Geeking Out

When my wife and I were preparing for the birth of our first baby, we picked up every “Rock-a-bye Baby” lullaby album. I thought it would be fun letting our son fall asleep to lullaby renditions of our favorite songs … Continue reading →

This awesome short film by Ami Thompson (Made as a forth-year project at Sheridan College) is really fun and features plenty of funky-looking monsters. You should definitely check it out! [Ami Thompson]

Well, the next-gen Xbox reveal event has come and gone. First things first: It’s called the Xbox One. Also, Microsoft would very much like you to stop using every other device you have in your entertainment system. As made clear by the event, the Xbox One is definitely being marketed as The One Device to Rule Them All, but I’m not sure I buy into all the hype. Before we get into all that, here’s the concrete stuff we know about the Xbox One: 8-core x86 processor 8GB of RAM 500GB hard drive HDMI pass-thru to allow for watching TV Blu-ray player Those are the big points that Microsoft got across, but they are far from the only ones. The Xbox One architecture’s a combined gaming OS and Windows OS — though we hope that the Xbox team stays far away from anything Windows 8. This allows stuff like Skype to run at the same time as a video game. It’s honestly pretty neat, and could prove interesting going forward. The controller for the Xbox One should look familiar to anyone that’s ever played an Xbox 360. Not a whole lot’s changed, but the changes that have been made are important. Of those, probably the biggest is the precision directional pad. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the 360′s d-pad was laughably, well, inaccurate. That’s great. What’s not so great? Well, Microsoft’s happier to push the idea of watching television through the device than pretty much anything else. Granted, there’s a good chance that E3 is going to be all about the games, but they were scarily absent for the majority of the event. We saw Quantum Break from Remedy, Call of Duty: Ghosts from Infinity Ward, a bunch of sports titles from EA, and a snippet of Forza Motorsport 5. That’s it. What’s the good news? Well, 15 exclusive titles in the first year, 8 of which are said to be brand new franchises, is great. Microsoft could use a few more flagship titles that aren’t Halo or related to Halo. Oh, part of the event dealt with the fact that Steven Spielberg’s going to bring us a Halo TV series for the Xbox One, so there’s that. We’re also getting the Xbox One around the end of the year, so it’s good to hear that they’ll be competing with Sony. As for news that we’re not really sure how to feel about, the Kinect’s getting an upgrade and is definitely still a thing Microsoft’s pushing. Specifically, it’s got an expanded field of view, new IR camera, better motion tracking, and a new multi-microphone array to better pick up on voice commands. Speaking subjectively, I’ve no desire whatsoever to use the doodad, but they certainly seem to want people to want to use it. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of applications developers use it for, but for the time being I just can’t be bothered enough to care. As for the always-on connection rumors and blocked used games reports? Well, the former looks to not be true, but word is that the latter is. We’ll definitely know more soon as E3 isn’t far away at all. (via Xbox) Relevant to your interests Sony releases pointless blurry preview of PS4 Outlook finally assimilates Hotmail Microsoft IllumiRoom gets an impressive walkthrough

jammag writes "Free sodas, candy and energy bars can be surprisingly important to developers, says longtime coder Eric Spiegel. They need the perks, not to mention the caffeine boost. More important, free sodas from management are like the canary in the coal mine. If they get cut, then layoffs might be next. 'The sodas are just the wake-up call. If the culture changes to be focused more on cost-cutting than on innovation and creativity, then would you still want to work here? I wouldn't.' Are free perks really that important?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kids today and their crazy nonsense words! How are lawyers and judges supposed to keep up with what the cool cats in court are saying? It turns out they’ve been turning to Urban Dictionary to define modern slang terms they don’t understand. That’s right! Urban Dictionary — the filthy Wikipedia of modern language — is being used as an official court reference. Last month the site was used in a financial restitution case because someone in the case referred to themselves and a companion as “jack boys.” The court used Urban Dictionary to define the term “jack” as meaning “to steal” and then rejected the man’s claim. Urban Dictionary has 114 listed entries to define “jack.” Some of them define it as stealing, while many others just talk about how great guys named Jack are. “Jack boy” only has one entry. It was submitted back in 2004 and reads (typos and all): 1)a person with many trades or abilities. 2)a person who is a thief,comitts robberies. 1)I can fade you up,tatt you up and fix ur car, man i’m a jack boy. 2)if we’re gonna robb them, let me gather up some jack boys. One case used the site to define the verb “to nut” in a sexual harassment case, and other cases used Urban Dictionary to define words like iron, dap, and grenade. The need for courts to use resources like Urban Dictionary is that non-urban dictionaries take too long to incorporate new words, but also because slang terms have different meanings to different people. They can be hard to define in a concrete way. That’s where a crowdsourced site like Urban Dictionary can be an asset. Slang terms are ever-changing, and so is Urban Dictionary itself. Since it’s hard to pin down a definition of a slang term, the best way to get a sense of what it means is to see what a lot of other people think it means. Urban Dictionary does just that. Plus it makes reading court documents hilarious. Someone please make a Judge Judy spin-off where she just reads Urban Dictionary definitions into the camera for half an hour. (The New York Times via The Verge, image via Urban Dictionary on Facebook) Relevant to your interests An IBM scientist taught the Watson supercomputer the Urban Dictionary President Obama screwed up and said “Jedi mind meld” Rap Genius is taking on Cliff’s Notes and could win

