Technology: Search Engine Optimization

One more article before I get back on track with the current economics discussions - specifically, the impact of a system with perfectly equivalent income followed by continuing to look at socially optimal wealth redistribution.

Anyways. I've been toying with the layout and setup for this blog for the past four or so days, and yesterday I finally decided it was time to optimize this blog - and my old one - for search engines.

It's literally performing miracles right now, so I'm going to write a little bit about the super simple things I did and how you can do them, too.

Tech Stuff: Game Concept

Over the next couple of months, I will be developing a Flash game of some sort.

Why? Because I can, I want to, and I'm bored. Reasons are less important than results, anyways.

This post exists for three reasons...

First, I'm hoping that all of you - referring, of course, to the single-digit number of people who regularly read this - will help me a bit in testing as soon as I can get the game to a point where it has a playable demo of some sort.

(Looking at about one month after this Monday, assuming I can get a working concept for the game by then. I can let people know if/when I know when such a demo might exist, if anyone actually cares.)

Tech Stuff: Indie Games

I'm sure you all know what video games are.

What about indie games?

For a moment at least, let's assume you have no idea what an indie game is, so I can explain it to you.

Unlike a 'normal' video game, indie games are usually produced by small businesses or groups of people, rather than a large, established studio, such as EA Games. They tend to have a small budget. The successful ones tend to be either very good games that are very simple, quirky in some way such that they would never be developed by one of the established studios, or unique/new in some way.

Perhaps the most-played indie game of all time is Minecraft. I'm sure many of you have heard of it. Some of you have probably played it, and some subset of that group of people also payed $5+ dollars for it.

An indie game's business model revolves around the low budget used to create the game. In some cases, there isn't a budget at all! Regardless, they intend to make money - or at least not lose it - as a result of their small budget.

For those indie games that are looking to make money, they need to do one thing, and one thing only - sell more copies. A sold copy of a good game is very nearly the best advertising you can ask for. As the marginal cost of selling another game is very close to zero, and selling a game should, theoretically, lead to future sales - assuming the game is good, which they have to assume - they can afford to sell the games on the cheap.

So, what's the point here? Well, indie games are cheap - often, they are even free! This makes them an excellent way for people to enjoy a lot of games without spending $50+ on each game, like you would to enjoy something like The Sims 5000: Pooping Babies Edition.

Without further ado here are some of my favorite indie games, in no particular order, and why I think they're so friggin' good.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Painfully difficult and hugely expansive 2D dungeon crawl with perma-death enabled? Sign me up, please! One of the best traditional games in a category known as the roguelike, Dungeon Crawl has been around forever, is still being developed today, is different on every play-through  and has such a wide variety of items, abilities, and enemies that you will only tire of it once the incredible difficulty of the game wears you down.

Or, you know, once you beat it. (Good luck!)

Dwarf Fortress

A traditional city-building game... except with dwarves, numerous deadly hazards, and a vertical learning curve with no top. The game's wiki even refers to losing as fun! What's not to like?

Seriously, though, you need to experience it to understand why it's so good. To do so, just read this 100 page manual on how to start a game! [Disclaimer: Not really 100 pages long. Actually page count? 240.]

FTL

A spaceship roguelike in its infancy. While it's currently somewhat repetitive due to lack of content, the game is awesome and will only get better as they develop it more and more.

And, really, who doesn't want to watch a spaceship blow up in their face hundreds of times?

Dungeons of Dredmor

A modern, friendlier version of Dungeon Crawl, with less overall content. Enjoy the look, enjoy the feel. Definitely a good game, but I still think it's inferior to Dungeon Crawl.

Not to mention, it costs actual money...

Minecraft

Old faithful. Want to build stuff? This lets you do it. Want to build things after collecting the materials from fathomless, hand-dug mine shafts while avoiding lava, zombies, and exploding creepers? Even better!

Really, though, for what you pay, this game is awesome. Trust me, as well as practically everyone on the Internet whose played it.

Binding of Isaac

A 2D, bullet-hell roguelike in which a small child hides in the basement from his murderous mother, only to find it full of monsters that he must kill by throwing his tears at them. Add this combination to tons of items, randomly generated levels, and only moderate difficulty (for a roguelike, that is), and you have a pretty awesome game.

