Portal is game design milestone. Originally only available bundled in with larger cousins Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 in The Orange Box, its creators, Valve Software, changed what first person gameplay could be. It's been a stand alone product for much of the four years since its release, but never an expensive one, usually available for $5 on Steam (also created by Valve). If that barrier to entry was too high for you, or you just never got around to trying it, there are no more excuses....
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.
Beauty is a fine line between art and science for Pe Lang, a Swiss sculptor living and working in both Berlin and Zurich. The autodidact artist specializes in graceful, hand-built kinetic sculptures made of magnetic, electrical and mechanical devices, all of which are elegant and completely mesmerizing. "Positioning Systems - Falling Objects" is one of his newest contraptions, which feels like a mix of home waterfall fountains, mechanical metronomes and a busy manufacturing plant.
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.
When it comes to graphing and comparing functions, the TI-83 graphing calculator is the end-all device for math and science students. But one of the most entertaining aspects of Texas Instruments' powerful algebraic and trigonometric calculator is not the equations themselves, but rather the art that can be "equated" on them—just think of them as the mathematical equivalent of the Etch A Sketch.
As a kid, my favorite thing to do at the Natural History museum was a midday stop, when my family strolled past an antiquated looking vending machine in the museum's musty basement. The Mold-A-Rama machine was oddly shaped, George Jetson-esque, and spewed out made-to-order, brightly colored plastic dinosaurs. There was such joy in watching the liquid wax pour into the mold, and then eject a warm, custom toy—well worth the dollar or two demanded. A version of this tradition was recently elevat...
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!
It's amazing how the years seem to slip by. One day you're a dreamy, starry-eyed college student. Hopeful intern the next. Before you know it, you're just a hard working stiff like the rest of them. Even though those college years don't seem too far in the past, it's always a shock when you come across an old photo and see a somewhat fresher, baby-faced version of yourself. Think about how shocking it would be to see a time-lapse recording of years gone by, each day incrementally displaying t...
You and I know that everyone's lookin for a killer deal for cellphone service. A lot of us hear about good deals for the plans, or who's got the hottest phones at the moment. Though most of us these days are just looking for something simple, that has all we need, and is fairly cheap too. But how cheap is too cheap?
Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.
If you're willing to shell out for a mind-blowing party trick, here's another great one to add to your repertoire. Unfortunately this isn't a dirt cheap junk drawer DIY—you'll need a $40-$60 gallium kit (which doesn't include the spoon mold). What is gallium, you may ask? An amazing, man-made metal which melts at the low temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Plunk your trick spoon into a cup of hot water, and amaze. According to the Department of Energy, it's safe to handle as long as you don...
It's gigantic! It can handle over 100 simultaneous touch points! It has a curvature of 135 degrees! And best of all, it is not the newest, insanely expensive gadget to hit the market. Instead, this touchscreen was hacked together with a bunch of PCs, video cameras, projectors and cheap infrared illuminators at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. It works like this: "The cameras, illuminators and projectors are all placed behind a large, cylindrical screen (formally used as a 3D t...
If you missed our previous posts on Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal's attempt to go cyborg, here's the short and skinny: First, Bilal announced a plan to implant a camera in his head, a project entitled 3rdi, which would record his daily life while simultaneously feeding the images to monitors at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. Then, he actually did it (and, yes, it was gnarly).
Feature documentary about female orgasms. Below is the trailer for the feature Film Orgasm Inc. Orgasm Inc. (2009) is the first feature documentary by award-winning director Liz Canner. It premiered at the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival. In the shocking and hilarious documentary, filmmaker Liz Canner takes a job editing erotic videos for a drug trial for a pharmaceutical company. Her employer is developing what they hope will be the first Viagra drug for women that wins FDA approval to tr...
Yup, that's right! There is a new larp starting up near me, called Cobalt Nightmares, where the theme is Post Apocalyptic Fantasy. I have to admit, I absolutely adore the Post Apocalyptic genre (especially that awesome Fallout LARP in Poland), and I'm interested to see what happens when it becomes a fantasy game instead of a science fiction game.
It may look like a modern take on Oliver Twist but, we assure you, this is for real. Before you get too alarmed, however, you should note that the headline reads "how to steal cars" and not simply "to steal cars." We are, after all, dealing with the fine people at Machine Project, a Los Angeles-based non-profit community space organized around the investigation of "art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food."
I remember once listening to a Christian comedian making fun of the way some Christians pride themselves on all the "evil" things they don't do.
