For newbies to astronomy, expensive equipment is an understandable deterrent. But with some thorough Google searching, you can find plenty of How-To's for making your own tools for less. Below are a few sites with several cool projects to offer.
I've come across a few very stubborn Xbox consoles in my day. A previous Null Byte demonstrated how to fix the Xbox with just eight pennies and some electrical tape. But if you've got one of those hell-born boxes that just refuses to be fixed in any way, shape, or form, there is always one last ditch approach. I'm talking about the infamous "towel trick". It works over 90% of the time, from my personal experience. Though, please note: This is only a temporary fix.
I can't believe it, but I've actually read about dozens of people getting their iTouch, iPhone, or iPad stuck in a bricked recovery loop and then going out to buy a new one. This is overly unnecessary. When it gets stuck in the recovery loop, some people mistake themselves by thinking that it is impossible to get the device back into DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode. Getting the device back into DFU mode would at least allow us to jailbreak the device, essentially bringing it back from its ...
Yes, you read the title correctly. GameStop has problems, and if you're lax in morals, you can take advantage of them for free games and cash. I'm bringing you all yet another exclusive Null Byte that falls into the fascinating category of life hacking.
The clock is ticking! Pick up some bokeh tips or buy an app—whichever method you choose, you have until Monday, November 7th, 11:59pm PST to participate in this week's Giveaway Tuesdays Photo Challenge. Below, 50 beautiful bokeh photographs to inspire your entry.
Permanently deleting files is something that a lot of people aren't aware of. Actually, most people think that once a file is deleted, it is gone forever. This is not the case. Hard drives write to the disk via magnetic charges, positive and negative correlate to 1s and 0s for binary. This is then interpreted into information for the computer to use and access.
The Humble Indie Bundle has become like an unpredictable little gamer Christmas. It helps indie developers get their games exposure, helps gamers get cheap DRM-free games via the most user-friendly online purchasing process ever, and helps the world at large by raising money for Child's Play and EFF.
We've covered Glitch before, the oddball indie social MMO involving the minds behind Flickr, Katamari Damacy, and Game Neverending. Yesterday, the game officially left Beta and entered general release. Anyone can create an account and start playing for free, although there are freemium elements in the form of real money purchasable clothing items.
This week's FIGRR is all about games that are old-new (or new-old, if you like) school. Each celebrates a different vital, yet largely taken for granted, aspect of video game history in the decidedly new-school world of indie games. Their titles betray them. Blocks That Matter is all about blocks. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is all about item shops. Neither are particularly sexy aspects of gaming, but both are ubiquitous elements of great games that can stand on their own.
Since our Canon 5D World is just starting out, there's not a lot of activity in the forum. If you have a question about your 5D or 5D Mark II, then ask away. But there are other communities on the Web that already have great information from its members. Hopefully, the Canon 5D World forum will be just as helpful to everyone, but for now, here are some of the best forums on the Internet that can help you with Canon's EOS 5D and 5D Mark II cameras.
Danish developer Playdead has made only one game, a little indie, side-scrolling, puzzle platformer called Limbo. It just happens to be far and away the best video game of that prominent genre (and perhaps the best indie game period) on the Xbox 360, and quite possibly for PlayStation 3 and PC, too. Critical and financial success has followed in droves, and today... Playdead has taken advantage of that success and indie-fied themselves even further by purchasing back the portion of the compan...
Behavioral ad targeting companies are diving deeper into the realms of your subconscious with a new approach to serving adverts to you online—and they're using your television.
You know I am so not ready for Halloween at all. No way summer is no where near over for me. I haven't even been camping yet. Summer always seems to fly by for me as it is the busiest time of year with craft shows and lots of visitors to our area.
Indie developers and their games have enjoyed massive success distributing through Steam, notably Zeboyd Games and Carpe Fulgar. While that bodes well for the future of indies on the platform, Steam has to devote a lot of front-page real estate to AAA games and thus can't promote small indies as well as a dedicated indie game distribution service could. IndieCity out of the UK seems like it could be that, but today a consortium of three German game companies launched their attempt at beating ...
The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.
Generally, summer is a slow time for video games, but not when it comes to Xbox Live Arcade where it's harvest season! In the last month, there have been at least four great games released on XBLA, with Bastion getting the lion's share of the attention. But the remaining three are pretty awesome, as well, and should help you while away the time spent indoors away from the brain frying heat sweeping the U.S.
More than a year ago, Twitter rolled out the first phase of its Promoted Tweets ad service, which consisted of selected tweets from advertising partners like Best Buy and Sony Pictures receiving "promoted" exposure in the search results pages on Twitter and in the trends lists. These ads were clearly labeled as such, so it was never any real bother to Twitter users.
Facebook games are ostensibly all about connecting their players. Yet, in many ways they exist on an isolated island. That's one of the reasons traditional gamers and game franchises have avoided Facebook in the past. And all of the breakout hits so far on Facebook have been cheap PC game ripoffs from the 90s, like FarmVille and ports of other popular casual games.
Google has been slowly rolling out a new update for the Android Market in the United States, which gives mobile users a new interface and some additional content for their Android-powered smartphones and tablets. The update started a couple weeks ago, taking the Android Market to version 3.0.27 on devices running Android 2.2 or higher. The new Android Market has a Honeycomb feel to it with a more visually pleasing layout and new colorful promotional page which showcases top apps and games, as...
Video games and books seldom have much impact on one another. Games based on movies based on books are fairly common, but games made directly from books are all but nonexistent. This is too bad, given that they're the two most interactive medias out there.
