most authors also list other possible triggers in their general tags, or else in the author’s notes for each chapter. I consider it an accessibility feature, and I think my future books may have something similar, so readers who want those warnings have easy access to them.

Because the Archive is well-organized and online, it also has an extensive filtering system. Within whatever tag you’re browsing (including fandoms) you can then choose to only see, or not see, any works with particular ratings, warnings, relationship categories, fandoms, characters, relationships, or particular tags. Furthermore, you can do the same for crossovers and completion status (I like reading stories that are already done, so that I can binge them), and set limits on word count or the date range in which works were last updated. If you want to read Marvel fics, but you don’t want Quantumania spoilers, you can filter to only see works that came out before the movie did! You can also do a more specified search, and sort by language.

The visual layout of the results is likewise convenient. Next to the title of each fic are four color-coded boxes, marking the maturity rating, romantic categories (gay, straight, lesbian, multi, gen, or other; gen is the circle with the dot, meaning any romance present isn’t the focus of the story), whether there are Archive Warnings (the lower left is red with an exclamation point when there are) and whether the work is complete. Like I said before, Archive Warnings are bolded, and relationship tags are highlighted grey, with a slash for romantic and an ampersand for platonic. Other relevant information is under the tags and summary, like the language, word count, and chapter count, all of which are nice and easy to find!

AO3 also has plenty of account features, like subscriptions, but the one I use most is bookmarks. Not only can you bookmark fics and then filter among them, but you can add your own Bookmarker’s Tags when you do! For example, one of my tags is “Spanish practice,” because I’ve found reading fanfic in Spanish is a great balance between education and entertainment. Plus, I learn a lot of really niche words I wouldn’t otherwise have cause to know!

All in all, I’m extremely impressed with this entertainment platform and how easy it is to use! Especially for a volunteer-staffed nonprofit. If you read fanfic, or want to read fanfic, and you haven’t checked out AO3 yet, I highly recommend it! They’ve got something for everyone. And it’s not that hard to find!

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It’s A Wide And Wonderful Zooniverse!

Zooniverse is a volunteer-powered research platform, which I stumbled across by accident and have been obsessed with ever since. “What kind of research?” you might ask – a reasonable question, the answer to which is yes. They’ve got NASA projects, medical research, digitization of centuries-old handwritten documents… the list goes on and on. Another cool example is Saint George on a Bike, which is training an AI to caption European visual art from the 12th to 18th centuries, based off human input!

The great part about all this is that you don’t need to be an expert. Each project has a tutorial and a field guide, which will tell you everything you need to know to perform your classifications! Sometimes the images are a little unclear – they were taken at night, or in motion, or the handwriting is just awful – but because each piece of data goes through multiple people, everyone’s best guesses can still provide a useful approximation. (Ex: “We can’t agree what kind of wallaby that is, but it’s definitely not a dingo.”) Personally, I’m partial to trail cam research, where you’re identifying animals, so the classification pictured below is from the WildCam Gorongosa project based in Mozambique. They have some extra features in their system, so not only is there a field guide with information on each animal, you can filter by build, horns, pattern, etc. to narrow down your options.

There's a lanky, orange-brown, antelope-framed animal sitting at slightly above the center of the photo, with a tall, vertical piece of grass just in front of the camera, and a shock of foliage to the left of the critter. The classification on the side has "Oribi" selected, as the species I deemed it most likely to be.

Each project has its own homepage with a progress bar, which shows what percent of the data has been classified, the number of volunteers who’ve worked on it, and other relevant numbers. There’s an explanation of the project itself, and an About page in the toolbar with more detailed information. Also in the toolbar is a Classify link (there’s also one of these on the main page, and I appreciate that there’s multiple easy ways to get to the actual workflow), and a Talk section to ask questions, comment on specific subjects (that’s the image you’re classifying) and generally hang out. You don’t need an account to participate, but if you have one you can also mark favorites, make collections of related images, and revisit subjects you’ve recently classified in each project. Your profile page also has a pie chart of your classifications to date, and a shortcut to projects you’ve recently worked on, both of which I’ve found super helpful!

The other big feature I love about Zooniverse is that you can pop in and out whenever. If you want to show up and binge Galaxy Zoo for an hour, you can do that! If you only have time for two classifications before lunch, you can also do that! There’s no obligation, just the Zooniverse at your fingertips for when it suits your fancy. And when it’s fun, satisfying and convenient… what’s not to love?

