Addict Understands Search Results

News: Proposition 23 Valero and Tesoro Oil Companies

Valero and Tesoro are known as the biggest oil companies in California. They have spent large amounts of money on the Proposition 23 campaign, Valero with $4,050,000 and Tesoro with $1,525,000, in hopes of passing the Proposition, which would suspend the Assemmbly Bill 32, the Global Warming Act of 2006, until unemployment drops to 5.5% for 4 consequtive quarters. Valero's stand is that the California's Global Warming Act will only cause more lost jobs for California and therefore should not ...

News: 11 Dirty Tricks Played by Crooked Web Designers

Ever been Privacy Zuckered? Roach Moteled? Friend Spammed? If you've been on the net long, odds are you have — and worse! Fortunately, there's a new resource for keeping track of the web's worst design practices; it's called "Dark Patterns" and it aims to "name and shame" sites that employ "user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have done."

HowTo: Cremate Yourself into a Vinyl Record

Think you're a music lover? Then arrange to offer up your remains as the final sacrifice to the Gods of Rock. A UK company called And Vinyly offers music fans an interesting post-death "alternative": have your ashes pressed into a vinyl recording of your favorite song, or opt for a personalized recording of your last will and testament.

Starcraft 2: Ghost of the Past trailer

Besides the great game play that made Starcraft great, there is also an equally excellent storyline that goes with it. This why Starcraft stands out so much from other strategy games. Anyone that played the original Starcraft probably still remembers the betrayal and Kerrigan's sad fate.

How To: Learn to Code for Only $40 with Learnable

No matter which way you cut it, coding remains one of the most lucrative tech skills you can learn in 2020, and, thanks to Learnable, mastering the essentials is even easier. This training platform is your ticket to learning many of today's top coding languages, as well as understanding key technologies, and lifetime subscriptions are on sale for just $39.99.

How To: Download TED Talks Videos onto Your Computer with the TEDinator

The TED website offers hours and hours of amazing streaming videos, with subjects including why videos go viral and sixth sense technology. With so much great content, it make sense that you'd want to save some of it to your computer, perhaps for a long plane flight or bus ride home. Unfortunately, because TED uses a proprietary video player, you can't use the normal stream downloading sites that you would for, say, YouTube. Luckily, there's a way around that.

News: Creepy Talking-Piano Hack

Austrian composer Peter Ablinger has created a "speaking" piano. Ablinger digitized a child's voice reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court to "play" on the piano via MIDI sequencer.  Apparently, the computer is connected to the piano, which analyzes the human speech, and then converts it to key-tapping.

How To: Succeed in palm reading

Check out this introductory lesson in the art of palm reading. Enjoy the lengthy (though extensive) how to tutorial that will teach you to understand what the lines on your hand say about you, your future, and your past. Succeed in palm reading - Part 1 of 23.

How To: Make a Programmable Piano in Minecraft

There are many impressive accomplishments in Minecraft, too many to name in fact. Sprawling builds, complex machines, and massive servers are the hallmark of Minecraft and things keep getting bigger and better. No one doubts the epic scale Minecraft has reached, but every once in a while something grand comes along that sets a new benchmark in awesomeness. By far the most recent step in this long line of big ideas was an innovation pushed forward by YouTube user Kimundi2. The premise of this ...

How To: Fish a swimbait lure to catch quality bass

If you're targeting big bass during the summertime, the best bait to use is a swimbait lure. You may know that they don't give you tons of bites, but in this case, quality is the key. The best bass you'll eve catch will come off this swimbait lure. This is why swimbaits are favorites with anglers who have the confidence to continue casting them in search of lunkers. Wade Bourne of MyOutdoorTV shows you how to fish a swimbait lure.

News: Book Review - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Have you ever been in the situation where someone whose taste in books you respect and generally agree with recommends a book that you have seen from time to time and you’ve always thought it looked just “Meh” and then you finally read War Dances which is by the same author and it’s amazing and funny and sad and you think, why didn’t I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, like, three years ago? No? Is that just me?

How To: Things to Do on WonderHowTo (06/06 - 06/12)

WonderHowTo is a how-to website made up of niche communities called Worlds, with topics ranging from Minecraft to science experiments to Scrabble and everything in-between. Check in every Wednesday evening for a roundup of user-run activities and how-to projects from the most popular communities. Users can join and participate in any World they're interested in, as well as start their own community.

How To: Pick Basic Tumbler Locks

Professionally and academically speaking, I am a computer scientist, but I also enjoy lock picking as a hobby, so I thought I would share what knowledge I have with this. Before we start doing anything, first we need to understand the fundamentals of how locks work and then acquire and familiarize ourselves with basic lock-picking tools.

News: Piratebay - To be blocked in the UK

To those who may not know about this, the UK high court has ruled that all UK based ISP's are to begin blocking Piratebay. This comes in retaliation to Piratebay's action to take down all torrents and provide only magnet links to the pirated content - a move which releases TPB from liability should they be once more accused of hosting the actual content.

News: Welcome to 0x10c World! A Community for Mojang's Latest MMO Space Game

Yesterday, Mojang announced their next video game project 0x10c, and the response has been tremendous. Discussions have covered everything from the math mystery over the game's name, to creating projects that interpret the assembly instruction code the in-game computers use (more on that later), to the debate over why a monthly fee would be required to play online in the "multiverse". To answer that last one, Mojang wants to run everyone's virtual computers in their cloud, even if the user is...

How To: Recognize Crowd Control - Part 3

For our final part of recognizing crowd control, we shall look at the mind. It's the most complicated thing in the universe, but also the most easily influenced. What makes us to gullible? What methods to commercials, companies and the media use to influence our position on things? These are just a few of the questions we will answer.

News: The Basics Of Website Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is now one of the most important topics for website owners to understand. Anyone that depends on their website to bring them business needs to know the ins and outs of SEO in order to maximize their website’s potential. And if you want your website to have a high Google rank then SEO is essential.

News: The Discovery of Dolphin Language

In my early life I was deeply impacted by the work of physician and psychoanalyst John C. Lilly. I still have my dog-eared copies of The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968). Lilly's work, with dolphins and the development of the sensory deprivation tank, has formed the basis of movies, music and television productions.

How To: Enable Code Syntax Highlighting for Python in the Nano Text Editor

With the plethora of programming that we promote at Null Byte, I figured a lot of you newbies that stop by IRC will need a big boost in the right direction to make your dive into programming a lot easier. A hot question that has been thrown around in IRC a lot when making the initial dive is, "How do I write code?". People who do not know much about computers can't understand how code is written. Code that we write here is usually scripted and written in Python, so we will use it as our examp...

Community Byte: HackThisSite Walkthrough, Part 2 - Legal Hacker Training

With the rather large success of the Community Byte activities, both programming and HackThisSite, I have decided to continue to do both activities every session! With that said, when programming sessions occur, they will be lead by Sol Gates in Gobby. Also, the programming mission will no longer be to code a tool, we have changed it to be even more "noob friendly". This means that instead of coding a tool, you will be walked through puzzles and challenges that must be solved by coding a scri...

News: Should Kids Be Allowed to Use Facebook and Google+?

It's a question I've been pondering a lot lately. Technically, children under the age of 13 are not allowed to join Facebook. But according to a Consumer Reports in May, 7.5 million children 12 and younger are already on the site. Currently, federal law prohibits websites from collecting personal data from children without parental permission. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, as it is more commonly known, has been in effect since 1998, but has not been updated since.