firehose

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that the chat logs between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange that were used as evidence in Manning's trial have made it onto the web, at least briefly. One of those logs contained something very interesting on page 4, which was picked up on by the News of Iceland, which reports, '"Jesus Christ. I think that we have recordings of all phone calls to and from the Icelandic parliament during the past four months". This text can be found in documents that the US military published on its website and is said to be part of the conversations between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. According to the documents, Assange claims to have phone call recordings from Althingi, the Icelandic parliament, but this is the first time that the existence of such data is mentioned publicly. ... According to Icelandic laws, it is required to inform the person you are speaking with if the phone call is being recorded. Given that the parliament is not violating laws it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices or wiretaps in the parliament.' — What makes it even more interesting is that Wired also reports in this recent story: Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angad Daryani built his first robot at age eight. By 13, he was building his own versions of the open source RepRap 3D printer. Now 15, he’s working on “SharkBot,” a modified version of the RepRap which he’ll sell to other “makers” in India, making it India’s first home-grown 3D printer. With teenage bravado, he told DNA India that it will be “the fastest and most robust desktop 3D printer that can print any material except metal.” One of his prototype 3D printers is being used at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.

Naturally, Daryani doesn’t have time for school. In an age when he was able to teach himself how to build a remote-controlled hovercraft by watching YouTube videos, what’s the point of formal instruction? From one of his online bios, here’s Daryani, who is technically home-schooled, says about education:

I am a school student, but i admit , 90% of my learning happens outside the classroom. My second school is the internet! I gained soo much knowledge from the internet and that has helped to reach this stage of being a maker, in my life!

Daryani has also created an e-book reader for blind people, the Virtual Brailer, which converts written text to brail as it scans across a text.

Daryani open-sources all of his designs so that others can copy and build on them. His TED talk isn’t online yet, but you can read more about him at the home of TED’s Mumbai meeting or on his blog, where he declares that “Computer Programming should be compulsorily incorporated into primary education just as literature is!”

by simonbitdiddle

Original Source

l4brys:

i wont rest until ive complained about everything

http://imgur.com/yMqg2gl

Original Source

The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial on Tuesday faced a murder charge in 2003.

I’ve decided to start a series of short tutorials on creating video game GIFs for Tumblr, and it seems like this is the best place to start. The Super Nintendo is known for being one of the first home consoles capable of extraordinary 2D animation and beautiful pixel art. Plus its game library is enormous, and easy to emulate. SNES ROMS are available all over the place, and there are plenty of emulators to choose from.

So why emulate the SNES instead of just playing games directly from the console?  There are various ways to capture video from an actual SNES, but I don’t have any experience with them. What I can tell you is that emulation makes it much easier to record certain moments in a game through the use of save states. These allow you to rapidly try a certain action over and over until you get it exactly how you want it. Of course this also helps you get through the game faster, which is important since a lot of these old games can be really tough! The other main benefit of emulation is that you get a very fine-grain control over the screen size, image quality and even content of what’s being displayed. I won’t go into the moral ethics of emulation, other than to say that most people think it’s somewhat OK as long as you own the original cartridge, or you’ve bought a digital release of it somewhere such as PSN or the Nintendo Virtual Console. Unfortunately this still doesn’t make it legal.

My emulator of choice is ZSNES, a free Windows-based emulator which I’ve been using faithfully since the mid-90s. It has a ridiculous-looking DOS-like interface, with no real “window” around it. The older versions even had your mouse cursor as a knife that dripped blood. They haven’t updated this thing since 2007 (version 1.51), but it works great on my Windows 7 machine. I don’t know if there are better emulators, and I don’t really care – this one gets the job done almost every time. They support LINUX as well, and there is an unofficial Mac version here (thanks to codeman38 for pointing this out). A lot of the principles carry over to emulators, so it’s worth reading this even if you intend to use something else.

Configuration

With using any emulator for GIFs, it is crucial that you configure the settings first before doing anything else. There are a ton of settings in ZSNES, but these are the ones you really need to pay attention to:

• Input— If you don’t have a gamepad, seriously go out and buy one before even trying to make a game GIF. It is absolutely essential. I highly recommend the Xbox 360 wired (NOT wireless) controller. Select “KEYBOARD/GAMEPAD” under “DEVICE”. Then click the “SET” button, and use the controller to indicate the correct button/joystick movement for each of the keys. Everybody hates the Xbox 360 d-pad, but the left analog stick works great for movement, so use that instead. After you’re done, it should look something like this:

• Video — This is EXTREMELY important. When emulating any game system with the intention of creating GIFs, you want to run at the native resolution in order to avoid artifacts. Artifacts are garbage pixels which will make your GIFs blurry and distorted. However it is perfectly OK to run at any resolution that’s a multiple of two of the native resolution (x2, x4, x8, etc.). The native resolution for the SNES is 512 x 448 (though Wikipedia says there are others as well), so you’ll want to use “512x448 R W” which will maintain the correct aspect ratio and run it in a window that you can video capture. When you’re done it should look like this:

  The great thing about the 512 width is that Tumblr’s standard GIF resolution is a 500 pixel width, so it’s easy to crop off 12 pixels without losing much. This is why I don’t recommend running at the 2x multiple (1024x896) for SNES games – you can crop down to 500 pixels, but I don’t think you can scale it down without creating distortion. ZSNES doesn’t have anti-aliasing, bilinear filtering or scan lines in the video settings like many emulators. These are great for playing old games, but they are terrible for making clean-looking GIFs (especially pixel art GIFs). Avoid these at all costs. Most emulators which have anti-aliasing or bilinear filtering will have it turned on by default, so you really need to look out for this.

