As your infant grows into a toddler, they begin to get interested in what you’re doing and things which require creativity and imagination. Your kid will eventually get tired of dealing with certain games and toys. While I work to continually invent new games, I also need to have some props to back the play or something she can easily take lead on when we hit an impasse.

You need something they can manipulate and something which allows them to express themselves. Puzzles are exciting for the one skill of matching they require but quickly get boring for some kids…

One of the most frustrating prospects for writing a scientific article is having the right access to quality sources. A foreign language learner’s blog is fundamentally different than a journal addressing second language acquisition. Google (including Google Scholar) only gets you so far without a more comprehensive toolkit of resources to draw from. Most journals want money for an article, others have a web interface that rivals something spawned from the ARPANET era which even modern search engines struggle to index.

The only real answer if you aren’t attached to a large research firm or a university in some way…

Chess is the quintessential strategy game taught in the West. Virtually any English speaker can play chess, or at least knows the basics of the game. Supposedly, 70% of adults per a YouGov poll in various Western countries have played chess at some point. But, what if you want the chess experience but don’t want to play international chess?

Chess is largely viewed as a strategic or tactical game since it eliminates elements of chance. It is a fascinating game from a mathematical and theoretical perspective. Orthodox chess isn’t quite a solved game, but a computer can consistently attain a…

CODEX

Metadata provides a general description of what is contained in a collection or repository of data which can range from technical specifications such as resolution or color depth for images, what the general contents are for GIS applications (region, lat/longs, etc.), to where and how the data was collected. With the right model, metadata can become the workable data for determining trends. Combining the metadata with the actual contents of the data can provide even more information with the right process.

There are countless examples of metadata, but if you’ve worked with any modern operating system you’ve seen metadata in…

Staring at a screen all day doesn’t come without its costs. While I really don’t want to stare at a screen all day, it’s a bit hard not to when you work in tech and blog on the side. It takes its toll on your body, both your back and your eyes.

I had serious issues with tension headaches, migraines, and even just an inability to focus before I learned how to reduce my eyestrain. Ideally, you should just let your eyes rest, but depending on your workload or goals, this isn’t always an option. …

The internet as a global information tool has been in free fall for decades now. It started the second the government understood its information delivery abilities. While Gilmore’s quote that: The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, has largely rung true, the number of valid routes around are dwindling in some areas. There are still routes to certain areas, but they’ve gotten rarer and harder to navigate.

Some places have censorship to the point a VPN or similar isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity for access, in or out. Others are gated by content being filtered by…

It’s hard to run out of ideas to write about, but it’s easy to run out of ideas worth writing about. At a certain point, the object of your writing becomes less fixated on producing content, and more focused on producing content which pushes your brand. I can write about everything, but I can’t write about just anything.

As you plumb the depths of a topic, you hit a wall where your understanding isn’t high enough to progress. The less you know, the harder it is to learn quickly. You walk in a spiral out away from the base of…

Tech work can be safely reproducible, or dangerously repetitive depending on your personality and where you are in your career. It’s as easy to land in a cushy position as it is to find yourself pigeonholed if you don’t expand your skill set. The pigeonholes are a lot more common though. It’s also easy to be made redundant if the primary technology (or technologies) you support fall to the wayside.

Technology moves rapidly and for every technology which has lasted decades, there are dozens which didn’t. Let’s learn how to stay ahead of the curve and how to stay educated…