About Today's topic Today we will talk about diagnosing and fixing connection problems. Let's face it - the truth is everyone who uses a computer and has an internet connection will have to deal with this at some point. Connection problems often occur at the wrong time and it is a real pain.
Watch out Instagram, there's a new free, sociable photography filter app that hit the iTunes App Store recently, and it just might be some good competition. It's called PicYou and might sound familiar to some of you photo sharing fiends out there. That's because it's been a successful web-based alternative to Instagram for about six months now.
Null Byte is looking for forum moderators! Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 9. This mission delves a little further into Unix commands and remote directory traversal (which is just a fancy term for going through folders blindly).
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 8. This meant that we had to learn some more basic Unix commands.
Nearly everyone has the capacity to be a cheater. Sometime or another, all Xbox users have yearned to get their gamerscore to unimaginable thresholds—for bragging and egotistical purposes. I can relate to this desire. However, I also don't want to mod my gamerscore, because it's just unfair and not nearly as much fun as doing it the honest way. To me, it's synonymous to entering the cheats into a game after you've beaten it. Cheats can add new life into a game once you're done, but since the ...
Another great Community Byte in the bag! This week was really cool, especially with programming going on twice a week. We transitioned to the new times very smoothly with no one left behind, from what I can tell.
Bluffing is one of the key components of poker. You may have a horrible hand, but if you can play it cool and raise the bet, you might just be able to convince your opponents otherwise and induce a few folds. But if you can't handle a little subterfuge, then you shouldn't be playing the game. Even the slightest tell could give you away. You have to maintain a poker face, no matter what.
With those icy winter months setting in, it's time to start sipping your bourbon warm. Spike your classic eggnog, hot chocolate, and even lattes with a splash of Wild Turkey bourbon. Below, five recipes to add a little fire to your typical cold weather beverages. Adjust the recipes to get more servings, and you've got some great ideas for Christmas party favors.
This week, in addition to the double exposure weekly challenge, we have a promotion specifically for iPhone users. The International iPhoneography Exhibition has asked for Phone Snap's best iPhone shots to enter for a chance to win a spot in the exhibition which will be taking place on December 16-22 at The Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York City.
Welcome to the Goodnight Byte for HackThisSite, Basic Mission 4. In Friday's session, we tackled some coding in Gobby. Nothing special, just a few modifications to the NullBot script we made a few session ago, and some education on regular expressions. Apart from coding, we did our scheduled HackThisSite mission. We had to take on some JavaScript, which was a new thing for Null Byte. This mission taught us about client-side HTML manipulation through JavaScript injections. This just means that...
Learning the basics of SEO In this tutorial I will go over the basics of Search Engine Optimisation. The "white-hat-way" ("black-hat" SEO is tricking Google and other search engine providers, this will get you into trouble quick!).
Since its inception, Google+ users have been a loud, vocal bunch, and they've made their displeasure known about many issues, especially on the lack of support for pseudonyms, Google Apps, and brand pages. It's been especially galling for many Google loyalists, who found their Google+ profiles suspended, when they ended up violating the Google+ "common name" policy.
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.
Bitcoin is a new currency built off "Satoshi Nakamoto's" (alias) 2008 Bitcoin white-paper. Bitcoin provides its users with a way to make peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions without having to use a bank as a mediator. There is no middle man, no corporation backing it, and no one has access to your money, except you. It's decentralized from government, run by the people, for the people.
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
The UK seems to have become an international hotbed of gamers going wild on society. Last week a British Navy sailor killed his superior officer, which parts of the tabloid media blamed on Grand Theft Auto. Today, a more concretely video game related tale of real life violence comes to us from The Daily Mail.
We've covered Glitch before, the oddball indie social MMO involving the minds behind Flickr, Katamari Damacy, and Game Neverending. Yesterday, the game officially left Beta and entered general release. Anyone can create an account and start playing for free, although there are freemium elements in the form of real money purchasable clothing items.
Most kids who play video games will never become professional gamers. Those that do are part of a very select group— it's like being a professional actor or athlete. It's nice work if you can get it. For everyone else, the sad realization usually arrives sooner or later that time spent playing games might not have the practical rewards that homework or working hard at your job might deliver.
Now that Google+ is open to everyone, there are a lot of new people who aren't techies trying out the service. When you first sign on, it can be overwhelming. I've decided to round up a bunch of resources to help you get started, and recommend some people for you to follow, if you want to stay on top of tips and new announcements.
For more than a decade, free-to-play games with microtransactions (also called In-App Purchase or IAP) by which players can pay real money for in-game content have been the industry standard for online success in Asia. Mainstream American gamers have long resisted these "freemium" games, with World of Warcraft and other subscription based online games reigning supreme, and being seen as more AAA than their free-ish counterparts. Casual games developers have encountered no such problems, and m...
By now you may have heard that the Diablo 3 Friends and Family beta testing has begun. Diablo III is the next highly anticipated addition in the Diablo trilogy, and is the sequel to Diablo 2, originally published all the way back in 2000. The game is the product of Blizzard Entertainment, a company well known for its very successful Warcraft and Starcraft franchises. Like the other Blizzard series, Diablo III will be exclusively for PCs at launch. Console players can rejoice as the lead proje...
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR) was the biggest AAA release two weeks ago, which has drawn rave reviews and sold well across the entire world. But if you've actually played the game, then you've seen something annoying that it and many other games share. It happens at the beginning of the game—every time you turn it on.
