In case you haven't noticed, I absolutely adore video games. Most of my friends don't, so to get my fix of knowledgable video game conversation I have turned to podcasts. They're free, they feature the smartest people in games journalism, and can be enjoyed while doing just about anything. Working. Walking the dog. Crying yourself to sleep. Whatever you're into.
PETA wouldn't consider James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau's ingenious flypaper clock very eco-friendly, but I might beg to differ. The clock doesn't require any electricity or batteries. Instead it captures flies and converts the bodies of the dead insects into energy. Eight dead flies makes for roughly twelve days of power. Not bad.
I love broccoli. I love cake. I know zucchini bread is sweet and delicious, but savoury broccoli cake? I'll have to take Kitchenist's word for it and give this unusual recipe a try:
The internet has a fetish for fried food. Actually, scratch that. America has a fetish for fried food. So, if you're gonna dive right in that vat of oil, why not dive deep. Like calories and calories and calories deep.
Bamboo is easy to grow, but there are a few things you should know before starting. There are hundreds of species of bamboo and they can be roughly divided into either running or clumping bamboos. Almost all cold hardy bamboos are runners and almost all tropical bamboos are clumpers. Running bamboos send out root like rhizomes underground and can spread many feet each year. Clumping bamboos slowly expand and stay in a tight clump with canes close together. We grow dozens of cold hardy bamboo ...
Gas prices across the United States have skyrocketed, with today's national average for regular unleaded gas at $3.51 a gallon, with California leading the pack at $3.90 a gallon. AAA reports that last week's national average was just $3.37. That's a $0.14 increase in just one week! Just one month ago, the average was $3.12. A year ago—$2.75 a gallon. Actually, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) states the price of gas hasn't been this high since since 2008 when it hit $3.57 in ...
Halyomorpha halys, squash bug, shield bug ... What's in a name? A pest is a pest and the brown marmorated stink bug is a pest par excellence. Though some home gardeners are content to use insecticides, you'll find that it's generally easier to work with nature than against it. And let's face it: trading noxious bugs for noxious chemicals isn't much of a victory. Particularly if you're growing food.
Muay Boran Muay Boran (Ancient Boxing) is an all-inclusive term for the ancient boxing arts of Thailand, from which modern Muay Thai was born. In the old days, fighters would wrap their hands with strips of twisted hemp cloth or hemp rope. Although it is commonly thought that fighters would dip their wrapped hands in broken glass, this is largely a myth. They did, however, dip their hands in water in order to harden the rope.
In this article, I'll show you how to make a high-powered, long-range, air-powered rocket gun. This launcher is based on a sprinkler valve, a modified propane tank, and a few other components. Though not hard to make, this device is VERY dangerous! The rocket can seriously harm, if not kill any living thing it's shot at. Here's a video of it in action, quite an accurate shot by my friend Chris... Parts
Bikes are a great form of transportation. They use human energy more efficiently than any other machine. You can keep it in your closet or hallway. You can even take it on the train in a pinch. However, this portability is also the bike's biggest draw back. If you own a bike in the city, chances are it will be stolen. Locks barely deter thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars. Throw the bike thieves for a loop and make a tilt-sensitive alarm. It will hopefully startle your bike's assaila...
Rockets are lots of fun when you are launching them. However, finding them can be an arduous if not maddening task. Fancy space rockets have lots of tracking equipment to make touchdowns as simple as pie. Today, we look at embedding LEDs into your hobby rocket for easy night flight fun!
Everyone dreams of having super powers. Flying, invisibility, and x-ray vision are popular, but my favorite is fire power! I've always wanted to be Wheeler from the Captain Planet kids show, and now I can with these handheld fireballs of awesomeness. The fireballs burn at a low temperature, so they are safe to hold in your hand and throw (shoot) at imaginary enemies.
VNC is a great protocol that you can use on Windows and Linux machines to remotely control computers. This is useful if you need to control your computer when away from home, help your grandma check her email, or help a client with a disk cleanup. VNC is secure in the sense that it requires authentication in order to make the connection, but after that, the data is sent over the internet unencrypted. This means that an attacker could sniff your traffic and snoop everything that's going on. Th...
