[via motherjones]:
Sticking to an exercise routine takes dedication, and many fitness junkies swear that a running companion can be a huge help. That’s why researchers have developed “Joggobot,” a quad-rotor helicopter drone designed to motivate joggers by flying in front of them.
The aerial robot uses its camera to spot a colorful pattern on a T-shirt worn by the jogger, and flies at a safe distance ahead. The runner can control Joggobot using a smartphone: In “companion mode,” the drone simply maintains the jogger’s pace; in “coach mode,” it pushes its human trainee a little faster.
Don’t worry, there’s a video
Science!
Maybe it should chase you instead?
Waxy roundup of DMCA takedown process stupidity.
“So the Scripps TV broadcasts are indexed by YouTube, and the Content ID robots do the rest. And because Content ID disputes are judged by the copyright holder, complaints are routinely ignored or denied.”
The conversation surrounding how to liberate HBO from its cable partners and create the entertainment utopia viewers have long desired has been fascinating.
The resulting analyses of the numbers has pretty much shown that the amount people are willing to pay is not nearly enough to…
Use of my old Hotmail account has really snuck up on me as I end up caring more and more about all of the services with which it is associated. The last straw is Windows 8 login, but previous straws include Xbox, Zune, SkyDrive, and my Windows 7 Phone. I like the features and sync'ing associated with the Windows Live ID, but I don't like my old, spam filled, hotmail email address on the Live ID account.
A coworker told me about creating a Live ID from a custom domain, which sounded like just the ticket for me. Following the instructions above I was able to create a new deletethis.net Live ID but the next step of actually using this new Live ID was much more difficult. My first hope was there would be some way to link my new and old Live IDs so as to make them interchangeable. As it turns out there is a way to link Live IDs but all that does is make it easy to switch between accounts on Live Mail, SkyDrive and some other webpages.
Instead one must change over each service or start over depending on the service:
Neat demo of Visvalingam’s line simplification algorithm in JavaScript applied to a map of the US.
To simplify geometry to suit the displayed resolution, various line simplification algorithms exist. While Douglas–Peucker is the most well-known, Visvalingam’s algorithm may be more effective and has a remarkably intuitive explanation: it progressively removes points with the least-perceptible change.
“From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
param([Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] [string] $Path);
$FullPathOriginal = (gp "HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment").Path;
if (!($FullPathOriginal.split(";") | ?{ $_ -like $Path })) {
sp "HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" -name Path -value ($FullPathOriginal + ";" +
$Path);
}Very interesting - both technically as well as looking into the moral justifications the botnet operator provides. But equally interesting is the discussion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960034. Especially the discussion on the Verified by Visa (3D Secure) system and how the goal is basically to move liability onto the consumer and off of the merchant or credit card company.
Its all quite shocking.
Fourth , when I explained that the blog publisher had received music from the industry itself, a government attorney replied that authorization was an “affirmative defense” that need not be taken into account by the government in carrying out the seizure. That was stunning.
Web apps really make obvious the lack of URI APIs in the DOM or JavaScript. This blog post goes over using DOM API side effects to resolve relative URIs and parse URIs. An additonal benefit of this mechanism is that you avoid security issues caused by mismatched behavior between the browser’s URI parsing and your app’s URI parsing.
I'm done playing Fez. The style is atmospheric retro nastalgia and on the surface the gameplay is standard 2D platformer with one interesting Flatland style game mechanic but dig deeper to find Myst style puzzles. Despite the following I thoroughly enjoyed the game and would recommend it to anyone intrigued by the previous. Five eighths through the game I ran into one of the game's infamous Fez save game breaking issues, but I enjoyed the game enough that I started over before any patches were released and had no further issues.
While playing the game I created some tools to help keep track of my Fez notes (spoilers) including a Pixelated Image Creator that makes it easy to generate data URIs for large, black and white pixelated images, and (spoilers) a Fez Transliteration Tool to help me translate the in-game writing system.
I’m distressed when my coworkers don’t know their backslash from their forward slash so I draw this to help them remember which is which.
So! Here is the trailer for a web series I’ll be hosting, where I chat with cool people over actual alcoholic drinks. We’ve shot a dozen of these so far and I am grateful to have been asked to host them. I got to have interesting conversations with strangers and friends alike.
It goes live on Monday 5/7!
Internet terms!
(via Descriptive Camera)
A digital camera sends photos to Mechanical Turk service to generate a textual description and print the result on a thermal printer. Thus a camera that prints out a textual description of what you photographed.
Web app for making diagrams like Visio. Export your results as SVG, PNG, PDF and others.
A House subcommittee has passed the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which would require disclosure from companies about their human rights practices and limit the export of technologies that “serve the primary purpose of” facilitating government surveillance or censorship to countries designated as “Internet-restricting.”
Specifically Twitter has said that they will only used these assigned patent rights defensively to protect themselves against hostile actions. And further that any company that acquires these patent rights from Twitter will need the inventor’s consent to use them in an offensive action. Twitter has also provided the inventor with certain rights to license the patent to others for defensive purposes. You can read the entire set of provisions on GitHub.
Javascript tool says if a photo is shopped. It can tell by looking at the pixels. Seriously. Links to cool presentation on the theory behind the algorithm behind the tool: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/files/bh-usa-07-krawetz.pdf
Some rights reserved