Apple's AirPods Pro offer three different audio modes for your convenience: "Transparency," which pumps in sound around you,"Noise Cancellation," which actively blocks out surrounding sounds, and "Off," which uses neither mode. Off saves battery, and does a decent job at passively cancelling noise on its own, but you can't seem to be able to use it with the AirPods Pro stem. Here's how.
Any talk about privacy is a complicated (usually) and touchy subject. In today's world, privacy is an ever eroding pleasure to be had. Numerous cases, like the monumental Kat'z vs United States, have been fought to hold on to this right.
The Power of One is one of those books that I really should have read years ago. I’ve certainly meant to read it for a long time so this was a satisfying title to cross off my list. It’s stunning that this was Bryce Courtenay’s first novel. I look forward to reading his others because if this is where he started, he’s a talented writer.
If there ever was a time for Null Byte to need people to contribute, it's now. Let's make Null Byte a place where anyone, from novice to master computer user, come and learn. It has been sometime since the last "Call to Arms" for Null Byte, and even longer since the last "Weekend Homework". We all know that this time of year is busy for everyone, but that didn't stop occupytheweb otw from creating a great article in his continuing "Hack Like a Pro" series.
Solar panels are an amazing invention. Catching energy from the Sun before it even enters Earth's food chain, photovoltaics are like an all-natural nuclear power plant. Unfortunately, the constituted parts of a solar panel are rare, valuable, and subject to the coercive forces of market competition.
You're sitting in front of your grandmother's Windows XP machine that has the worst infection you've ever seen. Safe mode? No dice. Restore points? They're compromised. Even worse, all of the files are hidden and none of the executables will run! This leaves her computer in a bricked state. Without some serious CPR, it will be lost to you. Sure, you could just reinstall the system, but then you might lose all of that valuable data.
If you've been reading, watching or listening to the news, you sure know about the Trayvon Martin case. If you visit this site often, you may also have noticed that I've not put up any news on this case. I have my reasons. And this post will describe why.
We had a blast during last week's social engineering calls. One of our attending social engineers was so clever that she convinced several people on Craigslist that lost items were hers, even if it seemed she couldn't be trusted. But females are better social engineers, naturally. Some say that females have a special knack for manipulating men, but I think that's preposterous. I can't see why that would be true in a million years (note my sarcasm).
At some point, we all go from organized to disorganized. Let's assume you are a business executive working in a busy corporate building. Chances are you are going to get a heavy workload and it will impact how clean your workspace is. However, this article is about keeping your desktop clean and clutter free, along with the use of software to find documents you have misplaced.
If you've ever heard software piracy terminology being discussed, I'm sure the term KeyGens came up. KeyGens is short for key generator, which is a program that exploits algorithmic faults in software by generating software license keys that appear to be genuine. Normally used as a technique to protect the source code software and prevent piracy, a key generator exploits the key algorithm to effectively nullify the need for any software licenses. For example, we must try to find patterns in t...
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Missed the other guides? Click on the links!
Google+ is taking over more and more of Google's core properties. This week, we've seen several announcements from Google blogs about new products, new features, new looks, new integrations. If you're like me, you actually want to know where to go for all the latest information on Google products.
Although most religions have inspired a variety of art, Buddhism seems to have a special relationship with the arts. Something about the endless circle of birth and rebirth seems to intrigue the minds of artists. Of course even if the art is not directly related to Buddhism, the Buddha has always been a fan of art. The Buddha has been quoted several times speaking about art, and most of his sayings are truly profound:
Nearly every game takes strategy to win, but when it comes to games like Scrabble and Words with Friends, you've also got to have a lexically inclined mind full of wonderful and weird words. Most start out by learning all of the two-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary, then work their way up to three-letter words. But where do you go from there?
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. While mining is a basic aspect of Minecraft, it is often overlooked. Every adventure requires iron and diamonds and other ore and if you're playing in hardcore mode then you need all the help you can get.
Lockpicking is a skill that takes years upon years to master. Locks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but have common ground in how they work. Most cylinder locks have "tumblers," which are metallic cylindrical objects that sit vertically to the actual locking mechanism. Tumblers have five or six holes with rounded key pins of various height in them, each needing to meet an exact height or the cylinder in the center (the lock itself) will not be allowed to turn. This is the reason why yo...
Game design is sedentary work. Generally its practitioners do their work with their butts planted securely in front of a computer in an office (be it home or away) as their muscles and verbal skills atrophy. Even game journalists are prone to this condition. Not so with Colin and Sarah Northway (pictured below), the husband and wife team behind NORTHWAY Games. Not only do they make really cool indie games, but they do it with just a laptop while traveling the world meeting indie developers of...
Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, I found I couldn’t browse the internet on my smartphone anymore. My eyes were tired from reading and there were no headphones to listen to music. There are no magazines at this dentist’s office, just an old TV playing Russian music videos ad nauseam. Mostly female Russian singers, and curiously enough they all shared similar traits: they can’t dance. They look gorgeous, but the best they could do is small movements and two slow moves at best- a huge diff...
For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...
While using Google+, it's been apparent that there are two types of posters. There are the people who post thoughtful, serious posts about everything from tech to dealing with cancer. And then there are the meme propagators, the people who decide to rick roll others (ahem, +Bryan Crow), and constantly put up animated gifs. Sometimes they are the same people, and this is where it gets a little controversial.
