For most people, New Year's Eve means watching the ball drop in Times Square. It means celebrating the New Year with friends and family. Countdown parties, clocks, confetti... passing out before the clock strikes midnight because you drank too much. But there's one more thing, and it's something we usually only see one other time each year— fireworks.
Many new players wonder how one actually gets a rating in SCRABBLE. Now, we're talking about an official rating, not one you would get on SCRABBLE Beta or with the ISC WordBiz player — I mean an "Official SCRABBLE Rating". A rating that allows you to play in the National SCRABBLE Championship (NSC), which is held once every year (sometimes two).
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.
As you progress in the world of information security, you'll find yourself in situations where data protection is paramount. No doubt you will have files to hide and secrets to share, so I'm going to show you how to use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG for short) to encrypt and decrypt as you need. GPG is a great open-source version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a similar application used for encryption, but licensing and patent problems led to the development of GPG in its wake.
Two weeks ago I reviewed browser-based video editor WeVideo and was amazed. Amazed not because WeVideo is a competent iMovie replacement for the casual editor (which it is), but amazed that a browser-based editor can work at all.
Last week I had a quick look at V.I.K.T.O.R, the anthropomorphized automated editing app that lives on your iPhone, and today it’s time to put it to work.
Can a free cloud-based video editor that lives in your browser replace iMovie? In three words: yes, it can. But whether you should use it instead of iMovie or an equivalent depends not on the functionality of the editor you need, as WeVideo can do what most of what iMovie does, but on what you need to do with your videos once they're finished.
As I was listening to Apple's WWDC conference today, what ran through my mind the most is if there were ever a time to switch to the world of Apple computing now is it. Today's WWDC keynote presentation was chock-full of new and updated iOS mobile software—too much to cover in this one article. But the most "new thing" coming from Apple this Fall is iCloud, a file sharing and streaming service that requires no wired connections.
In many of my articles, I will refer to applications designed to empower Mac users to automate various tasks on their computer. One such application is called Hazel. Like smart folders, smart playlists, and smart albums found in Mac OS X and iPhoto, Hazel can automate the task of moving, copying, or deleting files in folders on your Mac. I recommend Hazel as one of the most essential applications for any Mac user. Let's explore how it works.
Real-time strategy (RTS) was the most popular genre in PC games at one time. It put Blizzard on the map—one of the biggest game developers in the world. And it buried the once venerable turn-based strategy genre, the only survivor being the Civilization series. But like hair metal in the late ‘80s, RTS reached its saturation point. Many bands (games) were too similar and used ornamentation over innovation. Suddenly, the fans left. From ’95 to ’03, Command & Conquer releases were more like new...
The days of trundling hoops, hopscotch and painted wooden rocking horses are long since past. The latest trend in toys? Biofeedback. Electroencephalography. A decade into the 21st century, the toy market is awash in products that incorporate functional neural sensors.
Hallelujah, a miracle tool has been released to the world. This Windows/Mac tool is called Spirit and it enables you to jailbreak any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad quite easily. And Gizmodo is all over it, with an in-depth guide on exactly how to do it.
We’ve all been there before. Relentlessly refreshing Ticketmaster and filling in those CAPTCHA codes only to receive the miserable “No tickets are available at this time” message. That’s because ticket brokers with a dozen screens and God knows how many browsers snatch up anything and everything.
Are you interested in selling your products at the local Farmers Markets? Many small mom and pop food crafters get started selling their artisan breads, homemade cakes, cookies, pies, biscotti, candy, seasoning mixes or regional barbecue sauces direct to customers who visit local farmers markets and farm stands. What better way to start than with those visiting the local farmers market; a captive audience expecting a wide variety of seasonal fruits and veggies; along with specialty products t...
The relationship between developers and publishers in the video game industry has always been awkward. Many great game developers such as Bizzare Creations, Clover Studio, and Bullfrog Productions have been disbanded due to corporate shenanigans involving their publishers and owners. The indie game movement has risen largely as a response to this.
Go to a car dealership and test drive a car. Unbeknownst to the person test driving a car, stuff a bunch of fake drugs everywhere in the car and have the car salesman be an actor. Have the person test driving the car start to drive wrecklessly. A fake cop will pull him over and 'smell' something in the car. He takes your license and goes back to his car to run it. He comes back and says everything is okay and just to be more careful. Just before you are about to leave, the salesman looks susp...
The developer community has already made some incredibly quick progress on implementing assemblers, interpreters, and emulators for the proposed virtual computer in 0x10c, Notch's latest game. But the truth is that the majority of programmers out there couldn't be bothered with spending enormous amounts of time writing anything much more complicated than a "hello world" application in assembly. What's on the top of everybody's mind is creating a compiler for a more widely used language.
Recently, buyout talks between Google and Groupon ended with Groupon turning down Google's $6 million offer. But with Amazon backing LivingSocial, should they have? Your guess is as good as mine, but one thing's for sure— Groupon has a great voice, and they're sharing it with the world via their Public Groupon Editorial Manual.
Wouldn't it be nice to just sit at your buddy's house, plug into his network, and see exactly what he's doing? What if it was as easy as that? What makes packet sniffers like Wireshark such potent tools is that a majority of local area networks (LANs) are based on the shared Ethernet notion.
My JO was watching The Simpsons on FOX the other day, like she wholeheartedly does every evening, and I joined her, much like I always do— though I must admit, I'm not as obsessed with the cartoon family as much as she is. Just like she isn't as obsessed with SCRABBLE as I am.
The game has undergone many transitions over the years, since its days as LEXIKO (1931) to its briefness as CRISS CROSS WORDS to its current and amalgamated, renowned brand of SCRABBLE. There has been many editions of the word board game along that historic metamorphosis, and SCRABBLE has even given in to pop culture, sports memorabilia, and fanaticism.
