Author: AMH

Still can’t figure out when that leap second happened

By AMH

It’s the time of year to get yourself a new calendar – or invest in a perpetual calendar so you never have to worry about it again. If you’ve got twelve cents and a piece of cardboard, you can build yourself this little desk calendar that shows you the day’s date….. so long as you’re proficient with binary. I’d actually probably get more screwed up by remembering whether I started numbering the days of the week from zero or one, but (note to self) it would be a fun exercise to convince yourself that this is the minimum number of … Continue reading Still can’t figure out when that leap second happened

More Flying Pirate Squirrels

By AMH

After a several week downtime, the real-time furry flying combat and trading game Skyrates is back up. I posted about it when I first started playing over the summer, and I’ve been playing regularly ever since. This is a great time to try it out because in addition to making a bunch of improvements, they reset the game to put all of the players back at the same initial starting point as of noon yesterday. Just be warned that it’s in beta, so particularly in the first few days you might come across some bugs.

$1M still up for grabs

By AMH

I am having the students in my introduction to programming class work with the Netflix recommendations data for their final project this term, so it was timely that the New York Times recently did an article reporting on the progress that has been made on the Netflix Prize over the past two years. Nobody has made the 10% jump yet, and while teams have managed over a 9% improvement the improvements are getting incrementally smaller. The fun part of the article, though, is the details about what it is making it hard to get that last 1%. One’s rating for … Continue reading $1M still up for grabs

Holiday Baking

By AMH

I always get overly ambitious with holiday baking, because while I enjoy doing it my first instinct is towards things like pies (for Thanksgiving) or cut out and decorated sugar cookies (for Christmas) that are yummy but fussy and time consuming. So I need to remember that there are recipes like this out there as well. It’s not as fancy as a pie, but this Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Nut Bread is both easy and delicious. A single recipe really will make three bread loaves so don’t double it up unless you have an insanely large mixing bowl and want to … Continue reading Holiday Baking

Keep those keys in your pocket

By AMH

I think i love this story about researchers developing a system that can generate copies of keys based on photos because it illustrates how, even after centuries, a classic security technique can fall victim to new hacks. [via Make Magazine] The system, called SNEAKEY does not require a good close-up photo of the key, though they point out that you can find many such photos online at Flickr and other sites. Their front-page example photo is a somewhat blurry image of a set of keys laying on top of a book taken from 195 feet away, but they were still … Continue reading Keep those keys in your pocket

I’d look it up but my hands are covered in stuffing…

By AMH

I love this, though I suspect that I am more likely to have this used against me than to use it myself: Let me google that for you. The best way to understand what the site does is probably to check out what happens if you follow a link provided by the site that you can send to a friend who has asked for information…. Here’s that info you were looking for! It’s pretty mean and snarky, but it also cracks me up.

Rise of the Machines

By AMH

Before the election falls entirely out of memory, I wanted to note this interview with Dr. Barbara Simons of the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission about how eVoting went this election cycle. You get a nice summary of the role of the advisory board and the efforts underway to try to ensure reliable voting. Perhaps the most interesting quote was with respect to the composition of the advisory board: I was appointed by Senator Harry Reid to one of the four seats on the Election Assistance – on the Board of Advisors which are designated for technologists. … Continue reading Rise of the Machines

Like websurfing without all that irritating clicking

By AMH

Are you a dead-tree type of person? Like the idea of Web 2.0 but not all the gadgetry that goes along with it? Or maybe you have a portable device that does better with static pdf documents than dynamic websurfing – say while commuting by public transportation. Then you might like Tabbloid. Give it a set of RSS feeds and the service will create a pdf document for you out of those feeds that you can download or have emailed to you. If you like what you see, you can set Tabbloid to email you an updated pdf of the … Continue reading Like websurfing without all that irritating clicking

I think, therefore it moves

By AMH

I haven’t watched 60 Minutes in years now, but Lifehacker has a link to the story below from last week on controlling computers with thought and I was blown away. I’ve known there was research going on in this direction, but some of what they show here is amazing. Using just surface-level sensors one device can sense the brain pattern of “recognition”, allowing people to type or select words based as they are flashed onto a computer screen. The interface for that is pretty cool – I expected from the description a series of letters shown one at a time … Continue reading I think, therefore it moves