Poet Ponders the Digital

The three PlayStation consoles side by side. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 20, 2013 Deadline July 2013 Issue Letters from the Mailbag Questions and suggestions from readers arrive every month. It’s always nice to help people with a technical question, and many of the questions inspire columns. This month, I’m sharing some questions with short responses. When I don’t have a good answer, I’m sharing that, too. Q: Do you have a favorite gaming console? A: When buying a console, consider the games first. Many games are platform exclusives, especially for the Nintendo consoles. Other games ship first for one or two consoles months or years before the games are available for other devices. The gamers I know tend to own Sony and Microsoft consoles, while parents of young children seem to prefer Nintendo devices. I own a dust-collecting Sony PlayStation 2. Consoles have largely replaced personal computers for gaming, but I dislike the types of ga...

English: Apple IIe computer (enhanced version) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 1, 2011 Deadline June 2011 Issue Reliving the Past: Retro Gaming and Vintage Computing The Commodore 64 is back. Known by its fans as the C64, this “keyboard is the computer” stands alongside the Atari 800 and Apple IIe as one of the most important computers of all time. Technically, the new C64 is a licensed recreation, offered by a new company named Commodore USA . According to the Guinness Book of World Records, more than 30 million units of the original C64 were sold during the 1980s. Commodore USA started accepting orders for the C64 in April. The first systems will arrive in June. According to several published interviews with Commodore USA founder Barry Altman, the C64 is going to be a genuine C64. When you turn on the new C64, you are asked if you want to run Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu Linux or the new Commodore OS. In “Commodore Mode” you can run softwar...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 2008 Issue June 7, 2008 Exercise Your Brain for Success Crosswords, Lingo, Sudoku, and “Brain Age” games are among the most popular cartridges for the Nintendo DS handheld game system. Among students using the popular social Web site Facebook, versions of Scrabble and Boggle are the most popular games. As a teacher, I am thrilled. Word games dominating a popular Web site? I definitely did not see this coming. There are places to share scores, discuss strategies, and exchange user-created puzzles. Because I specialize in learning disabilities and special education, I’m especially excited to discover that students living with dyslexia and similar “decoding” challenges seem to enjoy these games. I’m not sure what started the craze, but anything that gets students wondering what a five-letter synonym for “remove” is can’t be bad. (The answer was “purge.”) When I was growing up, my mother always had a Dell Crossword or Find-a-Word book nearb...