Domain: kfu.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to kfu.com.
Comments · 15
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Ripoff of a classic
This is just a new form of the "How bored are you?" game which is itself as old as many readers here.
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That is Fake Tempest
REAL Tempest fits entirely memory locations 0x9000-FFFF, its lines are ONE pixel wide (but it's a BIG one!) and it does not have whiny buzzy switching power supply. It has a large throbbing step-down transformer and a whopping thirty-two thousand microfarad capacitor in the power supply. It has a flyback transformer feeding a CRT that bristles with actual electricity terror death.
Real Tempest machines go out with a real BANG.
What is shown is some Fisher Price low voltage plastic computing device, obviously meant for children, whose level completion screen is full of whoopy flashes and dancing bears distracting artifacts and eye candy as in, deer-meets-headlights.
The Real Tempest, when a level is complete it launches you into the middle and flies you through the tunnel, this was the COOLEST damned thing we ever saw when we first sawed it, and gets back down to business. No goofy crap.
THIS IS WHAT A REAL TEMPEST IS. IT CAN HURT YOU..
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony? If a bear shits in the woods and laughs because shit got on his 'bear' hands would he laugh hysterically and change brands of toiley paper?
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Re:Not bad ! not bad !!!
I don't think bandwidth is an issue in this design. I mean, once the initial data is copied to the RAM on the gameduino, how much really has to change per frame for the average sprite based game with a scrolling background? If you're just scrolling horizontally, you only need to change less than 40 bytes for each 8 pixels moved, and updating the coordinates and character mappings for a few sprites isn't exactly a massive task, nor is checking for collisions as it's hardware based.
I think one thing that could be added to really enhance it would be multiple character-based layers, as used in the later 80's arcade games - maybe even with hardware zooming. That would allow some pretty nice fake 3d effects.
I'd love to see a vector-based version of this made - as in the arduino would just fill memory on the shield with a draw list (like that used on the old Atari vector games: http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/games/vecops.txt ) - although it wouldn't be a true vector engine, deflecting the beam, a facsimile could be made, I'm sure. It would be way cool to see a copy of Tempest up and running on something like this!
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Do something practical
The first two things I wrote in java were the quintessential '15 sliding tiles' puzzle game and an Othello game. I wrote them in swing. I wrote them not because the world needed yet another implementation, but because it was a fun challenge, and I got some practical experience in writing not only Java, but UI code (in this case, Swing, but the concepts had far wider applicability).
They're still on the net, for what it's worth. Don't expect a lot.
The third thing I wrote was MacXM, though that was in Java/Cocoa. Its follow-up was JXM.
I mention all of this because my advice is that once you've gotten all of that theoretical stuff in your head, the next thing you should do is write something. Even if it's just something for you, it's still something.
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I am not afraid
Here's a photo of my keychain. Knock yourselves out.
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Re:God complex
What happens if they get run over by a bus or a stampede of wildebeests?
Or, in my own case, CalTrain.
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Re:Another "IPv6 won't be here soon" article...
IPv4 = 192.0.2.2 (IANA TEST-NET
;)
Thus:
2002::::/48 or in hex:
2002:c000:0202::/48 compresss that a bit:
2002:c000:202::/48
Now, IPv6 has 128 bits, minus the 48, leaves you with 80 bits for yourself which is the default site delegation, we use a /64 on each link, thus you can have 65535 networks you meant ? :)
a /48 is also 80bits - 32bits (IPv4) -> 48 = 2^48 = 281474976710656 bigger as the IPv4 space in terms of single IP addresses ;)
But.... 6to4 looks good, it won't be as long as there are no relays close to you and there are only few of those. See The 6to4 list or check your traceroutes to the anycast address... -
Re:OS X PCMCIA card
A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driver hack here and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link also make cards which use this chip as well.
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Re:10.2.4 broke the Linksys WPC54G AirPort2.kext h
Well, that didn't take long.
The procedure to get your WPC54G to work with Apple's AirPort2 driver is a little more advanced now (it involves patching the driver), but it once again works.
here is where you can get the details. -
Adding local CA certificates to Safari
I figured out how to add self-signed and alternate CA root certs to Safari. See how here.
