The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Overjustification effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
Sunday, January 15, 2017
The Line of Death
https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/
The Metro/Immersive/Modern mode of Internet Explorer in Windows 8 suffered from the same problem; because it was designed with a philosophy of “content over chrome”, there were no reliable trustworthy pixels. I begged for a persistent trustbadge to adorn the bottom-right of the screen (showing a security origin and a lock) but was overruled. One enterprising security tester in Windows made a visually-perfect spoofing site of Paypal, where even the user gestures that displayed the ephemeral browser UI were intercepted and fake indicators were shown. It was terrifying stuff, mitigated only by the hope that no one would use the new mode.
Friday, January 6, 2017
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Popcorn
I really like popcorn. I often find myself watching TV just as an excuse to eat popcorn. I've gone months where I had it every night. A while ago I decided to buy an air popper. I've built up quite a recipe around the air popper, and I'd like to outline it here.
Why an air popper?
Air poppers are like $20 and the popcorn is much cheaper than the microwave bags. They are a bit faster than a microwave, and you can never burn it. There is nothing to clean because you only put dry popcorn in them, the oil is added afterwards.
Air Popper
I did a fair bit of research into air poppers, as I tend to do before buying anything. Long story short, they're all the same, and you should get a cheap one. This one is about $20. It has a built in measuring cup, you dump the dry kernels in the top, and plug it in. Set a large bowl next to it, and wait a few minutes. The last 10 or so kernels never pop, so give up on them. Unplug and that's it.
Kernels
A few people recommended Orville Redenbacher for air poppers. I started out buying at the grocery store, but you can get a giant jug on Amazon for cheap.
Bowl
It sounds silly, but you do need a large bowl. I always ate popcorn straight from the bag, so I didn't have one. I just got a 7 L one from Walmart. Make sure it's at least 6 liters.
Salt
You can just use regular salt, but finer salt will stick better. Generally you'll waste tons of salt no matter what. After much research I found this movie theater style salt which is great, and will last like 30 or so bowls.
Salt Shaker
You can just use any regular shaker. But I'm generally looking for one that has a few, well-separated, smaller holes. The popcorn salt is much finer, so it comes out very fast of normal sized holes. This is the best I've found so far, it works, but the holes could be a bit smaller.
Oil
You need oil, basically to make the salt stick. I've just been buying this generic popcorn oil. Don't expect much flavor from the oil, it's basically just soybean oil. I've heard coconut oil is the best flavor, but it's difficult to spray on.
Sprayer
It's basically impossible to drizzle oil evenly. I bought this spray bottle, which is crazy expensive, but is designed for oil. There are cheaper oil sprayers but the reviews say they clogged, whereas I've been using this one for months and it's fine. A word of warning, they spray in a flat fan pattern, which means you have to move the sprayer as you spray.
Why an air popper?
Air poppers are like $20 and the popcorn is much cheaper than the microwave bags. They are a bit faster than a microwave, and you can never burn it. There is nothing to clean because you only put dry popcorn in them, the oil is added afterwards.
Air Popper
I did a fair bit of research into air poppers, as I tend to do before buying anything. Long story short, they're all the same, and you should get a cheap one. This one is about $20. It has a built in measuring cup, you dump the dry kernels in the top, and plug it in. Set a large bowl next to it, and wait a few minutes. The last 10 or so kernels never pop, so give up on them. Unplug and that's it.
Kernels
A few people recommended Orville Redenbacher for air poppers. I started out buying at the grocery store, but you can get a giant jug on Amazon for cheap.
Bowl
It sounds silly, but you do need a large bowl. I always ate popcorn straight from the bag, so I didn't have one. I just got a 7 L one from Walmart. Make sure it's at least 6 liters.
Salt
You can just use regular salt, but finer salt will stick better. Generally you'll waste tons of salt no matter what. After much research I found this movie theater style salt which is great, and will last like 30 or so bowls.
Salt Shaker
You can just use any regular shaker. But I'm generally looking for one that has a few, well-separated, smaller holes. The popcorn salt is much finer, so it comes out very fast of normal sized holes. This is the best I've found so far, it works, but the holes could be a bit smaller.
