GeekwithEnvy

internet

New League of Legends Debit Card Will Give RP

by Leave a Comment

LOLAEXCard
(Image Credit: The New York Times)

According to the New York Times, American Express will be releasing a League of Legends pre-paid debit card that will award you Riot Points when you use the card for everyday purchases. Just for signing up you will get 1,000 RP, plus another 1,000 RP when you preload $20 onto the card. You will get 10,000 RP when you set up a direct deposit to the card and another 1,000 RP for the first 10 purchases.

If this type of reward system catches on, and I hope it does, it could be a great incentive to use these cards. This is a great way to get into the growing gaming demographic. This could easily apply to any other popular game currency and appeal to a rather large audience. Getting in-game cash for spending money like you normally would in real life, sounds like a good deal to me.

There haven’t been any details on just how much you will be able to accumulate after the first 10 (ten) purchases, but either way, it’s more than what you were getting before.

The Science of Bullets Underwater in Slow Motion

by Leave a Comment

I saw this video trending on Youtube and had to share it with you guys. In a great two part video by the theslowmoguys and smartereveryday, we get to see some amazing and unexpected things happen when a gun is fired underwater. Not only is this awesome to watch but there’s a lot of really cool science going on here.

The first video really focuses on the high speed footage while the second part explains the science in a little more detail, so it’s well worth watching both parts. Both of these channels are on my subscribe list for sure and I’m sure you’ve seen videos from one of these channels before as well, but in the odd chance you haven’t, you can get your geek fix and check out some of their most popular videos.

Bid on Items From Playstation “Greatness” Commercial

by Leave a Comment

Playstation had a big hit with their “Greatness” commercial but it didn’t happen overnight. Many hours were spent custom building just about everything you see on screen. So it would be kind of waste to just store it all away right?

Well apparently Sony was thinking the same thing when they created the site Bid For Greatness which will allow players to bid on items from the commercial. All of these items are unique hand-made and well crafted items that took hours to make, so naturally they will be expensive right? Wrong, what makes this even better is that you will be bidding on each item using trophies that your earn on Playstation. This makes perfect sense to me, the more you game, the more you get. Even if your not a Playstation fan you can still appreciate the loot, besides I’m sure we will see them popping up on eBay.

WebP a New Image Format from Google

by Leave a Comment

WebP Logo

There is a huge demand for everything to be faster, especially internet speeds. We are constantly trying to see how much data we can pack into our devices and how quickly we can do it. Instead of always focusing on giving each user more bandwidth, it also helps to reduce the size of the files that we are trying to send and receive. The combination of these two methods can greatly improve overall internet “speed”.

The development team at Google has focused on the latter of these two and they have created a new image format which is called WebP. WebP is an image format specifically designed for the web and it’s based off of the VP8 video codec. Google claims it’s WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to the PNG format. Google also says that WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size when compared to JPEG images.

WebP is not widely supported, mostly because it’s brand new, but Google is trying to change that and they hope to completely replace the current web image standards. You can find our more information on this new image format on Googles’ own developer page.

Flush DNS Cache on Mac OS X

by 5 Comments

When you enter a web address into your webrowser like “geekwithenvy.com”, the DNS (Domain Name System) changes that user-friendly name into an IP address that computers can more easily understand. Your computer doesn’t need to do this every single time you visit a website because it stores the IP addresses for many sites on your computer for a short period of time. This information is stored in what’s called the DNS cache.representations of servers to show Clear DNS Cache

Unfortunately, this stored information may become corrupt or just end up being incorrect due to changes that occur on the site’s server. If your DNS cache has incorrect IP information then you won’t be able to access the site your trying to get to because it’s looking for the website in the wrong place.

There is a quick solution to correcting your DNS cache issues and that is to force it to ask the DNS what the new IP information is. You can do this by clearing the DNS cache or “Flushing” your DNS cache.

Launch Terminal and enter the commands below to flush your DNS Cache:

Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (10.7 /10.8)

  • sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Mac OS X (10.5 and 10.6)

  • dscacheutil -flushcache

If you happen to be running OS X Mavericks (10.9) you will want to do this two step command:

  • dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10)

(Please note: The the following command will clear your DNS Cache but there is no official confirmation from the terminal when entered.

  • sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache
  • sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches

Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.4 and Up) use this instead:

  • dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

That should cover it for DNS cache issues. If you are still having problems you can always reboot your machine, this should resolve any DNS inaccuracies on your computer.