Flooring is a very important part of your Minecraft builds. I've already shown you the three types of flooring designs and went into further details about inset flooring. Now it's time for the second main category of floor types—patterned floors.
I finally got around to trying out this jam jar jet project. The most successful and longest lasting pulse was somehow the only one I did not record. You can imagine how frustrating that probably was, though my tenth and final attempt was nearly as satisfying. But even the failures were fun to watch, especially the blue flame floating, almost dancing, around the jar. I especially liked the small foghorn sound that my first failed attempt produced.
You might already know a little bit about what the National Ignition Facility has been up to lately, or what they could possibly achieve. But last week, even the scientists at the Livermore, California station couldn't predict the awesome power that their humongous laser was capable of. NIF's laser is already the record holder for the world's largest laser, and now it can also claim to be the first ever 2 megajoule ultraviolet laser after it generated nearly 100 times more energy than any oth...
Last week, I did a short tutorial on three main types of flooring for your Minecraft builds. This week, I will be focusing on just one of those—inset floors. This was the first of the three types I briefly covered, and the example I used was an inset fireplace. Here, I will be going over 5 types of inset floors. I did not light the fireplaces, because the building I was using kept burning down.
For any of you not in the loop, last week marked our first ever WTFoto Challenge. The goal was to find the craziest, most absurd stock photo on the web we've never seen before. There were a lot of WTF images submitted to our community corkboard, and now it's time to announce the results of the stock image showdown. Who will win the the honor of Watermark of Weirdness? Drumroll please, imaginary band leader named Tim Drickles...
I write this post as an afterthought on the recent mass burnings of the Quran by U.S troops. Let me lay down the facts first to clear any misunderstandings:
Let's face it, the world we live in is far from the fairy-tale land we want it to be, where violence doesn't exist and weapons are not needed. Our foremost goal in life out there in the scary world is simply to survive. And if we need a few tools to accomplish this, we should use them, right?
Last week's social engineering phone calls were a blast. We made some friends, and even some enemies. We scored cheap food for some buddies, made some phone bills disappear, and even got a few people some free pizzas. So overall, it was a very successful night. In light of its success, I figured we'd all do another one!
How many Facebook friends do you have? The average person on Facebook has around 140 friends while some hit the ridiculous Facebook friend limit of 5,000. Facebook states that its services are for people you know in person. I don't think anyone has 5,000 friends in person, do you? Personally, I don't even think Megan Fox has 5,000 friends in person, so how could any regular person have that many? But that's beside the point.
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 2. This second mission in a series of realistic simulation missions was designed to be exactly like situations you may encounter in the real world, requesting we help a friend take down a racist hate-group website.
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 1. This is the first in a series of realistic simulation missions designed to be exactly like situations you may encounter in the real world. This first mission, we are asked to help a friend manipulate the website voting system for a Battle of the Bands vote count in his favor.
If you saw my last tutorial on retiring early and wealthy, you now know how anyone can invest a small amount of money over the course of their life, and by exploiting compound interest, achieve an extremely comfortable and easy going retirement. In Part 2, we are going to dive into something a little more risky: Tax liens.
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 8. This meant that we had to learn some more basic Unix commands.
Most of the car owners pay attention to the maintenance of the vehicle but among them, many forget to include windscreen maintenance in their periodic checkups. Car windscreen maintenance is quite simple and can be done on your own. In order to maintain car,the drivers should treat this with utmost care as they do for tyres because neglecting small issues in windscreen can land you in deep trouble and on safety prospects as well,it is unsafe.
Washing a car is a simple task. However, many people damage their paint by scratching it or making swirl marks when washing. If you are going to take the time to wash your car, make sure you follow these simple tips to prevent paint damage.
I woke up at 4:00 am this morning in order to take some video of the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America till 2014. The eclipse was beautiful. It was amazing to watch the shadow of our planet creep slowly across our nearest neighbor. Once the shadow was blocking out most of the light from the sun, the moon was significantly dimmer and the color had changed to a reddish orange. This color is caused by the same effect that makes our sunrises and sunsets so colorful. The light fr...
Christmas just wouldn't be the same without cookies. Besides the gifts, it's the one thing that keeps the family (not to mention Santa) coming back each year. As with any family gathering, there's bound to be some chaos this holiday season, but as long as you've got a good supply of Christmas cookies, there should be peace and harmony.
Cheers to another completed Community Byte project! Things went well regarding timeliness and being friendly to the other coders and students. If you've got ideas for our next mission, or an idea for a tutorial, submit them to me. Friday, our mission was to take out HackThisSite, basic mission 5. This mission focused on JavaScript, again. This time there is a little bit more security in place.
What happens when a struggling writer cannot finish the screenplay to her second film? She writes a book.