When it comes to social engineering, Null Byte is here to show you how it's done. Social engineering is the key fundamental to unlocking tons of possibilities and opportunities in your everyday life. So, what is social engineering? Social engineering can be called many things. It's taking nothing and turning it into something. It's taking the bad and making it good. Above everything else, it's the art of manipulating the world and people around you—coercing that salesman into giving you a low...
Is dessert your deadliest vice? Try adding even more decadence to the equation—heavy, gooey chocolate with hints of crispy bacon and smokey bourbon, AKA the calorie-rich bacon bourbon brownie. Adapted from Slash Food, this after dinner treat isn't for the faint of heart.
Gone are the days when you had to carry a clunky DynaTAC to make phone calls, pocket phone book for you contact list, Sony Discman for your tunes, and wallet for you cash and credit cards. Today, all you need is your smartphone. To be specific, Google's Nexus S 4G on Sprint.
Jim Lahey's no-knead pizza dough is more time consuming than Jamie Oliver's "cheat's pizza", but it's quicker and simpler than the more traditional dough recipes. The rise time is only two hours, and the kneading is minimal. I still prefer Jamie's pizza, but I sense this is because I haven't quite mastered Lahey's recipe yet.
Some cops already have the ability to extract data from your cell phone using handheld forensic devices, but soon police officers will have a new mobile data collection toy to play with—an Apple iPhone. Actually, it's an iPhone-based device that connects directly to the back of an iPhone, which is designed to give law enforcement an accurate and immediate identification of a suspect based on their facial features, fingerprints and even their eyes.
Solar Shades Looks like it's going to be another hot summer and this time of year, I always get questions about the best kind of Shades for the home! I may be a little bias in my opinion because I'm going through a more minimalist "less is more" style in my life right now. Taking the more modern design approach that is very popular right now, I wanted to talk a little about Solar Shades for the home.
This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to install the Ubuntu 9.10 operating system (Karmic Koala) on your computer. I have a Suzuki Kuiper 1411 HKS notebook computer with 2.1 GHz Intel Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 320GB hard drive. It has a dedicated 256MB Nvdia GeForce 9300M GS graphics card and 1270++MB of VRAM in SLI mode.
I'm in the middle of a project right now that uses POV for every shot. One of these shots involves a person swinging a golf club. A normal steadi-cam doesn't work very well for this, so I thought it might be easier to just build a helmet cam. Here's how I did it:
Editing with the Canon 7d and Final Cut Pro couldn't be easier, here are some tips to help you get started.
Artist Austin Houldsworth of the UK has come up with a device that drastically speeds up the process of fossilisation. Entitled Two Million & 1AD, Houldsworth is capable of creating a fossil in a few months (which otherwise might require thousands of years). Houldsworth is currently experimenting with objects such as a pineapple and phesant, but ultimately hopes to fossilize a human. Houldsworth proposes:
Despite the recent problems with the 1.04 update for PlayStation 3 gamers, Call of Duty: Black Ops remains a juggernaut for Activision in the gaming community, and its sales alone prove it.
I finally got around to trying out another one of Will's mad science experiments and found out that this one was actually more satisfying (and less frustrating) than my slightly uncooperative jar jet. There's something very pleasing about making potassium nitrate at home in the kitchen and then watching the transformation from semitransparent liquid to spiky, frozen crystals. That was the best part for me, second only to igniting it with its sugar companion.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Harvesting items from animals no longer requires wasting precious time chasing after them. During last Saturday's Weekly Workshop, we built a few different kinds of animal harvesters that worked in different ways, but for this guide we will be building the most compact and easy to use harvesters we made over the weekend.
Facebook games are ostensibly all about connecting their players. Yet, in many ways they exist on an isolated island. That's one of the reasons traditional gamers and game franchises have avoided Facebook in the past. And all of the breakout hits so far on Facebook have been cheap PC game ripoffs from the 90s, like FarmVille and ports of other popular casual games.