This week's roundup features three games that I've either never bothered to play, was unable to play due to PC technical limitations, or haven't played because they've just been released. None of these three games cost more than $15.
It's a hell of a lot easier to make money selling an indie game now than it was four years ago. But it's still a rough game.
Video games were blamed in the death of Chris Staniforth last May, but now things have gotten worse as video games take the blame for a more recent tragedy...
Since the beginning of last year, every six months or so the fine folks at Wolfire Games have gathered indie developers together to release a combo gaming pack called Humble Indie Bundle. Not only are the included games good, but the way one buys them is what makes Humble Indie Bundle one of the coolest products in games. Even better, Humble Indie Bundle #3 just came out last Tuesday and is available here for two weeks only.
Most stateside gamers have probably never heard of Level-5. If they have, it's more than likely due to the charming and maddening line of Nintendo DS puzzle games, Professor Layton. Some might even remember Dark Cloud and its sequel from the early days of the PlayStation 2, and all eight of you PSP owners in the U.S. might recognize the epic Jeanne d'Arc. These games alone make Level-5 a noteworthy company, but they've quietly surpassed "noteworthy" status to become one of the largest and gre...
See how to bake without butter, sugar, eggs, dairy milk and more. If you think it’s impossible to bake without butter without losing flavor and texture, then keep on reading. Even if you already substitute butter in your cakes and cookies, there may be some things in this article that you haven’t tried yet.
For a long time, video games manuals were serious business. Especially for strategy games and RPGs on the PC, the manuals would often run to a hundred or more full-color pages in length. They explained in vivid and well-written detail the history of the game world and every facet of the gameplay system. There were pages upon pages of appendices explaining the statistics of every unit, faction, and terrain type. They were majestic, and I would spend an hour or more poring over each one before ...
Netflix may be killing its competitors, but they're losing fans thanks to their reputation for rolling out interface updates without user knowledge or consent. PlayStation 3 owners were upset at the Netflix interface change earlier this year, and now nearly 5,000 diehard Netflixers are irate at the website's new look for its Watch Instantly section.
Every Friday here at Indie Games Ichiban, I will feature a sampling of reviews from the mountains of indie and vintage games that have crossed my internet connection in the past week. Each week will have some sort of theme, this week being old school turn-based strategy games available on Steam.
Advancements in technology usually lead to the miniaturization of old technologies, and video games are no exception. Since at least 1990, game hardware manufacturers and enterprising DIY electronics enthusiasts have poured their efforts into making full-size video game consoles smaller, even handheld. And for good reason—who would have ever played a black and white Game Boy if they could have had an actual NES in their pocket?
Aside from food, oxygen, sunlight and water, there are other necessities that humans arguably need today to survive—clothing, love and shelter among them. Almost everyone wears clothes, needs somebody (or something) to love and a place to call home. And what's the one thing that connects all three? Something we all have? Keys.
Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.
Video games consoles have long wanted to be more than just consoles. Nintendo Japan called the NES the Famicom because they wanted to make it the sole family computer. Obviously that didn't work out, and most efforts to make consoles into all-in-one entertainment systems have had similar fates. Sony has done the best job with the Playstation consoles, probably because they have experience with other types of electronics that most video game companies do not.
You've seen his explanation of a combination lock's inner workings. You'll never lose another game of Jenga, thanks to his winning wooden pistol. And nearly 4 million YouTube users have marveled at his wooden marble machine sculpture. He's Matthias Wandel, and he's accomplished what most only dream of—turning a hobby into a career. Matthias has been tinkering in woodworking since he was a child, with unrestricted access to his father's workshop, permitted to use power tools unsupervised from ...
In my earlier post about long-term strategies I promised I’d ask some of my neighbors who do what I call factory chicken farming (Let 1000 Chickens Bloom) if the coyotes that have shown up will change the way they play the game. The one guy who replied in any detail said that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do yet, but he thought that he was losing 50 chickens each time he harvested them pressing “Collect Bonus” using a coop.
A devastating tragedy occurred in Japan on Friday when a monstrous 8.9-magnitude quake hit, causing a 10 meter (33 foot) tsunami to engulf the northeastern coast of the country. There are reports of over 1,000 people who have lost their lives, tens of thousands evacuated, and massive damage. Whether you have a lot or a little to give, here are five ways you can aid in the relief effort this very moment, without even leaving your couch.
Sure, you go online to email and shop and do research. But have you ever been curious about how the internet actually works? Don't worry, you don't need a degree in computer science to get a handle on how your info gets from point A to point B. Learning the basics of the internet will give you a whole new appreciation for all those emails and chat messages that seem to magically appear. Get ready, because we're about to enter the wonderful world of digital data!
Welcome back to the two-part series of Ten foods to eat for clear, acne-free skin. Check out part 1 here.
Bird spotting is a fun and also fascinating pastime that is definitely expanding in reputation. Not simply can you watch spectacular birds, but you may appreciate the wonder of the open air as well as unwind in the clean air. Having time to view birds in there natural place or in their nesting behaviors can be a great way to escape the headaches of the planet for a little bit and simply experience nature.
When I heard that a man wearing a pink wig and matching PVC dress won the 2010 National Scrabble Championship yesterday, I wasn't that shocked. After all, it was Halloween. But it turns out that it wasn't just a Halloween costume. In fact, it's a way of life for this champion scrabbler.