Oil
You need oil, basically to make the salt stick. I've just been buying this generic popcorn oil. Don't expect much flavor from the oil, it's basically just soybean oil. I've heard coconut oil is the best flavor, but it's difficult to spray on.
Sprayer
It's basically impossible to drizzle oil evenly. I bought this spray bottle, which is crazy expensive, but is designed for oil. There are cheaper oil sprayers but the reviews say they clogged, whereas I've been using this one for months and it's fine. A word of warning, they spray in a flat fan pattern, which means you have to move the sprayer as you spray.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Body Cameras Are Betraying Their Promise
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/body-cameras-are-just-making-police-departments-more-powerful/502421/
In case after case, police departments say officers did not have their body cameras activated when it counted. It can seem as though incidents where body-cam footage helped secure an indictment—such as in Marksville, Louisiana, last November, or as in Cincinnati last July—are more rare than the cases where they don’t.
These are breaches of protocol—incidents where events didn’t happen as the law would require. Often, these violations are never significantly punished. This is the second major threat to body-camera accountability: If there’s not significant discipline for officers who fail to follow local policies—as the officers failed in D.C., Chicago, and Charlotte—then it doesn’t matter what’s in the policy.
Will Raccoons Trump Rats as the Ultimate Urban Mammal?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/09/raccoons_are_taking_over_urban_environments.html
And I heard from a friend who works in the State Department about a raccoon that snuck into her building while it was under construction, and then walked across ceiling tiles until it got to her office and hung out above her desk, visible through the mesh-type ceiling panels, perhaps attracted by the scent of her sandwich.
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Replacing a modded Xbox with a Raspberry Pi, as a classic game emulation station
As you're likely aware, I'm a big fan of using orginal Xboxes modded to allow playing various NES and SNES (and sometimes N64) games. Xboxes are cheap, and the software that runs on them has a pretty good UX. That being said, they are getting pretty long in the tooth, and while the finished product is pretty slick, the process of modding them is annoying enough that I pretty much refuse to actually do it. They are also rather huge and unwieldy in the age of tiny single board computers that are more powerful and draw far less power.
I have a few Pi 3s so I'd figured I give RetroPie a shot. This will be less of a how to, and more of a review/comparison to modded Xboxes.
What you need
This is probably the biggest draw back of the Pi vs Xbox. An Xbox can be had for $40 pretty reliably, or probably free from somewhere. They generally come with everything you need to play, including at least one controller.
The Pi costs $40 by itself. You then need a power adapter, a HDMI cable, a case, and an SD card. Then you'll need controllers, 2 SNES knock offs will cost $30, or you can use XBOX360 ones if you want wireless and joysticks, but that'll bump the cost up $70 more.
You might have some of this stuff, but I don't think it's fair to assume you do for the price calculations. So the cost is at least double an Xbox, probably more if you want joysticks.
Install
I won't give a full install guide here, you can follow the official guide easily enough. However, I will say the install is far easier than an Xbox. Download the image, write it to the SD card, pop the card in the Pi, attach controllers, and power it on. It autodetects the controllers, and lets you configure them. FTP in (u: pi, p: raspberry) and put roms in the ~/RetroPie/roms/* folders. Restart and the systems where it finds roms will show up in the list.
Config
There isn't much to config, you can pretty much just play out of the box, however, there were some things I wanted to change. For example, I found the layout of NES buttons to be annoying. A bit of research told me that while the initial global controller set up is easy, there is no way to edit per system controls without editing the cfg files. For NES the file is at /opt/retropie/configs/nes/retroarch.cfg
You can SSH into the Pi with ssh pi@192.168.1.125 (change the IP to yours), then cd to there, and use nano to edit that file. Alternatively, you can FTP the file back and forth. The config is very confusing due to the fact that you have the labels on the controller and in the file which may not match. The numbers refer to the position of the physical button on your controller. The letters refer to what that button should do. For the Buffalo SNES knock offs this was my config for NES:
input_player1_b_btn = 3
input_player1_a_btn = 1
input_player1_y_btn = 2
input_player1_x_btn = 0
Thoughts
I think it works pretty well. There are some rough edges, but I guess those are mainly a concern for someone like me that wants to configure everything. All the games I tested work well. The one exception was N64, where they stuttered quite a bit. The Xbox was never great at N64 either, but it feels like it did better than the Pi. Perhaps that's just the few random games I tested, or maybe because the Pi doesn't actually have a video card.
