Epic Games buys a compression company
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2021/1/7/22219284/epic-games-acquires-rad-game-tools-announcement Epic Games, yes, the people that make fort**** and Epic Games Store, they’ve just bought a company called RAD. There’s no information on how much they paid, but I doubt it was cheap. So what is RAD? They make various tools, but the main ones do compression. Like zip and MP4. Why bother buying …. Read More
Layers and abstraction
This looks at Linux gaming, and how they get Windows games working and how the systems interact with the hardware through the different stages of abstraction. GCSE and A-level students should have a watch to see about drivers and APIs.
How Among Us Was Made and Why The Developers Wanted to Quit
This is a nice look at the realities of the games industry and how indie games are made. It touches on the product life cycle which might be of interest to the imedia students.
Interview with a hacker
Kevin Mitnick is a world renowned hacker, even has a movie created about him. This video is an interesting interview, the last sentence gets me. “When we test organisations using social engineering trade craft, we always get in.”
Are Hard Drives disappearing?
A good look at not only the question in the title, but also the different factors at play and what developments are being made. A must for GCSE Computing, gives good background for any storage related questions.
Taking apart a hard drive
This video goes through not only taking a hard drive apart, but also taking the working parts from another drive and swapping them over. Don’t try this at home. See that machine which they’re working in? That’s filtering out all the dust etc so the hard drive doesn’t get anything on it that would damage …. Read More
Network Layers
https://medium.com/@james_aka_yale/the-4-layer-internet-model-network-engineers-need-to-know-e78432614a4f GCSE students (and A-Level students) will be familiar with the network stack…well…they’ll know it’s something they should know. It is however something which people are often fuzzy on. This article explains it nicely and talks about TCP and UDP and how it fits within the stack. Don’t worry about the OSI model, that’s something …. Read More
Ditch WhatsApp
Switch to Signal for encrypted messaging, EC tells staff An interesting article about how the top government agencies and companies are ditching WhatsApp in favour of a new one called Signal. A good read for GCSE students for examples of encryption and why it’s needed and why governments are trying to ban it. One thing …. Read More
Hacking passwords
Your password is rubbish. Statistically speaking that statement is probably true. This video gives a demonstration of thousands of passwords being hacked during the video. Year 11 have recently been looking at cyber security so this has done interesting ideas about weak passwords explored.
Sorting
https://youtu.be/WaNLJf8xzC4 This is a good graphical and easy to understand look at the sort algorithms. Unfortunately it doesn’t include merge sort which is on most exam specs. One nice thing about it is the real scenario, and also that it gives real world time calculations. It covers: Bubble sort Insertion sort Quick sort