Category Archives: Uncategorized
Play the world’s largest PacMan game
UPDATE: Many thanks to Ivan who pointed out that I hadn’t actually linked to the game itself in my narrative! That has been fixed, and while making that change I also realized it’s actually called “The World’s *Biggest* Pac Man Game,” not largest. Either way, it’s still a blast.
You know you love PacMan, the game that, when released in 1980, was considered the first uniquely identifiable game character, was the first game to appeal in large numbers to women, was the first to show non-violent games could be successful, and became so popular it earned $1 billion IN QUARTERS in a decade.
There are countless remakes of PacMan, but I am going to introduce to you to what I think is the best of the unlicensed versions: It’s the world’s largest PacMan game, playable through a browser, and the way it works is that people actually create their own mazes that then all interlock to form one huge game. You can choose any of the mazes to start, then going through one of the passages on the side of the screen will move to an adjoining maze.
Google, Mattel give us the ‘new’ View-Master
Remember View-Master? If you’re, uh, ‘younger,’ you may not, but if you’re my age you definitely will. First making an appearance around 1940, The View-Master was an odd, sort-of binocular-looking thing that had a slot in the top. into which you would insert a paper reel that had pictures of cities or illustrations for books among other things. They would have a 3-D appearance because you would view two of the fourteen images at a time, meaning each reel had seven images. By pushing down a lever, the paper reel would rotate to a new set of images. At one point it was used to train soldiers in how to identify enemy vehicles!
While it, like everything, has a collector fan base, the device fell out of popularity around 1997, although it is in the Toy Hall of Fame.
What’s the best antivirus program?
I don’t think I need to tell anyone reading this that digital security is a big issue at all levels: Personal, corporate, government, and international. On your PC, at the very least, an antivirus program is mandatory, although many people feel they don’t need one. Take my word for it, you do.
But there are many options, and for something like that you want the program that performs the best, detecting the most viruses and other malware compared to the competition. To offer some clarification, antivirus programs have a list of what are called ‘virus definitions,’ which is just what it sounds like: it provides characteristics of the viruses known to the antivirus package that it uses to determine if you have been infected (whenever you update your AV program, you’re downloading virus definition files).
No Amazon drone flights for now
Last semester, I made a post about Amazon’s intention to start testing the use of drones for the purpose of making deliveries. That’s right, they wanted to have a drone, with your box attached to the bottom, fly to your house, land, drop off the box, then fly back to wherever it originated.
However, Amazon isn’t the only one interested in drones; they’re really popular. So popular, they have caused problems for commercial jets, landed on the White House lawn, and you can even take an aerial tour of various places in the world thanks to drones.
Drone that crashed on White House lawn
So popular have drones become that the FAA decided they had to develop some regulations regarding their commercial use, and it appears that because of this regulations Amazon’s dreams of drone delivery will be left out in the cold.
Facebook now lets you choose a digital heir
Since its inception, Facebook has been struggling with what to do when one of its subscribers passes away. In the past, their general approach was to either lock the profile when they discovered its owner has died, causing grief for those left behind at one of the most difficult times a person faces, delete the account or convert it into a memorial. The latter would remove personal information, status updates, and only allow friends to post on the wall of the deceased.
Now, Facebook is allowing you to choose what they refer to as a “Legacy Contact,” who can take control, in some ways, of your profile. They won’t be able to see your messages or remove friends, but they will be able to respond to friend requests, as well as make a header post on your profile and update the main photos. You have to let Facebook know that the person has died, and the person chosen as the legacy contact won’t know they have been chosen until after the person who chose them has made their way to the great beyond. There’s no doubt that memorializing and Facebook itself can be one way to help people grieve.
What happens to social media profiles in the case of death has been an issue for a long time, and every social media site deals with it in their own way. Twitter, for example, only allows for an account to be deactivated, and their policy on this explicitly states that they will not give anyone access to a deceased’s account, regardless of their relation to the person (although in some cases they have).
I deactivated my Facebook account almost a year ago for reasons I detailed extensively on this post. However, considering over a billion people use it, and that it is *the* social network, I’m surprised it took so long for them to implement something of this sort.
