2009 Apr 21, 1:28Fallout 3's May 5th DLC removes old ending, adds new quests, new levels, new perks. Sounds good! "In a nutshell, Broken Steel will remove the game's ending entirely, with Bethesda's Pete Hines saying
simply to fans that called for an open-ended resolution, "We got the idea." Players will still have to make the final choice, but following that climax the game will continue, presenting new epilogue
quests, another 10 levels to gain, and new perks, monsters and achievements to keep the climb interesting."
game videogame news fallout3 fallout 2009 Apr 15, 7:33The emulator behind those cool script based Mario hacks. "FCEUX is a cross platform, NTSC and PAL Famicom/NES emulator that ... gives the best of all worlds for the casual player, the ROM-hacking
community, Lua Scripters, and the Tool-Assisted Speedrun Community."
emulator nintendo videogame software programming game 2009 Apr 15, 7:30Another cool Mario hack via some sort of awesome emulator: "...the FCEUX emulator includes a second LUA script that turns Super Mario Bros. 3 into the DS game Nintendo never made. The hack disables
direct control of Mario completely, and only allows you to manipulate him (and protect him from the rest of the world) via mouse-drawn lines ala the DS's Kirby Canvas Curse and Atari's The Chase."
game video mario smb3 videogame emulator 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Mar 23, 12:58Details on a particular browser exploit and how its been resolved in IE8. "One approach they presented allowed attackers to use .NET framework DLL's to allocate executable pages of memory at
predictable locations within the iexplore.exe process. They were then able to demonstrate how .NET behavior could be combined with a separate exploitable memory corruption vulnerability to run
arbitrary code."
security ie8 ie browser hack via:ericlaw 2009 Mar 17, 6:02"With LUA scripting included in the latest version of NES emulator FCEUX, Rusted Logic blogger Xkeeper has woven some black magic into Super Mario that gives you full keyboard/mouse control over your
surroundings."
video youtube videogames videogame hack mario 2008 Dec 30, 1:03"Introducing Make: television, Coming in January 2009: A new national series from MAKE magazine, Twin Cities Public Television, and American Public Television"
pbs tv make diy community hack via:boingboing 2008 Sep 29, 1:45"So the manual is correct, and this truly is a mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette. This diskette has officially blown my mind."
hack disk hardware history game computer 2008 Sep 22, 1:47Tottenkoph, Rev and Philosopher, "Hijacking the Outdoor Digital Billboard Network". DefCon talk presentation notes on hacking digital billboards.
hack defcon security billboard 2008 Sep 22, 1:21Rick Hill, War Ballooning-Kismet Wireless "Eye in the Sky". Presentation notes from Rick Hill's DefCon talk on WarBallooning.
hack balloon wireless warballoon defcon security 2008 Sep 18, 10:05Sarah Palin's Yahoo email addresses were hacked. I agree with the commenter: "I was just about to post how I feel bad for her despite disagreeing with most of her politics. There are plenty of
legitimate reasons to attack her (or any politician), but this is clearly personal, not politics. From what I've read, this wasn't even the account she used for those communications she wanted to
hide from subpoena, so the vigilante justice angle is BS. This is just plain mean." Although the last sentence of the following made me laugh: "A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password
account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his
pending message to one of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set."
security politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo 2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like
the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. Ugh
wired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon 2008 Aug 11, 3:58Fellow kindly fixes spelling error on trailer mounted electronic roadway message signs. Pulls up, connects keyboard, reads password off the side of the enclosure, etc. "Not far from my house is one
of those temporary trailer-mounted variable message signs, which for the past several weeks has been advising motorists that ..." I always wondered what it would take on those signs. And if all the
passwords are four characters long...
security hack howto sign humor 2008 Aug 6, 2:56Online and offline YouTube link to video download and conversion tools.
youtube video hack lifehacker flv converter 2008 Jun 25, 11:59Cool hack but I'd be irritated if my photos we're messed up. "a camera-like device that implants messages in a sub-visible spectrum on its object. These messages are invisible to the naked eye, but
are clearly visible when photographed. "
video photography humor camera hack 2008 Jun 15, 7:57
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in
the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a
strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that
reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
media-center thai netflix ong-bak vista 2008 Jun 13, 12:52Stream NetFlix's on demand movies to your Vista Windows Media Center and all extenders including Xbox 360.
via:dotjosh lifehacker movies vista xbox plugin mce windows netflix movie 2008 May 16, 2:12Joshua trains crows to give him coins. "Joshua Klein's TED presentation about how he taught crows to drop coins into a peanut vending machine of his own design..."
hack crow ted video presentation joshua-klien 2008 May 4, 10:35Video archives of DEFCON presentations.
via:swannman security video feed defcon conference hack monthly
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