How To: Volunteer in Your Community
So you want to be more involved in your community. That's great! It does not have to be super complicated to start being involved. Here are a few easy ways to go about doing so:
So you want to be more involved in your community. That's great! It does not have to be super complicated to start being involved. Here are a few easy ways to go about doing so:
Well, why aren't you? They're all the rage in pop culture right now, what with The Avengers blowing away audiences and the finale to the Batman trilogy coming out soon. Not to mention that Marvel is remaking Spider-Man! The original is only like, what, less than ten years old? Jeez. Now, I know what you're saying, "But, Henry! Comics are for nerds! We're waaaay cooler than that!"
Redstone and electricity have much in common. They both have what's called resistance. That is, they only travel a certain distance before the signal degrades to the point where it's unusable, and they take a certain amount of time to get there. With electricity, that time is nearly instantaneous because electricity is extremely fast. Redstone, on the other hand, is pretty slow.
The only thing better than successfully pulling off a new experiment is doing it with household materials. You get to laugh in conceit as professional scientists everywhere spend all their grant money on the same project you just accomplished with some under-the-sink chemicals! However, there are times when DIY gets dangerous. Some household chemicals are not pure enough to use and some are just pure dangerous. Let's take a look at two problems I have encountered in the course of mad sciencing.
In this article, I'll be exploring the basics of Python, i.e. variables, input and output. You'll need Python (2.7+), a computer, and some free time.
Continued from Organize Yo'sef Part One!
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.
Representative Henry A. Waxman is in charge of California’s 30th Congressional district. He is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ever since he began his career in the government business, he has been involved with health and environmental issues. He represents cities such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake Village and West Hollywood, as well as such areas of Los Angeles as Beverly-Fairfax, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Beverl...
Our class had been assigned interviews with political representatives from different branches. In these interviews we asked questions that we had generated about their career position, advice to young activists, our government system, getting involved, and their opinion on certain laws. Here are the results from the two interviews that were done.
How did it happen? How did your ultra-secure WPA password on your wireless network get broken into? Well, you might have just found yourself at the mercy of a cracker.
It has been suggested that about 150 million internet users will be affected by today's blackout of Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know what those are, go here and read up on it, and then take action yourself! After you've contacted your Representatives about these bills, you'll probably still need to get some work done today using Wikipedia's English-language site.
An information technology degree from Kaplan University could be the first step towards a potential information technology career.* Earning an IT degree online can seem like a daunting task, but Kaplan University faculty and staff are available to students through email, instant messaging, and phone calls as well as weekly online seminars.
Last week's Community Byte we got off to a great start! We had a few people build our IRC bot, and all went well. We had some great contributers, ideas, and people willing to learn. So, needless to say, we will be having another. Let's try to get a few more people involved this time!
Prank Calls, Masked NumbersWho is calling your phone or your child's? Pranksters use a lot of tricks to make sure they can get on your nerves. Being able to trace prank calls is important because you're not going to learn much from your Caller ID, since most prank callers use an unlisted number - such as, a cell phone number. Many also use special code *67 to mask the number so your Caller ID will show "Blocked Number" or "Private Number". There are a lot of mild cases of so-called phone bull...
XSS stands for cross-site scripting, which is a form of web-based exploitation that uses client-side vulnerabilities in a web page to execute malicious JavaScript codes. JavaScript is referred to as "cross-site" because it usually involves an external website containing the malicious code. That code is most commonly used to steal cookies with a website that the attacker created and hosted on another server. The cookies can then be used to escalate privileges and gain root access to someone's ...
Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.
For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...
If you’re unfamiliar with League of Legends, you’re either not into PC gaming or you haven’t spent much time on the internet. Riot Games officially released League almost two years ago, and since then it’s become a huge hit. In fact, the Santa Monica based company recently announced that the DOTA inspired game has 15 million registered users, 4 million unique logins each month, and 500,000 people playing the game at any given moment.
Foldit is definitely a niche game. The sole gameplay mechanic is attempting to fold complex proteins into smaller and more efficient shapes following the rules of molecular physics and biology. Points are awarded based on how small one can make the protein. Online leaderboards track players' relative progress and allows them to view and manipulate other players' completed designs. It's original, certainly, but no developer is going to ship a million units of a game about molecular-level prote...
For this week's review round-up, we bring you two games from opposite sides of the indie world. One is a free online hybrid shooter/platformer combining elements of Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft. The other involves driving jeeps around and shooting things as fast as possible. Both are great.