Last post, we looked at fractal cookies based off of the recipe by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. In this post, we'll follow their recipe for fractal cupcakes based off of the Koch Snowflake, which we used previously to decorate pumpkins for Halloween.
This is Null Byte's fourth part in a series about fully securing our computers (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In our last Null Byte, we went over how to encrypt an entire operating system to protect our data, however, this doesn't fully protect us. In the case of legal extortion, the government can actually make you give up your cryptographic key to your computer so that they can look through it.
There is a near-infinite amount of ways a computer can be broken into. But that does not mean that there isn't a reason to secure our computers as best as we possibly can. It's like the principles of a secure house. Which are the most secure houses? The ones with locks and advanced alarms, obviously, but not for the reasons people normally think.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Natural processes often create objects that have a fractal quality. Fractal branching patterns occur in plants, blood vessel networks, rivers, fault lines, and in several electrical phenomena. Many of these processes take lifetimes, or even occur on geological timescales. But this is not the case for electrical phenomena. They often occur near instantaneously. One example would be the branching patterns that sometimes occur in lightning.
Cheating. It happens everywhere. From scientists faking human ears on mice, to Hollywood thirty-somethings cheating on their quadragenarian wives, to chess players accusing supercomputers of fraud. There's no game or profession out there that doesn't have a cheater or two, but the bigger nuisance is probably those people who accuse others of cheating.
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
Sharing a laptop's wireless Internet connection with other computers connected to its Ethernet port is a great skill to know. It can be good for a number of reasons; Your computer may not have proper hardware to have a standard setup, or you may have an awkward network topology where sharing your wireless Internet via Ethernet would just be a better option.
PayPal has, all in all, been great for allowing Web 2.0 economy to grow. For most entities, it's the best way to send money between two people on the internet.
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
Earlier last month, I wrote on how to subscribe to Google+ users using PlusFeed. I used it, and then I realized that I wasn't getting my own feed anymore. I discovered that the free service had been disabled due to cost issues, as detailed by the creator +Russell Beattie. The code is open source, and you can roll your own service, if you have the know-how and the time. If you don't, but still want to create RSS feeds for your own public posts, or just to track your favorite Google+ users, the...
The UK seems to have become an international hotbed of gamers going wild on society. Last week a British Navy sailor killed his superior officer, which parts of the tabloid media blamed on Grand Theft Auto. Today, a more concretely video game related tale of real life violence comes to us from The Daily Mail.
MOCA's Art in The Street gallery was one of the first large scale street art related museum shows ever. It's not a point of debate whether this did or did not bring street art to a much wider audience, it most certainly did. It united the old graffiti artist of the seventies with the new street artists of the last twenty years. It was a big night with many famous artists attending the opening, including but certainly not limited to, L.A. native Shepard Fairey and the ever exciting Mr. Brainwa...
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.
Like the recent XSS 0day exploit found in the Mac and Windows versions of Skype, a similar one has been found in the Skype app for iPhone. The vulnerability allows an attacker to send a message that contains malicious JavaScript code in the "Name" parameter. This code can steal your phonebook, crash the app, and potentially do a lot worse. The URI scheme is improperly identified for the web-kit browser. Instead of going to a blank browser page, it defaults to "file://". The code could steal a...
For more than a decade, free-to-play games with microtransactions (also called In-App Purchase or IAP) by which players can pay real money for in-game content have been the industry standard for online success in Asia. Mainstream American gamers have long resisted these "freemium" games, with World of Warcraft and other subscription based online games reigning supreme, and being seen as more AAA than their free-ish counterparts. Casual games developers have encountered no such problems, and m...
He may be the oldest person to have invented an app for Apple devices, but 84-year-old George Weiss didn't originally intend on marketing his Dabble word game to the mobile crowd. He first came up Dabble back in 1958 when he was just 31. “A lot has changed since 1958, but people still love a good game,” said Weiss on his introduction into the iTunes App Store last month.
We've all seen FOX News commentators get worked up about silly non-issues. It occurs more than we'd like, but what happened last week on popular morning show FOX and Friends was not only a misleading and pointless attack on video games, it was an unintelligible attack on a mediocre and forgotten game from 2007, along with a handful of recent indies that no FOX and Friends viewers, or any of their close family members, had ever heard of before this broadcast.
The used video game market represents a huge portion of retail game sales. It's the only avenue in which most people can afford to buy AAA games. But game publishers aren't exactly big fans of used game sales, since they only benefit from gamers buying new ones. GameStop and Best Buy are huge corporate interests, so EA and the rest of the big publishers out there have not been able to push them around on the issue of used game sales... so far.
Big news from the world of game development engines. For several years, Unity3D has been the free 3D game development engine of choice for aspiring and indie game designers around the world. While it isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine, it's free and much easier to use. Now, according to an announcement made by Unity yesterday, Unity 3D is about to unleash a huge weapon that neither of those other engines can claim: Flash compatibility.
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
