Category: starred

Selling online is tough and most people are looking for an opportunity to get ahead: in my opinion ‘The Alibaba Opportunity’ is the most lucrative of our generation. How to Cash in on the Alibaba Opportunity By Issa Asad from Issa Asad
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How to Make Money With Alibaba

For players who can’t bear the thought of being away from their favorite board game, there’s a Portable Edition of Settlers of Catan that’s been around for years now. But it comes packed in a flimsy cardboard box full of tiny cards and pieces that are easy to lose. That’s why this new Compact Edition of Settlers of Catan, which folds up on itself for easy transport, is vastly superior in every way.

You lose the ability to completely customize the game board, because the various hexagonal tiles are grouped into larger modular two-sided pieces. But there’s still plenty of room to mix things up every time you play to keep things new and interesting. There are also slide-out drawers for safely storing the playing pieces and resource cards during transport, and the whole thing folds into a self-contained trapezoid-shaped case that can easily squeeze into a suitcase.

Available come June for $45, Catan Compact Edition Traveler even seals the tiny dice into a small cup that players can shake to reveal their roll, without the risk of either of them rolling off the game board or table and going missing. [Catan]

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via Gizmodo
The Travel Version of Settlers of Catan Just Got So Much Better

There are lots of ways to get started with coding, and as long as you get over the intermediate-level learning curve, you could be well on your way to a career as a programmer. But how do you know if you’re good enough to find a job in software development? Simple Programmer offers this 12-question checklist.

The questions are roughly based on "the Joel test," Joel Spolsky’s 12 questions organizations can use to find areas they need to work on and programmers use to evaluate a potential employer. (Things like quite working conditions and a bug database.)

If you want to do a quick self-test to evaluate your own skills, though, you can try the "Simple Programmer Test." These questions include things like using source control effectively, solving algorithm-type problems, naming things appropriately, and knowing how to debug effectively. They’re essentially some of the basic skills required of good software developers, and, the site says, if you score eight or above on these points, you should have a pretty easy time getting a job in this field.

If you honestly score no on some of the items, that’s just a sign of an area to work on.

The Joel Test For Programmers (The Simple Programmer Test) | Simple Programmer

Photo by illustir.

via Lifehacker
Benchmark Yourself as a Programmer with “The Simple Programmer Test”

As we saw in the rooftop snow removal post, getting rid of the white stuff provides unique design challenges for individual snow-clearers. And those challenges grow exponentially when spread over the community level. When entire towns and highways are buried under snow, local officials are tasked with an economic problem: How can we remove as much snow as quickly as possible while using the least amount of resources? Every hour of every day that a road remains unplowed, the local economy suffers; yet there are only so many plows, drivers, and fuel to spare, and there may be another storm coming next week, meaning resources have to be carefully managed.

When the storms start to stack up, traditional snowplows start to look like a hopelessly inefficient investment. Consider a local government tasked with clearing a multi-lane highway, and using this typical solution:

You’ve got to pay for all of those trucks, their maintenance, the fuel that goes into them, the wages of the drivers, the time it takes to gas each of those trucks up, et cetera. And having five or ten drivers tied up in one location means there are dozens of other locations left unattended. Plowing the highways isn’t much good if there’s no one left to plow the local roads leading to the highways.

Enter Bob Lannert, an engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation in the ’90s (and the guy who took those frozen balloon photos). Lannert’s a man with a background unlikely to be duplicated by America’s latest generation: Raised on a farm, Lannert worked his way through engineering school as an ironworker. This gave him an insight into 1) farm machinery, 2) engineering and 3) building things out of metal, and this cocktail of experiences made him the perfect man to solve this problem. Here’s his solution, called the TowPlow:

What you’re looking at is a towed unit hitched to a regular plow. During ordinary travel it rides in a straight line behind the truck—"I want to be able to go through a 10 foot tollbooth," Lannert told Kansas City Public Media—but when the driver flips a switch, the wheels can be steered to the side at up to a 30-degree angle.

Once the unit is fully deployed, the single driver has effectively increased his clearing width by 250%. This means one man can now do the work of two, with a fuel savings, and your total fleet of drivers can be spread to cover more areas of the community.

The TowPlow carries tanks filled with salt brine (which will not freeze), and these serve as ballast to keep the wheels in place. The contraption can safely be dragged along at 55 miles per hour, and can also be fitted with salt-spraying hoppers to do double duty.

In the ’00s, after experimenting with two lawnmowers on his farm–one pulling the other one behind and slightly to the side of it—Lannert was convinced his concept would work and patented the idea. He then convinced Canadian manufacturer Viking-Cives LTD. to begin producing them, with a classic sales pitch: "During an evening dinner when visiting the Ontario plant," writes trade publication Equipment World, "[Lannert] drew the idea on a table napkin."