Most of the indie and vintage games discussed in Indie Games Ichiban are pretty cheap to purchase. They rarely top twenty bucks, which is one of the major advantages independent games have against their sixty-buck, major league counterparts. But if you think $60 for a game and $300 for a PS3 or Xbox 360 seems like a lot, then you haven't played Steel Battalion or seen the TurboExpress. They go above and beyond what normal gamers are willing to spend for questionably entertaining products. Her...
Remember what life was like before your iPhone? Before there were palm-sized smartphones with seemingly endless features, there were phones like Motorola's RAZR that peaked with its embedded camera. Before that, there were simple flip phones with texting capabilities, bulky two-pound Gordon Gekkos—even briefcase phones.
If you found the world renown Body Worlds exhibition gnarly and perverse, perhaps you'll find this latest parade of plastination a little less so—considering we don't share the same DNA as these specimens of jerky-in-the-name-of-science. The Koerperwelten der Tiere—or Animal Body Worlds–doesn't showcase preserved corporal matter, but rather 20 odd plastinated mammals, currently on display at the Cologne Zoo in Cologne, Germany.
The widely used expression "free as a bird" intimates an enviable existence: delicate, yet mighty wings transporting to destinations no human could so breezily venture. But despite their fanciful, superhero ability, in truth, the avian race leads one of the most difficult existences in the animal kingdom. Yes, birds have existed for eons—they likely evolved from small dinosaurs of the Jurassic period—but for these creatures, life can be ruthless.
Two new and radically different ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) have burst into the news in the last week, and illustrate the very best of an innovative phenomenon: the commercial tie-in ARG, and the public service ARG.
So the fiance and I cannot imagine spending upwards of $500 on a DJ for our wedding when we have tons of perfectly good music on our computers. And the cross-fade feature... Genius!
It's somewhat funny that the HTC ThunderBolt smartphone would be released around the same time as Apple's new Thunderbolt technology. Mainly because HTC's smartphone isn't exactly something I would compare to a flash of lightning, which averages around 60,000 miles per second. But Apple's new interconnect surely deserves the Thunderbolt designation.
In this prank, all of the cast members will be involved because let's be honest, it's funnier when all of the "talent" is getting hurt.The premise is that each one of the cast members will have to complete a stunt in order for the next one to start. There will be eight individual stunts -- one for Preston, Wee-Man, "Danger" Ehren, England, Dunn, Bam, Pontius, and Steve-O. Each cast members will start in an enclosed box. Once their box opens they will be released into a 60x60' area that will b...
Revealed! The secret to learning a language quickly. It's a little known technique diplomats and royalty have used for centuries. I lucked up on it by analyzing how I could quickly boost my language and workforce marketability. You get it here by design.
This stunt involves the entire Jackass Crew wearing nothing but speedos and connected by ropes that are attached to them by the waist one-by-one like a linked chain. The length of the rope should be roughly 2-3ft long separating each person. A ledge or platform about 1ft in width can be either wood planks or some type of industrial metal, if all of their weight won’t be able to support the wood. This platform is sitting over a pool by a couple of feet. Inside of the pool is some kind of disgu...
Last week's challenge brought up a good question (thanks Lisa) regarding the functionality of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition, both online and in print form. The word TACTICAL was the answer to the first puzzle in that challenge, but when you search for the word directly in the print version, it can't be found. Likewise, when you search the online dictionary on Hasbro's site, you won't find it either. Go ahead, try it. You won't find it looking for TACTICAL specifically.
OSPD1 In 1978, the first SCRABBLE Dictionary was conceived and published by Merriam-Webster, with the help of the National Scrabble Association (NSA). The idea was to include any word that was found in one of the five major dictionaries at the time:
Remember the arcades? Were you saddened when they closed up one by one, leaving no outlet to actually go out and socialize while you played video games? With all the home consoles and internet connectivity, gaming has evolved, but the social factor has been eliminated. Sure we can play against others, but they may be miles and miles away. Remember back in the day when you could go down to the corner store to play your favorite game and show off your skills in front of a crowd? Well, all is no...
