Category: CoolTools

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Genius Beta Lets Anyone Annotate Any Page On The Web

Rap Genius was just the first step to fulfilling Marc Andreessen’s Netscape dream of letting people annotate the whole Internet. Today, the lyric explanation startup tries to achieve its destiny with the launch of its new genius.it/ prefix that lets you add annotations to any web page.

Just put the prefix before a URL like http://genius.it/techcrunch.com/author/josh-constine , highlight a piece of text or image, and you can append a back story, explanation, context, or extra links. Other users who visit the genius.it/ version of the same site will see your annotation, and can upvote or downvote it, reply, or share the annotation. 

Genius Now Lets You Annotate Any Web Page, Not Just Rap | TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/?ncid=rss

Another entry into the “annotate the web” space. It seems like the tech is finally maturing and will be a welcome addition for educational use.

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Amazon Web Services Makes Amazon Machine Learning Available

Amazon Machine Learning is a service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology. Amazon Machine Learning provides visualization tools and wizards that guide you through the process of creating machine learning (ML) models without having to learn complex ML algorithms and technology. Once your models are ready, Amazon Machine Learning makes it easy to get predictions for your application using simple APIs, without having to implement custom prediction generation code, or manage any infrastructure.

Amazon Machine Learning http://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/

This is intriguing. I wonder what might happen if I throw 4.5 million state court opinions in there. I’d like to be able to sort them by round topics. I think I’ll take a look.

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Git Large File Storage Extension Allows for Better Versioning of Large Files

Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.

via Git Large File Storage.

This could represent a solution not only for projects with large media assets, but also for doing things like keeping database dumps within a project. There is an API that lets you build a backend so you don;t need to use Github. The Reference server that uses the API is at https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server.

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Facebook releases Augmented Traffic Control, an open source tool for simulating network conditions

Augmented Traffic Control (ATC) is a tool to simulate network conditions. It allows controlling the connection that a device has to the internet. Aspects of the connection that can be controlled include:

bandwidth, latency, packet loss, corrupted packets, packets ordering

In order to be able to shape the network traffic, ATC must be running on a device that routes the traffic and sees the real IP address of the device, like your network gateway for instance.

https://github.com/facebook/augmented-traffic-control

This tool should be useful to anyone building an app on the network. CALI could use this to test behavior of Lessons on a bad connection, something we’ve been thinking about recently.