“Ninety percent of engineers I talked to said it wouldn’t work because it was too big,” Lannert said. Other naysayers said, “it can’t be stable,” or “it can’t plow in deep snow.”

Despite whatever skepticism Lannert had encountered elsewhere, Viking-Cives bit, releasing the first TowPlow in 2005, and it quickly became a hit. Today the DOTs in Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin all use TowPlows; up north, the Canadian provinces of Alberta, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec have all added them to their fleets as well.

“Almost everyone who has bought one came back and bought more," says Gerald Simpson, Viking-Cives VP of Sales. "They didn’t park them in the corner and say, ‘Well, it was a novelty, and it was cute, and it was nice, but it doesn’t work for us.’ Almost everyone has bought more."

The units aren’t cheap—we found conflicting sources online indicating they cost anywhere from $67,000 to $100,000—but with states spending millions of dollars on diesel fuel each year to clear snow, the TowPlow is still a no-brainer investment. "TowPlows can pay for themselves the first year in many states," the company claims, and the math adds up: While it increases the fuel consumption of the vehicle towing it by 10-15%, that’s still an 85-90% savings over having two vehicles do the work.

Lannert’s home state of Missouri now has more than 130 TowPlows in their fleet, and found that they do such a good job of clearing the snow that less salt needs to be sprayed on the roads. That also adds up to a savings. "For every ton of salt we don’t use in the winter, that’s a ton of asphalt we can use in the summer," Missouri DOT Maintenance Superintendent Mike Belt told The Missourian, pointing out that the two materials have similar pricing.

As for Lannert himself, he retired from the Missouri DOT in 2007 after putting in 34 years of work. He now runs self-founded civil engineering firm Snow King Technologies, where he continues to tweak the TowPlow’s future iterations, consult with Viking-Cives, and still trains TowPlow drivers personally. And he credits his background, particularly his familiarity with farm equipment, with his success: "[The TowPlow] would not have happened if I had not been a Missouri farm boy who learned that one can no longer compete by using four-row planters."

Here they are in action:

via Core77 Rss Feed
“Missouri Farm Boy”-Turned-DOT-Engineer Invents a Better Snow-Clearing Vehicle

via kottke.org
The Katering Show

Adopted by the United States Marine Corps in 2009, the M40A5 bolt action sniper rifle supersedes the M40A3 (both are still in use by active duty Marines).  The Marine Corps is unique among the services since it actually builds its own sniper rifles.  The legendary …
via Rifleshooter.com
USMC M40A5 Build- Part 1: Gathering the Parts

The Apple 1 is the most sought after collector piece of computing hardware. It is the Action Comics No. 1 of retro computing. The first appearance of Superman. The one that started it all. But if there was to be a No. 2, it would be this guy—the Commodore 65.

Although it doesn’t have the meteoric sales numbers like the Apple 1, it is almost on par in rarity. Only 50 to 200 Commodore 65 (also known as Commodore 64DX) still exist. This prototype, created in 1990, "was intended to be the last great 8-bit system," according to Hackaday’s Brian Benchoff, who spotted the original eBay listing.

The C65 start screen

The Commodore 65 in action

The C65 was meant to be backwards compatible with the C64 but also provide Amiga-level features of the time. The project began in late 1990 but was soon canceled. When Commodore was liquidated years later, some C65 computers were sold to the public, mostly likely the same machines circulating on auction websites today.

You can read more about this tech relic from this dedicated page (which looks like it’s as old as the computer itself). [Hackday]

via Gizmodo
This 25-Year-Old Computer Just Sold for $23,000 on eBay

Sometimes we all go a little too nuts on making folders inside of folders and you just need to flatten the whole thing down to one. OS X Daily shows off a handy Terminal command for just that.

When you have directories inside of other directories, you end up losing track of files pretty quickly. To smash the whole thing down into one directory, a simple Terminal command is all you need. In this example, TargetDirectory is the subdirectory you want to move the contents from:

find TargetDirectory/ -mindepth 2 -type f -exec mv -i '{}' TargetDirectory/ ';'

With that, all the files located in TargetDirectory will be moved up into the higher directory. Head over to OS X Daily for a few more examples of how it works.

Flatten a Nested Directory & File Hierarchy from Command Line of OS X | OS X Daily

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Instantly Flatten a Directory in OS X with a Terminal Command

The site Slightly Warped Curiosities has posted this wonderful, rare gallery of close-up photos of the Industrial Light & Magic spaceship models used in the first Star Wars trilogy. Anyone who scratch-builds models knows the importance of “grebble” — that’s the baroque surface detail–usually cool-looking bits “kit-bashed” from other models–added to […]

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Explore This Rare Gallery of Hyper Detailed Star Wars Models