Mods / Hacks
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Software, Video Games,
Every time a game makes you feel like you are standing in a concrete stairwell, somebody put that stairwell there by hand. A sound designer drew a box around the space, tagged it with a reverb preset, drew another box around the doorway so footsteps muffle when you round the corner, then did it again for every other room in the level. It works. It is also an enormous amount of tedious labor, and it stops being true the second a player knocks a hole in a wall.
Vercidium, a game developer who has spent the past year posting audio experiments to YouTube, released a plugin for Godot that does the job the other way around. It traces sound the way a renderer traces light. Rays bounce off the real geometry of your level, lose energy to whatever they hit, and what reaches the player is whatever survives the trip. Nobody draws a box around anything.
Click to continue reading Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
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Hugging Face’s $399 Microduck Ships With Its Training Code on GitHub
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Toys, Artificial Intelligence,
Most robot news arrives as a video. A humanoid folds laundry in a lab you'll never visit, running software you'll never see, and six months later nobody can buy it. Microduck showed up on Thursday as a pre-order page and two GitHub repos.
It's a 25cm bipedal robot duck, it costs $399, and it comes from Pollen Robotics, the French startup Hugging Face bought last year. It walks, sits, crouches, kicks, grabs things with an articulated beak, roller skates, and gets back up after most falls. Seven behaviors ship trained. Every one of them was learned in simulation, and every one of them is yours to retrain.
Click to continue reading Hugging Face’s $399 Microduck Ships With Its Training Code on GitHub
DLSS 5 Leaked Out of NBA 2K27, and Modders Already Have It Running in Control
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, PC / Laptop, Video Games,
A basketball game is a strange place to find Nvidia's next graphics technology, and yet here we are. NBA 2K27 went into early access this week carrying a file called nvngx_dlssnr.dll, short for DLSS Neural Rendering. Developer Renan Maniero spotted it. Within hours, modders had pulled it out and forced it into games it was never meant to touch.
DLSS 5 has not launched. Nvidia announced it in March and said it would arrive this fall, and a library buried in a basketball build is not a release. What people are running today is an unfinished piece of software that escaped early, injected into titles with no official support for it, at settings nobody outside Nvidia fully understands yet.
Watch Styropyro Turn Mercury and Neon Into Lightning in a Bottle (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Science, Videos,
The result looks like something out of a wizard's workshop: a hand-held tube that flickers and crackles with light every time it moves. And the wild part is that the basic trick is not new at all. People have been watching mercury glow in the dark since 1675, long before anyone had the faintest idea what electricity actually was.
Click to continue reading Watch Styropyro Turn Mercury and Neon Into Lightning in a Bottle (Video)
Top 10 Gear Live tech stories of 2015
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Editorial, Features, Handhelds, Mods / Hacks, Movies, Software, Transportation, Videos,
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We've come to the end of another year, and as we wave goodbye to 2013, we figured it was only fitting that we share the most popular stories published on Gear Live this year, as determined by our readers (we've also got the top ten most read stories regardless of publish date, as well as the ten most popular Gear Live videos of 2013!) These are the ten stories that were read the most, and when you consider that fact, it's pretty surprising to see what made the list. Let's kick it off with our most read story of the year:
OS X El Capitan will be released on September 30:
Anticipation for Apple's newest desktop operating system, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, trumped all other news here on Gear Live in 2015!
Click to continue reading Top 10 Gear Live tech stories of 2015
Australian iOS device users get held up for ransom
Posted by Ariel Levin-Waldman Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Mods / Hacks, Software,
You've probably heard it by now. There are no viruses on Apple products. They don't run .exe files. They don't get hacked. It's the reason I usually use my iPad to do my banking (that, and a lack of questionable browsing history.) I used to believe that.
Well, now it looks like I have to confront the truth. In a series of cyber attacks that have swept Australia, iPhone users have been locked out of their devices and have received a message saying “Device hacked by Oleg Pliss. For unlock device, you need send voucher code by 100 usd/eur (Moneypack/Ukash/PaySafeCard) to email:lock404@hotmail.com for unlock."
According to Apple's support forums, the hack seems to operate through the “Find My Device” feature on Apple products, and it seems that the data may have been matched to an eBay breach that occurred earlier in the week.
