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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Aperture: A Triumph of Science
Posted on May 18, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
There are a bunch of Portal films out there. Some are great, some are just mediocre and others, well lets just say they won’t be winning any academy awards.
One short film that deserves an award of some description is Aperture: A Triumph of Science, it was produced by a wonderful collective called SyntheticPH who happen to be working on a new Portal-esque film called Lab Rat, it will tell the story of Doug Rattmann in mixed media and live action.
In the meantime you enjoy the fruits of SyntheticPH’s labour in Aperture: A Triumph of Science.
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Quote of the day
Posted on May 17, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
From c0axr (Coder of Mass Destruction) on Twitter:
My new favorite hobby is to paste shellcode backdoor payloads to pastebin and title it MS12-020. It’s like cat nip to script kiddies.
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8-Bit Google Maps
Posted on May 17, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
If you ever wondered what Google Maps would have been like on the NES? Wonder no longer! Google is producing Google Maps 8-bit for NES. This has to be the coolest thing I have seen all week. Yes this is that it’s real. It’s not a proof of concept picture or animation, hit up Google Maps and click on the quest button to checkout Google Maps in 8-Bit goodness.
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10 of the best Lana Del Rey – Video Games remixes
Posted on May 14, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Love it or hate it, Lana Del Rey’s Video Games is a great song, on YouTube 34,984,645 people have viewed the video and of those people 121,138 like the song, compared to 4,719 who dislike it. If we are going to believe the numbers then yeah it’s a good song.
If you search “Lana Del Rey – Video Games” on Sound Cloud you will get 50 pages of results. Some of the results have nothing to do with the song, others are really poor covers/remixes, and occasionally you will come across a good remix. These are my top 10 picks in no particular order:
A nice laid back chilled out down beat remix
[Read more...]
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Online shopping – is that really your best price?
Posted on May 12, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Beware of web sites that offer the cheapest price. Always be sceptical of sales and discounts. You are constantly being lied to about price, those sales and discounts that you are being offered probably isn’t the best deal you could be getting. [Read more...]
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Why HTPCs rock
Posted on May 8, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Most typical entertainment set-ups usually consist of a set-top box (unless the TV is fairly new, I haven’t seen a new TVs that doesn’t have a built in TV tuner), a DVD or Blu-ray player, maybe an Amp and some sort of network media player like a Boxee Box, possibly a PVR or DVD recorder. That’s a lot of devices, remotes, and tangled cables (cable spaghetti anyone?) cluttering up your entertainment space.
All of those separate devices make it a pain to do something simple like watch TV. You have to turn on the TV, then turn on the set-top box if your TV doesn’t have a built in TV tuner, and if you have an Amp then you have to turn that on too. It seems a bit ridiculous just to watch TV, it’s more complicated than it should be.
Sure you could get a universal remote to replace your other remotes to make things a little easier, but you still have a bunch of different devices and tangled cable spaghetti. How cables get tangled while they sit there and don’t move is beyond me. There must be a messy cable tangling monster out there that visits in the dead of the night and messes up the cables and gets them all tangled. But I digress.
A better, and arguably the best, solution for a lot of people is a Home Theatre Personal Computer, or HTPC.
To prove that a HTPC is the best solution I’ll show you how one HTPC can replace multiple devices and do all of the things that those individual devices used to do. [Read more...]
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Mari0 has been released!
Posted on March 4, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Mari0… released… so excited! So much awesome! Can’t stop playing! More later.
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OEM PCs – poor value for money
Posted on February 9, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
The new year is a shop-a-holics wet dream come true with all the sales on there are plenty of bargains to be had unless you’re shopping for a new desktop PC.
You would think that a major name brand OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) PC builder, like Dell, HP, Lenovo etc… would be able to build and sell PCs cheaper than you could build one for given their purchasing power, economies of scale and all that. But they either can’t or won’t.
For example Dell is having a “sale” so I hit up their web site to check out their “discounts”. Dells cheapest bottom of the line basic PC, the Insperon 620s desktop is normally $798.99 Dell have “discounted” the Insperon 620s by $200, making it $598.99 which is still poor value for money. The advertised price, $598.99, is for just the desktop itself i.e. without any additional “extras” sans a monitor. Throw in a monitor for a complete PC and you are looking at $700.19.
Even with the “discounts” Dell are offering on the Insperon 620s desktop PC it’s still more expensive than building your own PC with off the shelf parts from online vendors or retailers, and I’ll prove it. [Read more...]
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Vimeo Vs. youTube
Posted on January 30, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
I’d be annoyed that I missed the War on the Internet (an event that was recently put on by Electronic Frontiers Australia, in partnership with the Australian Greens) if it weren’t for the fact that the videos of the talks were posted online.
The videos were posted on Vimeo, a YouTube alternative, which I now like even more than YouTube for one big reason; Vimeo supplies excellent information about the videos. Most importantly Vimeo will tell you how large a video is. YouTube fails to offer this basic but important piece of information. In fact YouTube fails to offer any useful information about any videos it serves up. Even the information about the video, which is user generated, is useless a lot of the time and doesn’t provide much if any interesting or useful data.
The fact that YouTube fails to notify users about the size of a video they are watching wouldn’t be a problem if everyone had unlimited data allowances but they don’t. Most internet plans have a data limit and more people than not are on an internet plan with a data limit. [Read more...]
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THINK! Supaplex
Posted on January 26, 2012 by Jingles | 2 Comments
Supaplex is an old skool puzle game that was released in 1991, then in somewhere in the mid 90s (my closest estimate is somewhere between 1994 to 1997) Digital integration, the publishers of Supaplex, agreed to release it for free and thus Supaplex became freeware. It’s the first game that I know that went from commercial to free. Now it’s a lot more common for games to go from commercial to free or even to be completely open sourced, but that’s a story for another time.
I enjoy Supaplex so much that I wrote what turned out to be a long, and I think, pretty comprehensive history of Suaplex because there was a bit of misinformation about the history of Supaplex and how it came to be.
While I was researching for the article I came across a bunch of interesting Supaplex information scattered across the internet in it’s dark corners and an odd number of Supaplex websites. [Read more...]
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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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