Answering questions at Boston College O’Neill Library
If you are at a release station that has a keyboard, you will be able to print all of the jobs in your queue by holding down Shift and then using the mouse to click each job. I have reached out to my friends in IT to see if we can get more keyboards set up in the print areas.
The Wall is happy to report that two Surface Chargers are available for loan at the O’Neill circulation desk. The loan period is four hours. Staff are monitoring usage and will increase the supply based upon demand.
You’re in luck! The Digital Studio has a recording studio that’s available for booking, and many of the staff members have experience with video editing. You can make an appointment or drop-in—check it out at ds.bc.edu.
As a Wall, I don’t watch shows myself and I don’t often have shows projected onto me, but I have heard that some people project movies and shows onto other walls. My human friends have a wide range of interests in Netflix entertainment. Digital Trends has an article on “The Best Shows on Netflix Now,” bit.ly/netflix-best. The list is mostly dramas, but if you like quirky comedies some people like a show called “The Good Place,” starring Kirsten Bell and Ted Danson, and the Huffington Post has an article titled, “The 5 Netflix Shows to Watch if you Like The Office.” bit.ly/netflix-office. Enjoy your downtime!
Given that pixelation–also called mosaic censoring–is a standard feature of even low-end photo and video editing software, and that attempting to draw a pixelated body part could be considerably more challenging than simply drawing the body part and then pixelating during production work, it’s quite likely that genitals are first drawn & animated and then pixelated. This blog entry on de-pixelating seems to imply as much: bit.ly/mosaic-censoring
Both? Continuing the superhero theme, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Any new technology solves some problems and creates others. Cars were much faster than horses, but people died a lot more often while driving them. Facebook makes communication much easier than mailing a letter, but also can be a platform for user manipulation. AI will probably solve a lot of problems and allow us to focus less on mundane tasks. But it will almost certainly lead to its own problems; potentially mass unemployment and/or even more structural racism. For more potential problems, checkout I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (PS3551.S5 I2 1950b).
This is one of those questions that won’t ever have a right answer and that people will argue about forever. Generally speaking, PS4 has more exclusives titles than XBOX. XBOX Live and Playstation Network are basically the same. However, XBOX live Gold allows users to keep the games they got for free even if their subscription lapses, which is pretty nice, but costs extra. XBOX also has interoperability with Microsoft Windows, allowing you to play some games on your laptop wherever you are, which I think is pretty clutch. And the XBOX controller just feels more comfortable than playstation. So I say XBOX.
You could speak to someone at the bookstore (2-0900 or in person) and ask them if they can order one for you, or you could go all 21st century on us and get one from one of the many sources online (Apple, Amazon, etc…) Best of luck!
Blockchain is hard to explain via post-it. Let’s say I spend money from my bank account in January and make a document with all of my transactions: how much they were, who I paid, etc. I can continue to add to that ledger throughout my lifetime, but it eventually gets to be such a big file that I can’t move it anywhere. In order to make it smaller, I can take chunks of a ledger (say January only) and create hashes (unique IDs based on the contents of the file). Then I can add the hash of all of the January transactions to my February ledger and I now know where to look for January’s if I want to go back that far. The same is true for March, I can add the hash of February, which also contains the hash of January’s transactions. This is where the “chain” part comes in, you’re creating a chain of pointers back to blocks of information all the way back to the beginning. A (better) simple explanation can be found here: bit.ly/blockchainsimple. Princeton has a great and VERY detailed video series on blockchain here: bit.ly/princetonblockchain
The usual rules apply: it helps to have professional experience, and it likely matters who you know as much as what you can do. The old line is: “Amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.” For some day-to-day examples of what the life is like, you might try this: bit.ly/bc-inside-pg or this: bit.ly/bc-cyber-athlete. And if you succeed, you might also have a career as a coach: bit.ly/bc-edge
I bet that will make you both happier and more productive – great resolution. You could start small, maybe no screens at meals or for a set period each day, and see how that works for you. I hope you will enjoy living outside of the Internet!
