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Use of the street drug known as “bath salts,” sold legally in head shops and gas stations, has quickly spread across the country. The problem is that these new drugs are made up of substances that are generally legal, making it difficult for the Drug Enforcement Agency to prosecute producers and users.
from News
While surfing Reddit I found this image that depicts 100 of the best DOS games of the 90s and it makes me want acquire many of them to relive the nostalgia of my early PC gaming days.
Here is the poster, but you will have to click on it to see the full res version.
I love how the images are sorted on stylized floppy disk templates. I kind of wish this is how the games were presented back in the days instead of on black or beige floppies. It also staggers me that these disks each held 1.4mb. That’s with an “m†there kiddos. Megabytes. While most of these games did come out on multiples disks (and some on Cds too) it puts a lot in perspective when we consider our smart phones are now more powerful than the computers that ran these games.
On this list, the most nostalgic of them for me has to be Betrayal at Krondor. I played the crap out of that game. And the hidden gem Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure and its sequel Twinsen’s Odyssey took up a lot of my time too.
Day of the Tentacle and Carmageddon were also pretty amazing. And it was Descent that earned the honors of being the first game to actually give me motion sickness with its 3D environments and 6 directions of travel.
Of course there are classics on this list that have franchises even to this day, like Elder Scrolls. However, Duke Nukem was better back then as the new long awaited version sucks.
I recently bought the Jedi Knight collection on Steam, which included the DOS version of Star Wars: Dark Forces from 1995. My monitor now supports six times the resolution that this was intended for, so I had to run it in windowed mode. The game was 72MB, so it downloaded and installed in a snap!
Some great nostalgia here as well as a potential poster for my wall!
This story in The New York Times, Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds, is pretty cool:
Yes, they are often picked green and shipped long distances. Often they are refrigerated, which destroys their flavor and texture. But now researchers have discovered a genetic reason that diminishes a tomato’s flavor even if the fruit is picked ripe and coddled.
The unexpected culprit is a gene mutation that occurred by chance and that was discovered by tomato breeders. It was deliberately bred into almost all tomatoes because it conferred an advantage: It made them a uniform luscious scarlet when ripe.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report that the very gene that was inactivated by that mutation plays an important role in producing the sugar and aromas that are the essence of a fragrant, flavorful tomato. And these findings provide a road map for plant breeders to make better-tasting, evenly red tomatoes.
Modern tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) varieties are bred for uniform ripening (u) light green fruit phenotypes to facilitate harvests of evenly …
from Discover Magazine
Google unveiled its own Nexus tablet, the Nexus 7, at the Google I/O conference Wednesday in San Francisco. The 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will have a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor as well as a 1280×800 IPS display with a 178-degree viewing angle.
The tablet, which Google says is “built specifically for Google Play,” will have a 1.2-megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, and a 4235mAh battery that will get it 8 hours of battery life “during active use” or 9 hours of video playback. The tablet weighs 340 grams, just shy of 12 ounces, and is 10.45mm thick (2.6 ounces lighter and just under a millimeter thinner than the Kindle Fire). Both 8GB and 16GB configurations will be available. Bluetooth, WiFi, and NFC all come standard, and there is no version of the tablet that can connect to a cell network.
When Google showed the device, it made special note of the fact that the user’s content collection is front and center, much like on the Kindle Fire. When demonstrating the magazine viewing experience, a Google employee was able to swipe through a pile of magazines, and a “view text” link would reflow a visible article into a formation that is “optimized for reading.” The tablet will also have a “new recommendation engine” for content that will show users content tailored to their tastes.
from Ars Technica