A little quantum mechanics could actually help you talk your way out of some pretty awkward situations… or maybe not. Thanks Steven! [AwkwardSpaceship]

When you’re an old guy like me—Thirty frikkin’ four?!  Who let that happen?!—and you’ve been reading comics for a long time, you tend to take for granted just how insanely and needlessly complicated the continuity of it all really is. It’s the times where someone asks me about a character and I start explaining it that I really tend to realize just how psychotic I must sound to a non-fan. I mean, try explaining Cable’s full origin story and not coming off as the crazy guy that no one wants to sit near on the bus.  Or Glenn Beck.  Either one, really. “I’ll give you two reasons why I’m right.Just give me a second to make up some ‘facts.’” With that in mind, Marvel created its own separate universe just over a decade ago called Ultimate Marvel and it allowed creators the freedom to reintroduce and reimagine existing properties without the constraints of continuity that existed in Marvel proper. Read more »

One of my favorite cereals, love its sugary goodness! I wanted to give Tony a different look for this but still keep him recognizable…

What little boy or girl never wanted a hovercraft? Something loud that could travel over water, pavement, maybe even over a plowed field or through a swamp? Ben King obviously wanted one, so after he grew up and got his PhD in physics and found a good job, he founded Lone Star Hovercraft. Timothy Lord interviewed Ben at the Austin Mini Maker Faire, and we also found some video of Ben flying (is that the right word?) one of his hovercraft on a lake that we spliced into the interview to liven it up a little. Vroom! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A previously little-known lecturer has made a significant breakthrough in the exploration of prime numbers. Dr Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire has brought mathematics closer than ever before to confirming that twin primes are infinite. A twin prime is simply two consecutive prime numbers that differ only by two. The lowest examples are three and five, five and seven, and 11 and 13. The highest known twin primes run to more than 200,000 digits. As researchers calculate more and more prime numbers, they’ve always been able to find twin primes popping up now and again, even if they appear at wider and wider intervals. Though unproven, a widely accepted theory (the Twin Prime Conjecture) is that the number of twin primes is infinite — in other words, you can identify any twin prime you like and there’ll be one higher, even if you haven’t found it yet. It’s a subject that interested Yitang, whose current academic posting didn’t come immediately after achieving a doctorate in 1992 — he’s said to have spent time working as an accountant and even a Subway sandwich maker while looking for a position in the US. Last month Zitang submitted a paper on twin primes to the Annals of Mathematics, where editorial staff were so impressed they bumped it up the line for peer review. That review has now described the paper as “a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.” The Simons Foundation has a detailed explanation of Zitang’s research and findings. He spent three years thinking about the problem, only to suddenly come up with a solution while killing time in a friend’s back yard before a night out. The breakthrough involves the way mathematicians filter out numbers that could be primes. A 2005 technique, known as GPY, helps first identify numbers that might be part of twin primes, leaving an easier and quicker task of verifying whether this is the case in each instance. Zitang has modified GPY in a way that means rather than just check specific numbers, he can prove a theory. In this case, he’s proven there’s an infinite number of pairs of consecutive primes that are separated by 70 million or less. That may sound incredibly vague compared to the separation of two, but the key here is providing proof. According to Zitang, further refinement should drastically reduce the gap between primes that can be proven to repeat infinitely. However, he says it’s unlikely the system can ever prove twin primes, and instead the most likely limit is proving infinite pair separated by no more than 16. (Picture credit: Lisa Nugent, UNH Photographic Services)