O niebezpieczeństwie korzystania z kart zbliżeniowych pisaliśmy już wiele. Nawet bardzo wiele. Poniżej kolejny przykład, tym razem z życia wzięty. Nie było żadnych “hackerskich ataków”,...

**** To tylko fragment wpisu! Kliknij na tytuł aby przeczytać całość. http://niebezpiecznik.pl

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New Cyanide and Happiness Short.

Jaki związek ma "książka" z "knieją"? Czy "książka" wywodzi się od "księdza"?

Calculating geometric means in SQL server without using aggregate functions, and why widescreen TV aspect ratio is 16:9

Introduction

One of the first reviews I posted on Everyday Linux User was for Puppy Arcade 10. In that review I highlighted that the concept was good but the overall experience could be improved.

I received an email a little while back now asking me to take another look at Puppy Arcade as version 11 has been released.

What is Puppy Arcade?

Puppy Linux is a lightweight distribution built to run in memory and therefore the overall footprint is very small.

Puppy is designed to run from a USB drive and not for installation on a hard drive.

There are a number of Puppy derivatives available including MacPup and Simplicity.

Puppy Arcade is designed for fun. It includes emulators for every games console imaginable as well as ROM loading software and joystick calibration.

How to get Puppy Arcade

You can download Puppy Arcade from http://scottjarvis.com/page105.htm

Note that there are three download links listed. I picked the one from 2013.

Normally when I install Puppy to USB I create a CD first, boot the CD and then use the Puppy Universal Installer to create a bootable USB drive.

For Puppy Arcade it was possible to use UNetbootin although the official readme suggests using the Frugal installer from the CD.

Click here to learn how to create a bootable Linux USB drive using UNetbootin.

When I tried Puppy Arcade on my newer Toshiba Satellite Pro it didn't work properly. There was a loud beep every time I clicked on an icon and the display was stuck at 800x600.

There is a newer version of Puppy Arcade 11 for newer hardware available at this page although it is a test version.

I have therefore decided to conduct this review on the same laptop that I used to review Puppy Arcade 10, the trusty old Samsung R20.

First Boot

When you boot for the first time you will be asked to choose between xorg and xvesa and you will be asked to choose your display configuration.

The Puppy Arcade desktop appears and you are asked to choose your language, timezone and keyboard layout.






























Puppy Arcade has a central tool for setting up things like network connections, default browser and Flash.

Save File

Before doing anything else I would recommend rebooting Puppy Arcade.

The way Puppy works is that everything is loaded into memory and every application you install is saved in a file which can be stored on your USB drive or on the host drive of the computer you are using. There is no partitioning or anything like that required, it just creates a file just like any other file.

The save file is not created until you shutdown Puppy Arcade for the first time.

As you have set up your display settings and your language settings it is a good idea to reboot and create that save file.


When you click reboot you will be asked whether you want to save data or not.


If you click "Save" then you will enter the PupSaveConfig utility. Click OK to configure the location of the save file.


The next screen lets you determine which folder to use to store the save file and a name for the save file.

You can also determine the type and size of the file. Remember that you will be loading in ROM files so you will need a decent sized save file.


Finally you are ready to reboot. Click Reboot PC and your Puppy Arcade should now load with the save file enabled...... but it doesn't.

There is a small bug whereby the save file name is wrong. Use a file manager to locate the save file that you created earlier and rename it to warysave.3fs.

Reboot again and Puppy Arcade should now load using the save file.

Connecting to the internet

To connect to the internet, open up the Puppy Arcade setup screen and click on "Network Setup".

You are now given the option to connect to a wired or wireless network.


If you click on the "Wireless Network" option you are shown a list of available wireless networks. If nothing is displayed you may need to click on the "Refresh" button.

Click on the desired wireless network and enter the security key to connect to the network.

Installing a web browser

Puppy Arcade doesn't have a web browser installed by default. Instead there is an option called "Browser Installer" from the Puppy Arcade Setup screen.


There are a number of browsers to choose from including Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Simply find the tab for the browser of your choice and click "Install Now".

Installing Flash

Flash is also not installed by default. There is a Flash installer option available on the Puppy Arcade setup screen.


A message appears asking whether you want to install Flash and then a further screen appears asking which version you wish to install.



Choose the version that you wish to install and you will then be able to play Flash games and watch Youtube videos.

Music

Puppy Arcade comes with a number of music applications including players and converters. The default audio player is the ever impressive DeaDBeef.


