Author: Caleb Kraft

1569 Articles

Top 10 Hacking Failures In Movies: Part 2

April 4, 2013 by 83 Comments

After going through the original quick list we tossed together, people were chiming in like crazy. We felt another 10 might help satiate the desire to smirk at the silliness of tech portrayed in movies and TV. Gathering examples from your comments, we have compiled part 2.  While I would have loved to narrow this down to a specific item like incorrect lingo or screen grabs, I didn’t quite have enough specific scenes to do it yet.  Be sure to keep the comments coming and be specific, I haven’t seen many of these till someone points it out.

Continue reading “Top 10 Hacking Failures In Movies: Part 2” →

Hackerspace Tour: Arch Reactor In St. Louis Missouri

April 2, 2013 by 10 Comments

Over this last weekend I was lucky enough to find myself in St. Louis, Missouri. Some of my favorite places in the universe are there, the city museum being one that pops into mind most frequently.  I realized I had never toured a hackerspace in St. Louis though!

A quick phone call to Arch Reactor remedied this. Even though it was Easter Sunday, they came down and gave me a tour.  The  space was quite nice with a lounge area, electronics workstations, fabrication tools and a complete wood shop. On top of the hackerspace’s pleasant atmosphere, the building also includes a fun little art-bike group called the Banana Bike Brigade,  and even has a roof-top bar made from reclaimed materials. For those of you who are into cars, in the bike shop there were several nice corvairs and a porsche 911 that appeared to be mid 80s.

If you ever get a chance to stop by, you should definitely try to visit Arch Reactor.

Top 10 Hacking Failures In Movies

March 28, 2013 by 211 Comments

It had been requested that we make a short video covering the top worst hacks in movies. Being the community that we are, it seemed like an interesting request. We asked for your input, and you were happy to deliver! However, the proposition of creating a “top 10” list turned out to be quite difficult. There were just SO MANY horrible scenes that I started thinking about how to even categorize them. We could probably to a “top 10” in any of the following categories without even having to dig too deeply:

  • hacker lingo
  • mocked up interfaces
  • fake input devices
  • virus screen-takeover moments
  • access denied messages
  • hardware taped together

Honestly, after breaking it down in such a manner, making the top 10 movie hacking failures, felt painfully general. It is like making a list of “top 10 animals that ever existed”. The state of technology portrayal in movies is frankly abysmal. It is obvious that the only people who know less about tech than “hollywood” are the people making laws about it.

Continue reading “Top 10 Hacking Failures In Movies” →

Going Back To Our Old Commenting System!

March 25, 2013 by 101 Comments

On Friday, I announced we would upgrade our commenting system. It was tested over the weekend, and ultimately I have decided to go back to the wordpress system.  Here are the reasons why:

1. Our old comments never got transitioned over.

The intenseDebate system says I can just click a single button and it will import our old posts into the new system.  I did this Friday and the page never moved from 0%. I tried again Saturday night, with the 0% import still there this morning(Monday). Our old posts simply never imported. I don’t know if it was because our database of comments was so large (I doubt it) or what. I went to contact their support, but found them out for the weekend. That’s no big deal, but I wonder if the importer was a manual thing and no one was there to do it? If so, they should probably put a warning on the importer page.

2. It wasn’t failing gracefully.

I had many emails and comments saying that the comments were not showing when people were using script blockers, or certain android devices. The intenseDebate website claims that their system will show comments even if someone is using a script blocker. I did not personally test this, and frankly I don’t have to. Even if those people are mistaken or have peculiar setups, I simply can’t ignore complaints that our content isn’t even showing.

3. I couldn’t expand all replies by default, or maybe I’m an idiot.

I didn’t see an option anywhere to display all comment threads expanded by default. Maybe I just overlooked it. Maybe there’s some css trick to it. We HAVE to have our comments expanded. Often there is more useful information in the comments than the article itself. With replies nested you would have to go through and click every single thread just to see if there was anything useful. This is such an obvious feature that I’m convinced I just went stupid for a while and didn’t read the button that enabled it, surely they didn’t omit it.

For these 3 reasons, I removed it.  Just like they said it would, it came out with no issue.

Finally Upgrading Our Comment System.

March 22, 2013 by 18 Comments

intense

UPDATE: I’m working on making the visual style fit better. It really needs some work.

Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re finally taking the plunge into a more robust commenting system. This one has a ton of features, but the following few have been asked for quite frequently.

  • You can now edit your comments. Yes, finally. No seriously, try it. To do this, you’ll need to log in though!
  • Subscription to a comment thread is now optional. Horay!
  • You can now “Like” or dislike comments.

IntenseDebate is converting our old comments over, so they should begin to appear soon. Please feel free to email me directly[caleb@] with any issue you encounter using the new system. I know you’ve been asking for it for a very long time, I’ll do my best to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible.

Bullet Time With A Single GoPro

March 20, 2013 by 38 Comments

Earlier this week I saw a video that was showing how some guys made some really cool bullet time effects with 15 tiny rugged awesome cameras called “GoPros”(that wasn’t a paid endorsement, they’re awesome).  For those unfamiliar, the bullet time effect gained popularity from the first matrix movie. The footage slowed down to slow motion while [Neo] dodged some bullets, but the camera was still able to move around. To do this, they built a massive circular rig and mounted tons of cameras all around. Using these multiple angles, they were able to stitch together the scene in slow motion and “move” the camera.

Continue reading “Bullet Time With A Single GoPro” →