Want to Learn Something New? Find Cool Skills to Learn With These 5 Websites

Learning a new skill is supposed to be easy on the web. But often, we don’t know where to start. Or critically, what to learn. There are beginner guides for almost any skill you can think of. There are MOOCs which can give you a Master’s level education at the cost of a single book. You can get confused faced with the glut of choices on your screen.

That’s why you need some help to create your own training plan to learn anything you want to. Use the five websites below to decide on the skills you want to try, and hopefully stick with for the long haul.

Learn-Anything (Web)

How easy is it to learn something new when the path is laid out for you? Learn-Anything is an Open Source web app that is built on that simple idea. Enter the topic you want to learn more about in the search box. Learn-Anything then creates an interactive mindmap of a few sub-topics with the resources it finds online. This relationship between the topics can be the learning path you follow.

The learning path may or may not be the most efficient step by step way to master a new subject. But it points you to sites, articles, and software you can jump to immediately.

Learn-Anything is community-powered and it is still a work in progress. But take some inspiration from the interactive maps and create some of our own. Also, log in and contribute to the content by adding resources you come across.

Degreed (Web)

The age of lifelong learning has started. Degreed can be your springboard with its learning pathways. The learning platform helps you construct a personal feed of resources around a topic. Your personal feed can have articles, videos, podcasts, books, and courses. You don’t have to hunt them down yourself as the site’s algorithm curates them for you. But you can also add any material to your profile too.

Think of it as a combination of a Facebook like learning network and place to capture all the best learning materials from anywhere. Use Degreed to follow people who are on similar learning journeys. Organizations can use it as a learning management system. The platform can also be used to track and measure skill improvement.

I would recommend that you also keep an eye on Degreed’s deep dives into specific topics with the Degreed Does Data series. The series takes a complex topic (like Data Science) and breaks down how it will change an industry.

Courseroot (Web)

Massive Open Online Course platforms like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy have their own search tool. But Courseroot does a good job of tying them all together (and a few more) under one massive MOOC search engine. The database lists the best courses on offer from the likes of FutureLearn, Springboard, edX, Skillshare, and Khan Academy too.

Search for the subject you want to begin learning. Filter the results according to price, difficulty, certificate quality, duration, and the platform you want to be on. Then, click the blue button to scoot to the source.

But again, you may not know what to study in the first place. Head to the A-Z list of all courses that Courseroot has cataloged. It could even be an arcane skill like Ancient Greek, or cutting edge like Xamarin.

Learney (Web)

Learney is a knowledge aggregator that is focused on software developers. It is so far a one-person team with a small community of users supporting it. Software developers have plenty of knowledge nuggets to depend on. Learney distills all that and cuts out the time you would spend hunting and collecting them.

It’s a humble try at connecting software developers to the most valuable knowledge available online. If you are a software developer, then use the Discover page to glance at all the things outside your areas of interest. It may be a new language, a new framework, or new methodologies.

Learney can not only help you expand your skillset but also help you start by cluing you to a learning path if you are still unclear about it.

r/IWantToLearn (Web)

You can ask the 400,000+ members about any subject you want to know more about, or you can just lurk. The subreddit is all about advice from those who have come before you. As their charter says, it’s about learning a concrete, useful skill, or a form of art, which usually takes time to master.

The sidebar lists several other interesting educational subreddits like r/FrugalLearning if you want to pick up skills without spending a bucketload of money.

Use the search box to find discussions around your topic of interest. You can also lurk efficiently by sorting the threads to the “Top” of all time. You might be amazed that most of us want to learn how to stop procrastinating!

Life Can Get in the Way of Learning

School is failing us. That’s why you need to take your learning in your own hands. A well-laid out plan, a bit of time management, the discipline of a schedule, and a daily dose of unflagging motivation should see you through.

But I know you just might come back to the same old question—what should I learn? How about taking on a new skill as a 30-day challenge and see where it takes you.

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5 Options for Samsung Galaxy S8 Screen Repair or Replacement

Google Adds Haptic Feedback to Gboard for iOS

Gboard for iOS now lets you feel each button press on your iPhone. This is thanks to Google adding haptic feedback to its iOS keyboard. Android users have enjoyed haptic feedback for a while, but now Google is offering the same feature to iPhone users.

What Is Haptic Feedback?

