Last week's Community Byte we got off to a great start! We had a few people build our IRC bot, and all went well. We had some great contributers, ideas, and people willing to learn. So, needless to say, we will be having another. Let's try to get a few more people involved this time!
Reuben Margolin builds large scale kinetic sculptures based off of mechanical waves. Some of his sculptures contain hundreds of pulleys all working in harmony with each other to create sinusoidal waves and their resulting interference patterns. He designs them all on paper and does all of the complicated trigonometric calculations by hand. Everything is mechanical; there are no electronic controllers.
The "slide-together" paper construction method is a fun and satisfying way to build 3D geometric objects. It only requires paper, scissors or an exacto knife, and some patience.
I've previously mentioned how saving browser passwords is a bad idea, but I never went into much detail as to why. Passwords that are saved in your browser can be carved out and stolen very easily. In fact, even passwords you save for instant messaging and Wi-Fi are vulnerable. Windows is very inefficient with the way it stores passwords—it doesn't store them in key-vaults, nor does it encrypt them. You're left with passwords residing in memory and filespace that's unencrypted.
Running a successful student council campaign requires hard work and preparation. Whether you’re part of a candidate’s support group or a candidate yourself, you need to focus and give it all you’ve got. As Vince Lombardi said, “Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work.”
Other than keeping your popsicles and frozen veggies frosty, who would have thought that your everyday freezer had so many uses? Just like your dishwasher can be used for many non-cookware items, the freezer can be used in a variety of useful ways that don't involve perishable food.
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.
Here is an alternative method to run Ubuntu 10.04 on a Mac without actually installing it on your internal hard disk.
Oh, teenagers. Maybe you would be better off planning a scavenger hunt for the screaming toddlers. Just kidding! Despite the mood swings, teens will enjoy a scavenger hunt more than younger kids. Some things to keep in mind, though:
Still reading? Either your kids are not in diapers anymore or you're just curious. Either way, on to the next category of scavenger hunters.
Our first look will be at scavenger hunt beginners. The youngsters. The ones some people say shouldn't even be doing a scavenger hunt (and maybe they're right). If you dare to put on a treasure hunt for people who can't tie their shoe, here is what you need to know.
Make sure you have A good place to work. Tips
Big Block Games has a pretty good indie track record. They've spent years developing their fun free-roving space game, Black Market, which is still in Beta. And they've spent just as much time with their much simpler, but fully completed physics platformer, Super Goblin War Machine. Their newest endeavor is called Coffee Break Hero. It sets itself apart from the other games, not so much by the game itself, which has only been in development for four days, but by its unique execution. Big Bloc...
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.
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.
Hungarian developer Nemesys Games is best known for making the lighthearted Fortix series, a pair of casual tower defense variants available on Steam. For their latest project, they've decided to expand their horizons, going beyond downloadable sawbuck games. It's called Rocket Bullet Storm, a chaotic old-school shmup similar to the surprising number of others to come out in the last year. The difference is that this one is huge—30 feet tall—and consumes 250 square meters of floorspace, which...
While we're waiting for Google to sort out the mess over suspended Google+ accounts, it's a good reminder that you have the option to download much of your Google+ data with Google Takeout. Google Takeout, created by an internal Google engineering team marketed as the Data Liberation Front, is a free service that provides a handy and easy way to download data from your Google+ stream, your contacts and circles, and other information in a zip file.
Google+ isn't filled with just Google workers and tech-obsessed nerds. Many creative people are part of the community, and they're using Google+ to connect with their fans. Authors, especially, love talking to people about their work. We've rounded up the best published authors for you to follow on Google+. We've listed their best known works so that you can get an idea of the topics they write about.
Art Babble is a video network for artists and art lovers alike, launched by a group of curators at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The site is divided into channels, series and partners, with a wide variety of top notch videos from institutions far and wide. The Getty Museum has posted some especially fascinating content, most notably their series on modern artisans and craftsmen demonstrating antiquated art techniques.
Three years ago, Double Fine productions held an in-house event called the Amnesia Fortnight. The company was split into four teams, each of which set out to spend two weeks developing an idea for a small game and present it to the other groups at the end of the duration. All of the ideas turned out to be winners, and founder/owner Tim Schafer secured publishing deals for all four games to be released on a combination of XBLA and PSN. In honor of the excellent Trenched becoming the third game...
When the New York Times paywall first went up, there was a whole lot of balking. The idea seemed egregious to most, and the digerati's overwhelming conclusion was that the system would fail. But interestingly enough, there is speculation that the NYT is actually experiencing an increase in their print subscriptions, which according to Business Insider founder Henry Blodgett, is due to users feeling less guilt over buying the print media if, after all, the digital version is no longer free.
