Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Firefox 3 Tweaks

I’ve recently moved to Firefox 3, and I’m pretty pleased with the performance.  Firefox 3 feels snappy, seems to handle JS and memory leaks well, and is all-around pretty impressive. Here are my tweaks:
I’m not a fan of the awesome bar – I simply don’t like interfaces (like Google Suggest) that create a lot of [...]

Twitter, the enterprise’s third space

When describing Twitter, I use a number of analogies. Most commonly, I think of Twitter as something like a slow-motion chatroom, or even a collection of away messages. I’ve got another one to add to this list: subject-only email.
This new analogy actually comes from my use of the iPhone, where the Twitter interface [...]

On hacking your (Brother) printer

Slate has published an article about one of my favorite topics – how to hack your printer. This fascination of mine started a few years ago, when during the middle of exams, my printer decided to stop printing because it was “low on toner.” Up until that point the pages were fine – [...]

Digital Media and Learning Competition 2008

Great news from the HASTAC team – the 2008 DML Competition has launched! Following the success of the 2007 competition, the team is awarding another $2,000,000 in grants to projects exploring participatory learning. From the announcement:
Awards will be given in two categories:

Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards will support projects that demonstrate new modes [...]

New course: Technologies of Friendship

I’ve completed a draft version of the syllabus to my new course, Technologies of Friendship. The course is on the books as a CMC course, but I couldn’t resist giving it a less formal name. If you’d like to check out the syllabus, it can be accessed from my new teaching portfolio page.
As [...]

Freedom in the Telegraph

Following yesterday’s excitement regarding Freedom’s appearance in BoingBoing and Lifehacker, the Telegraph (UK) has an article about the software.
A new tool promises to help computer users lacking in willpower by banning them from the internet and email for set periods.
Freedom, which is free to download, disables a computer’s internet connection for up to three hours [...]

And we’re live

…I hope. This is the first “real” post of the new Unit Structures. The last post on the now-defunct Unit Structures has some stats and history of the blog. While I’ll be posting all new content here at fstutzman.com, the Blogger version of Unit Structures will stay online to preserve permalinks, etc.
Aside [...]