Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field Lives On

There’s a story going around about how a 1-year old just can’t figure out a magazine, despite being able to work out how to use an iPad: 1-Year-Old Plays With Magazine Like It’s An iPad.

What’s amazing about this story is people gushing about how this further shows Steve Jobs’ genius or how he has “coded a part of [this child]’s OS” (comments on mashable, above). Wow, how amazing is the iPad that it’s easier to understand for a baby than a physical magazine?

This is ridiculous. Let’s stop and think for a minute. Children do not know very much about the physical world. If you give them an iPad and they play with it, they “learn” that touching the screen makes things move. Give them a magazine, of course, they’re going to think they can move the pictures around. They are experimenting and trying to learn how things work.

Surely, if you gave this baby a magazine first and one day gave them an iPad, it would seem odd to them that they can do things on an iPad they can’t do on a magazine. This has nothing to do with the intuitiveness of an iPad versus a magazine, or how magazines are somehow inferior, or how Jobs was a genius.

Seriously, yes, Steve Jobs was an amazing influence on computing and Apple makes great things, but enough with the gushing, as if you’ve just discovered you’re related to him and you need to share his genius with the world.

No, that YouTube survey with the free iPad is not real and you could be charged $9.99 for participating

A couple of nights ago during a late-night browsing session, I went over to youtube.com and was presented with this:

Before going forward, I should say it was a long day and I was really tired. I wasn’t thinking straight. Also, in my case, I’d swear that in the URL bar it said “youtube.com” and not what you see here.

Normally, such scammer tactics would not work on me and I’d close the window right away, but in this case it seemed legitimate (especially since the URL did say “youtube.com”). I pressed on. What’s the worst that could happen? After answering three simple questions, you are presented with this screen:

Here, greed just kicked in. I saw that they were all out of Macbook Airs and had only a few iPhones and iPads left, so I had to act fast! Somebody could be scooping up the last iPhones or iPads that YouTube was offering! Quick, let’s go with the iPad! I clicked on the iPad button and got this:

Now I must’ve been really tired because I should’ve immediately caught on that this was a scam if it required me to enter my phone number and email address. I mean, why couldn’t YouTube just use my YouTube account for this? Or maybe let me login with my gmail account? Foolishly, I entered my phone number and email address. It brought me to a page asking me for the PIN that they were about to text me on my phone. Ooh boy, here comes my free iPad!

A few seconds later, I got a text from some service called guessology.com with my PIN.

Without even thinking that this was a scam (again, I was really tired and fueled by greed), I entered the PIN. Immediately after entering my PIN, I got another text from the guessology.com “service”:

At this point I realized this must’ve been a scam since I read the text a little closer and realized there was a $9.99 per month fee. Man, did I feel like an idiot then. I just gave my email address and phone number to some scammer. I immediately texted STOP to the service and it gave me a message saying I had just unsubscribed. Good. No harm done. Hopefully.

I did some googling and found out that YES, they can and do charge you the $9.99 “service fee” even if you didn’t really consent to it. Basically, by entering the pin on the “survey” website, you are consenting to joining this fake service that just texts you bullshit. If you get as far as I did, be sure to text STOP so that they stop sending you these texts. Hopefully, at worst they will charge you $10 and you can then go to your mobile provider and try to get them to take the charges off.

I cannot believe this is legal. For at least $10 a pop, these guys must be making lots of money fooling people into entering their email address and phone number.

I did some more research and here’s some useful info on this scam:

I don’t recall what site I entered to get to this fake survey, but after some sleuthing, I found that these URLs work:

(THESE ARE FAKE)
http://youtub.com
http://youtubbe.com
http://youtubb.com
http://youtobe.com

In my case, I’d swear I went to the regular youtube.com. I have it in my history, so all I have to do is type “yout” then hit tab to complete it. I don’t know why I ended up on a fake site instead. Perhaps there was a malicious ad or something on the page that redirected me? I’ll never know for sure.

How limited audio chips led to beautiful music

Limitations in the physical world often lead to great innovations. There’s something about constraints that forces us to find ways to come up with creative solutions. In the 1980s, audio chips for game and computer systems were limited to producing synthetic audio with just a few parameters. Using these chips in their standard way would lead to a boring, lifeless synthetic sound. However, developers found ways to produce new and interesting soundscapes with such limited hardware by using the chips in ways that perhaps weren’t originally intended.

The video below gives a comprehensive summary of the techniques used by developers in the 1980s to produce computer-based music (i.e. chip music, or chip tunes) for games.

If the above video fascinates you and you’d like to try your hand at creating C64-style music today, I recommend you download GoatTracker. The instructions that come with it are a little cryptic, so I recommend reading through this instead.

I’m currently in the process of adding synthetic audio to my game engine. I’m going to incorporate much of the ideas in the above video to produce as authentic an 8-bit sound as I can. To see what I’ve got so far, check out the following video:

Quick Start Guide to C=64 Assembly

I came across this great link today:

Commodore 64 Programming #1: A quick start guide to C=64 assembly programming on Windows

The Commodore 64 is a great system that no hacker should be without. I didn’t have one as a kid, but I did buy one a year ago. Unfortunately, I haven’t devoted the time to playing with it as I thought I would. However, maybe the above easy instructions will change that. There are a lot of resources, I’m sure, on getting started hacking on the C=64 today, but this is a nice simple one that gets you writing some simple assembly and seeing results instantly.

For those running Mac OS X:

If you download the Cocoa version, launch the x64 app and hit cmd-O to open up the test.prg file you created with DASM.

Running on Real Hardware

Finally, if you have real hardware, I recommend getting an SD card reader for your Commodore 64. The one that I have is the uIEC/SD from jbrain.net: http://store.go4retro.com/categories/Commodore/Hardware/uIEC/ You just dump your d64 files (or the test.prg from the sample above) onto an SD card, plug it into the device, boot up your C=64, and you’re good to go.