Chủ Nhật, 7 tháng 8, 2016
With the whole world playing Pokémon Go, you need every advantage to stay ahead. Here are some of the hacks to get an edge on the competition when chasing pocket monsters, from easy to way advanced. So you finally cornered a rare Mewtwo Pokémon. It’s time to still your beating heart and capture the critter with a well-timed Poké Ball toss. Shooting straight can be tricky, but this low-tech prop will help you make every shot count: it’s just a piece of screen-wide paper with two sticky notes on both sides to guide your finger along. In addition to catching monsters in the wild, an important part of Pokémon husbandry is hatching them from eggs. That requires actual walking, as much as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) for the highest level monsters. Riding in a car or even a bicycle doesn’t seem to work, but strapping the phone to a ceiling fan with a rubber band does the trick. Those that do leave the house, quickly discover that the game excels at draining smartphone batteries. But why buy a charger pack when you can laboriously manufacture your very own custom handheld Pokémon encyclopedia? Unless you already own a 3D printer, a trip to a local maker space is in order. Borrow their soldering iron and wire the battery to a handful of components. You’ve just doubled your supply of juice and earned major DIY street cred. While most of you were skipping around in the sun catching Pidgeys, some people were holed up at home reverse-engineering server traffic and posting in online forums about obscure topics like protocol buffers. That’s how the app store is chock-full of third-party Pokémon maps even though the game’s developer Niantic Inc. doesn’t offer an official software interface. Some went further to create bots that can roam the map, collect items and hunt monsters. Before the robots come for your jobs, they’ll take your rare Pokémon first. Under the hood, Pokémon Go relies on the smartphone’s ability to find its location in the world by catching signals from satellites above. It’s possible to fake the transmission using hardware that can be bought for as little as $300 and software available for free. Although this kind of black magic may get you banned from the game and possibly arrested for operating a signal jammer—you can teleport your Pokémon hunter anywhere in the world. As a coup de grace for a game that’s intended to get you outdoors, add a joystick for enhanced comfort. Pokémon Done. This article originally published at Bloomberg here Level: Newbie
Level: Maker
Level: Bot Master
Level: Mad Scientist
Thứ Ba, 26 tháng 4, 2016
Cutting-edge technology doesn't stay cutting-edge for long. Case in point: Counter-Strike, a popular 3D-graphics intensive first-person shooter game that required a powerful PC when it came out in 2000, now runs on an Android Wear smartwatch. That's right, the smartwatch on your wrist is now as powerful as a computer as desktop computer from 16 years ago. As shown in the video above, YouTuber Dave Bennett figured out how to get Counter-Strike working on his LG G Watch. Sure, it's not the most practical way to play the game with the smartwatch's tiny, tiny touchscreen, but it's still impressive as a technical feat. It perfectly illustrates how far technology has advanced. The smartwatch is a two-year device so there's some noticeable lag, but my hunch is the lag would disappear if Bennett gets it running on new Android Wear smartwatches. Of course, that might be easier said than done since the newest Android Wear smartwatches have round displays, not rectangular screens. 'Counter-Strike' running on an Android Wear smartwatch. Image: dave bennett/youtube Recently, someone managed to emulate Counter-Strike on an Android smartphone. Can we get some Counter-Strike on HoloLens or in VR next? Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