Haptic feedback is exactly what the name suggests. Haptics is any form of interaction involving touch, and the feedback refers to what happens when you touch something. An extreme form is this technology is the mid-air haptics we saw at CES 2019.

Gboard for Android has offered haptic feedback for a while, but for whatever reason, Google is only now offering the feature on Gboard for iOS too. Google has still beaten Apple to the task though, as the default iOS keyboard doesn’t offer haptic feedback.

How to Enable Haptic Feedback on Gboard for iOS

Google isn’t really making a big deal out of this. 9to5Google just happened to notice the new feature in the update notes for Gboard version 1.40. They read, “Feel your keys! You can now enable haptic feedback on key press by going to settings.”

This is amazing. Awesome update. #Gboard pic.twitter.com/Zrd8Puo5rq

— ????????? (@RikRipper) February 14, 2019

Haptic feedback is available on all recent iPhones up to and including the iPhone 7. It isn’t enabled by default, so to enable it, click on Settings > Keyboard Setting, find “Enable haptic feedback on keypress” and toggle it across to “On”.

Once enabled, you’ll feel a small vibration through your finger every time you tap a key. This works for letters, numbers, symbols, as well as other options located within Gboard. Luckily, you can enable and disable haptic feedback at your leisure.

Download: Gboard for iOS

Don’t Forget the Default Keyboard for iOS…

Haptic feedback takes some getting used to. So, if you enable the option, our advice is to give it a chance before you disable it again. It isn’t for everyone, but it can be useful for those who need more than a visual clue that they’ve pressed a button.

When Google first launched it, we called Gboard for iOS “the best iPhone keyboard yet”. And that remains true to this day. However, the default keyboard for iOS has its plus points, and there are some essential iOS keyboard tips and tricks worth knowing.

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Apple acquires talking Barbie voicetech startup PullString

Apple has just bought up the talent it needs to make talking toys a part of Siri, HomePod, and its voice strategy. Apple has acquired PullString, also known as ToyTalk, according to Axios’ Dan Primack and Ina Fried. The company makes voice experience design tools, artificial intelligence to power those experiences, and toys like talking Barbie and Thomas The Tank Engine toys in partnership with Mattel. Founded in 2011 by former Pixar executives, PullString went on to raise $44 million.

Apple’s Siri is seen as lagging far behind Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, not only in voice recognition and utility, but also in terms of developer ecosystem. Google and Amazon has built platforms to distribute Skills from tons of voice app makers, including storytelling, quizzes, and other games for kids. If Apple wants to take a real shot at becoming the center of your connected living room with Siri and HomePod, it will need to play nice with the children who spend their time there. Buying PullString could jumpstart Apple’s in-house catalog of speech-activated toys for kids as well as beef up its tools for voice developers.

PullString did catch some flack for being a “child surveillance device” back in 2015, but countered by detailing the security built intoHello Barbie product and saying it’d never been hacked to steal childrens’ voice recordings or other sensitive info. Privacy norms have changed since with so many people readily buying always-listening Echos and Google Homes.

We’ve reached out to Apple and PullString for more details about whether PullString and ToyTalk’s products will remain available. .

The startup raised its cash from investors including Khosla Ventures, CRV, Greylock, First Round, and True Ventures, with a Series D in 2016 as its last raise that PitchBook says valued the startup at $160 million. While the voicetech space has since exploded, it can still be difficult for voice experience developers to earn money without accompanying physical products, and many enterprises still aren’t sure what to build with tools like those offered by PullString. That might have led the startup to see a brighter future with Apple, strengthening one of the most ubiquitous though also most detested voice assistants.

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Deploy the space harpoon

Watch out, starwhales. There’s a new weapon for the interstellar dwellers whom you threaten with your planet-crushing gigaflippers, undergoing testing as we speak. This small-scale version may only be good for removing dangerous orbital debris, but in time it will pierce your hypercarbon hides and irredeemable sun-hearts.

Literally a space harpoon. (Credit: Airbus)

However, it would be irresponsible of me to speculate beyond what is possible today with the technology, so let a summary of the harpoon’s present capabilities suffice.

The space harpoon is part of the RemoveDEBRIS project, a multi-organization European effort to create and test methods of reducing space debris. There are thousands of little pieces of who knows what clogging up our orbital neighborhood, ranging in size from microscopic to potentially catastrophic.