People with a hacked device should immediately attempt to change their Apple ID credentials and set up multi-factor authentification.
Taser-proof your clothes with carbon fiber
Posted by Ariel Levin-Waldman Categories: Wearables, Mods / Hacks, Science,
Remember the scene in Batman Begins where Christian Bale takes a taser directly to his bat armor and doesn't flinch? If you found that pretty cool then get excited, because this same borderline-superhuman ability can be yours. Hackaday user Shenzhen claims to have developed a way to make stun gun-proof clothing.
You won't look as intimidating as the Batman but you can get away with more style since just about any piece of clothing can be converted into high tech shock-armor. You just need a layer of carbon fiber, and that's widely available, given that it is commonly used in upholstery fabric at under $20 per yard.
Click to continue reading Taser-proof your clothes with carbon fiber
Top 10 Gear Live stories of 2013
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Editorial, Features, Handhelds, Mods / Hacks, Movies, Software, Videos,
We've come to the end of another year, and as we wave goodbye to 2013, we figured it was only fitting that we share the most popular stories published on Gear Live this year, as determined by our readers (we've also got the top ten most read stories regardless of publish date, as well as the ten most popular Gear Live videos of 2013!) These are the ten stories that were read the most, and when you consider that fact, it's pretty surprising to see what made the list. Let's kick it off with our most read story of the year:
OS X 10.9 Mavericks Developer Preview 3 now available:
Anticipation for Apple's newest desktop operating system, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, trumped all other news here on Gear Live in 2013!
Click to continue reading Top 10 Gear Live stories of 2013
Top 10 most read Gear Live stories in 2013
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Wearables, Features, Internet, Mods / Hacks, Music, Portable Audio / Video, Software,
Sure, we've given you a list of our top 10 most popular stories of 2013, but we figured we'd go a bit more broad than that. We also thought it would be interesting to give you a look at the top ten most read stories on this site this year, period, regardless of what year they were posted. We must say, we're just as surprised as you are at what did (and didn't) make the list! For example, you guys seem to really like Apple. Here we go:
- Sleeptracker Watch review: This one focuses on a watch that tracks your sleep data and aims to wake you up when you are in your lightest phase of sleep. The result is that you wake up feeling more rested, and more refreshed.
- Flash on iPhone is just around the corner: This five-year-old article made it's way back after being linked to by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. Since then we've learned that just because it's in testing behind closed doors, doesn't mean that it's going to make it's way to public release. Also, John, why couldn't you have linked to when we broke what was the biggest Apple software leak of the decade?
- Mod your Xbox without a mod chip: This is an all-time favorite of our readers. It dropped out of the top 10 last year, but has reappeared for 2013.
- Apparently that Xbox 360 Red Ring of Doom issue hasn't been fixed
- OS X 10.9 Mavericks Developer Preview 3 now available
- How To Mod Your iPhone on Windows Using iBrickr
- Apple releases iOS 7 beta 2 with iPad support: iOS 7 beta 1 supported the iPhone and iPod touch only. When beta 2 arrived with iPad support, many were excited.
- TiVo out-of-home remote streaming arrives on Roamio Plus, Roamio Pro DVRs: We'd been waiting for this feature for a long, long time, and it is finally here.
- Exclusive details on the next Nike+ FuelBand: We got exclusive details on the new Nike+ FuelBand months before its release.
- iPhone 5s review: Our review of Apple's flagship smartphone for 2013.
Any surprises? For a trip down memory lane, check out the top ten most-read stories in 2012, 2011, 2010.
We've also compiled a list of the stories that have dropped out of the top ten between 2012 and 2013, which you can check out after the jump, and don't miss the ten most popular Gear Live videos of 2013 either!
Click to continue reading Top 10 most read Gear Live stories in 2013
Apple sets up Developer Center system status page
Posted by Jason Diaz Categories: Apple, Mods / Hacks,
In light of last week's security breach by a security analyst, Apple has proactively introduced an online status page, much like the iCloud status page, but for the Developer Center. This status page allows registered Apple developers to track the progress as systems become available while Apple overhauls their backend services with added security. As you can observe there's still a lot of green missing. Here's a road map statement of their approach in bringing their services back online.
We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We'll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we've created a status page to display the availability of our systems. - Apple
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