Matt Garber

CodeCombat is a free game put together by a three-person team to teach web development, specifically JavaScript, skills. They were inspired to do this by the problems in web development they faced when embarking on their previous endeavor, an application for learning Japanese and Chinese characters called Skritter. I'll understand if you don't see much of a connection between a kanji-learning application and a game for learning programming, but my past experiences with Skritter have me rather excited for CodeCombat's prospects.

As you can see above, the game is fantasy themed. It looks a lot like Kingdom Rush, with fun cartoony graphics and a sense of humor that people of all ages can be attracted to. Thematically, it has nothing to do with computers or hacking or anything like that. CodeCombat does exactly what an educational game should do, which is make the material to be learned a skill to be mastered so that the game can continue, rather than pounding the material into every sense it can appeal to. That's how you learn to control jumps in games, isn't it? You don't just drill your jumping skills. The game gives you a place to go, and if you want to get there you have to learn to jump.

Each stage in CodeCombat is a puzzle to be solved. You have a starting setup, with a map shown on the left and code on the right. By hitting play, you can run the code and clearly see what each unit is doing marked with animated lines and check points. You can see where the puzzle is hanging up and it's easy to compare the map to the code and see exactly which line is doing what. Hints and instructions are displayed in code comments, and at the bottom of the code box is your list of "spells" which can be typed into the code to make things happen. Hovering over a "spell" gives you more information on how to use it and each stage adds one new skill to your mental coding toolbox.

The game is currently free and in beta, and is built on a huge foundation of open source libraries and software. The developers have stated that they want the game to stay free, since they want people to learn to code, and that they are considering making the game open source altogether. Their current monetization plan is to eventually branch into recruitment, connecting companies that need web developers with people they've trained up with the game and charging the companies a recruiting fee, though they aren't ruling out charging a subscription in the future. It's built to run in a browser using HTML and JavaScript and is therefore platform agnostic.

I personally have quite a bit of faith in these guys from my own days using Skritter. It may seem like learning to write kanji and learning to write code don't have a lot in common. In a lot of ways they are very different, but they have one thing in common: both require a lot of time spent just doing it over and over again. Most brains get tired of that quickly, and these guys have made it their thing to enable people to practice repetitive tasks in a way that is painless, engaging, and provides useful feedback.

If you're at all interested in learning to code, I really recommend you check out CodeCombat. If you already know how to code, they are looking for people to help create new levels.

Luiz Romero tells Boing Boing,

I just finished a documentary about Bruno, who for the last forty years single-handedly built an amusement park in the middle of an Italian forest. I think he talks about creativity and making from a very unique perspective. The documentary is called Ai Pioppi, it has around 11 minutes and is available here. It was directed by me (Luiz Romero), Coleman Guyon and Giacomo Pennicchi. Written by me, and scored by Coleman Gyuon. It was funded and produced by Fabrica, a research centre in Italy.

And from the blurb on Vimeo:

Hidden among the trees of an Italian forest, Bruno has been building swings, slides, seesaws, gyroscopes and roller-coasters for the last forty years. They are his passion and a way to attract clients to Ai Pioppi, the restaurant he runs with his family. Throughout this short documentary, his hand-powered toys move alongside his thoughts about existence and death; and why he spent more than half of his life creating rides.

“The website should essentially be about the negative effects of drugs, the dark side, you know, the horrible truth of addiction and desperation. And, also; I want a picture of Gandalf on there somewhere.”

UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

All rights reserved © 1995,InnerVisions Ltd.
Revised: ½/97

When you spend $500 on a video game console — and upwards of $60 for a single game — you might hope to not be inundated with advertising. But the new generation of Xbox will be just as ad-filled as the Xbox 360. Even better, Microsoft wants to use the mandatory Kinect audio/video sensor to provide ads targeted directly to the user.

“With the new Xbox One, the technology and Kinect has improved a lot,” a Technical Account Manager for Xbox LIVE Advertising tells StickTwiddlers.com. “so that actually the voice recognition, the way you speak to your Xbox and the transition between gaming and watching TV is a lot smoother, and hopefully we can transpire that into advertising that we do.”

StickTwiddlers gives the following example:

Kinect could detect how many users are in the room and could serve advertisements aimed at families, groups, or individuals. Additional information from your Xbox LIVE account could also influence these by using metrics such as your gender, age, location, media habits and more, and Microsoft are very aware of the potential around this.

Knowing that a number of gamers are concerned about the fact that the new Kinect will always be on (as long as the Xbox One is plugged in) and could possibly be used to snoop on users, the Microsoft suits are quick to point out that the advertising team doesn’t have as much access to the Kinect code as game developers do.

“[F]rom the advertising point of view we have a slightly more limited set, which is designed to protect the user,” explains a Microsoft staffer. “The company is very keen on protecting the user from any sort of abuse so we can’t do certain things.”

[via ArsTechnica]

Are you a fan of Pepperidge Farm’s goldfish crackers (who isn’t?) but wish you could have orange, fish-shaped food products at more meals? As of Monday, you’re in luck! That’s when boxed macaroni and cheese mixes featuring the famous fish silhouette swam into Walmart stores across the country.

