Peter Rakos wrote an article for Gamasutra today which demonstrates how to hack yourself a simple 3D engine by subverting an Excel worksheet. It’s not going to win any FPS awards, but the fact that you can even get Excel to draw raw shapes blows my mind. In his demo, the worksheet is used to […]
Someone in Atlanta created what appears to be a homemade Dalek to help deal with streetcorner criminal activity: Rufus Terrill has had it with the drug dealers, petty thieves and vandals he says roam the streets outside his downtown Atlanta bar, O’Terrills. Instead of calling the police or hiring private security guards, Terrill built his […]
Unlike USB2, the Firewire spec allows devices to have full DMA access. By impersonating the appropriate device, a PC can essentially obtain full read/write access to another machine’s RAM, just by connecting the two machines with a Firewire cable. Adding to the recent discussion about the insecurities of physical access and Princeton’s cold-boot RAM dump […]
YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320×240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448×336 resolution and I’m […]
update: As readers noted, it’s not the 0 degrees longitude that’s the problem, it’s at 180 degrees where you could encounter issues. I’ve also escaped the gt and lt symbols. Sorry about that. I spent the weekend participating in the F1 Website Challenge, a coding marathon in which competing teams each produce a mythical man-month’s […]
After Princeton’s cold-boot encryption key recovery hack, I got to thinking about what other useful things might be lying around in memory. It’s old news that passwords of logged-in users are hanging out in there, but what about something more useful to the everyday user? What about that file you were editing before accidentally closing […]
It’s a pretty common practice to comment and uncomment big chunks of code during the development and testing of software. Here’s an odd little hack from the ajaxian blog that can make this a little easier for blocks that you’re constantly flipping on and off during development. For C style comments, the following will be […]
