News

Watch a Community writing lesson

Posted by

0

In case you don’t know and haven’t heard me rave about it like the late-comer evangelist I am, Community is a US comedy set in an adult education college. It is very funny but it is also so deeply imaginative that I spent the whole second season simply agog.

Now, I do believe that reading the scripts and watching the episodes is an education in writing. I believe that about most scripts: I once read all seven years of Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts in order to see how a successful show finds its feet, matures and ends. That’s 178 one-hour scripts and my conclusion, if you’re interested and have far less time than you imagine this will take, is that most of them were boring puzzles rather than stories.

Whereas I then read all 176 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in script and enjoyed it immensely.

Only a few Community episodes are online but there are some at Lee Thomson’s fabulous site TV Writing here. Unfortunately, none of them are for the episodes I want to talk to you about.

More than talk: there is a Making Of documentary about two of them that is on YouTube now. Before I show you that, though, let me say that the episodes are sequels to the show’s first big hit. That was a season one story about a paintball game gone wrong – honestly, it is one of my favourite television episodes ever and I long to have been the one to write it – and that’s the lesson I want us to focus on.

Not why you should make a sequel to a hit since that’s obvious financially if in no other way. But actually why you shouldn’t. Why the show was told it could never top that original and how it did. Watch the episodes, would you? In fact, just watch the show. Part of the fun of seeing the episode A Fistful of Paintballs and its second part, For a Few Paintballs More, was the anticipation. And the part of the fun of watching was to see how it used the season leading up to it, how it was a true finale instead of a stunt episode.

You can get Community season one on DVD at Amazon UK here and at Amazon USA there.

Now, YouTube. The Making of the Paintball episodes:

You can be Siri-ous

Posted by

0

Hand on heart, I love Siri. I use it continually for setting timers when I’m cooking, for scheduling or rearranging meetings, for sending text messages and always, forever, constantly for adding tasks to OmniFocus.

Hand on heart 2, though, it is as if Siri has good days and bad days. There are times it just won’t work for me and they are exasperating. So far the days it has worked well have outnumbered the problem ones and the new discovery of something else Siri can do has kept me using it a huge amount.

I use it so much that there isn’t anything in Re/code’s top ten Siri tips that I haven’t used but still it’s a fine list and if you’re only ever aggravated by Siri, take a look at their full article for ideas big and small.

And as much of a Siri fan as I am, I can’t resist this:

Passwords. My mind to your mind…

Posted by

0

I’m afraid I tend to miss most news stories about passwords because I’ve long relied on 1Password and it’s given me no trouble. But I see that passwords are a concern for most people and I do recognise how feeble it is that our 21st-century lives are held together by words we incant. Or at least type. This may not last, though.

We do already have the Touch ID home button on Apple’s iPhones where it is your thumb print, verified, that unlocks the phone. Samsung has a similar thing, though that is a bit of a redundant sentence as if Apple does it, so does Samsung. A bit.

But there’s more this time:

…what if you could prove your identity without doing anything at all? That’s the idea behind Biocatch, a startup that’s observing people’s online behaviors and creating a unique signature for each account holder.
“Essentially, it’s a way to authenticate your mind by observing what you do and how you do it,” says Uri Rivner, Biocatch’s co-founder and vice president of cyber strategy.

To create its biometric “cognitive signature,” BioCatch analyzes as many as 450 physical parameters that describe a customers’ interaction with a computer, web browser, and mobile device.

For example, on a mobile device, it can use sensors like the accelerometer and gyroscope to measure whether someone has a hand tremor or, say, the level of pressure an individual typically applies when clicking a button. On a computer, it measures a person’s hand-eye coordination in using a mouse and precise ticks in how it’s dragged, as well as other browser habits like whether a person always opens new tabs or uses the keyboard to scroll or always corrects typos with a backspace.

No one of these factors by itself will identify any given individual, but by piling on hundreds of tests, within a few seconds of using the account, its algorithms can issue a score on the likelihood that the person logging on is the account holder (or one of several account users).

Forget Passwords: This Startup Wants to Authenticate Your Mind – Jessica Leber, Fast Company (24 July 2014)

You can do some serious damage in a few seconds. I’m just saying. Read more.

 

 

Workflowy: outliner, To Do, brainstormer, piece of paper…

Posted by

0

I saw a recommendation for this the other day and, hand on heart, I’d not heard of it before.