“Quadrilateral Cowboy is a game we’ve been watching with great interest ever since Thirty Flights Of Loving creator Brendon Chung first debuted it last year. It’s about hacking, but not via
irritating minigames or jargon-your-problems-away Hollywood magic. Instead, you learn basic (albeit fictional) code and take down everything from laser grids to gun emplacements with a twitch
of your fingers and a wriggle of your brain. It’s already an extremely clever game, and it’s quite empowering despite the fact that you play as someone who probably couldn’t even heft an
assault rifle - let alone fire one. Basically, it’s a wonderfully novel idea - more Neuromancer than Deus Ex - but words only do it so much justice. Thus, I’ve decided to play it for your
enrichment, in hopes that you will understand why Quadrilateral should be driving your radar haywire.”
More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election
campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s
the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption
seats in 2016 to effect real change.
Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian
effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of
corrupting multinationals.
“tl;dr I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to
know how it works.”
Former FireFox developer on the switch to their continuous update cycle.
Oh no, Chrome is doing such-and-such; we’d better do something equivalent or we’ll fall behind! We thought we needed a rapid update process like Chrome. We were jealous of their rapid update
capability, which let them deploy improvements to users continuously. We had to “catch up” with Chrome’s updating capability.
Dealing with servicing on IE for years had led me to some of the same thoughts when I heard FireFox was switching to continuous updates.
2009 Oct 18, 2:23TED video of Stewart Brand: "The book tackles three of today’s most profound transformations — climate change, urbanization and biotechnology — in a way that’s part practical guide to damage control,
part prescriptive inspiration for a more efficient society, part bold anthem of design-thinking. And if Brand’s track record is any sign at all, Whole Earth Discipline may well become one of the
(counter)cultural classics of our generation." stewart-brandclimate-changebiologybiotechurbantedvideoecology
2009 Aug 5, 7:57"Ten times smaller than barcodes, Bokodes’ low-cost optical design can be read from as far as 4 meters away, much farther than barcodes, by taking an out-of-focus photo with any off-the-shelf
camera." Love for stuff like this to catch on, however compared to QR codes, these are much more difficult to produce than barcodes in that you can't just print them out and they require changes
to the photography technique (must be out of focus) rather than just analyzing any photograph of a barcode. They seem to be solving slightly different problems. qrcodeqrbarcodecamerainformationdesignbokodeaugmented-realitytechnical
2009 Jul 20, 5:20"what better way to celebrate the tremendously fascinating week ahead than with a special behind-the-scenes look at all the incredible energy — physical, intellectual, emotional — that goes into the
making of a TED talk?"blogtedconferencedesignvideo
I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using
it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the
URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.
I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:
2008 Sep 8, 6:51Neil prints out brain cross sections from an MRI and pastes them onto a set of wooden cubes forming a model of his brain. "Last month I took a left-right MRI scan, reconstructed it, and rerendered
top-bottom and front-back scans... Another method to visualize a complex 3D object is to build a model. The dimensions of the MRI data cuboid are almost exactly 3x4x5. Accordingly, I obtained 60
one-inch cubes ... arranged them appropriately, varnished the 94 outside faces, printed nine carefully selected cross-sections and their mirror images, sliced the prints into 266 squares and glued
them to the correct internal faces."artdesignbraintoymodelwood
2008 Sep 5, 1:56This is the game from the same person I linked to previously who has a son named Link: "I'm very excited to finally announce our first game, Liight, for WiiWare! So... what is it? Liight is a puzzle
solving game where the pieces are colored lights and the goal is to make cool music! Anyone can play! Just illuminate all the targets in each puzzle with light of the matching color... but it's not
always so easy! You'll have to mix colors, cast shadows and make the most of your limited resources to solve these brain teasers. Solve 100 challenging puzzles! Create your own puzzles, and Share
them with your friends via WiiConnect24. Host a Contest to see who can solve your puzzle the fastest. If you're ready, take on Nonstop mode, a whole new way to play where arcade-style scoring meets
split-second strategy!"liightgamevideogamenintendowiiwiiware
2008 Jun 10, 3:10Interview with guy from "the Seasteading Institute, the brainchild of two Silicon Valley software developers, aims to develop self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to
break free of the cozy cartel of 190-odd world governments acommunitypoliticsseasteadingsocietyarticlearstechnica
2008 Apr 21, 2:24"Unlike the engineers who saw the service as too slow, he saw the problem as one deriving from the boredom of those waiting for an elevator. ... He suggested putting mirrors in the elevator lobbies
to occupy those waiting by enabling them to look at themsprogress-barpsychologyelevator
2008 Mar 21, 3:48An original style blog that consists of cool links and vidoes and things. Lots of interesting, odd, cool, and funny things here.blogmonthlyhumorphotosvideoslinks
2008 Mar 17, 10:16Jonathan Coulton's music available as CC mp3s. He did 'Still Alive' the ending theme for Portal and 'Re: Brains' the zombie song.jonathan-coultonmp3musicdownloadhumorcccopyright
A wise friend once said: "All I know is that the 'sh' in flash stands for
shell" -- @brainsmoke
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