Warning: full of inappropriate religious references. ALL THE TIME!

Braid

One of the best puzzle games I have ever played. It's really multiple games in one (as a result of some serious mechanics changes mid-game), and is a lot like a harder version of Prince of Persia with Mario-style platforming instead of the awesome jumps and shit you do in PoP.

Again, trust me and everyone on the Internet, this game is awesome.

Gratuitous Space Battles

Remember how I mentioned that everyone like's watching a good spaceship explosion? Whelp, this game is THE spaceship explosion game. Take a bunch of ships, hurl them at a bunch of other ships, and watch the amazing space carnage unfold in front of you!

Really Big Sky

A classic bullet-hell arcade shooter, complete with drilling through planets, variable difficulty, and exploding dinosaur skulls!

Painfully difficult, looks really good, and a lot of fun.


For reference, the only 'free' games on this list are the first two. The others all cost less than ten dollars the last time I checked. Don't quote me on that.

Hope you are inspired to go and at least check out a few of these games. They're all really, really good. I will see you folks tomorrow, where I will hopefully piss someone off with my political viewpoints!

Tech Stuff: Online Education

First off, apologies on taking the break I did. I've been a combination of sick, busy, and despondent over the last while, and it's kept me from being motivated enough to write this blog.

Anyways. First post back is going to be a fun one - online education!

It is my belief that the future of education is the Internet. As of the moment, it is already the world's greatest depository of knowledge, and - although I can gain no hard evidence of this - is probably the most-used method of self-education in the world.

There are a lot of obvious and not-so-obvious ways of making the Internet yield its secrets to you. Here are a few that I use...

YouTube

YouTube. Yes, YouTube. YouTube is awesome because people are posting stuff there all the time. Lots of it is junk, or news, or funny videos. However, there is a lot of educational content on YouTube, and the content posted there is generally very palatable. For instance, take a look at this video on a complicated topic in political science.

Social Media

More generally, social media, blogs, and things of that nature. If you're looking at what the right people are putting out, plenty of it is going to help point you in the direction of figuring out things that you are interested in, or things you should be learning, or new things that are just being discovered. Trust me, things like this are super useful.

Google

Perhaps this should have been first. If you know how to search properly, you can find an answer to almost any question. Not much to say about this one.

Stack Overflow, Yahoo! Answers, etc.

There are also a plethora of sites that focus on answering questions on a user-to-user basis. Stack Overflow is a great example of this - the site is devoted entirely to allowing users to answer questions posed by users, usually in some way about computers. Yahoo! Answers is another well-known service of this sort.

Coursera

Coursera is a bit different from the above examples. Coursera is a free online service through which you can take classes being taught by professors at prestigious universities, like MIT or Stanford. You don't get any actual credit for completing the courses - although some offer certificates and Coursera does keep track of your grades in the course - but the classes are, essentially, like taking the class in person, except you don't have to pay.

Go here to find it and browse through some of what's offered. I think you'll be surprised at some of the classes and, perhaps more importantly, some of the universities that offer classes there. I, personally, am always enrolled in multiple courses, and usually do all of the work for at least a few of them.

Codecademy

Similar to Coursera but more focused, Codecademy offers a bajillion guided programming projects in many languages to help individuals learn how to code and how to integrate that code with the Internet. It's great, easy to use, and offers a lot of insight into one of the most important skills of the modern world.

Again, I actually use this fairly regularly as of the moment. My current goal is to finish the entirety of the 'Code Year' track by the end of January, if not sooner. We'll have to see how that goes.


I know I haven't really discussed what online learning is, but these examples should give you a fairly good idea. In my opinion, most self-teaching will go the best over the Internet with, possibly, the help of a book or two on the subject - more as a reference source than anything else. You cannot, after all, trust everything you find on the Internet.

More important, what services do the rest of you use to learn things on the Internet? I want to know, as, being currently unemployed, I'm going to keep learning things until someone hires me for one of them! Great plan, amirite?

As per usual, comments go below, you can follow over on the right, and I hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know how you like some of the services I suggested, if you ever get around to using them!

Tech Stuff: Facebook

I'm sure you all know what Facebook is. In fact, I get upwards of ninety percent of my traffic from Facebook, as I put up all my blog posts there so my friends can review them. It has an estimated one billion active users as of October 2012. In short, if you are on the Internet, you at least know what Facebook is.