MP3s play straight out of the box without having to install extra codecs.

Gaming

The whole point of Puppy Arcade is under the fun heading. It is all about retrogaming.

There are emulators for pretty much every games system that you can think of including Atari ST, 800, 2600, Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, NES, SNES and Sega Megadrive.


One of the most impressive tools is the Rom-Loader which lets you load and run the ROM files for all the emulators through one interface.

A ROM file is basically the emulated game file. You can download ROM files from a number of locations online.

Be careful because the legality of using such files is a bit of a grey area and some sites deliver a little bit of malware to go with the file. Stick with sites like CoolROM.com and FreeROMs.com. For the Spectrum ROMs look no further than www.worldofspectrum.org.

From the Rom-Loader utility choose the emulator for the ROMs you wish to load and then navigate to the folder where the ROMs reside.
























The Rom-Loader utility not only lists the files that you have loaded but it provides other information such as release year, genre, developer and even the images of the cartridges.

To load a file you don't have to run the emulator. Just double click on the file.


Click "Play Now" to play the game.

Joystick support

Ideally most people nowadays have some form of games console and so it would be great if Puppy Arcade made it easy to use a WII remote or an XBOX controller. I couldn't get either of these to work.

I did manage to use a Bluetooth dongle and my OUYA Controller though so if you have a Bluetooth joystick you may be able to get it to work.

There is a special tool for joystick calibration and this works well.

Issues

Puppy Arcade provided me with a number of challenges over the past week as I fought to get to grips with it.

I have already mentioned the need to rename the Puppy save file.

The nature of emulation means that Puppy Arcade is restricted to the inherent issues that come with those emulators. For instance the NES emulator FCEU sometimes crashed the display and I had to run XWIN to get it going again.

The ROM-Loader needed to be resized in order to use the menu and occasionally it hung and I had to forcefully kill it.

Summary

In my review of Puppy Arcade 10 I mentioned that it was a good idea in need of an update.

In Puppy Arcade 11 I have seen improvements but anyone wanting to use this distro needs to know that it is clearly a hobby project and therefore it is rough around the edges.

You will probably need to put in some work to get each emulator behaving the way you want it to and to get it working with your desired controller.

If you hardware is too new then you may have problems running Puppy Arcade at all.

I think the best resource you can start with is the Puppy Arcade Readme. A lot of work has gone into the readme and it covers system requirements, installation and details about the emulators and Rom-Loader.

If you can tailor Puppy Arcade to your needs then you have a games system on a USB drive.

Thankyou for reading.

English translation only to the second part of this post (down below) ...

Windshield Raindrops

At what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield?

Daniel Butler

Fast.

Raindrops are tiny. Even in the heaviest rainstorms, the water in the air weighs less than the air itself (which is one of several reasons you can't swim upward in a rainstorm). Even at very high speeds, they can't break a windshield via their momentum alone.

Under ordinary circumstances, raindrops don't damage car windshields at all. However, they can destroy the windows of supersonic aircraft.

Here's what happens when a raindrop hits a glass surface at high speed:

When the droplet makes contact with the surface, a shockwave travels back up through the droplet.

Normally, this shockwave would move at the speed of sound within the liquid—about 1300 m/s, four times faster than in air. However, at high impact speeds, this shockwave actually moves substantially faster than the speed of sound in water.

The water is squeezed between the incoming drop and the glass surface, which makes it squirt sideways in all directions. These jets of water can move even faster than the original (already supersonic) droplet, and even faster than the shockwaves we mentioned.

One paper ran a simulation of water droplets hitting a surface at 500 m/s (about Mach 1.5), and found that the water sprayed out from the point of contact at over 6000 m/s—Mach 18.[1]That's a pretty simple way to expel material at 6 km/s. I wonder if anyone's ever tried to come up with a spacecraft propulsion system using it ...

The sharp pulse from the shockwave can crack glass. The highest pressures are found in the ring around the edge of the droplet, and only exist for a tiny fraction of the impact.

In addition to the direct downward pressure, the water jetting sideways can cause damage, too. If the material has any microscopic holes, cracks, or bumps, those jets can strike them and create new cracks or widen existing ones.

Even at high speeds, a raindrop won't create a bullet hole on its own—but a long series of supersonic droplets would start to eat away at the glass, cracking and pitting it like sand.[2]This type of "erosion" can also cause damage to steam turbine blades. Eventually, the windshield could fail catastrophically.

