Moftasa's Bookmarks

Most Recent Bookmarks

🔗 Language Reactor

-

Firefox add-on is "coming soon".

Language Reactor is a powerful toolbox for learning languages. It helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native materials. Studying will become more effective, interesting, and enjoyable! (formerly called 'Language Learning with Netflix')

🔗 CardStock

-

CardStock is a cross-platform tool for quickly and easily building programs. It provides a drawing-program-like editor for visually laying out your programs' parts, and a code editor for adding event-driven python code.

Aims to imitate Hypercard's simplicity.

🔗 A Bitsy Tutorial

-

[img[https://www.shimmerwitch.space/bitsyTutorialImg/IntroScreen.png]]

Bitsy is a web-based game-making tool on itch.io made by Adam Le Doux, available at https://ledoux.itch.io/bitsy.

...

It's a tool that people love so much because of its constraints. The limited colour palettes, tiny pixel canvas and simple mechanics allow for very focused ideas and thoughts in the games that people create in it. Every pixel, word, and colour decision has so much weight, and is capable of conveying so much in the absence of other noise. But, an 8x8 pixel grid gives you 1.8446744 x 1019 possible options for every tile. So how limited is that really?

It's also super easy and satisfying to use, with no need to code anything at all. It's …

🔗 Braggoscope - Explore the In Our Time archive

-

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 since 1998. Here’s the official site.

There are almost a thousand episodes (974 listed here), on all kinds of topics, and they are all available to listen to on the BBC website.

This unofficial site is about finding what to listen to next.

🔗 Amazon Kindle EPUB Fix

-

Amazon's Send to Kindle service has support for EPUB files, however, for historical reasons, it still assumes ISO-8859-1 encoding if no encoding is specified. This creates malformed formatting errors for special characters. It is also pretty strict when it comes to EPUB format validation.

This tool will try to fix your EPUB to be able to use with Send to Kindle. It currently tries to fix these problems:

Fix UTF-8 encoding problem by adding UTF-8 declaration if no encoding is specified
Fix hyperlink problem (result in Amazon rejecting the EPUB) when NCX table of content link to <body> with ID hash.
Detect invalid and/or missing language tag in metadata, and prompt user to select new language.
Remove stray <img> tags with no source field.

🔗 Building a website like it's 1999... in 2022

-

I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. Back then, there were no rules – you put whatever you wanted on a webpage, because it was your space to do as you please.

And for a whole generation of internet users, having a website was the cool thing to do. It's just what you did back then. We're talking pre-social media, pre-web 2.0 – the good old fashioned static personal home page.

Sites like Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and Expage offered free static hosting for all, and the number of personal websites boomed. Some hosts offered drag-and-drop website builders so you didn't even have to learn HTML.

We might …

🔗 Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why

-

Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English."

This is a really useful (and free!) tool. I have started using it regularly to make transcripts and captions (subtitles), and am writing to share how, and why, and my reflections on the ethics of using it. You can try Whisper using this website where you can upload audio files to transcribe; to run it on your own computer, skip down to "Logistics".

🔗 Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

-

"And we will. I’m sure. Somehow. We will find or make another place, eventually. It won’t be exactly the same. It never really is. But we’ll gather again, and they’ll burn it down again, and we’ll start over again. Some of us will lose everything in the cracks between safe spaces. Some of us won’t. It’s impossible to predict who will be who. We just keep trying. Keep trying not to let each other fall. I’m exhausted but that doesn’t mean I get to stop."