Contrary to what this part of the week is usually like, I am not going to talk about Facebook's functionality or uses in any way. Instead, I'm going to discuss a bit of what I think about the recent scare about Facebook moving away from user input when it comes to its terms and services and all that other jazz.

So, what was Facebook like up till recently? Well, unbeknownst to the vast majority of users, up until now Facebook has had a voting procedure in place whereby users could attempt to veto changes to Facebook's guiding documents, such as it's terms and services and other binding contracts between Facebook and its users.

More importantly, this allowed users to vote on how Facebook was allowed to use the data generated by Facebook users via the Facebook platform.

This is where the recent scare comes in - many people are of the belief that Facebook will attempt to gain more control over user-generated content, and that this reduces the benefit they receive by using Facebook.

I don't think this is going to happen and, even if it did happen, it is my belief that the vast majority of users simply wouldn't care. Let's look at each problem, starting with the second.

As it stands, Facebook does now automatically own the rights of everything you put on Facebook. However, let's imagine a world where they do. Would anything change for the average Facebook user?

In my opinion, it would not. Pictures uploaded to Facebook usually have little to no actual value, and the value that they do represent - if any - is sentimental, not commercial.

The one exception comes from people who post professionally taken photos in an attempt to share them with others, often with the intent of using these photos as a form of advertising. These people would want to remove all of these photos from Facebook, and refrain from posting any more.

A similar situation arises with writing. The vast majority of the text generated by users on Facebook is for public consumption. You do not intend to make money with your status updates, so why does it matter if Facebook gains control of the commercial rights for those words?

Again, the exception comes from people who might post complete poems or short stories on Facebook. These people would also want to remove any important content they may have posted and refrain from putting any more of it up on facebook.

The plus here is that the two fringe cases would have ample opportunity to perform the actions required to allow them to not lose out in this situation. This is because Facebook is legally required to inform users about changes to the terms and services agreement well in advance of the changes actually taking place, and these changes cannot change the terms and services associated with past services rendered.

In normal English, this means they would be allowed to remove any commercially important photos or text before that content fell into the hands of Facebook. As such, they would not lose out.

Now for the other concern - would this ever really happen? Again, in my opinion, it would not.

Facebook has little to gain from gaining control over all the user-generated content on Facebook. They make  almost all of their money through advertising, and all of the important data for that industry is already available to them through the current terms and services agreement. Considering the current scare going around as a result of something that hasn't happened yet - and probably isn't going to - Facebook certainly realizes that, at least for the moment, making any change at all will probably have a negative impact on their user base - something that they do care about.

To be honest, it's kind of scary what sorts of information can be pulled from your account if even minimal access is granted. Using the Facebook API, I can remotely pull not only all of your information, but all of the information of every friend you have, as well as the information of any individual who has interacted with any content generated by you.

The only exception, paltry that it is, is that I cannot get access to your email address through the API.

So, folks, if you want to be scared, the time to be scared has already passed. Facebook already has access to all the information about you that they are interested in, and can do with it more or less as they please. Stop being scared about potential changes, and start being scared about what they can already do.

Anyways. Hopefully this will generate some discussion. You are all welcome to leave whatever comments you so desire in the appropriate section below, and I hope at least some of you learned something today. And now its back to generating Bitcoin for me.

Technology: Bitcoin

Last week, I started delving more and more into random internet things. The most interesting - and, arguably, useful - things I found was Bitcoin.

For a quick introduction, watch this short video.

Essentially, Bitcoin is a distributed, secure, P2P currency. It is protected by some highly developed digital cryptography, and is about as structured and secure as normal currency. When you use it, you are given a digital wallet, and are able to generate payment addresses that are long, unique, and allow instant, anonymous payment from one individual to another, with no way of tracing or undoing the payment.

One important question remains, at least on the theoretical end: how is Bitcoin issued? Most currency is issued by a government, or by some other entity. Bitcoin itself has no such controlling entity and, in fact, is completely dissociated from any central authority - one of its most appealing and intriguing aspects, in my opinion.

