Tower defense games have covered a lot of creative ground over the last five years. They've gone from simple desktop amusements to a staple of the indie game scene, having been integreated into nearly every other type of game and released on every platform. They have taken place in ancient times, the far future, and on alien planets. But one place they (and most other types of video games) have never taken place is the real world. Not a virtual recreation of the world, but on the very terra f...
Video games are the newest major expressive media. As such, their role in society is still being defined continuously. A monumentally important example of this took place yesterday at the US Supreme Court. After a long deliberation, the highest court in the land handed down a decision invalidating a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors on the grounds that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, like movies and books.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Atomic Web as the best web browser for iOS devices, and while I believe it is a superior option, Atomic Web is not the only alternative web browser you can use on your iOS device. There are three more—Dual Browser, iCabMobile, and iSwifter—that are all great options because of their unique features. Let’s check them out.
One of the things I enjoy the most about making tutorial videos is watching the reactions. In YouTube's backoffice, they give me great tools like Insight, Demographics, Discovery and Hot Spots. I can tell when people's attention drops off when watching. I can see what age groups and gender my audience is made up of. And... I can see where most people came from to get to see my videos.
In this episode of MindPower, Bryce shows how to set up, light, and film a drawing or sketching video for use in instruction or speedpainting videos.
In this episode of MindPower, Bryce shows how to make your videos sound their very best by using the same techniques as the pros! These techniques can even be applied using free programs like Windows Movie Maker and Audacity.
Origami Skunk The Skunk is a model by Nick Robinson. Due to the use of a sink fold I rate this model's level low intermediate. If you're new to origami, be prepared to encounter some difficulties.
No matter if you've used one or not, you've got to admit that 3D printers are pretty darn awesome, especially the self-replicating ones that extrude molten plastic and the shoebox-sized versions that use mesmerizing stereolithography to build tiny objects layer by layer. But what's even cooler? A solar-powered printer that uses the sun's energy to melt sand and make 3D objects out of glass.
Six months ago, 1.3 million registered users of Gawker Media had their passwords compromised when the site was hacked by Gnosis. The passwords were encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made publicly available for all to see. Just three weeks ago, Sony Pictures was hacked by LulzSec, with 1 million passwords taken and 40,000 made publicly available. Comparing the two data sets, Troy Hunt found 88 accounts on both sites that used the same email address, and of those accounts, 67% use...
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?
Some speculated that LG's Thrill 4G would be the first 3D smartphone to hit the U.S. marketplace, but HTC's EVO 3D hit shelves first, going on sale last Friday for all Sprint customers. It boasts a slew of high-end features, including a 4.3-inch touchscreen display with 540 x 960 qHD resolution, 1.2Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, 3G and 4G connectivity, and Android 2.3 Gingerbread with HTC Sense. But obviously, the best part about this new device is its three-dimensional capabili...
Is that House? Built in Minecraft? Well, time to cross out one more item off my bucket list! As inspiration for this week's Minecraft-themed Tuesday Giveaway (enter here to win an awesome Minecraft Pickaxe!), I present a roundup of amazing things found in Minecraft.
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 ...
I have been wanting to share this great menubar app for a long time now (2+ years), but I really didn't know where. Just looking at Mac How-To World made me think to post it here.
Kevin & Maryann Gianni post daily videos about health, raw foods, fitness...they frequently answer questions and post recipe videos. I love them. :o)
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is one of the best multiplayer games of all time. It took nine years to make, and the developers have supported it with more post-release free updates than any other game ever. Four years after its release in 2007, it is still immensely popular, and although its price has gone down, Valve has managed to continue making a massive profit by introducing the first successful microtransaction model in a mainstream American shooter. That model has been so successful that it lo...
As a follow up to my article 10 Time Saving Menu Bar Applications for the Mac, this video covers Butler, one of my favorite menu bar applications. Produced by ManyTricks.com, Butler can help you quickly launch applications, websites, and other items on your Mac. It also includes a web search feature, a clipboard manager, a hot key launcher, and much more.
Focusing has always been a problem with photographers, and even with today's digital cameras it's not easy. The most obvious problem is trying to accurately focus on the subject before exposure. Next, you have to choose the correct aperture size in relation to the depth of field, and make sure you're using the correct exposure. Then there's lens aberrations, where a certain ray of light does not converge to a single focal point in the desired image, resulting in some light leaking away from t...
This video gives a step by step tutorial how to service a Peugeot 206 with the 1.4 liter engine. Please note that the video is not in English, but you can follow along by watching the video and following the written instructions below. Work under the car.
Playing Super Mario Brothers for the NES is the first thing I can ever remember doing, at age 3 sitting on the carpet at my grandparents' house. It was a special game for an entire generation, including British youths Andrej and Adam Zamoyski. It inspired them to eventually become video game testers and designers themselves; Andrej at Lionhead Studios and Adam at Headstrong Games, and then Zynga Mobile UK (until recently called Wonderland Software, developers of Godfinger for the iPhone).
Dropbox continues to make headlines with their recent programming blunder which left the accounts of its 25 million customers wide open during a four-hour time span. During the duration, anyone in the world could access any Dropbox profile by typing in any password. And seeing as this wasn't the first security failure, everyone, including the most loyal users are considering dropping the Dropbox.