The used video game market represents a huge portion of retail game sales. It's the only avenue in which most people can afford to buy AAA games. But game publishers aren't exactly big fans of used game sales, since they only benefit from gamers buying new ones. GameStop and Best Buy are huge corporate interests, so EA and the rest of the big publishers out there have not been able to push them around on the issue of used game sales... so far.
Studio Ghibli is the most well known anime feature film studio in the world. For over 26 years, their films have represented the peak of mainstream anime, and since Disney began distributing their films in America back in 1997, they've become a household name here in the States—not just in Japan. In 2001, they even bested Disney and Pixar, taking home a Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award for Spirited Away. Eight years later, Ghibli and Fukuoka-based developer Level-5 announced that they...
BioShock is one of the best games of all time. It combines FPS gameplay with RPG storytelling and supports multiple systems better than any other game, that much is for sure. And the setting of its amazing story is a place called Rapture, a high-tech libertarian colony at the bottom of the Atlantic built by Andrew Ryan, a greying industrialist clearly inspired by John Galt and his creator Ayn Rand, the mother of Objectivism and modern American libertarianism in general. Ryan is a Soviet exile...
Crysis 2 is the current standard for high-quality graphics in video games. No other game looks so smooth, so colorful, so... ultra-real. German developer Crytek has built their reputation on PC game technology to the limit, and the CryENGINE 3 graphics engine they used to make Crysis 2 might be the most powerful tool for creating 3D video game graphics on Earth. As of yesterday, it's also free for anyone, yourself included, to download from Crytek's website here.
Indie developers and their games have enjoyed massive success distributing through Steam, notably Zeboyd Games and Carpe Fulgar. While that bodes well for the future of indies on the platform, Steam has to devote a lot of front-page real estate to AAA games and thus can't promote small indies as well as a dedicated indie game distribution service could. IndieCity out of the UK seems like it could be that, but today a consortium of three German game companies launched their attempt at beating ...
To most gamers, video games are largely devoid of place. In the post-arcade era, the only real world locations most associate with video games are GameStop and the couch. But there's so much more to them than that!
Hard drive space is one of the cheapest things you can add to your computer. But people take it for granted, thus game developers have given up any efforts in keeping games compact. With all of its expansion packs, World of Warcraft takes up more than 60 GB of hard drive space, and almost any AAA game consumes a gig or two.
More than a year ago, Twitter rolled out the first phase of its Promoted Tweets ad service, which consisted of selected tweets from advertising partners like Best Buy and Sony Pictures receiving "promoted" exposure in the search results pages on Twitter and in the trends lists. These ads were clearly labeled as such, so it was never any real bother to Twitter users.
The whole world is connected to the Internet, which means bank for advertising companies who track your every move online. Most of the content you see on the web is free, and that's because of advertisements. If there were no ads, none of us would be addicted to the Internet because none of us would be able to afford it.
Deep in their heart of hearts, most Americans dream of having their car festooned with missile launchers and machine guns. Anyone who cuts them off or looks at them funny in traffic could be dispensed with quick and extreme justice, leaving a real-life James Bond and his passengers free to pursue their American dreams faster than everyone else. Racing games and shooting games are among the two most popular types of video games. So why aren't there more games where one can race cars and shoot ...
In the last decade, burglary rates in the United States have fluctuated little with over 2 million burglaries each year. In 2009, nearly three quarters of all burglaries were from residential properties, with over sixty percent being forcible entry. But we all know burglars don't like confrontation—they prefer breaking into apartments and houses when its owners are away. And that's why it's a must for apartment dwellers and homeowners to be on the defensive, even when they're not home.
Xe Systems, the Private-Defense-Contractor-Formerly-Known-As-Blackwater, has been busy attempting to re-brand themselves. They have a new name, several new sub-names, and have at least titularly shifted their focus to training rather than mercenary work. Controversial founder Erik Prince is no longer with the company, which is now owned by a large investment consortium.
Have you ever wanted to ride a rollercoaster while listening to Lady Gaga? Or have the Star Wars theme auto-play when you enter your house? You can with Minecraft. Search Youtube for a popular song + Minecraft, and chances are there will be a video for it!
Got a knack for speeding? Like running red lights? Believe or not, the police have better things to be doing than pulling you over, like catching real criminals. That's why more and more cameras are popping up at known speeding zones and on street corners—so the cops can clean up the streets, compared to just ticketing them.
The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.) has provided three different energetic and passionate methods for voicing support for Ai Weiwei, the famous Chinese artist and activist who has been detained without known reason by the Chinese government since March 31st.
Could the world really be coming to an end tomorrow? Presuming you believe the biblical prediction from 89-year-old Harold Camping, May 21st, 2011 is undeniably Judgment Day. If you have confidence in that prophecy, you're probably not even reading this because you're too busy either A) preparing for the Rapture or B) sitting in your backyard bunker hoping to outwit annihilationism.
With give or take 250 million cars in America, odds are most city dwellers waste time hunting for parking spots. And while a smartphone app can't make free parking spots magically appear, it can aid in the searching process.
People ask me all the time, "Nick, what are the best blinds for my home in terms of Wood vs. Faux Wood?" Well the answer to that question is not so cut and dry. However, I can help steer you in the right direction. In this post, we will examine the pros and cons of both wood and faux wood blinds to help you make your decision.