Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, Realistic 5, the fifth and last in my series of realistic hacking simulation missions. This time, telemarketers are invading people's privacy, and it was up to us to stop them! The job was to get root on the site and delete the contact database in order to return the right of privacy to its victims.
What happens when you combine a passion for astronomy and a love of wine? Cabernet that's out of this world. Literally. It's called Meteorito, and has a berry, nutty flavor with just a hint of iron and nickel. The wine was made by oenophile and amateur astronomer Ian Hutcheon, who runs his own vineyard and established an observatory in Chile called Centro Astronomica Tagua Tagua.
In this article I'll show you how to make a simple IP address notifier. The program will text you your new IP address, in the event that it changes. For those of you with dynamic IPs, this is very useful. I'm constantly frustrated when my IP changes, and it's handy to be notified via text when it happens. To use the program, you'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib2, and a program called "text" (see this article here to get it).
One of the best ways to make a great build is to build around the environment. Fancy plugins like World Edit and Voxel Sniper aren't always necessary. In the real world, people can't just edit the environment to their every whim and need. They have to work around it. Not only does building around your environment help to make your build look nicer, it helps to make it look more realistic. In the above picture, I could only make a small house because I wanted this build to work with the enviro...
During our final week here at Edit on a Dime, I looked at two different ways of making those cool photo-motion cinemagraphs, and tried editing on an iPhone for free:
It's not uncommon to find a good mod these days, for any given game. But as I have mentioned before, Skyrim is not just a game. It's a drug... A horribly entertaining drug..
Happy Monday to all of you out there, thankfully the Consumer Electronics Show is now behind us. It feels quite possible that a cold was caught by yours truly simply by reading the numerous reports of germs being spread from booth to booth on the show floor. I'll do my best to soldier on, in the meantime if you haven't already, you can experience the convention vicariously by reading my 'Best of CES' post here.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show is nearing an end so of course it's an occasion for the 'best of' lists. To save you time I thought I'd compile my 'best of' the 'best of' lists.
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 10. This mission teaches us how to use JavaScript to manipulate cookies on poorly coded cookie-based authorization.
Want to see your Minecraft creations in real physical form outside of your server? Mineways is a free program for Linux or Windows users that renders all of your Minecraft builds into full color 3D model files. Those files can then be sculpted using your own 3D printer (if you have one), or uploaded to Shapeways, a company that will print your 3D models creations in colored plastic, which you can then purchase or sell in their online gallery.
Now that the holiday weekend is over, there's only one more celebration this year, and that's saying goodbye to 2011 and welcoming 2012 with open arms! For this week's Phone Snap challenge, we'd like to ring in the new year with you and see your best cell phone photo from your celebration. Take a picture right as the clock strikes twelve or show us something that represents what the end of the year and the beginning of another means to you.
Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 7, which required us to learn some basic Unix commands. If you have any prior experience using Unix commands, this should be a breeze for you if you sit and think for a second.
Many users of the virtualization software VirtualBox may have noticed that the USB system has been pretty buggy for quite a long time. I've had my USB randomly duck out on me way too many times to count. This can really be difficult to deal with when you require access to the devices and files from the host system.
Thanksgiving. It's sadly over. But happily replaced by the Christmas season!
Adventure gamers would love to know what was the first adventure game. Well, it was a 1970s computer game titled "Colossal Cave Adventure", also known as "Adventure". Designed by Will Crowther, the game was in FORTRAN and initially had 700 lines of code and data, which was later expanded to 3,000 lines of code and more than 1000 lines of data.
POSTICHE 65 points (15 points without the bingo) Definition: an imitation [n]
I've been hell-bent on complete self sufficiency for a long time now. There was a point where I was living in a self-sustaining community in the mountains in Colorado, and we had a very large greenhouse there. Dragging the hose around to water plants was a real pain, and that stuck in the back of my mind even after I left the place. It would have been much easier to integrate watering into the frame at construction time than doing that hose dance every day.
No Time To Explain is the first game by two man indie developer tiny Build Games. It's a fun and very stylish platformer in it's own right, available for $10 from the tiny Build website. Articles about the game on RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, and other prominent PC sites helped it develop substantial hype and raise more than $26,000 via Kickstarter to fund development.
Camera manufacturers release new versions of the same cameras, mostly point-and-shoot models, as frequently as Detroit's auto industry upgrades minivans. They also add new lenses regularly, upgrading previous models with adjusted zoom ranges or the image stabilization feature. The same goes for tripods, portable flashes and even camera bags.
Yesterday, Google's VP of Product Management, +Bradley Horowitz, sat down with founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, +Tim O'Reilly, to discuss Google+, its future, and where it's headed. You can watch the hour-long video here: I wasn't able to find a transcript for this video, but O'Reilly has helpfully rounded up some of the more interesting points.
Web-spying technologies like FaceNiff, Firesheep and Newstweek are out there showing the world just how easy it is to see what you're doing online, but they're amateurish in comparison to what real hackers could do to you if they catch you browsing unsecured websites.
Smartphones are impressive devices, to say the least. A smartphone user can consume TV, music & movies; communicate via streaming video; check the weather; record audio; take professional quality video footage; snap high quality photos… The list just continues to grow and grow. With all of these incredible capabilities, why not add surveillance?