Age doesn't matter in the world of programming, only skills, and recent high school grad Jack Eisenmann definitely has them. He recently built a homebrew 8-bit computer from scratch, calling it the DUO Adept. A worn television makes up the monitor and speaker system, an old keyboard acts as the input controller and the actual computer itself is housed inside a clear Rubbermaid container, consisting of 100 TTL chips and a ton of wire.
Here's a lovely way to brighten up your table for a dinner party or a lovely gift to give to someone else. Knit a FLOWER NAPKIN RING.
Yesterday, I got an email from my mom. She asked if there was a way to send her colleagues a bunch of links to online documents, rather than weighing down an email with attachments. I knew that Google Docs had what she was looking for. As I started to write her an explanation, I thought, "Hm, I wonder if Google has one of their handy little YouTube videos on this topic."
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...
The Tokyo Game Show (TGS) is the biggest video game expo in the most game crazy country on Earth. It is kind of a big deal. As such, their "indie" game showcase/contest Sense of Wonder Night (SOWN) is a major opportunity for developers of all shapes and sizes to showcase their work to important industry leaders and expo attendees. 2011 will be SOWN's fourth year, and it began accepting submissions yesterday.
Lady Gaga and Polaroid's upcoming Grey Label Camera Glasses can record video and snap pictures, but who really wants to show the world what they're up too on those mini LCD screens? It's nothing more than a fancy gimmick between a pop star and a failing company. Isn't the intention of camera glasses to capture things around you as they are? Drawing attention to yourself with clunky video-displaying eyewear kind of defeats the purpose, but that's why they're "fashion" glasses and not practical...
Apple's newest version of their Final Cut Pro software was just released today, built from the ground up for modern 64-bit Mac computers, capable of handling 4K video and featuring the new Magnetic Timeline. But this time around Apple is doing something totally different when it comes to sales, making Final Cut Pro X a download only program from the Mac App Store, meaning no more trips to the Apple Store and no more boxes and discs to keep track of—just purchase from the comfort of your own c...
Pop Art by Mr Whaite is a cool tumblr featuring a series of neon film posters for popular movies. The artist says: "I love neon signs—they’re hypnotic, sexy, sleazy and tacky all at the same time—and I’ve always thought it would be cool if cinemas used them to advertise films. So with that in mind, I thought I’d have a go at designing some animated Movie Neon. My first attempt is Ghostbusters—an obvious choice really, particularly as neon featured heavily in the video for Ray Parker Jr’s sing...
Blizzard Entertainment is considered one of the most successful game developers in the world. Ever since the release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (their debut Warcraft game) in 1994, they've set sales records and created genre-defining games with remarkable consistency. But the company wasn't founded in 1994—it all started back in 1991 when they were called Silicon & Synapse.
Video games are the most prevalent type of interactive media, but certainly not the only one. The interactive music video for the song "3 Dreams of Black" by supergroup ROME and digital artist Chris Milk utilizes the latest web design technology, video game influenced art and interactivity, and large crowd-sourced elements to form a compelling work of art. ROME is composed of producer extraordinaire Danger Mouse, Italian film composer Daniele Luppi, Norah Jones, and Jack White. Their recent e...
German photographer Peter Langenhahn's process is incredibly laborious; similar to photographer Lori Nix, he can spend up to three months on a single photograph. But while Nix spends the time constructing elaborate sets, Langenhahn is anchored to the computer, editing.
Video games have been a purely digital medium for some decades now. They exist in the electronic nether, embedded on discs and projected on screens. Since digital distribution has gained popularity, even the physical manifestation of the game disc is going away, leaving games (especially digitally distributed indie games) more ethereal than ever before. It is unclear whether this slightly unsettling fact was on the minds of the three people who made Receipt Racer, but regardless, it stands as...
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.
For Windows laptops and PCs it's easy to install Linux. However for Macs, it's a different story. There are people installing Ubuntu on Macbooks and so far I've noticed that they are using 9.10. I've remastered my own Ubuntu 10.04 complete with playing flash videos and other applications already pre-installed on a DVD. Plus, it can boot on laptops with Nvidia graphic cards. If you'd like to see my workaround for Nvidia check out my article on remastering Ubuntu.
It's been a long time coming, but Microsoft has finally released a software development kit (SDK) for the Kinect on Windows 7 PCs. The word "hacking" is no longer needed, thanks to the free beta download available at Microsoft Research that allows anyone with a Windows computer and some coding knowledge to take advantage of the Kinect's motion-sensing capabilities.
I don't know what I'd do without my computer. I can't do my job without the internet. I communicate with employers, friends, and family through emails, video chat and Twitter. I schedule meetings and plan deadlines. I bank. I shop. I read the news. I play games. I watch my favorite shows. Yes, I'd be rather lost without this little plastic box of circuits.
I shot this X-Men: First Class Spoof with the new Technicolor CineStyle picture profile (it was a 5d, as well). I had done some initial testing, when the profile first came out, but never shot a real project on it. This X-Men short is my first real world experience with the profile.
I shot this X-Men: First Class Spoof with the new Technicolor CineStyle picture profile (it was a 5d, as well). I had done some initial testing when the profile first came out, but never shot a real project on it. This X-Men short is my first real world experience with the profile.
A short video on Jon Rafman, Google Street View "photographer" (previously 1, 2).