• Saves — This may be unique to ZSNES, but here you’ll find a bunch of options for controlling how save states work in the game. As I mentioned before, save states and game controllers are both your best friend when it comes to gif-making productivity. And linking these together can turn you into an unstoppable juggernaut.

  As you can see in the photo, I am mapping gamepad buttons (specifically the triggers) directly to “save state” and “load state”. So I can save and load whenever I want, and my hands never even have to leave the controller! Most emulators don’t have these menu options, but you can usually get around it using a third-party tool such as the free AutoHotKey or the not-free (but more user-friendly) Xpadder.

Dealing with ROMs

As far as where to obtain SNES ROMs, I’ll leave that up to you. Since the games are so small, there are a ton of sites that have them.  It’s a pretty simple Google search to find pretty much any game you’re looking for. Again, none of this is legal, even if you own the game. In fact I don’t think there are any legal SNES ROMs available anywhere outside of homebrew games and demos. So beware of anybody trying to charge money for ROMs, because it’s probably a scam.

SNES ROM files will usually have a SFC or SMC extension, but they will most likely arrive to you in a compressed format (ZIP, 7z, RAR, etc.) that will hide this. Open up the file, using a tool like WinRAR, and make sure there’s only one file in it, and that it’s in SFC or SMC format. If there is more than one file inside, or if the compression format is anything besides ZIP, you will need to extract it and (optionally) re-compress the ROM you want as a ZIP. If the extension is anything besides SFC or SMC, you can give it a try, but it may not work.

Once you have the ROM in the correct format it’s all pretty straightforward – in ZSNES you just select “Game” and “Load”. A dialog will pop up where you can navigate to the ROM you want to play. No, you can’t drag and drop – I’m not sure that even existed back when they first wrote this thing. It doesn’t matter. Just keep all your ROMs in one folder, and the emulator will remember the last place you loaded from.

Running the Game

From here on out, it’s pretty much like playing a SNES connected to a TV set, but with the added convenience of save states. ZSNES even lets you have multiple states – just go into the Game menu, and it’s under “PICK STATE”. The save/load buttons you mapped earlier onto your game pad will now use whatever state number you choose as your current state.

There are a lot of cool optional things you can do while running ZSNES. One of my favorites is the sprite and background layer display control. By default ZSNES maps these to the 1 through 6 keys. 1 through 4 are the background layers, 5 is the sprite layer and 6 resets all layers back to “ON”. This can come in handy when you’re trying to isolate a certain part of the image for your GIFs, so it’s worth playing around with just to see what your options are.

One minor note when running games:  I’ve noticed some weird resizing that happens if you go back-and-forth between full-screen and windowed in ZSNES. Try to stay windowed the whole time, but if you accidentally go full-screen, be sure to shut down ZSNES and restart it completely.

I’ll go over how I capture video from games in my next installment. Spoiler alert: I use HyperCam.

Flanders, Belgium designer bricobart of Yak-Proof demonstrates how to make a Viking-style beer mug out of wood in his step-by-step Instructables article. There are no crazy power tools required. All you need is a hatchet, a knife, polyester rope, some Propolis bio-resin for a leak-proof seal, and multiple layers of walnut oil. Then pour your favorite alcoholic beverage and join us in drinking to the mighty gods and goddesses of Norse mythology!

images via bricobart

Jasco Games took to Kickstarter to fund an officially-licensed Mega Man board game -called Mega Man The Board Game, appropriately enough - seeking $70,000 on the crowdfunding platform by January 19. After about 24 hours of life, it has already earned over $160,000. Our expert analysis leads us to deduce that people must really like Mega Man.

The core version of the board game celebrates the Blue Bomber's 25th anniversary with nine colorless figurines, four of which are Mega Man, four robot masters and one Dr. Wily for $70. The $140 deluxe version adds Jasco Games' Time Man and Oil Man expansion to complement the game's multiple 40-card player decks, individual robot master game boards and dozens of token pieces.

The board game creators set up 11 stretch goals to continue the crowdfunding campaign, starting at $80,000 and working up to $500,000, the latter adding a fresh coat of paint to every figure. It will add more goals as they unlock, and five have already been met, bringing about alternate Mega Man figures, Guts Man and Fire Man expansions.