Android's answer to the BlackBerry is here, and it's called the DROID Pro. Verizon Wireless officially starts selling the Motorola DROID Pro in stores today, November 18th, and you can get your DROID Pro online, too. Verizon states the full retail price at $479.99 with a final price of $179.99 with a two-year contract (after a $100 mail-in-rebate).
What's more important in maintaining a healthy body weight? Eating healthy food or simply reducing your calorie intake?
Happy Whore-o-ween! It's that time of year again for ladies to shed their inhibitions, show off the booty, and debase themselves. It's no great surprise that Jersey Shore is 2010's most popular costume choice.
Every once in a while you stumble across a HowTo on the internet that seems too good to be true. Magic. This happens to be one of them.
If you're a believer in the power of logic, may as well skip the game tomorrow. Two math professors at the University of London have supposedly determined who will win the World Cup, and have displayed their findings as a sophisticated infographic:
If you look up the word SAWBUCK in the SCRABBLE Dictionary, you'd see that it was a sawhorse, but there's another definition that we're all probably more familiar with:
The art of eating leftover pizza. Some like it cold. Some even whip it up into a leftover pizza sandwich. Me, I like my pizza reheated.
Kurt Harris, MD, writes about paleolithic nutrition at his highly recommended blog, www.paleonu.com.
This is a follow up to my last post on watching games in 3D. My main concern (because apparently I'm something of a technical snob, since no one else I went with considered it an issue), was that I perceived a lack of definition for a theater presentation.
The Illusion Contest of the Year recently announced their top ten finalists, and the overwhelming crowd and jury favorite is Impossible Motion: Magnet-like Slopes by Koukichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Japan.
The newest fuel alternative on the horizon? Pee. U.S. researchers have been experimenting with using urine as a method of producing hydrogen. Not only could this virtually free and readily available resource possibly power automobiles, but it could also aid in the clean up of municipal wastewater.
Oh Alice Waters and her magical Edible Schoolyard! Back in 1994, Alice Waters and King Middle School principal Neil Smith, worked with the community to refurbish their 1930's cafeteria kitchen into a wonderland of food education. The kitchen along with a one acre garden was the begining of what turned into the Edible Schoolyard project.
I've been on the inside of my box reflecting to what is on the outside. I live my life outside the box but occassionally have to get back intot the box to see what's going on... I have been on a 4 - 5 week non creative mode... Through this time frame... great people on Mikeyssmail have been still continuing to exercise their creativity... I'm so pleased to see that! Though many ideas come daily on what I could do next... I'm not motivated by just a simple request... I've allowed this same tim...
How do you top a movie like Avatar? James Cameron's recent release pioneered in 3D technology, and was the first film to gross more than $2 billion, as well as being the highest grossing 3D movie of all time. What do you do after wrapping up a project like that? Well, Cameron's current plans truly place him at the crossroads of science and art. Cameron has paired up with NASA to shoot Mars in 3D.
Part 2 of this short documentary continues to explain the different designs of racquet to suit different styles of player.
Sci-fi being just one descriptor, the late Alexander McQueen's final Spring 2010 collection draws inspiration from that and much more.
Helo my dear friends! A few days ago, I shared with this community my wrapper-script (a wrapper is a program that joins other programs that do the real job) to automatize the attacks on Pixie-Dust vulnerable routers. I was recieving complains from non-Kali users that had problems trying to launch the program, so I decided to make a good installer so anybody can use it in any DEB based distro.
Altruism was first explained as kin selection: "I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins", as J.B.S. Haldane put it.
A vast number of studies ranging across time, continents, cultures, political systems, and religions show that when evaluating potential mates, women place significantly greater emphasis than men on material wealth, and that men tend to both display and exaggerate their financial status and prospects when around women.
So I was wondering around Barnes and Noble (which happens to be a very bad habit of mine) see what is new and just checking out the books. Granted I was also straightening shelves and tables as well, I used to work there and old habits die hard.
We've seen compressed air power a homemade rocket, shoot erasers across the room, and even remove dents from a vehicle, but how about breaking a bike lock?
You might have seen our post on this last week: It's a working reproduction of the Mars Curiosity Rover made with LEGOs, but it's a bit complicated for anyone without a decent amount of robotics knowledge. Plus, you need to have some Mindstorms NXT and TECHNIC parts lying around. If you want something a little simpler than programming a working LEGO rover, you could always build a scaled model of the MSL out of regular LEGOs. Not only is this easy to build and looks great, but the step-by-ste...
Maglev trains. Why are they so cool? Well, for starters, they float. The idea of levitating trains have been around since the '60's. The first commercially available levitator was introduce in 1984, Birmingham, England. The fastest known floating train is Japan's JR-Maglev, reaching speeds of 581 km/h.