Specifics can be found on this Facebook page.
Apple is worth a whole lot
On Tuesday, Apple became the first company ever to be valued at $700 billion, a number so big I can hardly process it.
As this post over on Fortune.com explains, that value was reached thanks to their share price reaching $122.02, which is then multiplied by the number of shares outstanding to reach total market capitalization. And that capitalization destroys even the companies who follow behind; The next highest market capitalization is Exxon/Mobil at $382 billion.
Nutella can be used as thermal paste!
Some background: Two semesters ago, one of my students mentioned – in class no less – how much they loved Nutella. I had no idea what Nutella was, so they explained it was some kind of Frankenstein-like combination of nuts and chocolate smashed together to form a peanut butter-like substance. It sounded like an offense to the senses.
But she was insistent. So much did she want us to understand the glory of this substance, she made pastries that had Nutella in them and brought them to class to share with everyone. I have to admit that she was right; Nutella was glorious. She might have brought them for students but I dismissed the class and ate them all by myself. Not really, but I wanted to.
Now I understand
A couple of controversial apps
There are a couple of apps out there that are causing some controversy, but for two very different reasons. One is about class, and one is about cops.
Class120
The first one we’ll discuss is a class-attendance app called Class120, and it sends a message to the student and other designated people, usually a parent and administrator, when the student misses a class. It’s participation-based, meaning the student or someone authorized uploads their schedule into the app, and the phone uses its GPS in order to determine whether or not the student is in class. It won’t say where the student actually is, it will just say they are not in class.
Worm’s brain in Lego robot
What a time to be alive! In class on Friday, we had a tantalizing foreshadowing of fascinating topics for next class such as Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Intelligent Agents among others, and in our preliminary discussion about them, it was brought up that researchers had implanted the brain of a worm into a robot made of Legos.
Well, not really. Although it sounds remarkable (and it is), the link between a computer and a brain is not so far off. Computers are sort-of brains, and our brains are computers. Just like a digital machine, our brains rely in large part on electrical activity known as the action potential and the ability to carry that potential down a path of interconnected neurons, so transferring the behavior of a brain, if not the ability to cognate, into a machine shouldn’t be the insurmountable task it may at first seem.
Neuronal cell
So to be clear, the researchers, members of the groundbreaking OpenWorm project (download their app!), did not transfer the *actual brain* of the worm into the Lego-bot. They recreated its activity in software, simulating its low-level stimulus-response actions into programming code. Once that was complete, they were able to stimulate the robot in various ways, and it would respond in the same way the worm would respond. As stated in the post over on Smithsonianmag.com, when the nose of the robot was stimulated, forward motion ceased, just as it would in the worm.
What’s amazing is that none of that behavior was programmed in. It’s a result of them programing the structure of the neurons, so that the behavior is a *result* of the programming, not *because* of the programming.
Here is a video of the robot and its resultant behavior watch, and be amazed (Thanks to Dane for the subject and the link).
Goodbye Radio Shack
After 94 years, Radio Shack, a store that elicits very fond memories for me, has declared bankruptcy and is negotiating to close half its stores and sell the other half. They’re even being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
This is sad news. To me anyway. I’m willing to guess that for many people the nostalgia will seem misplaced, but for me it was an integral part of my tech education.
Radio Shack hasn’t been the store I remember for years and years, over a decade to be more specific. In those days, you could buy breadboards, capacitors, diodes, all sorts of adapters, cables, every kind of electronic component you could imagine. If you needed oscilloscopes, soldering irons, magnetizers, anything of the sort, they had it.
If you needed some oddball adapter so you could use headphones that had a 1/16″ headphone jack with a device that had an 1/8″ jack, they could set you up. If you needed to connect three game consoles to one TV and switch between them, they had the switchboxes for that. I have a jar out in the garage filled with adapters that I’ve used over the years for countless projects, mainly when wires ran endlessly throughout the house, all but one bought at Radio Shack. I dumped them out a took a picture of a subset of them. This is by no means all of them, but it gives a good idea.
