A Model Of Dry Humor

If you want to see a glorious combination of model bananas in a treehouse mixed with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor, you will appreciate [Studson]’s build video. Video also after the break. He is making an homage to Donkey Kong 64 from 1999, which may be a long time ago for some folks’ memory (Expansion Pak). Grab a piece of your favorite banana-flavored fruit and sit tight for joke delivery as dry as his batch of baked bark.

The treehouse uses a mixture of found material and crafting supplies. In a colorful twist, all the brown bark-wielding sticks are green, while the decorative greenery came from a modeling store shelf. It all starts with a forked branch pruned from the backyard and a smooth-sided container lid that might make you look twice the next time you nuts are buying a bin of assorted kernels. If you thought coffee stirrers couldn’t be used outside their intended purpose, prepare to have your eyes opened, but remember to wear eye protection as some of the wood clippings look like they could achieve escape velocity. The key to making this look like an ape abode, and not a birdhouse, is the color choices and finishing techniques. Judging by the outcome and compared to the steps, making a model of this caliber is the sign of an expert.

If you wish to binge on wooden Donkey Kong, we can grant your desire, but if you prefer your treehouses life-sized, this may launch your imagination.

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Little Bobby Tables Just Registered A Company…

Sometimes along comes a tech story that diverges from our usual hardware subject matter yet which just begs to be shared with you because we think you will find it interesting and entertaining.

XKCD 327, Exploits of a Mom (CC BY-NC 2.5).
XKCD 327, Exploits of a Mom (CC BY-NC 2.5).

You will no doubt be familiar with the XKCD cartoon number 327, entitled “Exploits of a Mom”, but familiarly referred to as “[Bobby Tables]”. In it a teacher is ringing the mother of little [Robert’); DROP TABLE Students; –], whose name has caused the loss of a year’s student records due to a badly sanitized database input. We’ve all raised a chuckle at it, and the joke has appeared in other places such as an improbably long car license plate designed to erase speeding tickets.

It's nice to see that Companies House sanitise their database inputs.
It’s nice to see that Companies House sanitise their database inputs.

Today we have a new twist on the Bobby Tables gag, for someone has registered a British company with the name  “; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD“. Amusingly the people at Companies House have allowed the registration to proceed, so either they get the joke too or they are unaware of the nuances of a basic SQL exploit. It’s likely that if this name leaves Her Majesty’s civil servants with egg on their faces it’ll be swiftly withdrawn, so if that turns out to be the case then at least we’ve preserved it with a screenshot.

Of course, the chances of such a simple and well-known exploit having any effect is minimal. There will always be poor software out there somewhere  that contains badly sanitized inputs, but we would hope that a vulnerability more suited to 1996 would be vanishingly rare in 2016.

If by some chance you haven’t encountered it before we’d recommend you read about database input sanitization, someday it may save you from an embarrassing bit of code. Meanwhile we salute the owner and creator of this new company for giving us a laugh, and wish them every success in their venture.

Weight Tracking, Wise Cracking IoT Bathroom Scale

For those fighting the battle of the bulge, the forced discipline of fitness bands and activity tracking software might not be enough motivation. Some who are slimming down need a little gentle encouragement to help you lose weight and keep it off. If that sounds like you, then by all means avoid building this weight-tracking IoT scale with an attitude.

Then again, if you live in fear of your scale, [Jamie Bailey]’s version is easy to hate, at least when your numbers are going in the wrong direction. Centered around a second-hand Wii Balance Board talking to a Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth, the scale really only captures your weight and sends it up to InitialState for tracking and feedback. Whether the feedback is in the form of jokes at your expense is, of course, is entirely up to you; if you’d rather get gentle nudges and daily affirmations, just edit a few files. Or if your tastes run more toward “Yo momma so fat” jokes, have at it.

Bathroom scales are a good hacking target, whether it’s reverse engineering a digital scale or eavesdropping on a smart scale. This build is snarky good fun, and if nothing else, it’s good for pranking your roommate. Unless your roommate is your husband or wife, of course. That’s just – no.

The Machine That Japed: Microsoft’s Humor-Emulating AI

Ten years ago, highbrow culture magazine The New Yorker started a contest. Each week, a cartoon with no caption is published in the back of the magazine. Readers are encouraged to submit an apt and hilarious caption that captures the magazine’s infamous wit. Editors select the top three entries to vie for reader votes and the prestige of having captioned a New Yorker cartoon.

The magazine receives about 5,000 submissions each week, which are scrutinized by cartoon editor [Bob Mankoff] and a parade of assistants that burn out after a year or two. But soon, [Mankoff]’s assistants may have their own assistant thanks to Microsoft researcher [Dafna Shahaf].

[Dafna Shahaf] heard [Mankoff] give a speech about the New Yorker cartoon archive a year or so ago, and it got her thinking about the possibilities of the vast collection with regard to artificial intelligence. The intricate nuances of humor and wordplay have long presented a special challenge to creators. [Shahaf] wondered, could computers begin to learn what makes a caption funny, given a big enough canon?

[Shahaf] threw ninety years worth of wry, one-panel humor at the system. Given this knowledge base, she trained it to choose funny captions for cartoons based on the jokes of similar cartoons. But in order to help [Mankoff] and his assistants choose among the entries, the AI must be able to rank the comedic value of jokes. And since computer vision software is made to decipher photos and not drawings, [Shahaf] and her team faced another task: assigning keywords to each cartoon. The team described each one in terms of its contextual anchors and subsequently its situational anomalies. For example, in the image above, the context keywords could be car dealership, car, customer, and salesman. Anomalies might include claws, fangs, and zoomorphic automobile.

The result is about the best that could be hoped for, if one was being realistic. All of the cartoon editors’ chosen winners showed up among the AI’s top 55.8%, which means the AI could ultimately help [Mankoff and Co.] weed out just under half of the truly bad entries. While [Mankoff] sees the study’s results as a positive thing, he’ll continue to hire assistants for the foreseeable future.

Humor-enabled AI may still be in its infancy, but the implications of the advancement are already great. To give personal assistants like Siri and Cortana a funny bone is to make them that much more human. But is that necessarily a good thing?

[via /.]

Hack A Day’s Dictionary Of Questionable Utility™

We frequently receive inquiries from eager readers asking how they can best get started in electronics and computer projects. Countless great books have been written on these subjects, and of course now there’s our answers.hackaday.com site. But there’s a difference between being “book smart” and being “street smart.” What are the terms that you really need to know to get ahead in this field? We’ve collected a few of our favorites here.

Have any terms or definitions to add? Leave a note in the comments!

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There I Fixed It: A Blog About Hacking, Poorly.

austinb-ipodmuffler

Thereifixedit.com is a site filled with dubious innovations. Some of them are cool, some of them are clever, and most of them are terrifying. Anyone who has ever stood in front of a broken household appliance with a roll of duct tape, one screw driver with a bit chipped off the flat part, and determination will laugh themselves silly browsing through this site. Maybe some of the ghetto hacks we covered before should be in this list.

[Thanks for the link Dad]

How-to: Fix Your Stupid Internet

aprilfools-1

Dear Hack a Day,
Websites keep publishing poorly executed jokes today; how can I fix this?

We’ve been getting a lot of questions on the tip line like the one above, so we put together this one-step illustrated how-to. If you’re not the physical labor type, you can use [Steve Lambert]’s SelfControl.

[Related: Hack a Day goes autonomous, Craft a Day]