Author: ryan
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The Betamax decision – This Geek in Review for 18 Jan 2019
Yesterday, thirty five years ago, one of the most important supreme court cases in my lifetime was decided, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. – Wikipedia. More commonly called the Betamax decision, this case allowed the sale and use of the video cassette recorder. The case started with the release of Sony’s Betamax video tape recorder in the early 1970s. Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company reasoned that since the VCRs could be used for copyright infringement, then Sony should be liable for such infringement.
Luckily for us, the supreme court ruled that time shifting content in your home is not copyright infringement, and that VCRs had enough non-infringing use that VCR sales should continue. This ruling also helped make ripping CDs to MP3s legal. If the case would have gone the other way, then pop culture would look really different today. The home market for videos would be basically non-existent, you would only be able to see movies in the theater, on pay cable, or broadcast TV.
Although these are VHS and not Betamax, here’s a visualization of vhs covers. A lot of these are surprisingly recognizable.
I’m not a fan of online quizzes, but the subject matter of this one is brilliant.
Facebook has made it in the news a lot recently, and now conspiracy theories are starting to rise. What if Facebook’s ’10 Year Challenge’ is really a way for Facebook to train its facial recognition features. And apparently, most Facebook users don’t realize Facebook is tracking their interests. I’m not in the #deletefacebook crowd, I just try to not feed the beast. I only check FB every couple of weeks for messages, and when I check FB, I do it from an incognito window. My phone is devoid of Facebook and Messenger.
Oh my, daughter calls the cops after her father takes away her smartphone.. Boy is she in for a rude awakening once she gets out to the real world.
If you have others using your iPhone, such as child, there is a hack to let you password protect your apps. The hack uses the screentime protection features of iOS 12 to require a password to launch apps. Pretty ingenius.
In my day, we microwaved pizzas like poor college students should, but now, Ohio State students can get their pizzas from an ATM!
Computer security is hard, and if you’re going to fake documents, do some research on your fonts.
Finally, if you are trying to create some photos for Snapchat with your guns, you may want to unload them first. And if you’re arguing with your SO, don’t hand her a loaded gun and have her point it at you.
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Bring on the robots – This Geek in Review for 11 Jan 2019
Technology gets a bad rap, and is blamed for a ton of society ills. But, that line of thinking just focuses on the negative. In Tokyo, technology is allowing a cafe to use robots controlled by paralyzed people.
First it was Space Invaders wrist, then it was Nintendo thumb. Now, we have selfie wrist. Think of the children!
Lawyers should leave technology to the professionals. Paul Manafort’s lawers attempted to redact information in a court filing by changing the background color of the text to black. Although this makes the text look like the information is redacted, in reality, anyone can highlight the “redacted” text, copy, and paste it into another document to read. And this isn’t the
first time.It looks good in the movies, I can’t believe it didn’t work:
This is the most disturbing looking iPhone charger that I have ever seen:
And, finally, some 80s bits of geekdom. First up is an auction for all 4 Cameros that were used in the Transformers movies. Unfortunately, they aren’t street legal.
Mark Hamill let us know that during the filming of Star Wars there was a record heatwave in England. Due to the heat, filming of the Death Star scene had most of the pilots wearing only the top-half of their costume, attacking the Death Star in shorts.
Check out this look of computer stores of the 70s and 80s. Once you’ve had your fill of the computer stores, you can see how computers were sold in the late 80s:
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Telling time – This Geek in Review for 4 Jan 2019
In the beginning, we had analog clocks and we liked them. Learning what the big hand and little hand represents was a huge accomplishment when we were 6. Later came digital clocks, which took a lot of the fun away from learning to tell time. For a time, I was using a binary clock. It was a lot of fun, but I dropped it and broke it. Now, the clock I want is an Albert Clock. Forget about doing binary math, this clock makes you solve all sorts of problems! The Albert Clock has different levels of difficulty, plus an Android and iOS version. Think Geek has it for $149.99 right now. I could not find a computer or web version of the clock, if you know of one, let me know!
This is what happens when you steal something off of the porch of a former NASA engineer. The video originally had two incidents that were faked, so he edited those portions out of the video.
I’m a sucker for anything 80s, and a giant boombox fits that bill:
Jeri Ellsworth is an awesome engineer, and her latest project combines a the sound chip from a C64 and a guitar:
SimCity was huge during the 90s, and lost version for the NES has been recovered. And speaking of classic games, Rich Whitehouse has created DOOMBA. What is DOOMBA you may ask? It is software that takes your Roomba’s map of your house and creates a level of Doom for you to play. The final classic game I’m going to discuss today is Lemmings, which is now available on mobile devices. It’s available, but you’ll probably not want to play.
Did you know you can order crickets over the internet? And do you know what can happen if you’re not prepared for the crickets when they get to your house? Well, now you know.
