Virtual Environments Search Results

How To: Play Safe & Avoid FarmVille Scams

With FarmVille being one of the hottest Facebook games on the market, it's no wonder it's the primary target for scams and virus downloads. Anyone playing FarmVille is at risk, but the primary targets are those looking to improve their gameplay and build their farms and neighbors up. These "farmers" are the ones seeking quick hacks and cheats.

How To: Make a simple combost bin

In this video tutorial, viewers learn how to make a simple compost bin. This task is very easy, simple and fast to do. Users will need some galvanized wire that is about 5 ft high and 4 ft long. Begin by fastening the wire together in a cylinder shape. Then place a pile of leaved into the wire bin and allow them to compost. Make sure to only place in organic matter into the compost bin. This video will benefit those viewers who are interested in gardening and helping the environment, and woul...

How To: Prepare Your Child For School

Academically Preparing Your Child For School Many parents are anxious when their child begins school for the first time, especially when he/she is the first child to leave the nest. Is my little one ready for school? What should my child know/be able to do before starting? Unless you have teacher friends or have been given guidelines by the school it can be difficult to know how to get your child ready academically. Here are a few tips to help give your child a good start.

Tor vs. I2P: The Great Onion Debate

In my recent Darknet series, I attempted to connect the dots on the Deep Web. I covered the two largest anonymity networks on the Internet today, Tor and I2P. While my initial four articles were meant as an introduction, I ended up receiving a lot of interesting comments and messages asking the technical differences between the two. I'd like to thank all of you for letting me know what was on your minds, as you should always!

Chess: The Ultimate PvP On-the-Go

Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, I found I couldn’t browse the internet on my smartphone anymore. My eyes were tired from reading and there were no headphones to listen to music. There are no magazines at this dentist’s office, just an old TV playing Russian music videos ad nauseam. Mostly female Russian singers, and curiously enough they all shared similar traits: they can’t dance. They look gorgeous, but the best they could do is small movements and two slow moves at best- a huge diff...

How To: Create Realistic 3D Shadows

Setting up shadows takes just as much time and attention as setting up lights. You can think of all of your illumination as one half of your lighting design, and shadows as the other, equally important half. Shadows can add richness to the tones and shading of your image, tie elements together, and improve your composition. Besides their artistic importance, rendering shadows is a key technical area to master. This chapter will explore both the visual and the technical sides of shadows and oc...

News: Final Fantasy 14 Final Thoughts

Spending five days with the game is enough to know it's not to my liking. Is it a horrible MMO? Yes, yes it is. There are better Free to Play MMOs launched years ago that are better than this. As a fan of the Final Fantasy series (I am currently playing and liking Final Fantasy 13), this MMO is so bad that at some point I couldn't justify the awful environment, game play, and interface.

Fire Texting: How to Write Secret Messages with Fire

Writing secret notes with lemon juice was one of my favorite pastimes as a child. All it took was a small flame to lightly scorch the paper and reveal the hidden message. Now that I'm tall and pay bills, lemon ink just isn't exciting enough anymore. Luckily, we can use another kind of invisible ink to write in fire! By using the saltpeter, we can whip up invisible fire ink in no time.

How To: Install Windows 8 Beta on VirtualBox

Windows 8 Beta (Developer Preview) It wasn't that long ago Windows 7 was released - now Windows 8 Beta is here. I did do a Google search to see when the stable version will be out but wasn't able to find an official statement from Microsoft. However - I saw several articles on Google hinting that the final release might be in August or there about.

How To: Create a Free SSH Account on Shellmix to Use as a Webhost & More

Having an SSH or Secure SHell to tunnel your traffic through is something we have talked about many times at Null Byte. As we know, it allows us to securely route and encrypt our traffic through a remote server, effectively anonymizing us and protecting our traffic from all forms of analysis—simultaneously. We have gone over how to make a home SSH tunnel. However, the question has come up, "How can I get an SSH tunnel to somewhere other than my computer?" This would be useful in a situation w...

How To: Backup All of Your Xbox 360 Data to Your Computer

Flash memory can be a tad unpredictable at times. I have had 4 flash drives die out on me over the last few years, and they usually die without warning. When a flash memory based device dies, the data is likely impossible to recover. Adversely on an HDD, or Hard Drive Disk, even if the disk dies out, someone will probably be able to fix it and get it back to working order—at least long enough for you to back up your data. Hard drives are a bit more forgiving. As you can guess, due to the unpr...

