Fun Stuff

Full House might not have been as good as you remember it being

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I watched Full House. You watched Full House. We ALL watched Full House. I mean everybody watched that show, and generally liked it, yes?

Well now you can go back and review every single cringe inducing moment, at Full House Reviewed.

I think I liked that show. I seem to remember liking that show. However, I don’t really remember anything that I actually enjoyed about it. And certainly, reading the strangely addicting recaps, a lot of the awful things about the show are starting to come back: the cheesiness, the over the top life lessons, the heavy-handed “I-WILL-make-you-say-awww” manipulation moments, the ’80’s decor/outfits/hairstyles, etc.

In other words, it doesn’t seem to hold up.

Still, I spent an awful lot of time with the Tanners, and reading the very thorough episode recaps is a great way to kill an afternoon.

Missilebreak Outvaders

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Friday is as good of a day as any for a time wasting flash game. In case you couldn’t tell by the name, Missilebreak Outvaders is like an ’80’s greatest hits mash-up of all the best video games: a combination of Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Breakout.

It’s kind of weird, since the games seem like they’re nothing like each other, and yet the combination works surprisingly well. Very enjoyable.

My high score is 150300. Can you beat it?

Can’t Touch This

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Every once in awhile you come across a fantastic parent hack. A solution to a common problem that is so obvious, you just want to slap your forehead and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Very rarely do you find a parent hack that involves MC Hammer. Even more rare is a parent hack of both the the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that variety AND the MC Hammer variety. This is one of those hacks.

Problem: If only I had some way to easily, and consistently label the things that my kid shouldn’t touch. If only I had one icon (pun intended) that could easily signify to my child, “You Can’t Touch This”.

Please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘um.

Link via Sara

Zombie PSA

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Zachary Levi from Chuck reminds us: be wise, shoot between the eyes. There’s no need for unnecessary zombie torture. Remember that zombies used to be people too!

My god…it’s brilliant…almost TOO brilliant

/ Shane / 2 Comments

You are probably aware of Google’s efforts to digitize as many books as possible, scanning (literally) tons of print books into their computers. Sometimes there are technical glitches or errors when scanning these books in: print may be smudged or damaged, especially if it is very old. So Google came up with a brilliant yet simple solution to this problem: get people to unwittingly do it for them, for free.

You see, even now, there are some things that are very easy for a person to do, but very difficult for a computer to do. Recognizing distorted text turns out to be one of these things. Google doesn’t want to pay an army of people to read through these books and transcribe them. That would take forever, to say nothing of the cost (although I’m pretty sure Google is more concerned with the time, than the cost). So how do you trick people into doing this for you?

reCaptcha.

You might not know the term, but a “captcha” is one of those things you have to fill out on the Internet to prove you’re not a spambot. You know, look at the image and write the text that you see, something like:

Well, if you’re using Google’s free reCaptcha product on your site (and who wouldn’t? If it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me!), it not only verifies you’re not a robot, but also helps decode a particularly tricky word.

Take the example in the picture above. The first part (Years) decides if you’re a robot or not. The second part (maybe subioik?) is a picture of a word from a paper book which was scanned in, but not understood by the Google computers. If enough people answer the same thing on that captcha, the Google hive mind can assume that that image correctly maps to subioik.

In other words, it might take a computer a million years to run algorithms to figure that out, but Google could accomplish the same in about 30 seconds by harnessing millions of people trying to enter porn sites.

This is such a simple, obvious solution to the “smudged word” problem. It’s so smart it’s almost scary, like encountering an alien intelligence that is so far beyond my capacity. In fact, when I first heard about this, I dismissed it as some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. Not so. Information is available directly from Google.

I don’t see anything wrong with them doing this per say, but it still leaves a funny feeling in my stomach. I feel manipulated somehow. And anybody that ingenious is a little scary. So far they seem to be using their power for good, but what if that changed? I don’t know man…for some reason, this disturbs me greatly.

Link via Sylvain