The Leaving Certificate results come out next Wednesday, August 14th. Prospective university students will be looking at their options and this free app from NUI Galway can help speed up the process.
Developed by former IT student Paul Herron, iPoints is the first official third level app designed to help calculate Leaving Certificate points. It's pretty straightforward: enter in results for each subject and choose higher or ordinary level to get your CAO points total. Share results from the app by text or through Twitter and Facebook.
https://itunes.apple.com/ie/app/id658202598
Netflix Profiles for household accounts
Netflix's recommendations work this way: suggestions are based on your viewing history and ratings. Then your spouse comes along, watches a bunch of cheesy action movies and messes it all up.
Netflix Profiles allows the creation of up to five separate profiles per account, which should help matters. Even if you only have one account, it's a good idea. Do you want guests to see that you've been mostly watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer while pretending to enjoy political documentaries?
http://blog.netflix.com/2013/08/make-netflix-your-own-with-profiles.html
Celebrities read mean tweets
US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel refers to Twitter as "the number one way to insult celebrities" and a "great way to say mean things to people without getting punched in the face". So true.
Sometimes, though, celebrities actually respond to nasty things people say about them online. In this series of hilarious YouTube clips, a bunch of Hollywood types read out some of the clever (and astoundingly dumb) insults hurled at them through the Twittersphere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRBoPveyETc
The music of Wikipedia
What do thousands of people busily editing Wikipedia sound like? Not the furious clacking of keyboards working in unison but rather gentle new age-ish music. Hatnote is a project that renders Wikipedia edits into music by generating notes in real-time as an article is amended, added or removed. The pitch of a note is influenced by how big the edit is, strings indicate new articles and a bell sounds when something is deleted entirely. The visual interface is also quite pretty. Well worth a visit.
http://listen.hatnote.com/
