Dare to be Digital competiton

Just received an update from the University of Wolverhampton Facebook page:

A team of our students are designing a new video game for a popular console as part of a national competition.

The Computing students are taking part in Dare to be Digital, a video games development competition for talented students, organised with Channel 4.

To support them please have a look at their profile and vote for them at: http://www.daretobedigital.com/team-information/team.php?idTeam=280

Best of luck to the team of students and please provide your support by voting for them.

RSS Day

Today is RSS Awareness Day so I thought it would be useful to celebrate this by sharing some information on RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Some of you may already be familiar with RSS feeds and even use the RSS feed on the SCIT blog. For those that aren’t, RSS is a simple way of subscribing to your favourite web content. You can use a desktop RSS reader (Outlook 2007 and ThunderBird have RSS feeds integrated to their e-mail applications), or you may prefer to use a web-based RSS reader. Bloglines and Google Reader are both popular RSS readers which you may want to try. Once you’ve got your RSS reader sorted you can subscribe to any RSS feed (usually an orange button like the one on the left column). BBC News website has RSS feeds you may be interested in, and almost all blogs have an RSS feed to subscribe to. You can also set up RSS alerts for searches from some of our databases such as Computer Source.

There’s a great video demonstrating the basics of RSS from YouTube:

Dangerous cinematic computers

A bit of fun away today away from resources, thought I would share with you this fun article about dangerous computers in the movies. Starting with the infamous Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, it looks at the computers in The Matrix, Alien, Weird Science, The Lawnmower Man, Demon Seed and Dark Star among others with clips from youtube. Enjoy!