Category Archives: Technology

Bill Gates releasing many bugs on purpose

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Believe me, it’s not at all what you think.

In what is probably the coolest conference-talk attention grab I’ve ever heard of, Bill Gates apparently just released a swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd at TED, the geniuses-only mind meld. Holy shit.

“Not only poor people should experience this,” the Tweetosphere has Gates saying as he released the swarm into the audience. Malaria is a cause that Bill and Melinda have been hitting hard with their philanthropy, and this is certainly a way to drive that point home.

No word yet on the size of said swarm, or confirmation that they weren’t actually infected with malaria for that matter, but as far as stunts go, this is prit-tay fucking awesome. We would know.

via Gizmodo

XBox Live Updates on your BlackBerry

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I think it might only be Carl who has a Blackberry AND an Xbox Live account, but I thought this was interesting nonetheless. It’s also available on Windows Mobile and the iPhone (as an app).

Ever found yourself wishing you could get your XBox Live fix on your Blackberry?

Now you can, thanks to the mobile app from Zumobi. In no time at all you can have Xbox 360 news, Xbox Live Marketplace updates, video & audio clips, community updates, and your gamer friends’ status.

via BlackBerryNews

New Technology Could Display Your Dreams on Screen

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A research team at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan has successfully displayed simple images produced in the human brain on a computer screen. Dream recorder anyone? In a nutshell, the device converts electrical signals sent to the visual cortex into images that can be viewed on a computer screen. In their experiment, they showed test subjects the six letters in the word neuron and succeeded in reconstructing the word on screen by measuring their brain activity. As the technology progresses, it could be possible to “see” what people are thinking, what they dream about and record it for posterity.

Personally, I’d be curious to see my own dreams, if they could be recorded (I don’t often remember my dreams unless they’re really significant or vivid); but the concept of others watching/recording thoughts or dreams is kind of creepy.

via Gizmodo

William Gibson’s AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed

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While the text of William Gibson’s elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem’s initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete ‘run,’ as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA’s public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There’s also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself.

via Slashdot

18% of Consumers Can’t Tell HD from SD

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To be honest, I would’ve thought even more people couldn’t tell the difference. Of course, this isn’t a scientific study, it’s a phone survey, so it’s not necessarily completely accurate. I can’t say I’m surprised though. While my TV isn’t true HD (it’s 1080i instead of 1080p), I found it hard to tell the difference when it came to DVDs. Games I notice a big difference, but not movies.

A recent survey by the Leichtman Research Group (LRG) shows that 18 percent of HDTV owners think they’re watching high-definition shows, when in fact they’re viewing standard definition programming. The findings are based on a telephone survey of 1302 U.S. households.

via PC World

Gravatars

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Hey folks, I decided to add Gravatar support to the site. What’s a Gravatar, you ask? Why, it’s a universal avatar not tied to any one particular site. It’s actually made by the people who made WordPress, but once you set your avatar up, you’ll end up using it on any Gravatar-supporting site. Cool, eh?

Go here, register, set up your picture, and give it about 5-10min to take effect. It doesn’t quite integrate with this theme as much as I might like, but if I can find the time to, I’ll be making some changes to the theme to make it more my own and to integrate the avatars a bit better.

Let me know what you guys think!

Gmail and SSL

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A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so, as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool, is planning to release it in two weeks.

To turn this on, go into Settings, and then at the bottom turn on “Always use HTTPS” beside Browser Connection.

And if you use Notifier at all, then you need this patch for it to continue working.

From Slashdot

Google Calendar

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By now you guys should’ve probably got a bunch of emails from Google regarding invites for Google calendars. I figured I’d add in the events calendar at long last so we can stay organized as a group. Obviously, there was some challenge in setting it all up and there still is. I originally shared my own calendar, but it was including personal events (doctor’s appointments, etc) and I’d really like it to be a bit cleaner than that. So I created a new calendar and invited everyone to have access to it, and that’s the one you see shared here. Unfortunately, things still aren’t quite working as planned. Carl tried adding an event earlier and it seems it added it to my own personal calendar, not the site’s calendar.