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Strange Sentences

I’ve already posted about Duolingo in comparison to Rosetta Stone, but I’ve recently realized that a not-insignificant number of my screenshots are of Duo… more specifically, of the strange and amusing sentences their lessons are known to have. There were several that almost made this post, including “The fly is important,” (why, we are not told) and “She is making a drink out of beans.” I’m hoping they mean coffee. In the end, though, these are the ones I chose:

The assignment is to "Write this in German: 'The vegetable does not like vegetarians.'" The answer, "Das Gemüse mag keine Vegetarier," has been marked correct, and an orange bar at the top of the screen denotes 14 correct answers in a row.
A yellow bar at the top of the screen denotes 8 correct answers in a row. The assignment is to "Write this in English: 'Warum ist der Horrorfilm so langweilig?'" The answer, marked correct, is "Why is the horror movie so boring?"
An orange bar at the top of the screen denotes 15 correct answers in a row. The assignment is to "Translate this sentence: 'Warum haben Sie zweihundert Kartoffeln im Koffer?'" The answer, marked correct, is "Why do you have two hundred potatoes in the suitcase?"

There’s one more, which I picked less because it’s humorous, and more because it’s timely. I was pleasantly surprised to find it in my Hawaiian lessons!

An orange bar at the top of the screen denotes 12 correct answers in a row, and the lack of grey left to the bar indicates the end of the lesson. The assignment is to "Write this in English: 'He hana koʻikoʻi ka mālama i ka poʻe maʻi i kēia wā maʻi ahulau.'" The answer, confirmed as correct, is "Taking care of the sick is important in this time of pandemic."
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So Many Critters!

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about mine this time. Rather, I’m talking about one of the cool new things to come out of quarantine, which is the Bringing The Zoo To You program! Since March 2020, several zoos across the US have joined the BringingTheZooToYou hashtag on Facebook with videos and Facebook Live streams, providing a mix of entertaining updates – such as Minnesota Zoo’s wolves howling along to the local siren test – and educational presentations on various animals, ecosystems (Symbiosis On The Reef), and aspects of care and maintenance. Of the selection I’ve watched so far, my personal favorite is Brookfield Zoo’s chat about Leo Red Panda – they trained him to use a paintbrush!

So yeah, this post is effectively an advertisement for a whole archive of (p)awesome animals and fascinating facts. Go wild!

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Owls and Multilingualism

Yep, I’m talking about Duolingo. As some of you know, I’ve already posted about Rosetta Stone — another language platform. Yes, I’ve used both, and no, I’m not going to slam either. They’re both good, for different reasons.

Rosetta Stone offers a lot of languages (I provided a list in my post). So does Duolingo. As of when I’m writing this, they have Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Hindi, Greek, Irish, Polish, Norwegian (Bokmal), High Valyrian, Hebrew, Latin, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Danish, Romanian, Czech, Welsh, Indonesian, Swahili, Klingon, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Navajo, Esperanto, and Scottish Gaelic, organized by number of learners. As you may have noticed, some of these languages are from fictional universes, like Klingon. No, that’s not a joke. Yes, they legitimately cover those.

I also made a point of saying, “As of when I’m writing this,” because Duolingo is always adding new courses. They also add them faster than Rosetta Stone, namely because, as a subscription service, Rosetta Stone has to have the full course ready before they make it available. Duolingo, on the other hand, puts it up in beta and keeps adding to it.

That’s another point — Rosetta Stone costs money, Duolingo is free. Like I said, they’re both good, but, again, for different reasons. Rosetta Stone has the breakdowns I mentioned in that post, focusing on different parts of each lesson, whereas Duolingo really doesn’t (the closest they get is Tinycards). On the flip side, because there’s not a set amount of time until your subscription runs out, with Duolingo you don’t feel pressured the same way, which allows you to pick up multiple languages without concern over money and time management. I’m currently taking five.

Duolingo lessons also tend to be, in my experience, more… bite sized, I suppose. They’re faster and have less content per lesson to memorize, which allows me to binge Hawaiian lessons without running out of steam. Rosetta Stone lessons tend to be longer, taking an estimated ten minutes for most of the exercises.

As a final note between the two, Rosetta Stone gives you words in the target language and a picture to match it, whereas Duo gives you the English translations for the words. As I said in my Rosetta post, I don’t really know how to feel about that, or which I prefer, but they both work.

Overall, I’d say if you’re seriously intending to put a lot of focus and effort into learning a language, Rosetta Stone is the way to go, but if you just want something that you can work on in your spare time, or for fun (I picked up Hawaiian on a whim, for instance) you might prefer Duolingo.

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Writing Competitions

I wrote “For All Time” (parts 1, 2, and 3 here) for a short story contest. I told you about the contest in the first of the three posts linked above. What I didn’t tell you was how I found out about that contest.

My editor/publicist/manager/mother also writes, largely short stories, and at some point she stumbled across Almond Press and their list of writing competitions. What they do is make a list of creative writing competitions that other groups have set up, take the highlight information and a link to the page, and they put them all in one place for easy access. This is how I found out about the Felix Dennis competition that I wrote “For All Time” for.

When I say “highlight information,” I mean just that. They have the competitions ordered by deadline, with their name/title (unsurprisingly), followed by where they’ll accept entries from, the entry fee, if there is one, the maximum word count, and the top prize. Each block doubles as a link to more information about their corresponding contest, with more about the theme and requirements. That page has a link to the website that’s actually running the competition for entry.

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