Officially licensed Mega Man board game blasts Kickstarter for mega bucks originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 13 Dec 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If this story turns out to involve meth, it might be among the most Oklahoma things to ever happen. Cattle ranchers on Tuesday found a wet, nearly naked man hiding from extreme weather in a guitar case near the town of Muskogee, cold but alive.

With a quadruple-jump in dollar value and an equally stratospheric increase in the number of transactions, even homeless people look set to benefit from Bitcoin.

Jimmy Kimmel we brought in a real sign language interpreter to tell us what this guy was actually signing.

Frank Underwood is back.

submitted by shannonpreble [link] [6 comments]

Bluewater Productions announced Monday that it is adding the former GOP presidential candidate to its graphic biography series. "Political Power: Herman Cain" is is set to be released Wednesday, with an E-book version costing $1.99. Print aficionados can get their hands on a copy for $3.99.

Beyoncé just pulled the biggest stunt of 2013 and dropped an entire album on iTunes.

Mirror Universe Mr. Rogers doesn’t think you’re special, hates that you’re his neighbor and loves our Krampus Sweater. He does still wear tennis shoes because they’re so darn comfortable. 

Buy your own sweater here

Dr. Indra Neil Guha, a liver specialist, and his colleagues at Nottingham University Hospital in England spent a year poring over Ian Fleming's James Bond books and tabulating how many drinks the suave spy drank a day.

Peyton Manning was kept off the field in a game the Chargers controlled offensively to keep their season alive.

The big question entering Thursday Night Football was whether the San Diego Chargers would have an answer for Peyton Manning, but the focus should have been if the Denver Broncos could stop a choking, ball control Chargers offense. San Diego limited Manning's time on the field by holding the ball for 38:49 in a 27-20 Chargers win.

A rusty first quarter was quickly forgotten when Philip Rivers and Keenan Allen connected on two first half touchdowns to give the Chargers the lead entering the break. The pair opened the scoring on a crossing route that left the Broncos defense bewildered, and hooked up again shortly before the close to the half on an end zone throw that saw Allen elevate over defenders and extend the lead.

Ryan Mathews extended the lead early in the third quarter and Denver quickly found itself on the wrong end of a 14 point deficit. San Diego's running game was effective throughout the night, with Mathews and Danny Woodhead combining for 171 all-purpose yards, opening up the passing game for Rivers.

Clock control was Denver's biggest enemy. San Diego wasn't moving the ball through the air on big plays, but continually ground out first downs that took large chunks off the clock. Long passing plays never materialized for the Chargers, but it didn't matter.

San Diego's offensive success would be for naught if not for stellar defense play that turned largely Manning into a non-factor. Denver's passing game was threatening, but lacked punch without Wes Welker in the slot. This was compounded by the return of second-year linebacker Melvin Ingram, who made an impact in his second game of the season after being activated off the PUP list.

Denver still control their fate entering the 2013 playoffs. New England is positioned to make a late push for home field advantage, while the Chargers wait to see how chips fall in the AFC.

Fantasy studs and duds

Mathews had an excellent night running for the Chargers, finishing with 128 yards and a touchdown.

Manning played well, but didn't make his customary impact from a fantasy perspective -- throwing for 289 yards, two touchdowns and an interception.

Injury report

Players left the field for both teams, but nobody was lost for the game. The Broncos and Chargers escaped Thursday night without any serious injuries.

Did they cover?

The Denver Broncos were 10-point favorites, according to OddsShark. Their outright loss means they failed to cover.

What's next?

12/22: San Diego Chargers vs. Oakland Raiders

12/22: Denver Broncos vs. Houston Texans

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Rooster ripping up the Nashua Market Basket!

submitted by rroach [link] [63 comments]

This Town Just Keeps Getting Worse...:

From the essay:

In late 2012, after I had finished most of the This Town manuscript, I was interviewing Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, for a brief Q and A that would appear in the front of The New York Times Magazine. Feeling a bit jaded — maybe more than usual after three years’ immersion in the Washington political class — my sarcasm flowed: “You’re retiring after serving 24 years in the Senate,” I asked Lieberman. “What lobbying firm are you going to join now?

“I’m not going to lobby,” Lieberman told me. “For sure.” “Chris Dodd said the same thing two years ago,” I said. (Dodd, Lieberman’s longtime fellow senator from Connecticut, had left the senate in 2011 and since went on to become head of the Motion Pictures Association of America, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.)

“Yeah, I know,” Lieberman said. “Watch me.”

We did, and it’s no surprise how this story ends. Politico’s Byron Tau reported before Thanksgiving that Lieberman had in fact signed on to represent a Libyan businessman who might run for president of his native land. Lieberman’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman, would include “government relations services, communication of information to the principal and as well as [communication of] information about the principal to interested persons in the public sector,” according to public documents. Such communication will include “meetings with members of Congress, executive branch officials and others.” Not lobbying per se — he would not formally register! — but certainly lobbying-ish activities.

20 Things the Poor Really Do Each Day

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