Piracy!
Piracy in the digital age – An essay about piracy in the digital age. Is it really that bad?
The WWW is not the internet!
A real geek should know the difference, do you? Learn the difference and stop being a n00b.
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Games used to be good then they took an arrow in the knee
Posted on December 16, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
I grew up in the good old 8-bit glory days of gaming when games were good and geeks weren’t chic.
Now trend whores have hijacked ‘geek’ and made it ‘geeky’ apparently they decided that the geek look was in, to the ire of real geeks, ever since it became ok to be a real geek. Trend whores became wannabe geeks i.e. they are just geeky not a real geek. You can hate trend whores and hipsters for helping the chic geek look take off, unfortunately they couldn’t do the same for R&B singer Aaliyah’s Cessna 402-B.
Time has been harsh to the gaming industry, the quality of games has degraded over the years. Games have gotten as bad as they have gotten good. Few games these days are destined to become classics with all of the uninspired copycat games based on the same engine. Games that really stand out are few and far between which is why people have coded emulators and made ROMs of their favourite game.
Ask 5 gamers what their top 10 classic games are and you will get 5 different responses. A few gamers might share one or two classic games but it’s more likely than not that two lists won’t be identical.
This is my list of top 10 classic games. [Read more...]
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The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
Posted on December 13, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
What!? Why would you want to stop the future of the internet!? Because the internet, PCs and technology in general is becoming more closed, we are drifting back to the walled gardens of the 80s internet services.
In the 80s a time before before the World Wide Web (WWW) existed there were services like AOL, Prodigy, Compuserv etc… that were essentially walled gardens i.e. you only had access to the resources that AOL, Prodigy or Compuserv put on their systems.
Then in the late 80s and early 90s Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which came along and disrupted everything in a major way, now anyone can publish anything they want if they have a PC and the know how. [Read more...]
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Saturday shorts: Sebastian’s Voodoo
Posted on December 10, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
Can a voodoo doll find the courage to stop his friends from being pinned to death?
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Commercialising the internet
Posted on December 5, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
I don’t think that many people realise that the internet, as we know it today, wasn’t always commercial, i.e. that it wasn’t always accessible to the general public via an ISP by paying them a monthly fee for an internet access plan.
The internet has been around for 42 years depending on when you start counting from. I’m counting from October 29, 1969, when ARPANETs first two nodes, the UCLA, and the Stanford Research Institute, were connected. Although the internet has only been commercial for the last 16 years of it’s 42 year life. The decommissioning of NSFNET (which removed the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic) in 1995 marked the start of the commercialisation of the internet.
Before 1995 the internet was only accessible to students at universities and other research and educational institutions. [Read more...]
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Saturday shorts
Posted on December 3, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
I’m still optimistic that Half-Life Episode 3 will be released in my life time. I’m likely to be 78 and my arthritis will be too bad for me to use a keyboard and mouse, that’s if we are still using keyboards and mice as input devices. But until then I’ll have to be content with awesome Half-Life inspired shorts like Beyond Black Mesa & Half life: Origins. Enjoy…
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Beastie Boys – Fight For Your Right (Revisited)
Posted on December 2, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
Back in April the Beastie Boy released this video to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album. Be warned it’s NSFW in any way shape or form, but it is seriously hilarious, I was crying with laughter.
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A short history of e-mail
Posted on December 1, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
E-mail, it was one of, if not, the first ‘killer app’ for the internet. Anyone that has an internet connection more likely than not has an email address, a lot of people have more than one email address. There’s the personal e-mail address, the work e-mail address and any other number of email addresses for various, general and specific purposes.
Most people take e-mail for granted, they have never known life without e-mail, the internet or computers.
But have you ever wondered where e-mail came from, who invented it, who chose the ‘@’ symbol to use between the user and host portion of an e-mail address or who decided what headers should be included and excluded in an email?
E-mail as we know it today wasn’t invented, it evolved, and it’s older than the internet itself, even older than ARPANet which was an experiment that evolved into the internet as we know it today.
To discover the origins of email we need to jump in the TARDIS and set the date to 1965 when computers took up an entire room, they were the opposite of personal, time sharing was cloud computing and no two computers were the same. A time before computers were networked, before the internet even existed. [Read more...]
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Crimes against design – part three: Bad spelling, grammar & other annoyances
Posted on November 30, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
This is the third and final part of crimes against design. I hope you have learned something. If you commit any one or more of these crimes then either do something about it or save yourself some money and do everyone else a favour by removing your website/blog/monstrosity from the internet.
Auto playing audio/video
Don’t make audio and video auto play, and especially don’t auto play music on your web site and have no way to turn it off. I guarantee this will make any user hit that back button in double quick time. If I want to watch a video or listen to audio I’ll choose if I want to watch or listen to it and when to play it if I do want to watch or listen to it. Even more annoying are those video ads that auto play. Auto playing music and videos alone they are enough to make me close the web page. [Read more...]
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Crimes against design – part two: Advertising
Posted on November 29, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
Love it or hate it, advertising greases the wheels of some of the biggest web sites about. If it weren’t for advertising then some of your favourite web sites may not even exist. I don’t mind advertising as long as it’s not obtrusive. [Read more...]
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Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors
Posted on November 28, 2011 by Jingles | No Comments
Not many people understand that the internet is real, that it is tangible, that you can touch and feel it. Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors gives us a better idea of what the internet looks like, or at least what a part of it looks like.
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors from Ben Mendelsohn on Vimeo.
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I'm Jingles, I'm like the Keith Miller of geeks, i.e. an all rounder, I'm a web scientist, an A+ certified (it means I'm not a “noob”) computer technician, and this is my blog. I'm your curator of all things awesome, cool and geeky on and off the net. More...
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