808 Claymation

It's been rainy and dreary for the past few days, so the Activity Room has had to remain indoors rather than enjoy the early-Fall weather. However, a rainy day provides the perfect opportunity for some indoor crafts, and yesterday the kids enjoyed playing with and making various sculptures out of Play-Doh.

Above: Doodie poses with his Play-Doh sculpture of Mario, the famous Nintendo character

These Play-Doh sculptures brought to mind our movie efforts from months back, where the kids created some clay figures that we then turned into stop-motion animation. The videos are older, but had never been posted to this blog before.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here are two "claymation" short films, created and brought to you by the kids of 808 & 812 Memorial Drive.

We're currently having problems with our camera, but if we can get it running again, we're going to create some more videos to post on YouTube. Stay tuned for more "claymation" action...

National Night Out Slideshow

We recently received a ton of photos from this summer's National Night Out festivities, so we put together a slideshow with some "summery" music and turned it into a video.

Here's the result, enjoy!

2010 National Night Out, Cambridge, MA - More bloopers are a click away

Football Pick'em Update!

We're now nearly a third of the way through the NFL season, and our Football Pick'em game seems to get more popular every week. We've had nearly 25 kids participate overall, and they're starting to get more and more interested as they see their friends play.

Here are the overall standings after Week 4, which ended after last night's Patriot win against the Miami Dolphins:

1. Davonte- 67.63%
2. Adonay- 67.5%
3. Darius- 66%
4. Martha- 65%
5. Jhkyos- 64.63%
6. Robell- 64.5%
7. Sura- 60%
8. Sabrin- 59.5%
9. Nebil- 57.75%
10. Mike, Fernandes & Hamza- 56.5%
13. Josh- 55%
14. Adem- 54.5%
15. Shahir- 53%
16. Dan- 50.38%
17. Antonio- 50%
18. Feldano- 48.25%
19. Sirak- 47%
20. Lena- 37.5%
21. Abdullah- 36%
22. Saffiyah- 29%
23. Paulos- 13%

Each person's "percentage" is the average percent correct they got each week. For example, if a player got 60% right in Week 1 and 55% right in Week 2, his or her overall score would be the average of the two, or 57.5%.

If you want to get involved, it's not too late to play! Stop by the Computer Learning Center and pick up a sheet from Mike or Dan.

Facebook Privacy Settings

As we've mentioned before, many CLC patrons are using Facebook, the wildly popular social networking site that has over 500 million users worldwide. Facebook can be a valuable communication tool, connecting long-lost friends and helping people stay in touch across vast distances.

However, Facebook also puts lots of personal information out there, from a user's hometown to his or her birthday or place of business. With all of that valuable information out there, it's important to protect one's identity online, and to make sure that personal information remains secure.

Facebook's standard privacy settings do a pretty good job of keeping things safe, but if you want to be extra careful, we've assembled a collection of links with security tips below.

- 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

- 10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy

- 5 Essential Facebook Privacy Tips

- Facebook's Help Center

Keep in mind that these sites (with the exception of the last one) are third-party sites, meaning they aren't affiliated with Facebook, and are only offering advice and recommendations. None of these "fixes" are 100% necessary, but they are designed to be safeguards to make sure all information remains private.

To browse more safety tips, check out a Google search listing here.

New Tools for Back to School

While we all wish summer could go on for ever, school's now back in session for pretty much everyone. With school comes homework, and computers are becoming ever-more useful in helping kids and teens alike get their coursework done. Completing homework more quickly means more free time, and that's what we all want, right?

Aaron recently discovered this list of 50 open-source (i.e. free to use and download) software tools that could be helpful for students who are working on everything from math homework to astronomy projects.

From Aaron:

Here is a listing of 50 Free Tools that may be useful in the centers. Glancing over the listings, there is a graphing calculator program that will be useful, especially for the teens.

The graphing calculator program he's referring to is GraphCalc, a program designed to do everything hand-held calculators can do. These calculators are often essential in high school-level courses like Algebra, Geometry and Statistics, so this program could really come in handy for the older kids.

Check out the full list to see if there's a program to suit your needs, but there really is pretty much something for everyone on there. And best of all, it's all open source, which means it's all yours to use as much as you want.

Pigskin Pick'em

Summer is over, there's a bit of a chill in the air and the kids have gone back to school. This can only mean one thing...it's football season!

Hopefully we get to see another picture like this at the end of this season, right?

In the past, we've run a couple of fantasy football leagues in the CLC and Activity Room. While these leagues are a fun way to keep track of stats and battle for bragging rights, they often require a time commitment and can only be played by the older kids and teens who have a wide knowledge of the NFL and its star players.

This year, to get more kids involved, we are running a sort of pick-em contest instead. Each week, those who want to participate are given a sheet of paper with all of that week's games listed on it. The player then must circle who he or she thinks will win each game. There are usually 15 games per week, so that's a lot of deciding to do!

After each week of action is completed, the scores will be tallied. At the end of the season, the player with the most correct picks (or the highest average score per week, we aren't sure which yet) will win pick-em bragging rights and a cool prize.

Want to play? Stop by the CLC and ask for a sheet to get in on the football action.

ESPN's main NFL page, in case you want to read up on the league before making your picks.

Routine Maintenance Complete

This past Thursday, routine maintenance was performed on every computer in the Computer Learning Center as part of an effort to keep the new machines running smoothly.

CC Cleaner was used to clear out old, unused Internet files and histories, opening up as much as a half-gigabyte of space on some of the hard drives.

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware was used to check for any viruses, spyware or adware on the computers as well. Unlike last time, where multiple machines were infected with adware, this time only two computers had any infected files.

We've also identified the cause of the "infections:" an add-on tool bar called the MyWebSearch toolbar. A Google search of "MyWebSearch virus" returns thousands of results, with all of the users complaining that the toolbar had infected their computers with unwanted files.

Running frequent virus checks is a great way to keep your computer healthy.

We're still trying to figure out who is downloading and installing this toolbar, but in all likelihood it's coming packaged with free game demos downloaded by the kids, just one more reason to always read what you're installing before putting it on your hard drive.

A tip for all of you internet users out there: check your web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) for this toolbar. If you see a "MyWebSearch" tool bar underneath the address bar (the place where you type in a website's address), you should probably use MalwareBytes to get rid of it.

It doesn't appear that this adware is dangerously harmful, but it is unwanted, will slow down your computer and could lead to other problems down the road.