Reading Search Results

News: Book Review - The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

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.

Weekend Homework: How to Become a Null Byte Contributor (2/17/2012)

Grab your thinking caps and get your hack on. Null Byte is officially seeking contributors on a weekly basis who are willing to take the time to educate the Null Byte community on anything, from hardware hacks to life hacks. Contributors that write tutorials will be featured on the Null Byte blog, as well as the front page of WonderHowTo (providing it's up to par, of course).

News: Organize Yo'sef! Part One

It’s that time of year (in the U.S. anyway) when people are focused on getting organized -- or rather wishing they were organized. Being organized is great, it affords physical space, mental space and all but insures higher efficiency. But wishing and doing are two entirely different things. Wondering how to achieve the bliss of knowing where your stuff is? It’s easy... if you start small and don’t waste your valuable time watching TV shows or reading magazine articles on “how to” do it.

Community Contest: Code the Best Hacking Tool, Win Bragging Rights

Here's something fun for the Null Byte community to do—a coding competition! This week, I wanted to get everyone involved by offering you all a nice library of possible program types to choose from and try to code. At the end of this competition, all of the submitted programs will be reviewed by the community and myself. The coder that receives the most votes will be dubbed THE BEST.

Google Dorking: AmIDoinItRite?

What is Google Dorking? Well, simply put, "Google Dorking" is just an efficient way to utilise keywords in order to perform very specific searches on a given subject. In this case, one would look for websites/servers that are vulnerable to attacks or are configured improperly by using specific search criteria that should yeild results, should it find matches to known mistakes/errors in a website or webserver.

How To: Extract Images and Text From PDF Files

Since PDF files are so popular in both our daily life and work, we see them everywhere. And sometimes we find there are terrfic images or text in the PDF files and we want to save them as seperate files for future use, such as in a presentation or post. Here's the question: how can we save those elements from the non-editable file formats?

PAX Prime: A Video Game Convention That's Actually Fun

There are a lot of fantastic video games out there. Indie Games Ichiban's bread and butter is making sure that you steer clear of the bad ones and embrace the good. But really, the biggest goal here is to help everyone have more fun. To that end, today a game is not recommended, but an event. If you like games—not just video games—but tabletop, board and even hopscotch, then PAX Prime is one of the best events you could possibly go to.

News: Dota 2 Gamers Compete in Unprecedented $1,000,000 Tournament

Most indie game developers will never see a million dollars in their bank accounts, and I certainly doubt that Eul, the anonymous developer responsible for the original version of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), expected to. But now even the fans can earn a little green. Some lucky and talented DotA players are about to win $1,000,000 for playing the unreleased sequel to the free unsupported Warcraft III mod from 2003.

Emerald Knights: A Palace of Nerdery

Before last Sunday I hadn't been to a proper game store since I was in middle school. Over ten years ago. If you decide to stop reading right now because I obviously don't care enough about MTG to be writing this thing, I don't blame you. But I tell you, friends, as someone who has denied the utter awesomeness of their hobby for too long, that going to Emerald Knights in Burbank made me feel at home. I want to tell you about it and explain why I will be back many times in the future.

News: Book Review - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Have you ever been in the situation where someone whose taste in books you respect and generally agree with recommends a book that you have seen from time to time and you’ve always thought it looked just “Meh” and then you finally read War Dances which is by the same author and it’s amazing and funny and sad and you think, why didn’t I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, like, three years ago? No? Is that just me?

News: Welcome to 0x10c World! A Community for Mojang's Latest MMO Space Game

Yesterday, Mojang announced their next video game project 0x10c, and the response has been tremendous. Discussions have covered everything from the math mystery over the game's name, to creating projects that interpret the assembly instruction code the in-game computers use (more on that later), to the debate over why a monthly fee would be required to play online in the "multiverse". To answer that last one, Mojang wants to run everyone's virtual computers in their cloud, even if the user is...

Hack Logs and Linux Commands: What's Going On Here?

This morning, I received a message from a friend who was reading a hack log, and she had some questions about the commands used. This got me thinking, as Linux has a ton of commands and some can be archaic, yet useful. We are going to go over everything you need to know to read a hack log and hopefully implant the steps in your head for future use.

News: Introduction to Link Building

This article is going to cover the basics of link building. Why do we want to build links? First of all, what is a link? A link is a hyperlink, actually. You click on it and it brings you to another webpage. I'm sure you've all clicked on links before. Well, what we want to do is we want to build links from other sites back to our own site. Why do we want to do this? Google’s problem, as I see it, and this is based on thousands of hours of research, reading articles and watching videos and li...

How To: Protect Your Door with High Voltage

In this article, I'll show you how to create a simple yet effective way of scaring off intruders. Of course, there are methods around this approach, but it's great for office pranks and general fun. The project requires a little background knowledge in electronics and circuitry, like reading schematics and using a soldering iron.

How To: Make Crop Circles or Are Aliens Among Us?

Does this video prove that otherworldly intelligent life has visited Earth? No. It does not prove anything other than there are designs ‘etched’ onto the surface of a field. Does the video immediately above prove that otherworldly intelligent life hasn’t visited Earth? Yeah, you saw it coming; no, it proves nothing more than humans are able to ‘etch’ designs in a field of grain.

How To: How Anyone Can Retire Early & Wealthy, Part 3: The Stock Market

If you've read Alex Long's last two articles in this series (Part 1 and Part 2), you know by now that making money rarely is risk free, and generally plays out to be a high risk-high gain/loss scenario. The best way to make money is to have money, so for this article, lets assume a financial backing of about $10,000 dollars. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be working with online trading systems in this article. Some stocks are traded on exchanges, where buyers meet sellers and decide...

News: UK Newspaper Runs Series of Yellow Anti-Video Game Articles

The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.

News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Grand Theft Auto's Sci-Fi Genesis Granddad

Grand Theft Auto 3 was the biggest video game of the last decade, by far, introducing open-world adventure games to consoles, a genre that now rivals shooters and sports games for market dominance. A huge map, decentralized narrative, and myriad of interlocking quests and objectives that happen in a flexible order all became hallmarks of the "new" genre, along with the ability to shape the morality and reputation of your character. And most importantly, all of the quests and stories are compl...

Minecraft: Her Crushed Dreams

What happens when a person who has never played a building sandbox game tries it for the first time? Reality happens. The harsh reality of human nature. You would think playing with friends in a creation game would be utopia, but in truth it's more like being stuck with people that would walk all over you if it provided a softer path.

Not Your Ordinary Gamer: Yahtzee Croshaw Does It All

Most employed in the game industry have two-word job titles that start with “game”—game designer, game producer, game critic, game tester, etc. Usually, they’re one or the other, even though some can be both a game designer and a game tester or game critic and game tester. And rarely does one person get to call themselves a “game everything”. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is the exception.