Author: ryan
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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.
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The map room scene in Raiders would be very boring if it didn’t have John Williams’ score, which elevates the scene to one of the best in the movie.
The map room scene in Raiders would be very boring if it didn’t have John Williams’ score, which elevates the scene to one of the best in the movie.
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Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. — Rework (pg. 77)
Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.
— Rework (pg. 77)
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The 911 Christmas Present edition – This Geek in Review for 28 Dec 2018
Sometimes, even seven year olds can teach adults a thing or two, especially when it comes to getting clothes at Christmas. In Ontario, a seven year old called 911 after getting snow pants for Christmas.
Every year, the city of Gavle, Sweden erects the world’s largest straw goat for Christmas, and then spends the rest of the season protecting it from vandals and drunks. For the last 51 years it has only survived 15 times, so here’s hoping for the best this year. There is a live webcam available, so far, so good!
Every booby trap in Home Alone, in Flipbook form:
Some confused parents with their gift of a portrait of Obi Wan Kenobi. And to continue odd Christmas items that exist, how about a twerking, Alexa enabled bear, Christmas bear, and Santa.
If you were wondering why I’ve been getting turned off about social media such as Facebook, articles that suggest 60% of internet traffic is fake is one of the factors. If you share something on Facebook, there is a good chance that what you are sharing is fake and not real. If you are reading this, how do you know it’s real? You’ll just have to take my word for it. A Facebook bug giving access to private photos doesn’t help, but if you are uploading photos you want to keep private to Facebook, you’ve got other problems. Facebook also gave Microsoft’s Bing search engine access to everyone’s Friends list, and gave Netflix and Spotify access to everyone’s private messenger conversations.
Check out Wired’s video profile of the creator of the Hoberman Sphere:
The shoes we’ve been waiting for since may finally become reality in 2019.
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Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative. — Rework (pg 67)
Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.
— Rework (pg 67)