There are as many ways to take down these rogue items as there are sizes and shapes of space junk; perhaps it’s enough to use a laser to edge a small piece down towards orbital decay, but larger items require more hands-on solutions. And seemingly all nautical in origin: RemoveDEBRIS has a net, a sail, and a harpoon. No cannon?

You can see how the three items are meant to operate here:

The harpoon is meant for larger targets, for example full-size satellites that have malfunctioned and are drifting from their orbit. A simple mass driver could knock them towards the Earth, but capturing them and controlling descent is a more controlled technique.

While an ordinary harpoon would simply be hurled by the likes of Queequeg or Dagoo, in space it’s a bit different. Sadly it’s impractical to suit up a harpooner for EVA missions. So the whole thing has to be automated. Fortunately the organization is also testing computer vision systems that can identify and track targets. From there it’s just a matter of firing the harpoon at it and reeling it in, which is what the satellite demonstrated today.

This Airbus-designed little item is much like a toggling harpoon, which has a piece that flips out once it pierces the target. Obviously it’s a single-use device, but it’s not particularly large and several could be deployed on different interception orbits at once. Once reeled in, a drag sail (seen in the video above) could be deployed to accelerate reentry. The whole thing could be done with little or no propellant, which greatly simplifies operation.

Obviously it’s not yet a threat to the starwhales. But we’ll get there. We’ll get those monsters good one day.

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Even years later, Twitter doesn’t delete your direct messages

When does “delete” really mean delete? Not always or even at all if you’re Twitter.

Twitter retains direct messages for years, including messages you and others have deleted, but also data sent to and from accounts that have been deactivated and suspended, according to security researcher Karan Saini.

Saini found years-old messages found in a file from an archive of his data obtained through the website from accounts that were no longer on Twitter. He also filed a similar bug, found a year earlier but not disclosed until now, that allowed him to use a since-deprecated API to retrieve direct messages even after a message was deleted from both the sender and the recipient — though, the bug wasn’t able to retrieve messages from suspended accounts.

Saini told TechCrunch that he had “concerns” that the data was retained by Twitter for so long.

Direct messages once let users to “unsend” messages from someone else’s inbox, simply by deleting it from their own. Twitter changed this years ago, and now only allows a user to delete messages from their account. “Others in the conversation will still be able to see direct messages or conversations that you have deleted,” Twitter says in a help page. Twitter also says in its privacy policy that anyone wanting to leave the service can have their account “deactivated and then deleted.” After a 30-day grace period, the account disappears and along with its data.

But, in our tests, we could recover direct messages from years ago — including old messages that had since been lost to suspended or deleted accounts. By downloading your account’s data, it’s possible to download all of the data Twitter stores on you.

A conversation, dated March 2016, with a suspended Twitter account was still retrievable today. (Image: TechCrunch

Saini says this is a “functional bug” rather than a security flaw, but argued that the bug allows anyone a “clear bypass” of Twitter mechanisms to prevent accessed to suspended or deactivated accounts.

But it’s also a privacy matter, and a reminder that “delete” doesn’t mean delete — especially with your direct messages. That can open up users, particularly high-risk accounts like journalist and activists, to government data demands that call for data from years earlier.

That’s despite Twitter’s claim that once an account has been deactivated, there is “a very brief period in which we may be able to access account information, including tweets,” to law enforcement.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company was “looking into this further to ensure we have considered the entire scope of the issue.”

Retaining direct messages for years may put the company in a legal grey area ground amid Europe’s new data protection laws, which allows users to demand that a company deletes their data.

Neil Brown, a telecoms, tech and internet lawyer at U.K. law firm Decoded Legal, said there’s “no formality at all” to how a user can ask for their data to be deleted. Any request from a user to delete their data that’s directly communicated to the company “is a valid exercise” of a user’s rights, he said.

Companies can be fined up to four percent of their annual turnover for violating GDPR rules.

“A delete button is perhaps a different matter, as it is not obvious that ‘delete’ means the same as ‘exercise my right of erasure’,” said Brown. Given that there’s no case law yet under the new General Data Protection Regulation regime, it will be up to the courts to decide, he said.

When asked if Twitter thinks that consent to retain direct messages is withdrawn when a message or account is deleted, Twitter’s spokesperson had “nothing further” to add.

Twitter says bug may have exposed some direct messages to third-party developers

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