Fatbob

See that wooden round thing above? That's a smartphone -- a real, working smartphone with a high-res screen and a camera, and not just a concept that will never come to life. Just imagining how to take calls on it without a headset or how to access w...

(Photo: Lisa Mann/BBC)

Blogger David Thompson calls her "an eight-year old queen of the crows." So far, Gabi Mann of Seattle, Washington is using her super power modestly. It's been developing for the past year. What is her power?

Crows bring her things.

(Photo: Katy Sewall/BBC)

Wild crows fly up and drop small objects in front of her. They're gifts. For the past 4 years, she's fed them scraps for fun. Now they're expressing their loyalty. The BBC reports:

The crows would clear the feeder of peanuts, and leave shiny trinkets on the empty tray; an earring, a hinge, a polished rock. There wasn't a pattern. Gifts showed up sporadically - anything shiny and small enough to fit in a crow's mouth.

One time it was a tiny piece of metal with the word "best" printed on it. "I don't know if they still have the part that says 'friend'," Gabi laughs, amused by the thought of a crow wearing a matching necklace.

How should Gabi use this power?

Today, while having sex, my fiancé started talking dirty. I enjoyed it, until he had a brain fart and said, "God, you love fucking my pussy." FML

Every few months a game comes along which is so addictive, players can’t seem to put it down – no matter how frustrating it may get. Last year one of those games was Super Hexagon. After fighting his way through several levels, [Val] decided that designing a bot to beat the game would be more efficient than doing it himself. Having played a few rounds of Super Hexagon ourselves, we can’t fault him on that front!

At its core, Super Hexagon is a simple game. Walls move from the screen edges toward a ship located near the center of the screen. The player uses the arrow keys to “orbit” the ship around a central shape. Avoid getting crushed by the walls, and you’re golden. However, the entire game board is constantly spinning, expanding, contracting, flashing, and generally doing things to disorient the player while ever more complex wall patterns move in to kill you. In short, Super Hexagaon makes Touhou bullet hell games look like a cakewalk.

The first step in beating the game is to capture the screen. [Val] tried Fraps and VLC, but lags of 2 seconds or more were not going to work. Then [Val] turned to DLL Injection. Super Hexagon calls the OpenGL function glutSwapBuffers() to implement double buffering. Every frame of the game is rendered in the background. Once rendering is complete glutSwapBuffers() is called to swap the buffers, and the process starts over again. [Val] changed the game code such that his own frame capture function would be called instead of glutSwapBuffers(). Once he was done capturing the game’s video buffer, [Val] then called the real glutSwapBuffers() function. It worked perfectly.

Now that he had an image, [Val] used OpenCV to process it. Although game is graphically very noisy, there are only a few colors used at any one time. It didn’t take much work to come up with an algorithm which would create a binary image of the walls and the ship itself.

[Val] cast rays from the center of each wall through the center of the screen. The ray which was longest before intersecting another wall would be the best escape route. This simple solution worked, but only for about 40 seconds. At that point, Super Hexagon would start throwing more complex patterns, and the AI would fail. The final solution was to create an accessibility condition which also took into account how much space was available between the various approaching walls. This new version of the AI was able to beat the game.

So was this a more efficient method than grinding through Super Hexagon manually? Since [Val] now knows all about DLL injection and OpenCV, we sure think it was!

Click past the break to see the [Val’s] bot in action!

Filed under: video hacks

LOS ANGELES — Miracles for sale. Price: $15,000 and likely climbing.

Demand for the Grateful Dead's July 3-5 farewell shows at Chicago's Soldier Field has been so staggering that by the time the public Ticketmaster deal went down on Saturday morning, secondary market sites like StubHub were offering single tickets for $1,000 and up, with some three-day packages going for as much as $15,000.

SEE ALSO: Grammys prove Rock 'n' Roll isn't dead — but it's sure getting old

It wasn't supposed to be this way, but hey, capitalism always finds new ways to skin the goat.

When the surviving members of the band announced the shows last month, Deadheads were cheered to hear that the old-fashioned mail-order system was back, too: Byzantine instructions, meant to separate 'heads from scalpers with No. 10 envelopes and index cards and postal money orders, were supposedly designed to gave fans a reasonable shot at a face-value ticket. Read more...

More about Music, Tickets, Concerts, Ticketmaster, and Grateful Dead

via

 

The post Marvin Gaye – I Heard It Through The Grapevine (A capella) appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

I find it hard to believe that cats love it.

Thanks sg

 

The post Cats love it! appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

via

 

The post Alex Boye’, & The Dancing Grannies – Uptown Funk appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Some people think this whole dress debate is about how the mind processes color or lighting tricks

But it's really about trust. Can you trust your own eyes? Can you trust your white and gold friends when you clearly see black and blue?

Fortunately, there are a lucky few who have actually seen The Dress in real life who can guide us through this mystifying time

Laura Coleman, the woman who modeled the infamous dress and actually wore it, wants to set the record straight: It's black and blue.

Okay so I was the first to wear this dress and just to confirm it's definitely black and blue! #thedress

A photo posted by LAURA COLEMAN (@misslauracoleman) on Feb 27, 2015 at 5:17am PST Read more...

More about Debate, Watercooler, Pics, Conversations, and Thedress

Read all about it.

 

The post How to make your own ice melt solution appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Thanks Ernie

 

The post Meanwhile, at the auto repair shop appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

The titled epitome of '90s raditude done in by hubris, Sonic X-Treme, was meant to be the first full 3D Sonic -- a Mario 64 colleague -- and the first of SEGA's star series for its Saturn system. Like so many subsequent 3D Sonic games should have been, Sonic X-Treme was cancelled. The Saturn lacked its company mascot, and ultimately SEGA was done in on the hardware side.

We've seen leaked footage of Sonic X-Treme before, but dedicated fans have actually put together a playable demo, which you can get here with a forum registration.

As the thread notes, it's just one level -- with "more builds and levels to come later" -- that is "an almost as is port of the engine...how the original developers had left it." The fish-eye lens that characterized the canceled platformer will come in a later version.

A few weeks ago, an Australian startup offered to send me a T-shirt. I'm not normally on the T-shirt beat, but this one was special. The 100-percent cotton garment featured "patented hydrophobic nanotechnology" to make it super stain-resistant. "I'll be the judge of that," I thought, and a few days later the Threadsmiths T-shirt arrived in the mail.

Read more...

The unusually cold and snowy winter in southern New England has broken records and resulted in many indellible images, from collapsed roofs to massive snow farms and a frozen Hudson River in New York. Now, a new iconic image of the winter of 2014-15 can be added to the mix: slush waves.

Nantucket-based photographer Jonathan Nimerfroh captured waves coming ashore that contained bits of ice, making them resemble a slurpee

Slurpee Surf

A photo posted by Jonathan Nimerfroh (@jdnphotography) on Feb 25, 2015 at 7:06pm PST Read more...

More about Photos, Winter, Us World, Us, and Ice