The pastas come in nacho cheese, cheddar, and butter parmesan flavors. The first two are, yes, orange.

If you can’t get enough fish-shaped food, Goldfish-shaped bread from Pepperidge Farm is also a thing.

News: Pepperidge Farm – New Goldfish Mac & Cheese [Brand Eating] (via Foodbeast)

"Bill and Hillary Clinton will not support Anthony Weiner in his dream of becoming mayor even though they love his wife, Huma Abedin," the New York Post reports. reports.

Said one source: "The Clintons wish Weiner would just disappear. Every time he pops up, it's a reminder of Bill's scandal with Monica Lewinsky, and it isn't helpful to Hillary's hopes for 2016."

From Public Policy Polling: "Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
Do 4%
Do not 88%
Not sure 7%

(Via The Atlantic Wire)

OK, seriously, I have no idea whether the output of this "cook a perfect tubular egg-thing-on-a-stick" thinggum is anything remotely edible, but the production company that made it is basically staffed with evil geniuses who made me vibrate with desire within about ten seconds. Also, there's something weirdly compelling about a device that appears to get a boner while it cooks for you.

Rollie Eggmaster Cooking System | Official Site (via Red Ferret)

Normally stories about city-council dress codes (or at least the ones I notice) involve audience members refusing to wear pants, but this one is about a councilor who won't take off his mask.

Skull Reaper A-ji won a seat on the city council of Oita, Japan, in February, but was not allowed to attend initial meetings last week after refusing to remove his lucha-libre-style wrestling mask for that purpose. According to one report, the majority decided that allowing a masked city councilor would "offend the decency of the Assembly," which sounds like something they just made up because they're not wrestling fans. Another report said the majority cited a rule providing that "a person taking the floor shall not wear items such as a hat." If that rule exists and applies to everybody, that might be different—I'm having trouble thinking of a reason that a wrestling mask would not be an "item such as a hat."

But should they make an exception for Skull Reaper A-Ji? He did campaign in the mask, after all, so if it didn't bother the citizens why should it bother the councilors? In fact, if the citizens voted for masked representation, wouldn't making an exception be the democratic thing to do? Because Japan is awesome, there is actually precedent for such a thing:

A number of politicians who choose to wear wrestling masks have been elected at the local level in Japan, including a councillor who goes by the name Super Delfin in Osaka and the former professional wrestler The Great Sasuke, who was elected to represent Iwate Prefecture in 2003.

"Skull Reaper" is, if anything, more awesome than those guys. But unless the majority has changed its view during the last week or so, he remains shut out of council meetings.

Unless he has changed his own view, that is, and agreed to unmask. As of last week, he was standing firm. "If I take my mask off, I'm an entirely different person," he said, although in fact he would be the same person, just not wearing a mask. Still, "I will not take it off," he insisted. At last report, the stalemate had not been resolved.

These reports don't make it clear whether Skull Reaper A-ji is or has ever been a real wrestler, or if he just likes the masks. There is no suggestion that he is somehow dangerous or prone to violence, and in some legislative bodies that sort of thing might actually come in handy anyway.

Give the people what they want. Or what 2,828 of them wanted, at least.

(Great Beyond)

Lawmakers over in Mississippi are probably not going to be best friends forever with New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg any time soon, considering they’re pushing a bill that’s the opposite of what Bloomberg is trying to do in his city. No matching bracelets for these two camps.

The New York Daily News says over in Mississippi — which the story points out is the most obese state in the U.S. — they’ve approved an “anti-Bloomberg bill” that would ban communities from requiring restaurants to post calorie counts or limit portion sizes.

And lest you think a local rule against toys in kids’ meals would be a good idea, the bill would put the kibosh on that as well. The governor is expected to sign the bill.

State Sen. Tony Smith wrote the bill and also owns a BBQ chain. He says it’s all about limiting the power of the government.

“If we give government a little more control of our personal rights — where does it stop?” he told the Daily News, adding that Bloomberg’s health crusade gave him some motivation to write the bill.

Mississippi passes ‘anti-Bloomberg bill,’ banning local limits on portion sizes and requirements to post calorie counts [New York]

"The Tribune followed up this story on the very next page with one on how the English aristocracy was turning into gorillas."

Mars peopled by one vast thinking vegetable!

Apparently in response to a request from someone in Washington, in 1959 the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu (yes, Bob Seger spelled it incorrectly) sent back this brief summary of the Nepalese government's "REGULATIONS GOVERNING MOUNTAIN CLIMBING EXPEDITIONS IN NEPAL—RELATING TO YETI."

Most importantly, one may not kill Yeti "except in an emergency arising out of self-defense."

It is possible, I suppose, to imagine other extraordinary circumstances in which it would be necessary and appropriate to use lethal force against Yeti. Were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising you on the scope of your Yeti-killing authority.

Boing boing has the full document (via Anorak).

A suspected burglar in Bradford, England, was arrested last week by Batman and subsequently charged with handling stolen goods. [Reuters]