Luckily, cars can't drive at Mach 1 without lifting off, so your windshield is safe from ordinary rain. On the other hand, if you're driving under a thunderstorm with strong updrafts ...

... the precipitation can smash your windshield at any speed.

Wystartował dziś BookRage 8, który daje nam kolejny niezły zestaw polskich autorów.

Po ogłoszeniu dzisiejszego zestawienia ktoś zapytał na Facebooku – „jak to robicie, że każdy pakiet jest lepszy od poprzedniego?”. No, Zajdla może nie przebije – ale tu faktycznie jest lepiej niż przy Grabińskim, to był bodaj pierwszy pakiet, którego nie kupiłem.

W podstawowym pakiecie (czyli w formule „płać ile chcesz”) kupimy sześć tytułów:

• Małe zielone ludziki - Krzysztof Boruń
• Senni zwycięzcy - Marek Oramus
• Klatka pełna aniołów -  Andrzej Zimniak
• Trylogia księżycowa – Jerzy Żuławski: Na srebrnym globie, Zwycięzca, Stara Ziemia.

Żuławski jest też dostępny w Wolnych Lekturach, wersja z BookRage zawiera dodatkową mapę Księżyca, pozbawiona jest też nadmiarowych przypisów, charakteryzujących publikacje WL.

Kto zapłaci więcej niż średnia (ok. 25 złotych), dostanie:

• Jasnowidzenia inżyniera Szarka - Krzysztof Boruń
• Twarzą ku ziemi - Maciej Parowski

Jak widać, są to klasyczni autorzy polskiej SF ubiegłego wieku. Jedna edycja z dwiema powieściami Borunia już była i przyjęto ją bardzo pozytywnie. Sądzę, że i tutaj wszyscy miłośnicy fantastyki będą zadowoleni. Ja się szykuję szczególnie na political-fiction Borunia i socjologiczną SF Oramusa.

Tradycyjnie, wpłaconą kwotę możemy podzielić między autorów, tudzież ich spadkobierców (z wyjątkiem Żuławskiego – domena publiczna), Fundację Nowoczesna Polska oraz ekipę BookRage. Akcja potrwa dwa tygodnie.

Jeśli ktoś z Was czytał którąś z części obecnego pakietu, zapraszam do dzielenia się uwagami w komentarzach.

Czytaj dalej:

• Kolejny BookRage: Boruń, Kres, Chmielarz, Dębski, Grabiński, Doyle
• „Zajdlowy” BookRage uzbierał 100 tysięcy!
• Ruszył BookRage 7 – Demony Grabińskiego
• BookRage – kolejny polski projekt „płać ile chcesz” – są Dukaj, Zimniak, Orbitowski, Kańtoch
• Ruszył BookRage 3 – tym razem polskie fantasy: Piskorski, Guzek, Brzezińska, Kres
• Najlepszy BookRage w dziejach: sześć e-booków Janusza Zajdla!

The MVPS HOSTS file was recently updated [April-22-2014]
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Download: hosts.zip (132 kb)
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip

How To: Download and Extract the HOSTS file
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts2.htm

HOSTS File - Frequently Asked Questions
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hostsfaq.htm

Note: the "text" version makes a great resource for determining possible unwanted connections ...
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt (500 kb)

Get notified when the MVPS HOSTS file is updated
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/updates.htm

 If you find the MVPS HOSTS file useful ... please consider a donation ...

Sometimes it’s more convenient to record the screen and share it in the form of animated GIF files rather than as videos. I do this when I want to show an action or the result of an action which cannot be properly conveyed through static pictures. On the other hand, videos are a hassle because they need to be uploaded to YouTube or a similar platform and require Flash to playback in the browser. Besides, GIF is more practical for screen recording that contains large areas that doesn’t change between frames. Additionally, GIF is better optimized for images that contain flat blocks of colors such as text, logos and illustrations (which is usually the case when recording a screen).

GifCam is a screen recording software and an animated GIF maker rolled into one. Simply move and size the recording frame over the area you want to capture and press the record button to start recording. But GifCam does more than simply take screenshots and string the frames together. GifCam employs a number of tricks to significantly reduce the size of animation. For instance, when it finds the previous frame is same as the new recorded one it automatically adds delays instead of adding a new frame and increasing gif size. It also saves precious bytes by replacing redundant pixels with a green screen and only drawing the new pixels, and by replacing colors with nearest matching one to reduce the size of the color palette and thus the size of the file.