Also there is no easy way to turn the Pi on and off, you just unplug it. For what it's worth, I measured the Pi as using about 2 watts (compared to the Xbox at about 50 w), so leaving it turned on 24/7 isn't a bad idea.
I was kind of disappointed at how poor N64 performance was. If that were better I'd spend the money for a set of wireless controllers and be quite happy. Each release of the Pi see a pretty significant speed bump, but at the same time I don't know if that is going to actually help, I think it's more the software and lack of video card.
I have a few Pi 3s so I'd figured I give RetroPie a shot. This will be less of a how to, and more of a review/comparison to modded Xboxes.
What you need
This is probably the biggest draw back of the Pi vs Xbox. An Xbox can be had for $40 pretty reliably, or probably free from somewhere. They generally come with everything you need to play, including at least one controller.
The Pi costs $40 by itself. You then need a power adapter, a HDMI cable, a case, and an SD card. Then you'll need controllers, 2 SNES knock offs will cost $30, or you can use XBOX360 ones if you want wireless and joysticks, but that'll bump the cost up $70 more.
| Name | Cost | Link |
| Pi 3 | $36 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01CD5VC92/ |
| Power | $10 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00MARDJZ4/ |
| Case | $8 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01F1PSFY6/ |
| SD Card | $10 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B010Q57T02/ |
| 2 Controllers | $25 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B002B9XB0E/ |
| HDMI | $6 | https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B014I8SSD0/ |
| Total | $95 |
You might have some of this stuff, but I don't think it's fair to assume you do for the price calculations. So the cost is at least double an Xbox, probably more if you want joysticks.
Install
I won't give a full install guide here, you can follow the official guide easily enough. However, I will say the install is far easier than an Xbox. Download the image, write it to the SD card, pop the card in the Pi, attach controllers, and power it on. It autodetects the controllers, and lets you configure them. FTP in (u: pi, p: raspberry) and put roms in the ~/RetroPie/roms/* folders. Restart and the systems where it finds roms will show up in the list.
Config
There isn't much to config, you can pretty much just play out of the box, however, there were some things I wanted to change. For example, I found the layout of NES buttons to be annoying. A bit of research told me that while the initial global controller set up is easy, there is no way to edit per system controls without editing the cfg files. For NES the file is at /opt/retropie/configs/nes/retroarch.cfg
You can SSH into the Pi with ssh pi@192.168.1.125 (change the IP to yours), then cd to there, and use nano to edit that file. Alternatively, you can FTP the file back and forth. The config is very confusing due to the fact that you have the labels on the controller and in the file which may not match. The numbers refer to the position of the physical button on your controller. The letters refer to what that button should do. For the Buffalo SNES knock offs this was my config for NES:
input_player1_b_btn = 3
input_player1_a_btn = 1
input_player1_y_btn = 2
input_player1_x_btn = 0
Thoughts
I think it works pretty well. There are some rough edges, but I guess those are mainly a concern for someone like me that wants to configure everything. All the games I tested work well. The one exception was N64, where they stuttered quite a bit. The Xbox was never great at N64 either, but it feels like it did better than the Pi. Perhaps that's just the few random games I tested, or maybe because the Pi doesn't actually have a video card.
Also there is no easy way to turn the Pi on and off, you just unplug it. For what it's worth, I measured the Pi as using about 2 watts (compared to the Xbox at about 50 w), so leaving it turned on 24/7 isn't a bad idea.
I was kind of disappointed at how poor N64 performance was. If that were better I'd spend the money for a set of wireless controllers and be quite happy. Each release of the Pi see a pretty significant speed bump, but at the same time I don't know if that is going to actually help, I think it's more the software and lack of video card.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Friday, July 29, 2016
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