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-...
Nick Campbell is the creative force behind GREYSCALEGORILLA, a blog of tutorials, ideas, news and inspiration for other creators. The Chicago-based motion graphics designer has worked on the graphics for Dexter, Target, Blackberry, and the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.
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.
If you liked the idea of cutting duplicate keys from a personal 3D printer, then you might be interested to know that researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have successfully designed the smallest 3D printer to date. The prototype device is smaller than a shoebox and weighs only 3.3 pounds. It uses stereolithography compared to the RepRap's extruding molten plastic, and it's not a self-replicating machine and costs a bit more, at nearly $1,800 each. But compare that to ...
Oat bran has the ability to lower cholesterol plus it contains fiber, iron, calcium, and trace minerals, vitamins A, E, & K and several of the B vitamins. Here's the nutritional lowdown. But really, how many bowls of oat bran can you eat every day? Luckily it can be added to lots of the foods you already eat without changing flavor or even texture. Here's how:
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.
E Ink technology is nothing short of amazing. It recently contributed to the world's first bend-sensitive flexible smartphone, and now it's capable of something even cooler, not to mention astonishingly simpler—flashing digital displays on cloth.
Sticking with our theme of XBLA games with uninspiring names, we have Outland. This game shares its name with an unrelated sci-fi cult film from 1981, unrelated comic strip from the '90s, and unrelated region in World of Warcraft. Didn't exactly try hard to build name recognition. Other than that, Finnish developer Housemarque has created the best 2D platformer I've seen in years.
Over years of almost-daily orange eating, I have developed a 90% effective workflow for removing the peel from an orange in one piece. While this might not seem important, people who see me do it generally ask about it, so I thought it would be cool if you would illustrate the process for the world. Having a nice hand-drawn set of instructions to frame on my wall would save me time explaining it to people as well.
What do you do when you desperately need to put a parking garage into the bottom floor of your Victorian apartment building, but the city's Department of Planning says "No". The simple and expensive answer: Create an elaborate secret garage door. If you own a pretty building, it is well within the jurisdiction of the Landmark Commission to inform you that even though you own the piece of property, you cannot remodel it any way you want. Seems un-American. But in San Francisco, specifically th...
The iPad has established itself as "the" tablet computer for gadgeteers on the go. But Google is giving Apple a run for their money as Android tablets improve with each new release. Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy are among the top dogs competing against the iPad, along with another from ASUS, which just became available yesterday in the United States—selling out in mere minutes.
My friend has been through a lot. He's fallen down cliffs, been killed by lava and attacked by wild wolves. Let me explain about the "been killed by lava" bit:
Have you ever felt the desire to reach out and touch a galaxy? Or "feel" those stunning nebulas and planets you see in Hubble photos? As alluring as it sounds, it's safe to say the odds of your whim coming true are nonexistent. You'd have to travel about 6 earth years and spend millions of dollars building your own personal spacecraft to get close enough to actually wave your hand through one of Saturn's rings. But in an attempt to help the blind "see" what they're missing, some semblance of ...
Are you a conventional male in a conventional relationship with a conventional female? The majority of the population aged 25+ would likely answer "yes". According to stereotype, many males seem to "genetically" struggle with what many females seem to "genetically" value: the acknowledgment and appropriate appreciation of relationship milestones. If you've answered in the affirmative, worry no more, because there's an app-to-the-rescue for the helpless male: If you include yourself among the ...
These magical beans can keep your coffee hot for hours. Not blazing hot, burn your tongue on the first sip, and not disappointingly lukewarm, but coffee fit for every baby bear—just right. Genius.
What would it be like to have a super-realistic humanoid modeled after you...and then come face-to-face with the moving, life-like version of yourself... Creepy? To say the least.
Here is an interesting use of AR for a librarian. Anybody read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? The book does a great job exploring Augmented Reality in a future thriller & it actually has a moving library! Highly Recommended!
I've been dealing with emotional difficulty for many years. It started when I had surgery for the epilepsy I was dealing, and quite literally, dying with. Since the surgery on March 28, 1990 I have had no seizures, but I have had plenty of emotional difficulty. Along with that, surviving some traumatic events has added some emotional baggage...in other words struggling...along the way.
How about a laser? One that is strong enough to nudge debris out of earth orbit. That's what NASA contractor James Mason wants to do, and his lab simulations suggest that the idea is possible. Mason wants to use a 5kW ground-based laser and a ground-based 1.5 meter telescope to spot potentially hazardous space waste and shove it off, by about 200 meters per day of lasering. It's kind-of like air traffic control for near earth orbit.
