I was browsing again for possible links for a blog and found a funny post on how to interpret people’s avatar photos. It talks about how blurry photos mean this about a person and cartoon avatars mean this about a person…. Check it out HERE!
We’re barely past Halloween and people are already working on their next LED based holiday decorations. For Hanukkah, Gizmodo pointed out the PCB menorah pictured above. It uses a set of DIP switches to control which LEDs are lit. A couple years ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories put together a tutorial for building a more minimal LED menorah. Each of the nine LEDs are soldered directly to the legs of an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Every time you power up the device an additional LED is lit. [Ori] liked the project and decided to take a slightly different approach. He used an LM3914 DIP18 LED bar driver. A potentiometer controls how many of the LEDs are illuminated.
Browsing mozilla’s endless (mindless) stream of extensions and wish there were some way to get all of your social networking stuff added into the same browser without 30 minutes of adding extensions to Firefox???
Well, with Flock you can have everything added into a single browser as one of Mozillas experiments. I adde it to Linux Mint. Yes, it was a bitch. But I believe it was worth it. I can send media, such as YouTube vids, Photobucket pics, Delicious bookmarks to my Myspace, Friendster (does anyone use that one anymore?), or Facebook friends. I now am finding myself using this rather than Firefox. My biggest complaint was that after compiling and installing, I had to move it to my Desktop to get it to properly run without keeping the terminal running fulltime. Also, that was the only thing that kept the Adobe Flash up to snuff. Well, consider it. You’ll be using a free browser, and an open source one at that. 
Cheers!
Browsing the net again (on Lifehacker) and it brought up one of the ideas I was always interested in… sharing wireless with the entire neighborhood. I’ve always lived near a bunch of people I trusted until I moved to a condo and near a bunch of people I didn’t know. But this might be a good idea for you if you have the ideas of spreading wireless internet to the entire world a little bit early.
Here’s the link: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Share_Your_WiFi_With_the_Neighborhood
If you can tolerate HTML being repeatedly referred to as code, then there is an interesting post placed here. It talks about the basics of righting markup that others can read easily or that you can refer back to. Sort of like the principles of outlining that you learned in high school, but only slightly more difficult. This was worth the read, even for someone who is rustly with HTML or a n00b. And, of course, you can Digg It! at the end. So go on and get at it.
Cheers!
I stumbled upon this.
Thought it was awesome and wanted to spread the word of real zombies.
Enjoy my friends.
Zombies appear regularly on our TV screens, as more Tales of the Undead are unleashed upon us, and some old ones exhumed. But here’s a surprise - zombies can be real.
In real life, the zombies come from the Caribbean island of Haiti. They are a person who has been almost-killed, and then later raised from the almost-dead by a voodoo priest, to be used as slave labour for the rest of their miserable life. Zombies can move, eat, hear and speak, but they have no memory and no insight into their condition. There have been legends about zombies for centuries, but it was only in 1980 that a real-life case was documented.
The story begins in 1962, in Haiti. A man called Clairvius Narcisse was sold to a zombie master by his brothers, because Clairvius refused to sell his share of the family land. Soon after Clairvius “officially” died, and was buried. However, he had been later secretly unburied, and was actually working as a zombie slave on a sugar plantation with many other zombies. In 1964, his zombie master died, and he wandered across the island in a psychotic daze for the next 16 years. The drugs that made him psychotic were gradually wearing off. In 1980, he accidentally stumbled across his long-lost sister in a market place, and recognized her. She didn’t recognise him, but he identified himself to her by telling her early childhood experiences that only he could possibly know.
Dr. Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist from Harvard, went to Haiti to research this story. He discovered how to make a zombie. First, make them “dead”, then make them “mad” so that their minds are malleable. Often, a local “witch doctor” secretly gives them the drugs.
He made the victim “dead” with a mixture of toad skin and puffer fish. You can put it in their food, or rub it on their skin, especially the soft, undamaged skin on the inside of the arm near the elbow. The victims soon appear dead, with an incredibly slow breath, and an incredibly slow and faint heartbeat. In Haiti, people are buried very soon after death, because the heat and the lack of refrigeration makes the bodies decay very rapidly. This suits the zombie-making process. You have to dig them up within eight hours of the burial, or else they’ll die of asphyxiation.
