It’s long been a trope of science fiction where one of the characters has the capacity for superhuman access to data in realtime, usually through prosthetic eyes that incorporate heads-up displays that make geospatial coordinates and targeting information available without the distraction of having to look down at a monitor of some kind. In point of fact, this isn’t anything particularly new. Fighter jets like the FA-18 have long had transparent monitors positioned directly in the pilot’s field of vision that incorporate much of the information of the instruments on the panel. Players of first-person shooters like …
It’s a sure sign that you’re trying to accomplish too much when you start forsaking sleep for other things. Lately, work has been running me ragged so to compensate I haven’t posted (or been writing) for a couple of days. To keep from overrunning myself I’ve been reworking a couple of electronics projects in my spare time and discovered in the process that the circuit diagrams I’ve been working from, simply put, won’t work as advertised. Thankfully, the principles they were supposedly based upon are sound so I broke out the data sheets and …
One thing I've noticed about Eclipse Phase is that the system makes it easy to develop very detailed, very powerful (which stands to reason, when you think about it), and sometimes very quirky characters. It isn't often that a game system will let you design a character that has stats that cover a high degree of skill in a hobby as well as a profession, say, Zen calligraphy or tailoring.
For many years, Alan Turing was one of the lesser-known heroes of World War II. Born in 1912, he rose to prominence at Cambridge in the early 1930’s where he was eventually elected a fellow of the King’s College. Much of his work on computability, or whether or not a problem can be solved and the most effective methods of going about it if it can, is now considered 101-level stuff in comp.sci programs around the world. At the time, however, this work was revolutionary. Turing is best known for the hypothetical Turing Machine, a computing device …
For the past week or so, a new tabletop role-playing game called Eclipse Phase has been eating most of my spare time. If you're not familiar with it, it is best described as transhumanist hard science fiction combined with a style of horror which is almost Lovecraftian in nature. I find that the best way to learn a system is to sit down and generate a character for it, so I decided to build a couple of NPCs for other gamers to use if they wish and release them onto the Net under the same license as the game: Creative …
Something that I keep meaning to write about is the topic of practical data backups - how to back your data up in such a way that you won't go bonkers trying to manage it, but if you blow a drive you'll be able to restore something at least. The thing about backups is that they're at once easy to overthink and confuse yourself horribly (which means that you'll never make or use them) and easy to do in such a fashion that they won't be usable when you need them the most. At the enterprise level, there are at least …
It’s only in the past quarter-century or so that semiautonomous sensor platforms – self-powered robots equipped with cameras, rangefinders, and the like – have really advanced to the point where they’re feasible for field work. Right off the bat, everyone thinks of the UAVs deployed in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere or sophisticated robotics projects developed by hackers, but why stop there? When you consider practical sensor platforms most of them aren’t subtle: they’re the size of a model airplane or larger, and depending upon the method of propulsion used you might even hear them before you see …
If you’ve ever hacked around with wireless communications, in particular data networking chances are you’ve come across the oh-so-nifty USB spectrum analyzers that operate in the gigahertz range (which 802.11a, b, and g networks, among other wireless applications, operate within). The idea is simple: you plug the analyzer into a USB port on your laptop, fire up the software, and you can see the whole spectrum broken down into channels with relative signal strengths representing activity on the screen just like in the movies. While granted this can be a useful tool for anyone doing serious RF …