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A better optionOne of the things we have to look forward to once broadcast television has gone fully digital is the give-back of the VHF TV spectrum. IMHO, VHF TV was one of the biggest wastes of spectrum ever conceived. The 12 channels of TV take up more than a quarter of the VHF bandwidth. By contrast, the 56 channels of UHF take up about 12.5% of UHF.
So what?
In general, lower frequencies tend to suffer a bit less from multipath distortion, suffer less from feedline losses, are easier to engineer, and more efficient to generate.
Channels 2-6 are very low in frequency indeed. They start at 54 MHz (TV channels are 6 MHz wide), but there is a 4 MHz gap between 4 and 5 for various low power services (mostly RC cars and planes), with channel 6 abutting the bottom of the FM radio channels (88 MHz). Now, I think channels 5 and 6 should be dedicated to an amateur broadcasting service, and the rest perhaps to land-mobile activities, but channels 7-13 are the perfect place for low power data services.
Of course, it's going to be years before the VHF TV transmitters are finally turned off, but I do believe it will happen eventually, and if we don't plan well in advance, there will be a smoke-filled-room give-away of this prime spectrum to someone with a lot of money, which isn't necessarily in the best interests of everyone.
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Re:How do I get an IPV6 address?
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S/MIMEI'm sure I won't be the only one to say it. I think S/MIME is the way to go. PGP has too many variations that don't conveniently interoperate. S/MIME basically has one. You can even generate S/MIME messages with shell scripts and openssl's smime commands. Find out how here.
Think about this: The whole purpose beind certification (and PGP's key signing is just another kind of certification, make no mistake) is to be able to have some assurance that the public key you're encrypting or validating signatures with belongs to whom you think it does. With PGP there is no certifying authority. I know there was supposed to be a distributed trust model with PGP, but in actual practice it hasn't worked out that way. I don't trust keys unless I have signed them, and I only sign them when I have verified them. Why? Because to do otherwise I would have to manage a list of trusted signers, which is no different than S/MIME, but the number of signatures that those trusted signers would be giving out would be relatively low. My trust would not reap much benefit.
By contrast, those issuing S/MIME certificates by and large are in the business of doing so. They generally have posted policies that allow me to determine whether I trust them or not. So far, that's no different than PGP. But the difference is that there are relatively few organizations that have gone to the trouble of becoming S/MIME CAs, which means that trusting one of them nets me a large number of other users with whom I can interoperate without any prior introduction. I dare say that with a single root CA cert (the thawte freemail one), I can probably get over 90% of S/MIME users all at once, and I have some assurance given the rules for their so-caled Web of Trust system that the identities being offered were properly screened.
Moreover, S/MIME has key expiration mechanisms built into it, which PGP lacks. Turning your key over frequently helps make sure brute force attacks don't result in an attacker being able to forge signatures (by the time they brute-force the keypair, it's expired).
And if Thawte ever decided to either charge for their services or pull the plug, it would be simple to 'fork' to a new free system -- If Thawte certificates are trusted, then simply demanding a prospective user of the free system that they sign a random plaintext and send it back would be sufficient to get proof of their name and e-mail address (which is the only thing Thawte certifies in any event).
Oh, by the way, yes, Microsoft uses it. That doesn't make it evil on its face.
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6to4 for easy testing...If you want to test IPv6 functionality easily, look into using 6to4. Every IPv4 address has around 2^80 IPv6 addresses associated with it (I can't recall the split into networks). That page gives instructions for BSDs, and some Linux instructions are available from Debian. I believe MS has instructions somewhere as well; check Google.
It's nigh trivial to set up. However, the public gateways listed aren't terribly reliable. Don't plan on running useful servers behind a public 6to4 gateway. It is very useful for testing programs.
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Re:Is IPv6 done, or what?
Basically you have to use a special IPv6 router. It is called a 6to4 router, in that it works to send the ipv6 packets across ipv4 networks with no knowledge of ipv6. You have to understand that packets won't really go anywhwere if the routers don't support it. Check out this article. It was posted in a slashdot story yesterday in the bsd section.