News: Performance Hacks & Tweaks for Linux

If you have made the switch from Windows to Linux, I want to congratulate you in advance. I'm sure you have noticed a huge performance increase when using Linux over other operating systems. This is only half the battle, though! Most users who are new to Linux end up using Ubuntu. I have no gripes with Ubuntu, but I do not agree with their philosophy. It almost mimics Windows. Ubuntu favors ease of use, and despite valiant efforts by the development team thus far (Ubuntu is crazy fast), all o...

News: Google+ Pro Tips Weekly Round Up: Google Cleans Up

It’s been a pretty big week for Google, and Google+ itself. There were a number of articles proclaiming the end of Google+, because allegedly traffic dropped over 60% after it opened to the public. Then +Steve Yegge accidentally posted a long rant on Google+ itself, which was originally meant only for Google employees and colleagues to see. Interestingly enough, the most inflammatory content wasn’t actually about Google itself, but about the horrible work environment at Amazon. The accidental...

News: Moshi Monsters Rise from Indie Game to Kiddie Empire

Four years ago Mind Candy was a pretty small game company. They were best known for their revolutionary but short lived ARG Perplex City, and had no other successful franchises to fall back on when that ended. Their plan to save it? Start a free online social game for children ages 7-12 called Moshi Monsters, where kids can create monster pets, raise them, and socialize with one another in a controlled, safe environment.

News: Glitch Gets Better with Katamari Damacy

Stewart Butterfileld is one of the last great old-fashioned tech billionaires. He founded Flickr, and then sold the company to Yahoo! for a stupendous amount of money in 2005. Like Mark Cuban and others before him, he was left wondering what to do with the rest of his long and fabulously wealthy life. Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks and turned them from unabashed losers into beloved champions. Butterfield decided to try his hand at game design (something he had attempted with the ambitious ...

How To: How Much Advertising Can a Free Game Site Have and Still Be Considered Indie?

Mediocre free Flash game websites are all too common. Many of them thrive off peddling the same few popular games to fans who have slim cause to pick one over the other. They thrive off the indifference of casual gamers and an environment that does not have to stand out to survive, only appeal to the lowest common gaming denominator with tower defense clones and brightly colored Peggle knockoffs. In that context, what Nitrome is doing seems downright commendable.

How To: Boot Ubuntu on a Macbook From USB

For Windows laptops and PCs it's easy to install Linux. However for Macs, it's a different story. There are people installing Ubuntu on Macbooks and so far I've noticed that they are using 9.10. I've remastered my own Ubuntu 10.04 complete with playing flash videos and other applications already pre-installed on a DVD. Plus, it can boot on laptops with Nvidia graphic cards. If you'd like to see my workaround for Nvidia check out my article on remastering Ubuntu.

Dumpster Drive: Exchange Your Digital Trash with Strangers

Do you ever wonder if the files you're trashing on your Mac are actually trash? Let's say there are 80 million computer owners running Mac OS. If each user trashes at least 10 files each day, that's 800 million deleted files that cease to exist every 24 hours. If that doesn't sound like a lot to you, a month would equal 24 billion junked files, a year—nearly 1 trillion.

The Witcher 2: First Impressions

Do you have an awesome rig that is able to run anything you throw at it at 60 fps with maximum settings? Prepare to be humbled. The Witcher 2 is the first game in quite some time to tax your system the same way Crysis did when it first came out.

AudioSurf vs. Polynomial: The Battle Between Psychedelic MP3 Games

In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique level based on that song, which the player must then navigate whilst playing a block-matching, Tetris-like puzzle game. It's an incredibly compelling audiovisual experience, one with immense replay value and surprisingl...

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

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 ...

Outland: A Polarizing Experience

Sticking with our theme of XBLA games with uninspiring names, we have Outland. This game shares its name with an unrelated sci-fi cult film from 1981, unrelated comic strip from the '90s, and unrelated region in World of Warcraft. Didn't exactly try hard to build name recognition. Other than that, Finnish developer Housemarque has created the best 2D platformer I've seen in years.