Bag of Beans

This is an amusing spoof of all those MMORPGs that have degenerated into little more than the constant need to level up and to farm gold. It eliminates all of that tedious work and lets your character level up without you having to expend valuable free time.

Progress Quest is a next generation computer role-playing game. Gamers who have played modern online role-playing games, or almost any computer role-playing game, or who have at any time installed or upgraded their operating system, will find themselves incredibly comfortable with Progress Quest’s very familiar gameplay. Progress Quest follows reverently in the footsteps of recent smash hit online worlds, but is careful to streamline the more tedious aspects of those offerings. Players will still have the satisfaction of building their character from a ninety-pound level 1 teenager, to an incredibly puissant, magically imbued warrior, well able to snuff out the lives of a barnload of bugbears without need of so much as a lunch break. Yet, gone are the tedious micromanagement and other frustrations common to that older generation of RPG’s.

This section of the FAQ cracked me up:

Q: I’ve been running PQ for years now, and my character is eighty-somethingth level, and now the game crashes or I’ve been thrown into the Hall of Infamy or some other random badness is going on. What can I do?
A: You are witnessing a form of senility and/or corruption and/or loss of bladder control brought on by the decrepit age of so ancient a character. (Equivalently, this is a limitation of the program which has no remedy.) It’s time to make way for a new generation of adventurers!

• Link

The Ethical Hacker Network has some tips on using Google queries to check the security of a site. The article is an excerpt from the book Google Hacking for Penetration Testers.

Although we see literally hundreds of Google searches throughout this book, sometimes it’s nice to know there’s a few searches that give good results just about every time. In the context of security work, we’ll take a look at 10 searches that work fairly well during a security assessment, especially when combined with the site operator, which secures the first position in our list. As you become more and more comfortable with Google, you’ll certainly add to this list, modifying a few searches and quite possibly deleting a few, but the searches here should serve as a very nice baseline for your own top 10 list.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

This is quite an entertaining music video of one man playing all 37 parts of a song using only his cello.

I thought it would be a fun project to write and record a pop tune using nothing but cellos, then make a video of the performance. The original goal was to keep everything entirely acoustic, with no recording studio effects or other processing. I quickly abandoned that idea to get more variety of sounds, but everything you hear was played entirely on my cello. There are 37 separate cello parts recorded on 23 tracks using 37 plug-in effects.

I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to admit I spent hundreds of hours on this project, or proud to have paid so much attention to detail. You be the judge. So pick a media version your computer supports, crank the volume up to 11, and let ‘er rip.

• Link (via Digg)

Coding Horror has packaged up all of the C# code snippets provided by Microsoft into one simple package.

Microsoft recently released a complete set of C# code snippets for Visual Studio 2005. This brings C# to parity with VB.NET, which had many more code snippets “in the box”.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s installation strategy for these new snippets leaves a lot to be desired. You can download and “install” all the snippets at once, but you must manually add each of the snippet folders via the Snippet Manager (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+B). I loves me some snippets, but this is unacceptable!

• Link. Note that you will need 7-Zip to unpack the download on the site. You can also use WinRAR if you have it.
• Original snippets from Microsoft’s site

This is the classic hacker text on how many locks work and how to pick them. This was apparently published by a student at MIT in 1991, but MIT requested that their name be removed from the title.

• Link (via reddit)
• Alternate link
• Here is the response from the MIT Hacking community after this document was released
• MIT Gallery of Hacks

This is a brilliant idea. Someone figured out that the Creative Zen Micro fits perfectly inside an Altoids mint tin. Just drill a hole for the headphone jack and you’re set! If you like, you can also cut holes for the power switch and usb connectors. Check out my pictures on flickr.

• Thread on Head-fi.org where the idea originated
  

Nathan True has hacked together a wireless music player using a Netgear WGT634U wireless router. It might be hard to locate the Netgear router since it has been discontinued, but still a nice hack.

The Mission

When I began this project, I knew I could not settle for anything less than:

• A small, low-power networked music player, which
• Runs Linux, and
• Can connect either wirelessly or wiredly, that
• Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum, and
• Accepts commands remotely from a PC or PDA, in addition to
• Displaying song info such as Artist/Title on a display local to the device.

This is a nice set of photos of miniature people-figures apparently living on items of food.

Funny rant on how it all went horribly wrong.

From the piece: “There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. And that movie was Shaun of the Dead. That movie was not, unfortunately, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a movie that floated around Hollywood for about 20 years before it finally appeared in theaters as a flat, lifeless, americanized lump that was mostly hated by people who liked the book and loathed by people who hated the book. “

This is an extremely detailed guide to sharpening your kitchen knives for optimal performance.

Knife sharpening is not difficult. It is not shrouded in mystery. With a little knowledge, a little geometry, a couple of tricks and some inexpensive tools, knife sharpening can be fairly easy and extremely rewarding. At the very least it’s a great skill for the toolbox. You’ll come away from this clinic with a better understanding of edges, steel and how to maintain your knives yourself. Or, if you decide to send them out, you’ll know how to make sure you’re getting what you want – and what you pay for.

This is another web-based riddle, similar in concept to Python Challenge. But, this one doesn’t require any programming. You will, however, need to be proficient at figuring out subtle clues, lateral thinking and searching for information on the web.

There are a total of 138 levels. Good luck!

Interesting article about a study from the University of Leicester.

You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like “It was the right price”, or “I liked the label”. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn’t.

That’s funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens

Andrew Carol is building a Difference Engine that Charles Babbage designed in the 19th century but was never able to complete. And he’s doing it with LEGO.

Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes.In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine.

Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers.

Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.

An early study suggests exposure to blue light at night can help perk you up. Not much in the way of detail in the article on what the level of exposure was, or what the possible long-term effects might be.

“Light exposure to this system, particularly blue light, directly reduces sleepiness,” said Steven Lockley of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Subjects exposed to blue light were able to sustain a high level of alertness during the night when people usually feel most sleepy, and these results suggest that light may be a powerful countermeasure for the negative effects of fatigue for people who work at night.”