Liked The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (Terence Eden’s Blog)
I’ve told this story at conferences – but due to the general situation I thought I’d retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in Lo…

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML – Terence Eden’s Blog

But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

Super story that those of us providing for distant pupils should probably pay attention to. Via Doug Belshaw

Bookmarked Among Us in the Classroom | #AmongUsEDU by Carrie (carriebaughcum.com)
Please note: I know there are a TON of game mechanics in Among Us. I am only sharing the ones that I thought would work for my students, my classroom, during COVID (6 feet apart and no sharing materials ), and with students in person and remote

Looks interesting. My class are pretty interested in this game and play their own version in the playground.

Liked Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Overall, AppTrackingTransparency is a great step forward for Apple. When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will stand with it, just as we will come down hard on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong. Next step: Android should follow with the same protections. Your move, Google.

In reality, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach the creators of the content—the app developers and the content they host.  Instead, the majority of any extra money earned by targeted ads ends up in the pockets of these data brokers.

Liked Chrome is Bad (chromeisbad.com)
Short story: Google Chrome installs something called Keystone on your computer, which bizarrely hides what it's doing from Activity Monitor and makes your whole computer slow even when Chrome isn't running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone makes your computer way, way faster, all the time.

Via Aaron.

Surprised I’ve not see this in my feeds yet. I’ve certainly noticed that Chrome can sometimes seem to hog resources and energy on macs. I mostly use Safari and Firefox.

Liked Facebook Takes Out Full-Page Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple’s Changes Strengthening iOS Privacy (Daring Fireball)
Link to: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/16/facebook-takes-out-full-page-ads-to-attack-apple/

Here’s the thing. Apple isn’t blocking the ability for Facebook to personalize ads, in any way. Apple is just providing users with control over their own privacy. Users can easily choose to keep providing Facebook (and anyone else) with all the information they want. Or they can choose not to.

Fascinating and weird.

Bookmarked Making & Moving with Micro:bit & Scratch (docs.google.com)

Making & Moving with Micro:bit & Scratch

A google doc:

The Scratch Team will show you how to get up and running with micro:bit and Scratch. We’ll demo a variety of projects that connect Scratch to the physical world using micro:bit. The session will end with sharing resources that support making and moving with micro:bit and Scratch!