Virtual Environments Search Results

How To: Improve your oral presentation skills

The ComCoachVideo Tutorial is an online learning environment designed to help students improve their oral presentation skills. The website contains video clips illustrating effective and ineffective public speaking practices, as well as an interactive feedback component designed to foster students' ability to critically evaluate presentation segments.

How To: Clean a Flag

We hang flags to proclaim our patriotic spirit. This is especially true for retired veterans or those who have loved ones serving in the military. Others hang flags representing the seasons, important events, favorite teams or just a cute and whimsical design as decoration. An American flag can be particularly tricky to wash. Red, white and blue all lying together in one inseparable panel can cause the blue or red dye to bleed onto the white. This is not just a problem with an American flag; ...

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...

News: Minecraft, Meet Terraria

Minecraft was first released just a few years ago, but when a paradigm-shifting piece of media comes along the rest of the world is quick to take inspiration from it. The absolutely terrible XBLA knock-off FortressCraft was the first, and last month a much more interesting game called Terraria came out on Steam for $9.99. It is clearly inspired by Minecraft, and there is a long checklist of identical features. It is, nonetheless, a very different product, and just might be called the first in...

News: Mind Your Manners!

If you live in an urban environment, chances are that you've seen this: It's a program started by the FBI to prevent terrorism and general thievery in peaceful and innocent communities all around America. I myself have seen a lot of these, and my previous apartment community was part of this 'program'.

News: The Right Linux Distro

As many of you Null Byters may know, I was planning on writing this article a week or two ago. Better late than never! So, let's get right to it then—choosing the right Linux distro for your needs.

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite Walkthrough, Part 4 - Legal Hacker Training

Cheers to another completed Community Byte project! Things went well regarding timeliness and being friendly to the other coders and students. If you've got ideas for our next mission, or an idea for a tutorial, submit them to me. Friday, our mission was to take out HackThisSite, basic mission 5. This mission focused on JavaScript, again. This time there is a little bit more security in place.

How To: Enable Code Syntax Highlighting for Python in the Nano Text Editor

With the plethora of programming that we promote at Null Byte, I figured a lot of you newbies that stop by IRC will need a big boost in the right direction to make your dive into programming a lot easier. A hot question that has been thrown around in IRC a lot when making the initial dive is, "How do I write code?". People who do not know much about computers can't understand how code is written. Code that we write here is usually scripted and written in Python, so we will use it as our examp...

How To: Remove a Windows Password with a Linux Live CD

Back when I was a Windows user, I know I'm not the only one who has experienced password loss—that moment where you just can't remember your password. Sometimes it happens to the best of us. So, how can we get into the system without paying a local geek or geeksquad to do it? First, we have to look into how Windows stores their passwords.

Secure Your Computer, Part 4: Use Encryption to Make a Hidden Operating System

This is Null Byte's fourth part in a series about fully securing our computers (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In our last Null Byte, we went over how to encrypt an entire operating system to protect our data, however, this doesn't fully protect us. In the case of legal extortion, the government can actually make you give up your cryptographic key to your computer so that they can look through it.

How To: Recover Deleted Files in Linux

File recovery on Linux is a bit different than Windows. It requires different software than the Windows counterparts because every OS has their own file system. Windows uses NTFS, or FAT file systems, while on the other hand, Linux uses ext-based file systems. I personally use ext4 file system because it's the latest and greatest ext-journaling system and supports a large level of directory recursion and file sizes, but most installations still use ext2 or ext3. When files are deleted from a ...

News: Complete Arch Linux Installation, Part 1: Install & Configure Arch

"How do I install Arch Linux?" That question was bound to come up eventually. And with me using Arch, it's no coincidence that all of you want to use it as well. Arch is arguably the best Linux distro available. Distros that come close are Gentoo and some aspects of Ubuntu, but Arch is meant for building your OS from the inside out. Arch is built around minimalism, so you won't get anything by default. It doesn't even come with sound!

How To: Stream Media to a PS3 or Xbox 360 from Mac & Linux Computers

One of the main reasons I was held back from fully switching over to Linux was the fact that media streaming is nearly impossible. You have two choices in Windows: either you use file sharing with Windows Media Player, or you can just use the Windows Media Center. But both of these softwares are not for Linux or Mac. Microsoft doesn't like to make open source software because they believe in making a profit, instead of allowing others to innovate it.

A Closed World: MIT Video Game Confronts Sexual Identity Issues

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 ...

News: Resurrecting the Video Game Magazine: PC Gamer Digital

PC Gamer represents all that was awesome about games journalism in the '90s, now sadly diminished. Brilliant, funny, full of integrity, and solid print sales were always present, and with the tragic exception of the latter, still are. Video game magazines were hit harder than nearly any other magazine vertical when the internet began its uncoordinated, but inevitable assault on print media. Magazines are now struggling to find their place in a world filled with more competitors than paying cu...

News: Finally! A Practical Use for Arcade Game Skills

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.

3 Dreams Of Black: An Interactive Music Video You Can Create and Control

Video games are the most prevalent type of interactive media, but certainly not the only one. The interactive music video for the song "3 Dreams of Black" by supergroup ROME and digital artist Chris Milk utilizes the latest web design technology, video game influenced art and interactivity, and large crowd-sourced elements to form a compelling work of art. ROME is composed of producer extraordinaire Danger Mouse, Italian film composer Daniele Luppi, Norah Jones, and Jack White. Their recent e...

News: Microsoft Releases Sneak Preview of Touch-Friendly Windows 8

Microsoft recently released the first sneak peak of their new operating system, Windows 8, and it's a pretty big departure from the last few major updates. The new Windows 8 was built from the ground up, and is designed primarily as a touchscreen interface, which is perfect for the expanding tablet market. They've ditched the clunky start screen that's dominated Windows 95 through Windows 7, replacing it with grids of application tiles, similar in functionality to an iPad or Android tablet, a...

News: The Revolution of the Hacked Kinect, Part 3: Gaming Gets Artsy

Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not just as a medium of expression, but as a means of creating great art as well, the art community would be forced to consider it differently. The third part in the Hacked Kinect series will focus on the artistic possibilitie...

How To: Record the Evolution of Your Face with an iPhone App

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...

News: Overview of New features in Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft office 2010 is the successor version of office 2007 and is code named as office 14. It is the first 64 bit version of office which is only compatible with Microsoft service pack 3, Windows vista and windows 7. It was released on April 15, 2010. It is the first Microsoft application which offers free online version of word, excel, PowerPoint and one note. These can be easily used with all the popular browsing software. The various functionality which are added in office2010 are descr...