It's like the H-bomb. In slo-mo, it's stunning. In real life, it's terrifying. The footage below was uploaded by YouTube user NielsBorg, unfortunately lacking in description, but offers the following information via headline: "T90 shot taken by Photron camera at 18000 fps". The T-90 is a brute of a tank, a third-generation battle vehicle used by the Russian Ground Forces and Naval Infantry. The tank contains an autoloader which can carry 22 ready-to-fire rounds, loadable and ready to go in 5-...
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
You're in a new city and you want to explore—what mobile app is best? If you want to know what club is hopping that night, use SceneTap. If you want to know if any friends are at a nearby get-together, use Foursquare. If you want to know what restaurant is best, try Yelp. But if you're looking to get a real feel for the city, skip the more touristy destinations and take to the streets—discover where some great graffiti is located or where the best view of the city is with the Trover iPhone ap...
"Mind Your Step" is a gargantuan street illusion staged in Stockholm's most public square, Sergels torg. Created by artist Erik Johansson, the illusion will be up until June 12th, so swing by if you happen to be in Sweden. Erik has documented his entire creative process here, including this great little tutorial on how to create your own optical illusion.
Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...
Google's sociable equivalent to the Facebook Like button is finally here, and it works very similar to your favorite social network's recommendation system, except it shows up directly in Google search results. Whenever your Google friend gives a website or webpage the +1, you'll see it in your search results, as long as you're signed into your Google Account.
Thanks to digital media, music lovers can listen to the newest tune from their favorite band whenever they want, however they want. Audio files can be played in many different formats on many different devices, from iTunes on your computer to Pandora on your cell phone. The music you love will always be instantly available to you, note for note, word for word—just how you like it. But as a result of today's software-driven world, you now have another, less static option for listening to your ...
What do you get when you combine eBay, foursquare, and Craigslist want ads into a single mobile application? A really gnarly mobile bazaar called Zaarly that lets you post wanted products or services based on local proximity and timeliness. It's not a new idea, but it's the first to get it right.
Area 51 is the most secretive military base in the United States, a base that U.S. government officials to this day still barely acknowledge because of its top secret development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. But a slew of Cold War-era documents have finally been declassified, and National Geographic has discovered a rather low-tech method the military used to hide its high-tech prototypes.
Everyone knows who Charles Dickens is—the famous English author responsible for such iconic novels as Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and The Adventures of Oliver Twist. But what if this Victorian era novelist (who died in 1870) was resurrected into today’s futuristic world? How would you explain the concept of a technology he’s never seen before? Even something that perfectly fits his area of expertise—books? How would you elucidate the Amazon Kindle?
In the past, geocaching has been an activity overlooked by most. Partly because nobody really knew what it was and partly because you needed a GPS-enabled device to participate, like a Garmin. But now, thanks to GPS-enabled Android and Apple devices, geocaching will finally be noticed by the masses in Garmin's own OpenCaching.
It seems the French have carefully observed the hacking achievements of one super clever Carnegie Mellon grad, turning his hack into a modern iPad application-to-be.
If you've yet to witness B.A.S.E. jumping, it's an activity for adrenaline junkies first publicized by filmmaker Carl Boenish in '78. The freefall sport employs ram-air parachutes, and is most commonly executed in locations such as the highly elevated El Capitan rock formation of Yosemite National Park (El Capitan is also technically the birthplace of the sport).
Hacking can't be that hard, can it? At least, that's what it seems like thanks to movies like Hackers, The Net and that last Die Hard flick. Even the Jurassic Park girl's got some game. They all look like they're typing 20wpm, yet can generate a screen full of code in the blink of an eye. Amazing. As long as they're some isolated computer nerd who's glued to their PC all day long (which is pretty much all of us these days, thanks Internet), they're a bona fide hacker.
It's remarkable that a gaming device (from Microsoft, no less) designed for geeky gamers has incited broad innovation in medicine and robotics. But that Kinect has captured the imagination of hackers-with-MBAs-in-mind is downright amazing.
Why is it so satisfying to squash, snap, squeeze and splatter? You know, squashing a juicy grape, snapping a twig, squeezing ketchup out of a packet—perhaps with your fist—or splattering mud across a sidewalk. But all of these actions are child's play next to animators Laura Junger and Xaver Xylophon's Joy of Destruction. The real joy of destruction is illustrated below—we're talking sawing ladies in half, exploding corn into popcorn with dynamite, burning cities, and rolling over statues wit...
Outstanding advancements in medicine and super creepy Androids aren't the only jaw-dropping inventions out there. Every once in a while, an incredibly random—and at first glance, seemingly useless—device comes along and strikes a chord of strangely deep satisfaction. Behold, the SWITL, a mysterious goo-scraper robot hand created by factory equipment manufacturer Furukawa Kikou: From what I can glean from a very rough Google translation, it sounds like the SWITL was developed for food producti...
Tired of getting calluses from incessantly strumming along to 'No Woman No Cry'? Just hook up to the brain-music system and use your brain power to play a tune instead. I'm not talking—humming along in your head. The machine, created by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, is composed of electrodes taped directly onto your skull that pick up tiny electrical impulses from neurons in your brain and translates them into musical rhythms on a co...