You can also edit the animation by removing unwanted frames, add text overlays and adjust frame delays. Finally, you can save the animation in full 256 colors, in grayscale or in any of the 5 color reduction formats.

Another interesting feature is the ability make cinemagraphs.

Cinemagraphs are looping video of a short animation where the motion occurs in an isolated part of the video leaving the rest static like a photograph, like the one shown above. The term “cinemagraph" was coined by photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, who used the technique to animate their fashion and news photographs beginning in early 2011, and since then became widely popular. Microsoft even developed a tool that lets users create cinemagraphs easily.

In GifCam, you can paint “green screen” over the parts you want to freeze motion while keeping only the parts where you want to show motion. It’s not very user friendly though – you can’t adjust brush size and there is no undo if you made a mistake.

Other features include the ability to add reverse frames to the original GIF to create seamless loops, smooth resize with anti-aliasing, full screen recording, capture cursor during recording, animation previews and export video to AVI.

GifCam weights less than 1 MB in size, is portable and freeware. It’s a great little tool for demonstrations and basic tutorials. Here are some creative uses of GifCam.

An animated painting using MS Paint.

An animated message in notepad.

A retro gif (monochrome color redaction) from YouTube video

Dlaczego czasami używamy formy wołacza nazw męskich ("Jasiu", "wujciu", "gościu") w funkcji mianownika? Czy jest to poprawne?

What is the lowest, theoretical, score it is possible to score in a game of Jeopardy?

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A few minutes' walk from my home.

A friend of mine recently asked an interesting question in his Google+ stream. He wanted to know: when you feel you want to "get away from other people", how far do you have to go? And he was interested in how people from different countries and cultures answered this question, so asked anyone who responded to mention where they lived.

The question is of course open to interpretation. I interpreted "get away from other people" as "get away from the hustle and bustle of human civilisation". When I want to take a break from that, I head to a place surrounded by nature, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. There are parks not far from where I live where I can sit on the grass or a tree stump or some rocks, surrounded by enough trees that it's difficult to see the buildings which lurk just a hundred or so metres away. The noise of traffic has died away to the very occasional loud motorcycle or emergency siren, but otherwise there's just the sound of birds and the wind in the trees.

So if I want to "get away from other people", I can walk for about 15 to 30 minutes and find such a spot. I stated this as my answer, and added that I live in an inner city suburb of Sydney, Australia. I then added that if I really wanted to get away from it all, I could drive about an hour or two out of the city and into one of the nearby national parks, and really lose myself in true wilderness. Out there, it'd be possible to actually get so badly lost that you couldn't find your way back to civilisation, as several search and rescue operations over the years testify.

Then I read some of the other respondents' answers. Some of them said that they would go to the local library. Or simply sit in their bedroom. Or even just put on some headphones and listen to music - even if they were surrounded by other people. And that would be enough for them to "get away from other people", by their interpretation of the question. The interesting thing was that almost all of these people were from Europe. There was another Aussie respondent, and he answered similarly to me, that he'd take a 20 minute walk from his front door until he was surrounded by bushland. The responses from Americans were mixed, some of the "bedroom" variety, ranging all the way up to one who said he'd drive five hours out to the mountains.

I don't normally buy fruit from an open-air market like this, because there are none near me, alas.

There's an interesting cultural correlation there, though of course this is highly anecdotal and subject to respondent interpretation of what was a pretty open question.

In the present day it's easy for us to connect to people across much of the globe and to interact with them. One of the cool things we can do is to find out more about how they live, their culture, and their attitudes to various things. Because not all of us behave and think the same way, and a good part of that is derived from the culture we live in. And some of the things that are different we just don't consciously think about very much.

• How often do you buy breakfast out instead of make it at home?
• What do you wear to work, or to school?
• If you need to get a couple of kilometres across town, do you walk, cycle, drive, or catch a bus, taxi, or train?
• Where do you buy fruit and vegetables?
• Who cuts your hair?
• Is there an art museum near you? Do you ever go to it?
• Do you carry an umbrella?^[1]

I almost always have an umbrella with me if I'm leaving home for more than an hour or two. I carry one in my backpack, and we have a couple of spares in the car at all times. Sydney's weather, while not as famously changeable as, say, Melbourne's, can cloud over and dump a storm on you with very little warning. And when it rains here, it rains hard. You don't want to be caught in it. During a storm, you'll see most of the locals have an umbrella.