Anyways. The issuance of Bitcoin comes from a concept known as Bitcoin mining. Essentially, Bitcoin mining is a computationally difficult problem in which you add the logs of Bitcoing transactions to the overall logs. This is made difficult by the use of difficult to compute hash tables.

So, in a non-technical fashion, Bitcoins come into existence when other people allow you to move your Bitcoins around.

In addition, the reward for mining goes down over time, and the difficulty goes up over time. Within the next few weeks, for instance the reward will be dropping from 50 BTC per block to 25 BTC per block. As the difficulty goes up and the reward goes down, the number of BTC issued continues to drop, with an eventual hard cap of about 21 million BTC, IIRC.

(At this point, the only reward for mining will be transaction fees, which are attached to many different types of transactions. The hope is that those transaction fees will start adding up after Bitcoin matures more, ensuring that mining remains an overall attractive option.)

So, what do you use Bitcoin for? Well, you buy stuff with it, or you trade it, or whatever else. If you go to the Bitcoin Wiki, you can easily find the trade page for Bitcoins, which is a list of different services you can trade for - over the Internet, of course - in exchange for Bitcoins; the variety is somewhat astounding, and some of the offered services are incredibly skill and/or talent intensive.

You can also buy tangible goods with Bitcoins. There are bars in Germany that sell drinks in exchange for Bitcoins. Perhaps more relevantly, you can exchange Bitcoins for gift cards for major online retailers, such as Amazon.

To get started with Bitcoin, you basically just have to download a wallet and look around. There are many opportunities to get small numbers of Bitcoins for free just by browsing around the Internet, and you can always offer up your part-time services in exchange for Bitcoins.

(It is important to keep in mind that, currently, one BTC is worth about ten dollars, and it is fairly easy to exchange them for goods, cash, or gift certificates in close to that amount - sometimes less, sometimes more.)

To put it all in short - Bitcoins are cool, useful, valuable, and fairly easy to get into. You probably don't want to try mining unless you're super hardcore with your computing, but there are other ways to get a hold of Bitcoins.

And now I'm done. As per usual, put any comments, insults, or other vaguely related statements in the comments section below, and I hope you enjoyed the read.

Tech Stuff: Buffer

And this is another new thing. That's two in one week! More importantly, having five sections to the blog means I can have something to post every day of the week. We'll see if it holds or not, but I'm hoping it will.

Anyways. Thursdays are now for reviewing some technological widget, gizmo, gadget, or other thing with an awesome name, description, or acronym.

My very first review is for a service called Buffer. This review will cover only what I have experienced so far with the service, as I have only used it for a short period of time and it has a paid portion that I will probably never bother to access.

Buffer allows you to post to Twitter or Facebook with a schedule, and helps to provide feedback on how viewed the post was by your friends/followers.

So, why should you use this? Well, obviously it's somewhat useful to be able to write something now and post it later. However, this functionality doesn't seem particularly amazing for Facebook or Twitter, which are usually for posting things that are happening now or are largely unrelated to timing at all.

However, there is one case I can think of where it is supremely useful - in conjunction with another service that allows you to schedule posts for the future. For instance, Blogger allows me to schedule a blog post for an arbitrary future date and time. Using Blogger and Buffer in conjunction, I can setup a blog post for the future, and simultaneously setup a Facebook or Twitter post promoting that blog post to occur right after the post itself is made.

Kind of neat, huh?

In addition to this, Buffer allows you to track how many people viewed your post and how well it was received, albeit not well - at least in the free version. For Facebook, you can easily see how many people commented on or liked your status, and can experiment with different posting times to see which yield the greatest result in terms of viewership.

(Keep in mind that Facebook's API allows you to track a wealth of information about any post, so this is kind of paltry. Still, it's simple and helps you get the job done.)

One area of the service that I have yet to fully explore is extensions. Taking a quick look over that portion of the service, it seems Buffer can be used on a lot of different devices as of the moment, and can also be used as a browser extension for quick and easy sharing. I'm sure there are lots of other things sitting around in there, as well, so I'd encourage you all to go and take a look.

So, yeah, new thing number two for the week. If any of you have feedback, insults, suggestions, comments, or ideas on things I should or should not write about, put them down below. I even promise that commenting will not automatically put out an assassination contract on you! Can you think of a better deal? I certainly can't.