The skin of the common toad (Bufo bufo bufo) can kill - especially if the toad has been threatened. There are three main nasties in toad venon - biogenic amines, bufogenine and bufotoxins. One of their many effects is that of a pain-killer - far stronger than cocaine. Boccaccio’s medieval tale, the Decameron, tells the story of two lovers who die after eating a herb, sage, that a toad had breathed upon.
The other half of the witch doctor’s wicked potion comes from the pufferfish, which is known in Japan as “fugo”. Its poison is called “tetrodotoxin”, a deadly neurotoxin. Its pain-killing effects are 160,000 times stronger than cocaine. Eating the fish can give you a gentle physical “tingle” from the tetrodotoxin - and in Japan, the chefs who prepare fugo have to be licensed by the government. Even so, there are rare cases of near-deaths or actual deaths from eating fugo. The toxin drops your temperature and blood pressure, and puts you into a deep coma. In Japan, some of the victims recovered a few days after being declared dead.
Back in Haiti, once you’ve got the zombie-in-waiting out of the ground, you make them mad, by force-feeding them a paste made from datura (Jimsons Weed). Datura breaks your links with reality, and then destroys all recent memories. So you don’t know what day it is, where you are and, worst of all, you don’t even know who you are. The zombies are in a state of semi-permanent induced psychotic delirium. They are sold to sugar plantations as slave labour. They are given datura again if they seem to be recovering their senses.
Datura (Jimsons Weed, Angel’s Trumpet, Brugmanisa candida) contains the chemicals atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, which can act as powerful hallucinogens in the appropriate doses. They can also cause permanent memory loss, paralysis and death.
The person who applies these chemicals to a victim has to be quite skilled, so that they won’t kill them. There is a very small gap between appearing-to-be-dead, and actually being dead.
So make sure that before you use a priest or witch doctor, you ask to see their qualifications…
Epic Games President Michael Capps says the reason you’re not seeing Gears of War 2 on the PC is - get ready for a shocker - piracy and the used game market.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, Capps said the used game market is a “huge issue” in the U.S., which has resulted in the growing trend toward activation codes and installation limits. “We don’t make any money when someone rents it, and we don’t make any money when someone buys it used,” he said. “Way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it.”
He’s reluctant to blame gamers for the popularity of the second-hard market, although he does point out that Epic has a “rule” against its employees buying used games. He also comes very close to equating used game sales with piracy, saying, “If people are playing games without buying them, then the games aren’t going to keep coming.”
“I think a little bit of it is education so people realize that the reason there’s no PC market right now is piracy,” Capps said. “I mean, Crytek just put out some numbers saying the ratio was 20:1 on Crysis, for pirated to non-pirated use. So guess what? That’s why there’s no Gears of War 2 on PC, because there’s no market, because copying killed it - and that’s gruesome to a company like ours that’s been in the PC market for so long.”
Perhaps his most interesting statement refers to legitimate used game sales, which he readily admits is the most profitable part of the videogame retailing business. “Our primary retailer [GameStop, perhaps?] makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales,” he said, “And so you’re starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by… if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code.”
Why would Capps support actions that are essentially designed to punish his “primary retailer?” Digital distribution is growing by leaps and bounds but it’s still far from ready to assume dominance over regular retail sales, yet Capps doesn’t sound too worried about cutting his main distribution point off at the knees. Profit margins on new games and gaming hardware are incredibly tight, and unless that changes no game retailer is going to survive without rentals and used game sales. Why does this seem so hard to understand?
So, browsing the interwebs again, and I found some ‘puter case mods that were just spectacular. I decided not to post them directly because I didn’t want to make WordPress flip out…. (again). But here goes: LINK HERE
Check out WMDII, for it has a link to the sponsors for the case mod. I wish I could get sponsors for my next modification. (lol) Every hacker/maker should have one.
Cheers!
A few Windows 7 changes that I saw on Lifehacker are that you’ll be able to switch in between 802.11 spots easier. That’s nice for all of your wardriving needs. Also, for when you’re just messing around on your neighbors network. They got rid of that horrible sidebar, which is reminiscent of the widgets from Linux. Now, you can move your widgets anywhere on the Desktop that you wish. I saw nothing talked about (which I was most exicted about…..) the new Touchscreen environment. From what I understood, Windows 7 was going to be a Touchscreen-required OS. That would have changed the entire Tech scene, and I was looking forward to that.
Hopefully, these changes will be enough to bring some of us back from Linux…. I know that I’ve went open source and don’t plan on going back!