So I was somewhat surprised when I visited London, a city famous for its gloomy weather, and it rained, and my wife and I pulled out our umbrellas that we'd brought with us on the trip. We saw that virtually none of the people around us had or were using umbrellas. They just huddled under their jackets and shuffled through the rain.

A rainy day in Sydney.

Perhaps Londoners are so used to the rain that they don't feel a need to protect themselves from it. Or perhaps the rain in London is only ever a drizzle, and rarely the sort of skin-soaking downpours we get in Sydney, so people think a jacket is enough. Or a mixture of both, maybe plus something else I hadn't considered.

The point is, we're all different, but often we don't realise just how different we are. The modern world has given us a great tool to use to explore those differences and learn in what ways our cultural environments shape us. It's called social media. Got a question or a burning curiosity about how people do something elsewhere? Ask on Facebook, Google+, or your blog - or any of dozens of other Internet community forums or sites. Social media can get a bad rap sometimes, but it's just a tool and we can use it for good: to educate people about how we do things and to learn how other people do things.

The old saying goes that travel broadens the mind. It certainly does: you get to see first hand what other cultures are like. And since we're all humans, learning about how other humans live is a worthwhile thing. It gives us a better perspective on humanity as a whole. It underlies the way we think about other people, about how we consider political decisions, and about how we relate to other people, which leads to a basis for ethical and moral behaviour.

I've found that people who travel and experience a diverse range of cultures generally have broad and sympathetic outlooks. They don't suffer as many prejudices (conscious or unconscious) about people who live differently from them. They tend to see not "other people", but just "people".

But if your opportunities for travel are limited, the next best thing is to read widely and to find out more about other cultures anyway. Ask questions on your social media, prompting people from other countries to tell you how things work where they live.

---

[1] My answers:

• Almost never. About the only time I have breakfast out is when I get up before dawn to shoot sunrise photos, then pop into a cafe afterwards. (Which is a handful of times a year.)
• To work I wear casual clothes. In summer, a polo shirt or T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. In winter, replace the shorts with some casual trousers or jeans and add a pullover or light jacket. Back when I went to school, I wore a school uniform.
• I usually walk if it's less than about half an hour's walk.
• Usually the supermarket, but moderately often at a specialist greengrocer.
• The same barber who has been cutting it for almost 20 years. He still uses a cut-throat razor to trim around the ears.
• There are a couple of major art museums in Sydney. I visit them once every year or two.
• See main text for my answer to this one.

Materiał zawiera: - najistotniejsze kwestie związane z samodzielną budową niskonakładowego, akumulacyjnego pieca rakietowego

Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego w Rzeszowie informuje Pasażerów, że:

To niezwykła linia kablowa: pierwsze połączenie elektroenergetyczne naszego kraju ze Skandynawią, pierwsze w naszym kraju połączenie transgraniczne prądu stałego oraz pierwsza linia podmorska gdzie zastosowano zamiast elektrod kable powrotne. Brzmi strasznie, ale mam dla Was też parę obrazków.

O tym jak doświadczenie psychodeliczne wpłynęło na jego życie.

Może to nie rysunki Disneya ale warto zobaczyć :)

Aby ocenić inteligencję mężczyzny, wystarczy na niego spojrzeć. Czyli jak śpiewał Wojciech Młynarski "Gdy za mało książek znasz, to ci wychodzi na twarz."

How long does it take to double your money, and just what is 'The rule of 72'?

Aktywność fizyczna może wyłączyć geny otyłości, a przytulanie dziecka aktywuje u niego geny empatii! Nie jesteśmy więc skazani na to, co odziedziczyliśmy po rodzicach. Poprzez wychowanie, styl życia i środowisko, w jakim się znajdujemy, możemy wpływać na własne DNA!

Która godzina jest teraz w Sydney?W jaki dzień w tym roku wypada Wigilia? Który długi weekend pozwoli na najdłuższy urlop? Te i podobne pytania wciąż nurtują ludzi na całym świecie, a nie raz mieszają im szyki. Okazuje się, że w szufladach naukowców istnieją propozycje na to, jak tego chaosu uniknąć

Michio Kaku (ur. 1947 r.) jest amerykańskim fizykiem teoretykiem - profesorem na Uniwersytecie Nowojorskim. Jest badaczem teorii strun, popularyzatorem nauki, futurologiem i autorem ponad 70 prac i wielu książek.

Może się kiedyś przyda? Kto wie, podawajcie w komentarzach co jeszcze natura nam daję do jedzenia w lesie.