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.
Last week, Google+ took a crucial step towards becoming exactly like Facebook. As of now, there are games available for download within the service, most notably Angry Birds, which is already available on at least one of the devices owned by everyone in America today. Some of the other popular games include Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker, and out of all of the available titles, all come from four companies that have come to form the four-headed dragon of U.S. casual gaming: EA, Zynga, PopCap...
It's a hell of a lot easier to make money selling an indie game now than it was four years ago. But it's still a rough game.
Advancements in technology usually lead to the miniaturization of old technologies, and video games are no exception. Since at least 1990, game hardware manufacturers and enterprising DIY electronics enthusiasts have poured their efforts into making full-size video game consoles smaller, even handheld. And for good reason—who would have ever played a black and white Game Boy if they could have had an actual NES in their pocket?
Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.
Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...
You're walking down the street, minding your own business. Then you see it—a large, bright fireball in the near distance. A tremendous heat wave speeds towards you at one thousand miles an hour, and before you can think, before you can even blink, the extremely heated wind pushes right through you. Your skin melts, your eyes liquefy—your face disappears into the wind. Before you know it, your pancreas collide with what’s left of the person next to you, your duodenum is dissolving faster than ...
ATTENTION COLLISION REPAIR INDUSTRYHave you ever put your stud in your stud gun to repair a dent and the stud falls out before it reaches the panel? Sure it has, it has happened to all of us. However, the new Magna-Spot eliminates this problem with their exclusive (MPS), which secures the pins in the electrode. You can read the press release below to learn more of the benefits.ENTER AND WIN THE NEW MAGNA-SPOT STUD GUNDetails to this contest are going to be revealed in layers as follows:
Attention all National SCRABBLE Association members: You know that newsletter that you get in your mailbox every month or two? That SCRABBLE News mailing from the NSA? Well, they're axing it. No more printed SCRABBLE News. No more ink on your fingertips. No more surprises in your mailbox. It's done for... kinda...
There are several ways you can go about creating your NURBS helix curve in Maya; I will demonstrate the two easiest ones.
So, at this time of the year, everyone seems to be going through a lot of stress - and by “everyone,” I mean, “anyone who has any contact with people who are in schools of any kind.” Still, stress can hit you at any time of the year, whether it’s right before Christmas, or when you’ve let all those little chores pile up, or when omigod all those bills are due tomorrow. When you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions, it’s easy to want to murder everyone or plan an elaborate esc...
Guitar Essentials My friends and I would secretly scribble tab in the darkly lit practice rooms in our university even though we were educated musicians. So, being able to read tablature, or tab, is essential for beginning guitarists.
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:
SCRABBLE may seem like a board game for word nerds only, but believe it or not, SCRABBLE can be used to lure thousands of hot women into your bed... at least that's what Clive Worth claims.
FOXBORO, Mass. - The New England Patriots Alumni Club (NEPAC), announced that more than a dozen former Patriots players are gearing up to host a "Football for You" youth clinic in Worcester on Saturday, May 29 from 12:30-5:00 p.m.
A Way Out of the Overload How do we simplify? There's a welter of information, advice, techniques, schools and every imaginable video tape available on the market to answer that question for you. In making a selection from this movable feast you'd want to take into account the background and credentials of the person offering you a way out of the overload. That's assuming you didn't just throw up your hands in exasperation and walk away from the task entirely.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -Leonardo da VinciLearning a kata requires that you go through several stages. First you have to learn the basic pattern and the techniques. Then you have to perfect what you've learned. Then you have to deconstruct what you've learned and perfected in order to truly understand what the kata is teaching you vis a vis close quarter engagement.
Up On the Roof: Urban Rooftop Farming and The Brooklyn Grange So sometimes something inspires me so much that it makes me want to run to the rooftop of my eastside L.A. apartment and shout out at the top of my lungs "LOOK AT THIS, THIS IS AMAZING!". The Brooklyn Grange is one of those kinds of things.
I have prepared a stable stuffing how-to for you! For more information about stuffing see this article.
Oh, LifeHacker, we love you. You've brought us so many handy HowTo's: Hack Wireless Internet, Bypass Blocked Websites, Convert a Laptop Into a Projector, Watch TV & Movies on the Web For Free, 10 Must-Know Google Privacy Settings, and more.