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If, in the 1980s, you were blowing on NES game cartridges to try and get them to load, you must play this free Flash game. It’s a loving tribute to video games of the era, with faithful–albeit, on occasion, hilariously wrong–re-creations of gameplay and characters from Double Dragon, Mario, Contra, Zelda and more:

I’m stuck on the Zelda level, but I’ve actually been re-playing it so I can finish the game and try out all the different levels. Me! Wanting to finish a game! This is new ground, people.

(Thanks Brandon for the alert on the game.)

I was playing around with multi-site-specific browser Raven, and I wanted to use Instapaper Article Tools for Instapaper, like I did on Safari and Chrome. However, Raven doesn’t support Safari extensions, so I had to use the user script version. Unfortunately, that’s based on an old version of the Instapaper website, so it didn’t work as expected. Anyway, long story short (well, still unnecessarily long), I did up a quick fix for the script:

Download it here.

This should work with Raven, Fluid and Firefox with Greasemonkey.

(I sent a copy to the author a couple of days ago, but I thought there’s no harm posting this here too.)

One gentleman named Burton Durand took it upon himself to translate spambot/comedy-genius Twitter account horse_ebooks into comic form.

For example:

SO GREAT.

horse_ebooks has become one of my most frequently-faved Twitter accounts, and this comic adds greatly to the overall sense of mirth and bewilderment. I recommend reading The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks for some background on the account and how it rose to Internet stardom.

A follow-up piece to the previous link, which argues for digital literacy over coding skills:

Digital literacy means the the skills and confidence to take an active role in engaging in networks, and in shaping and creating opportunities – social, political, cultural, civic, and economic, and we shouldn’t be collapsing these broader rights into the relatively narrow concerns of computing science as a curriculum area.

Article via Fraser Speirs. Mildly surprising, to me at least, is his strong support for the argument raised in the link article, given that he’s a programmer and Computer Science teacher. This piece of his on “technology for subjects not traditionally well-served by technology” may serve to explain why, but I’m still trying to digest all of this.

From September, England’s schools will offer computer science classes instead of ICT (a.k.a. IT ‘skills’ such as PowerPoint and Excel):

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary will announce later.

The subject will be replaced by compulsory lessons in more rigorous computer science and programming.

Not sure how they’ll start this up so quickly, given this glaring problem:

“There are, of course, significant challenges to overcome, specifically with the immediate shortage of computer science teachers.”

See also this Guardian article: “Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree.” Similarly the case here, although the return of A-level Computing should imply that NIE will be doing something about training CS teachers.

I’m still on the fence about whether CS absolutely needs to be taught at a pre-tertiary level. There was some interesting discussion on this recently between a couple of Mac developers — see this blog post by Guy English on “Scripting is the New Literacy”, a response to this piece by Daniel Jalkut encouraging everyone to “Learn to Code”.

(News via Matt Johnston.)

My favourite new lorem ipsum generator. This setting emulates the writing style of The Verge:

If you want an Android phone, this might just be your best bet, for this reason suits your needs so we would recommend this phone if you wanted this sort of thing nevertheless possibly, so as to it can’t hold a candle when is might be better than the iPhone, once only time will tell if it will be successful.

Just pips the iPhone at the post, soon battery life isn’t great but not too bad either, whatever could be the best Android phone, overall better than most of its competitors as soon as just about the best in the main depends.

This, together with image placeholder generator PlaceKitten, makes you all set for some client-confusing design greatness.

Hilarious piece. What a great kid, and a great couple of seasons.

Via multiple sources:

This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education.

This is the most excited I’ve been about an Apple event since the iPhone.

A delightful piece of installation art:

Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color.

Mac OS X’s built-in Screen Sharing feature changed slightly between Snow Leopard and Lion. Before, it was a straight-up VNC server, and you could connect to and control the remote computer with just a password. With Lion, when you try and connect to a machine using the built-in Screen Sharing app, you get this pop-up:

This happens when the remote computer has someone logged in with a different account than yours — in this case, my wife’s account is logged in, and I want to go in and troubleshoot something remotely. (This doesn’t happen if you have the same username and password on both machines, but I haven’t been able to test this.)

This new behaviour is useful if you want to log in to your own account, without disturbing whoever’s using the computer. My problem, though, is with having to “ask to share the display”: what if there’s nobody on the other side to click “allow”? This happens to me regularly when I’m out, or errm when I’m in the bedroom and don’t want to walk to the living room don’t judge me! ermm.

Turns out there are a couple of ways to get around this, as long as you have the currently logged-in user’s password:

Connect via Finder. This works best on a local network, when you can see your other computer under the “SHARED” panel on the Finder’s sidebar. Clicking “Share Screen” will bring up some options:

From here, you can log in as the current user, and not have to ask for permission.

Send user and password in VNC request. Just log in as follows when Screen Sharing asks for where to connect:

user:password@server-address

…and you’ll get into that user’s screen, no questions asked. This works a few ways, e.g. by entering this into the “connect” dialogue box of the Screen Sharing app (in /System/Library/Core Services), in Terminal.app:

open vnc://user:password@server-address

Finally, you can save vnc://user:password@server-address as a bookmark in Safari. Note that storing your account password in a bookmark is probably a terrible idea, but then, so is having to get up from the bedroom to walk to the living room.