Question: Question from Class, "On Twitter, can you delete tweets? Is it like E-Mail? Do those messages take up space on my computer?"
Answer: Great questions. For any of our listeners who aren't familiar with Twitter, it's a free "micro blogging" service. Twitter lets you send messages (called tweets) of up to 140 characters to other Twitter users who "follow" you. To follow someone means that you receive their tweets. When they post something, you get it, possibly as a text message on your cell phone. You are able to delete the tweets you have posted. You can't delete the tweets you've received from others, but you can choose to stop following them if they do something you don't like. You might get some spam from time to time, but you can report any spam tweets you've received right on your Twitter page. Tweets are all stored on Twitter's servers, so they don't take up any space on your computer at all.
Cool Site: AttendVLS: Most or all of our listeners' local churches are having Vacation Bible School, really winding down at this point, I guess. Well, the Kentucky 9/12 group took a look at Vacation Bible School and wanted to do something similar to educate our kids on History, the Constitution, and our Founders. They came up with Vacation Liberty School and their site is at attendvls.org. First of all, I love the concept: if the schools won't teach the truth of our founding, we'll teach it ourselves. At this site, you'll find videos of VLS in action, you'll also find lots of resources to plan your own VLS: a detailed lesson plan, links pointing to many original sources of information like the Constitution, the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, the National Constitution Center, and many others. Vacation Liberty School is intended for kids Ages 10-15, and is intended to help them experience for themselves many of the things that make our nation great. One paragraph from their website says,
quote:At a Vacation Liberty School your children will be sent on daily journey back to the founding of our nation and learn the truth about our history and the impact faith had on both the founding fathers and the foundation of our country.
Learn the role of Faith in the Revolutionary War and discover the Black Robe Brigade
See how faith influenced Samuel Adams and other founding fathers
Learn the story of the Constitutional Convention
Learn the story of the Constitutional Convention
Understand what "equal justice" means
Realize through activities the balance between liberty and tyranny.
This is an awesome site to check out as we head into the election season, and the great thing is it's mostly faith-based. At every turn, the faith of our founders is emphasized; the values and principles they espoused are taught. Read their curriculum. I can almost guarantee you, you'll learn something you didn't know.
Cool Gadget: iSafe Backpack: From Gearlog comes this week's cool gadget. It's almost back-to-school time and it'll be time to get a new backpack. Consider the iSafe backpack. At $60 it seems a bit pricey to me, but the great thing about this backpack is that it has a built-in panic alarm. If your son or daughter is being bullied or something, a quick yank on a strap activates the panic alarm. They offer several different models of backpack, all including the panic alarm and a replacement policy. When you buy an iSafe backpack and wear it out, you can send it back and get a new one at a 50% discount. The alarm will go off for up to 2 hours solid, or you can pull the alarm, replace the pin, and then pull it again later. This is useful if you're lost in the woods or something and need to make noise but you don't know for how long.
It's All "Geek" To Me: Botnet: This week's term is Botnet. Certain viruses and malware have the ability to turn off your firewall, or open holes in it. Hackers use such malware to run programs on infected computers. The programs may simply send several hundred spam emails, or they may attempt to infect other computers with viruses. The programs the hacker executes on your computer are called bots. The computers controlled by the hacker's bots are called a botnet.
