When Destiny launches next week, 10 million players will be let loose in an intricate, beautiful, interplanetary gaming playground.
READ MORE: Destiny: behind the scenes of the worlds most expensive video game | Art and design | The Guardian.
Tag Archives: software
This Clever Image Search Could Change The Way You Find Pictures Online | Gizmodo
Compared to searching for text, searching for images is super hard. But a new way to index and navigate through averaged images—those blurry composites that pull together millions of images into one—could radically change the way that we search for photos or products online.
READ MORE: This Clever Image Search Could Change The Way You Find Pictures Online | Gizmodo
How to Encrypt Everything | Gizmodo
[T]he Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF and Fight for the Future—offers instructions on how we can all avoid mass surveillance. But it also offers a “Privacy Pack” for the average user. Its simply a bundle of free software to help you encrypt your data and communications. You should download it right now.
Encryption doesnt require coding knowledge or math skills, but it does demand some attention and care. The Privacy Pack is a great starting point, but if you want to cover all of your bases, there are few more things you need to do. Weve put together a little guide that includes details on the software in the Privacy Pack and a little bit extra. In case youre not quite sure what encryption is or how it works, EFFs Surveillance Self-Defense site is a great place to start.
READ MORE How to Encrypt Everything | Gizmodo [Phone, Email, Browser, Everything Else]
Cheetyr is a Searchable Shortcut Cheat Sheet for Designers and Devs | LifeHacker
If youre a regular user of Photoshop, Illustrator, or do general web development, you probably find yourself drowning in a flood of keyboard shortcuts. Cheetyr helps make sense of them with a searchable database of keyboard shortcuts for several common apps and services. Currently, Cheetyr contains shortcuts for Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS, Git, and Vim. The site is accepting submissions and assistance, so the database is likely to grow over time. You can search for any function in the search box for each product to find the shortcut youre looking for.
via Cheetyr is a Searchable Shortcut Cheat Sheet for Designers and Devs | LifeHacker
Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress | The Signal: Digital Preservation
Several months ago, while performing an inventory of recently acquired video games, I happened upon a DVD-R labeled Duke Nukem: Critical Mass PSP. My first assumption was that the disc, like so many others we have received, was a DVD-R of gameplay. However, a line of text on the Copyright database record for the item intrigued me. It reads: Authorship: Entire video game; computer code; artwork; and music. I placed the disc into my computer’s DVD drive to discover that the DVD-R did not contain video, but instead a file directory, including every asset used to make up the game in a wide variety of proprietary formats. Upon further research, I discovered that the Playstation Portable version of Duke Nukem: Critical Mass was never actually released commercially and was in fact a very different beast than the Nintendo DS version of the game which did see release. I realized then that in my computer was the source disc used to author the UMD for an unreleased PlayStation Portable game. I could feel the lump in my throat. I felt as though I had solved the wizard’s riddle and unlocked the secret door.
A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | WIRED
Data surrounds us. It’s everywhere, in the most micro sense small gadgets that track calories we’ve burned, or how much water our plants need to the most macro analytics companies that can monitor, for instance, the health of entire populations. But there are precious few companies actively working on helping us make sense of all that data. One of them is Tableau, a software company that turns heaps of data into visualizations for the common man: teachers, doctors, journalists, you name it. To make those tools clearer and cleaner, they recently partnered with Stamen Design, to release three new map templates, which anyone can play around with by downloading Tableau’s free software.
READ MORE A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | Design | WIRED.
You Can Grab Software That Helped Pixar Make Wall-E For Free Soon | Gizmodo
If youre an aspiring animator, this might be the best news youll hear this month: Pixar is giving away—thats right, giving away—a version of RenderMan, its in-house rendering software. Gratis. No catch. Youll be able to download the program some time in August. READ MORE: You Can Grab Software That Helped Pixar Make Wall-E For Free Soon | Gizmodo
NASA’s About To Release a Mother Lode of Free Software | Gizmodo
If you’ve been thinking about getting started on the rocket project that’s been on your mind for ages, now is a good time to get serious. Next week, NASA will release a massive software catalog with over 1,000 projects. It’s not the first time the space agency’s released code, but it is the first time they’ve made it so easy.
The breadth and variety of the software projects that NASA’s about to give away are difficult to express. It’s not just a bunch of algorithms and star-finding software, though stuff like that is in there. The crazy geniuses that land rovers on Mars are actually releasing code for ultra high-tech NASA stuff like rocket guidance systems and robotics control software. There’s even some artificial intelligence.
And did I mention it’s all free? Read more: NASA’s About To Release a Mother Lode of Free Software | Gizmodo.
See also: NASA Technology Transfer Portal
Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 | TechCrunch
Microsoft’s Terry Myerson today announced that Microsoft is “all-in” with the desktop. Indeed, while he wasn’t quite ready to announce Windows 9, he did show off how Windows 8.1 will soon get a new version of the beloved Start menu back.
When Microsoft removed the Start menu, quite a few of its users were upset, and this move did indeed make Windows 8.1 harder to use for many. The new Start menu will combine live tiles and other Metro-influenced UI elements, as well as most of the features still available in the Windows 7 menu.
In the future, all of Microsoft’s Universal Windows apps will also run in a window. That sounds like the company is backing off a bit from its Metro interface on the desktop.
It’s unclear when exactly Microsoft will launch these features, though. As far as we are aware, it will take another update to Windows 8.1 and it’s unclear when exactly this will happen. Read more: Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 | TechCrunch.
This is great news! I provide volunteer computer coaching at my community library and I groan every time a patron comes in for help with Windows 8 (which is often!). The interface is problematic, so bringing back the start button (and hopefully making the metro interface optional) is a very welcome improvement.
Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning | theguardian.com
San Francisco startup Vicarious aims to create ‘a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn’t need to eat or sleep’. via Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning | Technology | theguardian.com.
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