Just thought I’d give everone a heads up. I’m sure once everything’s working as planned it’ll work great, we just need to sort it all out.

UPDATE: Alright, everything seems to be squared away. Hopefully you guys didn’t have to agree to too many public calendar invites. Now when you add an event to the calendar, and set it to public, it should show up on the website. This should help us keep everything organized (for D&D in particular).

Joe’s Chat App v2

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After my Actionscript workshop I was pumped and ready to do something in flash… but what to do?

I decided to use my new knowledge of flash and PHP to recreate my flash chat app, and so far so good. In one day I have managed to do much of what I did when I first created the app so many years ago.

Before I continue my work I want to hear from you guys. What would you like to see in the program? I want you to “blue sky” it, anything and everything goes. Dice rollers, shared scratch pads/whiteboards… anything at all.

Currently I have managed to make a connection, allow for unlimited connections, show who is in the chat and scroll the chat when it gets to big for the dialog box. it also allows HTML, so href’s, font tags, breaks and even img’s to some degree are allowed (Although I may catch and post img’s to a seperate window you can toggle through.

Let me know and maybe next game we can try it out.

Potential Future New Computer

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Ok, so i have spent the morning going over parts and stuff for building a new computer system that i could maybe pick up over the summer if i am extremely lucky. As far as i can tell all is compatible with each other and by using an online power supply calculator to determine power requirements i think i am well covered. I have calculated a potential cost for it at “bare bones” which is one processor and one stick of ram, then also did the price as a quad core machine with 8gb of ram.

So i guess i am looking for Curt, Joe, and anyone else that has an opinion or thoughts to look it over and double check it. Make sure i did not goof somewhere and pick non compatible parts, or pick shitty components and what not. I got the prices mostly from a decent local store that i have used in the past (Not MicroBytes!). If you think i can get better prices elsewhere (even online) that would be fantastic. So let me know what you think! Thanks!

New Computer Specs
Case – Antec Nine Hundred $119
Motherboard – Asus M3A AMD770 $100
Processor – AMD Phenom 9600 QCORE BE 2.3G 4M Box AM2+ $282
Power Supply – Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX850EWL 850W $240
Memory – Kingston 2 x 2048MB 800MHz DDR2 $139
Graphics Card – Asus PCI-E GeForce 8500GT 512MB DDR2 128bit $95
Sound Card – Creative X-FI Xtreme Gamer $109
Hard Drive – WD IDE 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache OEM $125
Optical Drive – LG GSA-H55N 20X/20X DVD-RW Internal $55

Bare Bones Total = $1264
Total with quad Core and max Ram = $2527

Photoshop CS4 to be 64-bit on Windows Only

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It seems that the next version of Photoshop will be 32-bit on everything, except Windows, where it can be 32- or 64-bit. This is significant for people planning on working with very large images as they’ll only be able to use somewhere under 4gb of ram. Just by reading the comments on the linked page, it seems that this is because the API that Photoshop is written on for Apple is 32-bit only, even though they initially promised that there’d be a 64-bit version, which has now been canned.

Read more here.

Yo Joe!

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Since Joe is our resident Mac-man (nice spin on pac-man, right?) I figure he would be the best one to ask about Mac’s.

So Joe, i need a run up on a decent mac system. Maybe something along the lines of like an octo 2.8 or something, with atleast 2gb of ram…I have no idea how affordable it would all be, but that is why i am asking. I figure if you can’t build the best system for the least amount of money, nobody can. Or if that is not really possible (cheap and powerful) you could atleast give me idea’s on ways to go that would be affordable and practical.

Also, how worthwhile are mac books for serious work? am i better with a tower no matter what? I am trying to be an informed Mac guy.

I am trying to find a system that would be good for serious photoshop work. I may need to work with material in huge resolutions with massive ppi and the like. I am liking the fact that Leopard is not resolution dependent and when the new line of monitors start coming out that will make use of this i would like to be prepared.

On the bright side, through school i can get Adobe Photoshop CS3 for only $397 instead of the whopping $2000! Go Concordia go!

Thanks in advance! Looking forward to following up on this one. My responses may be a little delayed as my internet access is limited for the time being.