A couple months ago, the world was supposed to end. It didn't. But that didn't stop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from warning citizens of one global possibility besides complete destruction—ZOMBIES. They used the farcical flesh-eating living dead as an excuse to teach you about the necessity of real-life emergency planning.
If you're lucky, your digital camera has a built-in intervalometer that lets you operate the shutter regularly at set intervals over a period of time. Why would you be lucky? Because you can create some very awesome time-lapse videos, like the horribly beautiful eruption of a volcano or vivid star trails in the night sky. You can capture the stunning display of the northern lights or even document the rotting of your favorite fruit.
(Difficulty Level: from Newby to Expert) Digital cameras can produce freaky sharp images—it’s one thing that sets them apart from film cameras. A DSLR doesn’t have grain, it has noise—and that sounds a lot less charming for a reason. If you shoot at a low ISO, high f-stop and fast shutter speed, you can wind up with a super sharp image that might look great even on a billboard. But sometimes, sharp isn’t everything.
For most Americans, the bane of the hangover is typically remedied by lots of water, painkillers, greasy food, and a day wasted on the couch. But if you're tired of potato chips and fried eggs, perhaps it's time you enter unfamiliar territory. Below, a combination of unorthodox methods for taming the beast, derived from science, sparkly Whole Foods new ageism, and the far East.
Mold making is pretty thrilling—the ability to replicate objects right down to every little crack and crevice seems like something only a machine would be able to do. But in many cases creating a replica from a mold is surprisingly simple. Found on Tasteologie, La Receta de la Felicidad presents a fun alternative to the classic Jello jiggler. For a Dada-esque dessert, try using a banana peel as your mold. As you can see below, it works quite well at capturing the natural texture of the banana.
Looking to go "Green" When I'm looking to do new remodeling projects around the house, I find myself asking, is this Eco-Friendly? Is this main stream America brain-washing me into a "Greener Tomorrow?" I doubt it! Embracing Eco-minded products is not just good for preserving the natural environment, but it's about creating a healthy living environment in your home as well.
My idea for a Yumi-fied how-to guide is this: Learn to juggle. I thought for the longest time that I couldn't juggle because of some personal deficiency. That, somehow, a connection between the two halves of my brain and my hands could not be formed and I would never be able to do it. I had watched people do it, I had even bought sets of special juggling balls (regular balls sold in a nice box) but nothing seemed to work. It seemed as though the ability to juggle was a gift possessed by some,...
After stumbling across an interesting article by Hanne Blank—(apparent) hobbyist chef and widely known activist on the issues of weight, bisexuality, and sexuality—I've become even more fascinated by kitchen shortcuts. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's recently released Modernist Cuisine also spurred a similar interest, particularly after reading a WSJ piece in which Myhrvold attests —by law of science, of course— that a ¼-inch-thick sheet of steel is more than adequate in place of an ex...
Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all sorts of other important aggregators though, and you probably use at least one every day: Fark and Reddit for web content, Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and Metacritic for a variety of media, but most importantly, vid...
When you look up the word free in the dictionary, you'll find a lot of definitions, but in the days of digital dependency and a falling economy, free only means one thing—expensive stuff for nothing. And if you own a Windows computer, one of the best sites to get free software from is Giveaway of the Day.
Dear Miss and Mrs. H, I love your blog! Its nice to get two completley different opinions on one subject. I have a couple questions for you both and then need some advice.
Penny pincher? A true believer in "waste not want not"? Then listen up—here's a quick tip that will save you some spare change.
It's amazing how the years seem to slip by. One day you're a dreamy, starry-eyed college student. Hopeful intern the next. Before you know it, you're just a hard working stiff like the rest of them. Even though those college years don't seem too far in the past, it's always a shock when you come across an old photo and see a somewhat fresher, baby-faced version of yourself. Think about how shocking it would be to see a time-lapse recording of years gone by, each day incrementally displaying t...
Traders are in a frenzy of instant messaging all day long. The best ones, at least. A recent study says the best traders are the ones that IM the most and the least successful traders were the ones that IM the least. So, it seems like if you can find a way to jump on the bandwagon, you can beat the odds, too. But, what's their secret? Are they passing around insider information?
There really are depths of dumbth up with which I will not put, so I won’t be spending nine coins to build a Detective Agency in FrontierVille.Historically, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was started 1850 but came into its own working for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War (1861 to 1865, for foreigners and the home-schooled) catching Confederate spies and running their own networks in the South. The US didn’t have a national police force until the Bureau Of Investigation started up...
I'm not going to lie. I was Catholic. But one of my reasons for my faithful departure was having to tell my innermost secrets— my sins— to a silhouetted figure behind a latticed screen. With the creepy enclosed booth structure and separation of sinner and confessor, its anonymity was clear, yet deceiving. You always knew the priest and he always knew you. If I wanted total privacy, was there really a need for this intermediary to God?
Running this World has prompted me to think about MTG on a deeper level than I ever have before. In attempts to contextualize it, explain it, research it, and understand the parts of it that I don't yet understand, I have come to an unexpected conclusion: I'm old.
Check out this awesome Under the Sea themed party, hosted by Jessica of Party Box Designs: Theme: Under the Sea
This past Sunday, a group called Gnosis launched a massive hacker attack on Gawker media, one of the web's most popular blog networks (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot). 1.3 million registered users' passwords were compromised, and 188,279 of them were decoded and made public. The biggest takeaway? Many Gawker denizens use downright dumb passwords. (Guess they didn't see their own Lifehacker's story on avoiding such a thing.)
So you know what language you want to learn You've got your language picked out and you're ready to dive in, so let's move on to the first step in building a language foundation:
