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Hal 9000 live wallpaper1/9/2024 A voice interaction system translates human-language queries or commands into tasks those layers can carry out. As Bonasso describes in his piece, and as is documented more thoroughly elsewhere, CASE is composed of several “layers” that govern control, routine activities and planning. There’s no reason for one single system to encompass command and control methods for robotics and a VOIP stack - yet at some point these responsibilities should be known and understood by some overarching agent.ĬASE, therefore, isn’t some kind of mega-intelligent know-it-all AI, but an architecture for organizing systems and agents that is itself an intelligent agent. Meanwhile someone may also want to initiate a video call with another part of the colony. It may be, for example, that a robot arm needs to move something on the outside of the habitat. One of the many challenges of this project is marrying the various layers of awareness and activity together. Currently that work is being done under the auspices of TRACLabs, a research outfit in Houston. “When people ask me what I am working on, the easiest thing to say is, ‘I am building HAL 9000,’ ” he wrote in a piece published today in the journal Science Robotics. A simple question with an answer that has been evolving for decades the International Space Station ( which just turned 20) has complex systems governing it and has grown more complex over time - but it’s far from the HAL 9000 that we all think of, and which inspired Bonasso to begin with.ġ1 moments from the International Space Station’s first 20 years The question is how to intelligently monitor and administrate a complicated environment like that of a space station, crewed spaceship or a colony on the surface of the Moon or Mars. It’s easy to forget these days that research in this area goes back to the middle of the century, with a boom in the ’80s and ’90s as computing and robotics began to proliferate. (I think that’s what happened.)ĬASE is primarily the work of Pete Bonasso, who has been working in AI and robotics for decades - since well before the current vogue of virtual assistants and natural language processing. Don’t panic! Life imitates art, to be sure, but hopefully the researchers in charge of the Cognitive Architecture for Space Exploration, or CASE, have taken the right lessons from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and their AI won’t kill us all and/or expose us to alien artifacts so we enter a state of cosmic nirvana. Gzip unzip1/9/2024 z, -z, or _z (ignoring case) and which begins with the correct magic number with an uncompressed file without the original extension. Gunzip takes a list of files on its command line and replaces each file whose name ends with. If the original name saved in the compressed file is not suitable for its file system, a new name is constructed from the original one to make it legal. This is useful when the compressed file name was truncated or when the timestamp was not preserved after a file transfer.Ĭompressed files can be restored to their original form using gzip -d or gunzip or zcat. These are used when decompressing the file with the -N option. Names are not truncated on systems which do not have a limit on file name length.īy default, gzip keeps the original file name and timestamp in the compressed file. For example, if file names are limited to 14 characters, is compressed to. (A part is delimited by dots.) If the name consists of small parts only, the longest parts are truncated. gzip attempts to truncate only the parts of the file name longer than three characters. If the compressed file name is too long for its file system, gzip truncates it. In particular, it ignores symbolic links. gzip only attempt to compress regular files. (The default extension is -gz for VMS, z for MS-DOS, OS/2 FAT, Windows NT FAT and Atari.) If no files are specified, or if a file name is " -", the standard input is compressed to the standard output. gz, while keeping the same ownership modes, access, and modification times. Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the extension. Gzip reduces the size of the named files using Lempel- Ziv coding (LZ77). Two point hospital steam key1/9/2024 Make use of the extensive statistic and information screens to analyse your strengths and weaknesses, and make rapid alterations. Train and improve your staff, levelling them up with new skills and abilities to make your hospital even more efficient. Improve your facilities, upgrade machines, staff and layouts to make more money, more quickly. Once you’ve cured the residents of a small harbour village, can you take on a bigger challenge in a busier hospital? Your first hospital is where it begins, but what next? Improve and expand your hospital horizons! Once you’ve conquered an illness, research improved cures and machines and turn your hospital into an unstoppable healthcare juggernaut. You can handle a single patient – but can you handle a Pandemic? In this world, you’ll experience all kinds of unusual illnesses from Light-headedness to Cubism – each requiring their very own special type of treatment machine.ĭiagnose illnesses, build the right rooms to handle them, hire the right staff, and then get ready, because curing just one of these illnesses is just the beginning. Cure unusual illnessesĭon’t expect Two Point County to be populated with your usual types of patients. Place decorative and functional items around your hospital to improve its prestige, lower patient boredom, increase happiness and keep those end of year awards flowing in. Expand your hospital to multiple buildings as you look to get as many patients through the door as possible. Optimise your hospital design to increase patient (and cash) flow, arranging corridors, rooms and waiting areas to your exact specifications. Two Point Hospital, for those unable to play on PC, will be heading to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Switch later this year.Build up a hospital from nothing to a masterpiece as you design the most beautiful – or functional – healthcare operation in the whole of Two Point County. There's also 33% off Two Point Hospital's previous two expansions - the tropical-themed Pebberley Island and snowy Bigfoot DLC - and 10% off the newly released Close Encounters.Īnd if that's still not quite enough Two Point Hospital to be getting on with, today also sees the release of the new Retro Items Pack (costing £2.99), which adds a total of 26 vintage ornamentations to be placed around your burgeoning medical establishments, including flying ducks for your wall or a classic gramophone. Those that find themselves sufficiently dazzled by Two Point Hospital's charms over the free weekend might like to know that the game is currently discounted by 50% until 5th September, and can be purchased for the entirely reasonable sum of £12.49. Two Point Hospital is a delightful experience, perfectly capturing - and expanding upon - the compulsive management tinkering and knockabout silliness of its obvious inspiration, Theme Hospital, which isn't too much of a surprise given that Two Point Studios co-founders Gary Carr and Mark Webley both worked on Theme Hospital while at legendary British developer Bullfrog. It's definitely worth giving it a go too, if you haven't already. Two Point Studios' wonderful medical management sim, Two Point Hospital, is free to try this weekend on Steam, marking the arrival of its new alien-themed DLC, Close Encounters.įor those eager to slip on their stethoscope and take Two Point Hospital's wellness action for a spin, no money required, the Steam Free Weekend is underway right now, and will continue until Monday, 2nd September. Saeculum Obscurum: A Late Antiquity Mod, Fall of the Western Roman Empire and Rise of the Early Medieval Era. LUX INVICTA! Rebuild the Empire of Megas Alexandros! Restore Roman Glory! Banish the Dark Ages! Possible expansion of the map to include far-off, alluded to lands such as Geroia. Unchecked sea raiders might turn into a full blown army of Nords looking to make good their claim on all of Calradia.Invasions from the edge of the map, hordes of the Khergit, Vaegir, and Sarranid people swarm into Calradia hungry for land and plunder!.More strategic terrain, mountains and rivers are impassable, except through certain passes and bridges.Plausible expansion of Calradian lore to include new genealogies of Kings and their claimants.Many of the nonsensical things from vanilla Crusader Kings 2 modified to make sense.Simulation of bandits through events, modifiers and traits pay adventurers to put a stop to them or attempt it yourself.Interact with Guildmasters and Village Elders to bolster your coffers and levies.Overhaul of the economy and building trees, which will include the fief improvements and trading system of Warband.Revamped prisoner and combat system, integration of the siege capture and dueling mods.A fanciful map which faithfully portrays a surrealist's rendition of the beloved land of Calradia (Anyone want to help?).New tournament and feasting system to emulate the infamous deeds of King Harlaus 'the Fat'.More and rebalanced traits so that you don't get spammed with dwarfs and cowards.Additional events and decisions that allow you to roleplay and shape your characters story.Expanded Calradic languages, now you can see other jibberish names alongside old favorites such as: Grainwad, Ushkuru, and Ryibelet.Renown, Honour, and Right to Rule will be modeled and will affect AI decision making and options.Realistic portrayal of Calradian warfare, with the most epic of battles measuring in the hundreds.Specialized bonuses for every faction/culture, giving each one strengths and weaknesses.Give passing adventurers tasks or recruit them as "mercenaries for the upcoming campaign".Every town, castle and village from Mount and Blade is included in the game.Redone coat of arms, you will no longer see a shield divided into quarters with a disgusting combination of blue and black with orange seashells.Play as any lord from Mount and Blade: Warband, complete with their facial appearance and personalities.The Calrad Empire fell long ago, and now 6 successor states vie for control of its lands.īefore I list the features I request that you send me a message if you're interested providing aid to this endeavor in any way, whether it's making the map not look so rough, coding events, or just suggesting features and character names. Greetings good Paradoxians: Calradia Kings is a total conversion mod set in the land of Calradia, from the Mount and Blade series. Evil inside reviews1/9/2024 Mikami isn't afraid to use cheap shocks to contribute to your sense of mental fragility and unease. The attempt to straddle two distinct cinematic genres creates a tonal melange, but the fear effect isn't diminished. Resources throughout the game remain scarce. Traps can be disarmed and the parts you collect from doing so later used to craft bolts for your crossbow. The horror trope of the anachronistic mental hospital is over-familiar, but Mikami revitalises it here by making it the place where you find sanctuary, if never peace. The chair in which you must sit in order to 'upgrade' Castellanos' abilities and weaponry - using a currency that's represented by green liquid, found in jars or pocketed from the dissolving corpses of your foes - has leather restraining straps a wire helmet descends onto his head as if about to perform a lobotomy. The door of your padded cell may be unlocked, but the corridors "smell of medicine" and decline. This area is an esoteric ward set within the mental hospital where the game opens. The tonal divide is best exemplified by The Evil Within's 'safe' space, an area to which Castellanos can retreat in order to save progress and enjoy a moment's calm away from the storm of the main game. As well as fighting and fleeing towering chainsaw-wielders, you find yourself pitted against characters familiar from contemporary Japanese horror films in the game's frightening boss battles. Camera filters are used to great effect, taking transparent freeze-frames and then smearing the frozen image over the subsequent action, in order to confuse and fuddle. The game constantly messes with space, shifting the sets and corridors in disorientating ways. The unnerving props and characters (a soiled doll, a lank-haired monster woman who walks on all fours, a butcher's slab for carving humans) are borrowed as much from the work of film director Takashi Miike as from Mikami's favourite, George Romero. The psychological horror that runs, spine-like, through each of the game's 16 lingering chapters is new. There are also new traits that mark The Evil Within as a distinct proposition from the schlock-horror series with which Mikami made his name. Either way, the aspect ratio is a curious choice. Two heavy black borders frame the screen, either to provide a sense of cinematic grandeur or to help keep the frame-rate up. This is a Mikami game from hilltop to catacomb, and it's undeniably the closest we've had to a direct sequel to his greatest work, Resident Evil 4. There are familiar sections during which you fight alongside a second, computer-controlled character, tending to their well-being while trying to maintain your own. There are rabid super-dogs, creeping villagers who stare with bright eyes and wield torches or chainsaws - and there's your own a burgeoning armoury, which you are restrained from using liberally through the scarcity of ammunition. There are fat, mad friars who roam derelict churches. There's a mud-slung rural village and ambient storytelling about unethical scientific experiments that drove its residents to violence. There are the familiar ponderous door animations, which ratchet up the tension each time you pass from one virtual space to the next there are the balloon-bursting headshots. There's the crouched zombie munching on a cadaver who peers back at the camera over a rotten shoulder - a frame-for-frame rerun of the famous scene from the first Resident Evil on PlayStation. The Evil Within is also something of greatest hits of the director's finest ideas and moments. Neither has the tone of his work changed, from the B-movie dialogue to the taut gunplay. It's been nine years since Shinji Mikami directed a horror game with Resident Evil 4 none of that game's rhythm and pace has been lost in the intermission. Inside the entrance, Castellanos finds a multitude of bloodied, slumped corpses. The few seconds it takes for the building's double doors to creak open are all the time that the game bothers to spend on creating an initial sense of tension and dread. The Evil Within opens with the psychologically wrecked detective Sebastian Castellanos arriving at a mental hospital surrounded by the flash and wail of police cars and ambulances. Shinji Mikami returns to horror with a greatest-hits package that recalls - but can't match - Resident Evil 4. The cupcake baker1/9/2024 If you enjoy baking the same thing over and over again, a cupcake bakery may be for you. Now though, to devise a completely new cupcake flavor is a feat of magnanimous proportions. And my Sangria & Cheese cupcakes blew my customers away. When I first started my cupcake shop, S’mores cupcakes were not yet a thing. If you’re anything like me, part of the joy in baking cupcakes is getting to be creative. It’s harder and harder to come up with unique flavors to get excited about.But due to rising costs of labor and ingredients and the lowering of the price you can charge per cupcake, it is no longer realistic to be successful at selling just cupcakes. I had zero desire to cook chicken French or pour glasses of wine (for anyone other than myself). So this isn’t a cupcake bakery, is it? When I opened my cupcake bakery I wanted to open a CUPCAKE BAKERY. That “cupcake bakery” owner who’s holding the “how to open a successful cupcake bakery” class fails to remind her students that her “cupcake bakery” is an actual restaurant with actual meals serving actual ALCOHOL. And don’t think you can charge more for that popular-costly-to-make-chocolate-cupcake either, because you can’t. So when your most popular cupcake is a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting you’ll be spending hundreds of dollars a week on cocoa powder alone. That may not seem like a lot but if you have any self-respect, morals, or standards you’ll be making your cupcakes and frosting from scratch and you’ll go through A LOT of butter. Between the time I started in the business and the time I left, butter jumped from $1.75/lb to $2.25/lb. In addition to these rising costs, are the rising costs of butter, sugar, and cocoa powder. With the hike in minimum wage and the hike in business taxes you’ll be tearing your hair out every Friday and every end quarter. If you live in NYS please, please do not open a cupcake bakery. I’m really oversimplifying this but the point is that if you’re selling just cupcakes (as I was) you need to sell a lot of freaking cupcakes. So if I profited $2 off of every sale of a $3 cupcake I would have to sell at least 825 cupcakes a week just to cover rent and payroll expenses. Payroll for three employees averaged about $1500 a week. When I was looking for a bigger location the rents were anywhere from $1000-$4500 a month. My rent was a great bargain at $600 (but do not expect you’ll find this kind of a deal). Rent+payroll+equipment+ingredients+unforeseen costs = sell a lot of cupcakes.Unless your cupcakes are infused with gold, your customers may stray to where the prices are lower, ie. With a saturated market comes more competition and with more competition comes competitive prices. You can’t charge $3+ for a cupcake anymore.You want to open a new cupcake bakery in this market? You better do something real different to stand out. Add to that the dozen-plus other bakeries selling cupcakes and the mastermind of Wegmans with their new cupcake-bakery-inside-a-grocery-store model and you have more cupcakes than the general public can/should eat. There are 7 cupcake bakeries in my county of 750,000 people. So while she’s teaching you how to open your own cupcake bakery I’m going to teach you for free why you should not. I’m all about entrepreneurship and I’m all about helping people learn how to start their own things and succeed at them but let’s be realistic: if you wanted to open a cupcake bakery, you should’ve done so 5 years ago. I applaud this entrepreneur’s idea of branching out for herself and seeking ways to extend her brand and increase her income, but I think (and this is just my opinion here) that she’s doing it in a socially irresponsible way. While I was perusing the Internet the other morning I came across a successful cupcake bakery’s website with a promotion for their 2 hour $200 class that teaches people how they can open their very own cupcake bakery. Pondering on Life Unapologetically Me 7 Reasons Why You Should Not Open A Cupcake Bakery The letterbox1/9/2024 Revealing the “official” 2-solve on a regular basis will help familiarize players with the vocabulary of the game. Players are offered a par score e.g., Try to solve in four words. Dickman said, “and then I try to focus on words with those escapees.” Study the previous day’s answers.Īll three of our aficionados recommended looking at the previous day’s answers. All you have to do is form words from the letters that are distributed around a box. Arguably the best craft gift kits on the market, that makes two bottles of your chosen tipple, and fit through a letterbox. Adding to the creative struggle is a pesky seagull that seems intent on disrupting his work as much as it can. “One secondary strategy I use when I’m stumped is to keep mental track of which letters keep escaping my attempts,” Mr. A Composer trapped on a desert island struggles to write his magnum opus. Lots of words either begin or end with S.” Double down on the letters that you have trouble placing. “Sometimes it’ll be a red herring, but often it is the easiest way to connect two words and offers the most options of other words. If there is an S in the puzzle, hang on to it for dear life. Letterbox contact starts after the adoption order has been granted in the agreed month and continues until the child turns 18. Dickman both mentioned looking for prefixes such as EX- and suffixes such as -ED or -ING. “They can use a lot of unwieldy letters and often allow for combinations that are hard to find in more ‘normal’ words,” he said. Epstein also recommends becoming familiar with chemical compounds and elements. One of the rules in Letter Boxed is that the last letter in one word has to be the first letter of the next word, so players should try to form words where these uncommon letters are tucked inside the word. Koker and Jeremy Epstein of Brooklyn, N.Y., advise scoping out the puzzle for those high-scoring Scrabble letters. Look for the uncommon letters, such as F, J, Q or Z.īoth Ms. Trying for a 3- or 4-solve “makes it seem more manageable and helps with finding solutions,” she said. Koker also recommends setting reasonable expectations for yourself when starting out. From the bestselling author of The Dominic Grey series comes a thrilling new mystery that weaves. If at first you can’t 2-solve, try for a 3-solve. Buy a cheap copy of The Letterbox book by Layton Green. In addition to starting with common words, she recommends thinking about whether these words might make a compound word with another one, or become a prefix or a suffix. Needless to say, I trust what she says implicitly. In the App Store Letterboxd is your film diary Explore film Explore what’s popular among your friends and the wider Letterboxd community. She plays five or six times a week and is one of the regular 2-solvers on Twitter. You may be able to add on to them.ĭeb Koker, of Bedford, Mass., has been playing Letter Boxed since it was introduced on Jan. Or maybe they just felt sorry for me, I don’t know. I don’t think I would be overstating things if I said that puzzle solvers are some of the kindest people in the entire universe, and they were very forthcoming. Alfred Stieglitzs Famous Photo of the Flatiron Building, 1903 Flatiron Building, Chrysler Building. Jealousy does not get you a 2-solve, however, so I thought I would ask some of the regular players on Twitter how to improve my game. It employs ingenious and exacting card-engineering, hand-lettering and assembly techniques, which it took Liberty more than a year to master, while still calling for every new box she makes to be individually laid out and designed from scratch.Ĭlients commission Liberty to make Letter Boxes to mark and to celebrate life’s important events, including births, weddings and anniversaries, in a way that will fascinate for generations to come.Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She was inspired by this rare, lenticular picture box (above) that hung in her childhood home, which was made to celebrate a Victorian wedding.Īs the viewer moves from left to right, a clever optical technique is used, that intrigued our ancestors - and continues to delight people today – in order to reveal the bride’s and the groom’s Christian names flanking the surname which newly unites them. The term refers to the shape of a letter box, a slot in a wall or door. The Letter Box Company was established by designer Liberty Wright.Īfter working for many years for the renowned artist Rob Ryan, Liberty set up her studio in Bath and started making her hand-painted Letter Boxes. Free Essay: The Letterbox Essay By Lori Provan The Letterbox By Ann Marie Di Mambro is a dramatic monologue which discusses the theme of domestic violence. THE GLITTER BOX is Proud to Offer a Fine Selection of Vintage Designer Costume Jewelry Vintage Scandinavian, Arts & Crafts, and Studio Artist Sterling Silver Jewelry and Vintage Taxco & Mexican Sterling Silver Jewelry and Holloware. Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to. The t pain engine1/9/2024 Musculature and nervous tissue are combined in ways unimagined by nature, and the emotions absorbed in flesh at the time of a creature's death are extracted, enhanced and fashioned into weapons. Different types of harvested material carry different properties, each of which has a unique purpose. To outside eyes such stringency may seem wasteful, but in their craft the Haemonculi require absolute precision. Failure to complete such a task - or worse still, deviation from instructions - inevitably sees the Talos dismantled and discarded. When raiding in T'au space, the Talos known as "Marrow Giver" was once instructed to consume only those Fire Warriors who had witnessed the rest of their Strike Team slaughtered before them. However, at times the demands of the Haemonculi are far more nuanced. Typically this involves devouring certain types of creatures from a planet's populace or subsuming a specific individual such as a Planetary Governor. When Haemonculi send their Talos Engines to accompany a Drukhari raid in realspace, the monstrous servants are often tasked with collecting specific samples for their masters. When it catches its next quarry the process begins anew, but the fate of one caught by a Talos does not end in death - upon the Engine's return to its Coven's oubliettes, the constituent parts of its victims will be siphoned out from within its metal shell and used to create yet more potions and elixirs. Clacking and twitching as if revelling in the kill, the Talos advances with renewed vigour, its high-technology weaponry spitting indiscriminate death into the ranks of the foe. In battle, this gruesome process is immensely pleasing to the Haemonculus owner, for not only does it provide an entertaining spectacle but it also affords the Talos even greater motive power as it harnesses and consumes its fleshy bounty. The remnants of the victims caught within its grasp are siphoned out to be used in the creation of potions and elixirs.Ī Talos Pain Engine with an unfortunate victim caught in its deadly grasp. The fate of those caught within the death-grip of a Talos does not end with death. These semi-sentient machines are invaluable to the Haemonculi, as they serve as both guardians and mobile torture chambers, inflicting punishment upon all those that displease their master. Battlefield 6 battle royale1/9/2024 I’ve have been playing Battlefield nonstop since the beginning (1942, not the year □), including the odd ones out, i.e. The hype continues to grow for Battlefield 2042, and Tom Henderson recently dropped a little rumor, indicating that the game will have big news revealed on May 7th. For example, the name and setting of CoD: Modern Warfare and its Battle Royale spin-off, Warzone.īattlefield 2042 is due to release in the holiday of 2021 and will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.īattlefield 2042: Official Announcement in May Henderson, however, has been proven right many times in the past. Of course, keep in mind all of this is a leak, and information can change. It’s worth noting that according to the leak, PS4 and Xbox One owners will not have access to these high-player counts and will instead play the classic 32vs32 matches. Henderson thinks the game will feature 128-player maps and have crossplay enabled. In a recent EA earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said, “the next vision of Battlefield takes all the destruction, player agency, and vehicle and weapon combat that the franchise is known for and elevates it to another level.”īattlefield 2042 launches with next-gen consoles in mind, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. In recently revealed test footage for the game, we caught a glimpse of the building destruction, player numbers, massive maps, and character detail. With Call of Duty: Warzone seeing player counts at 150 to 200, we can expect similar numbers in Battlefield 2042, with the franchise already known for its massive battles. Expect a fast-paced, first-person shooter featuring huge maps, lots of players at once, and plenty of vehicles. Like all long-running franchises, we know what to expect when it comes to the core gameplay. Some think DICE is looking to rekindle Battlefield 3 with a soft reboot. Rumors, and possibly hope, is that Battlefield 2042 will feature a modern setting. Whenever a Battlefield game gets announced, the hottest question on everyone’s lips is, “what era is the game set?”īattlefield V has a World War 2 setting, and Battlefield 1 is World War 1. With every Battlefield game comes a key question – when and where will it be set? Given that previous entries have had very different settings, there’s a lot up in the air on this front. This follows the success of Call of Duty: Warzone by Activision. According to Henderson, the Battle Royale mode will launch as free-to-play and release along with a Battle Pass. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |