Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 18

Useful open source

Here are a few open source projects I stumbled on recently that I thought might be useful. I’ve been trying out ThinkUp because it might be useful to me in a way that was not intended by design. Rather than a reporting engine, it could be a stand-alone tool for pulling social data to be re-used on another Web site.

HybridAuth, Open Source Social Sign On PHP Library

HybridAuth enable developers to easily build social applications to engage websites vistors and customers on a social level by implementing social signin, social sharing, users profiles, friends list, activities stream, status updates and more.

ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Platform

With ThinkUp you’ll get the detailed insights you need to learn what’s working, and what you can do even better.

howler.js – Modern Web Audio Javascript Library – GoldFire Studios

Browsers have come a long way over the years, and we are now able to achieve amazing results using all of the great new technologies often referred to as HTML5. However, generally speaking, audio still sucks.  So, we decided to create our own library and open source it. This library works great for games, but it can work just as well for any other audio-related web app.

PieCrust — A static website generator and lightweight CMS.

PieCrust is a static website generator and lightweight CMS that’s all managed with text files. No complex setup, databases, or administrative panels. Simple, beautiful, and yummy.

Laravel – A Clean & Classy PHP Framework

Laravel is a clean and classy framework for PHP web development. Freeing you from

spaghetti code, Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive

syntax. Development should be a creative experience that you enjoy, not something that is

painful. Enjoy the fresh air.

 

Imperial College developing designer drugs

Aren’t these commonly known as bath salts?

Synthetic alcohol: booze without the hangover

What is non-alcoholic and non-toxic but gives you the buzz of a? Synthetic alcohol, according to David Nutt of the Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London.

Google Indexes Printers and Video Camers

In case you needed another reason why security by obscurity is no security at all…

Google Indexes 80,000 Printers That You Can Print To From Anywhere

We just received a tip from someone that Google is indexing 80,000 printers that are connected to the Internet.  Using a little Google search magic, it becomes apparent that you can really find anything using Google.  To top it off, aside from just being indexed by Google, you can easily print something to any one of these 80,000 printers surely giving the owner of the printer quite a scare.  Obviously the people who configured these print servers skipped firewall 101 class.

Big Brother

These are live video feeds from 325 unprotected Panasonic Network

Cameras, mostly in Asia, discovered only through search engines. Click an image to open the camera’s control interface in a new window. Scroll or refresh to load more. Works best in Safari, slow in Firefox and Chrome, not at all in IE and Opera (does not support M-JPEG). Requires JavaScript.

Microsoft’s modern.IE

MS released a site dedicated to testing old versions of MSIE. In addition to a tester you can use right in the site, they offer up virtual machines for VirtualBox that cover all versions of MSIE, including MSIE 10.

Home | Testing made easier in Internet Explorer | modern.IE

modern.IE is a dev center – free tools & resources – built so you can spend less time testing for the various versions of Internet Explorer and more time building what matters to you on the modern web.

We recognize that there are still a lot of users that browse with older versions of Internet Explorer. And while modern web standards andautomatic updates with platform previews might be steps in the right direction, we know that the range of devices and browser versions still present a real challenge for your testing matrix. modern.IE is a way we can help move the web forward by making it easier to build innovative experiences with web standards like HTML5 & CSS3 while supporting older versions of IE.

Ford offers OpenXC, an SDK for their cars

I think Ford just left the other carmakers in cloud of bytes.

Ford’s open-source kit brings era of smart car apps – tech – 24 January 2013 – New Scientist

MIRROR, signal, manoeuvre – now set your engine to “supercar”. Car maker Ford has just released OpenXC - an open-source hardware and software toolkit that will let the hacker community play around with the computer systems that run modern cars. While the first apps may add nothing more exciting than internet radio, the open nature of the system should eventually lead to custom apps that give drivers far more control over their car’s performance.

PS4

Great news! We love our PS3 even if the XBox 360 has been getting a bit more attention since it arrived at XMas. Aside from the games, the PS3 has been a superior way to watch video, whether it’s Netflix, Blueray or streaming from our media center.

WSJ: PlayStation 4 will launch this year

If your heart hadn’t already made up its mind regarding the subject of last night’s PlayStation tease, the Wall Street Journal flat-out said this morning the PlayStation successor is launching this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-3GMH...

 

Linden Lab’s ‘dio’

I wanted this to be a lot cooler than it actually is. It’s a toolkit for making Scott Adams-style adventure games, the fancy kind with pictures rather than the text-only Infocom ones. Six years ago we were thinking we’d have Second Life in a browser tab any day now…

Exclusive: Linden Lab’s ‘dio’ to Let You Gamify Your Media for Fun and (Eventually) Profit – Forbes

Do you think Instagram would be more fun if it were an experience rather than a site? Do you think advertising could benefit from more interactivity? Do you like playing games? Do you want to make money the new-fashioned way? Linden Lab says they have what you’re looking for.

Gun Buy-back turns into ad hoc gun show

Vivat liberum mercatum!

Gun LOL: Seattle Cops Get Pwned

Nothing gives me an eye roll quite as much as hearing the phrase “gun culture” applied to America. Alls I can’t figure out is which is dominant. Is it the “gun culture,” “big-car culture,” The “drive-in, diners & dives culture,” or something else altogether?

Or, do all these sub-cultures simply have a common thread running through them, manifest when people are so messily left to their own proclivities to pursue their own values for they own sakes?

Self-help books treat depression

This data threatens those who consider depression to be solely biological and treatable by drugs only.

BBC News – Self-help books ‘treat depression’

Prescribing self-help books on the NHS is an effective treatment for depression, a study suggests.

Patients offered books, plus sessions guiding them in how to use them, had lower levels of depression a year later than those offered usual GP care.

The effect was seen in addition to the benefits of other treatments such as antidepressants, Scottish researchers report in the journal Plos One.

Such an approach may help the NHS tackle demand for therapy, they said.

Half-Life on Steam for Linux

More good news from Valve.

Half-Life now runs on Mac OS X and Linux, we assure you

Now with a Steam page that doesn’t expressly list Mac as a supported platform, we understand your skepticism regarding the headline to this very post. Indeed Half-Life has been ported to both OS X and Linux today.