Kiran Upadhyay

When we first stumbled upon the auction for the Guinness-certified "World's Largest Video Game Collection" a few weeks ago, bidding had only reached $50,000, short of the auction reserve price. When the GameGavel auction came to a close late Sunday night, though, the price was significantly higher: $750,250 to be exact. According to the GameGavel price history, the bulk of the bidding action took place last Wednesday, as users "catch123" and "peeps_10091970" rapidly outbid one another from a starting point of $150,000. The final bid has yet to be publicly verified, though, so it's still possible this could be another hoax bidding situation similar to the one surrounding a $100,000 Nintendo World Championship cartridge auction earlier this year. If the sale goes through at this price, though, it will be among the largest single sales of video game items in history. It won't be the largest, though; a 7,000-game set, including "complet

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just announced the company's first-ever smartphone, the Fire Phone, at a private event in Seattle. The device is the latest in a growing family of Amazon hardware that includes the Kindle Fire tablets and the Fire TV set-top box. The phone is exclusive to AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract for a 32GB device and $299 for a 64GB device. The phone will cost $650 off-contract, which is common for high-end smartphones. Amazon's product page indicates that it's available for pre-order now, and will begin shipping to buyers on July 25. For a "limited time," a full year of Amazon Prime membership is included with purchase. The phone has a 4.7-inch IPS display with 590 nits maximum brightness and a 1280×720 resolution, giving it a density of 315PPI. This isn't the biggest or highest-resolution phone there is, but Amazon says it has been "optimized for one-handed use." The phone has a rubberized frame, a glass

You can lock every door and window of your house, but if you use a skeleton key the odds are pretty good someone is probably going to end up robbing you blind. The same is true of your passwords. If your passwords are not unique and unbreakable, you might as well open the front door and invite the robbers in for lunch. A few years ago, Damien described a few ways to  come up with strong passwords , like making sure you use special characters and that the password is at least 8 characters long. Still, creating a complex password is only half the job, the other half is actually remembering it. And, is any password truly unbreakable? Not really, but in a recent  interview with Bruce Schneider , Bruce referenced one of his blog posts about choosing a secure password. His advice was to take sentence and turn it into a password. His exact words were, “Choose your own sentence – something personal.” This sounds like a simple concept, but even coming up with a sentence that you’ll re

Calling all Android tinkerers! There’s one aspect of Android customization that a lot of users tend to overlook. Once you’ve fiddled around with a  custom Android ROM , new  Android launchers , new  icon packs , new wallpapers, and a  nifty new keyboard , is there anything left to play with? Yes! The lockscreen. Are you tired of looking at the same, boring screen every time you wake up your phone from sleep? That screen is called the lockscreen — because most users require a password or gesture to unlock access to the device — and it can be easily customized. Are you ready to breathe new life into your phone? Start Formerly known as Active Lockscreen, Start has really earned itself a large and loyal following. It’s sleek, classy, and packed full of features that make it a strong choice for an “all-in-one” lockscreen; in other words, it allows you to perform many different actions directly from the lockscreen itself. On the left, there’s a sidebar that lets you manage all

It’s a common use case scenario: you want to broadcast a public WiFi network for anyone to use, but you’ve got strict requirements that only cat images be permitted. Great news: your Raspberry Pi is a perfect  transmoggification  machine. Intrigued? Read on. This project starts out identical to the  Onion Router  we built a few weeks back. We’ll make the Raspberry Pi into a standard WiFi network first, then place a proxy in the middle. The proxy will be filtering posts through a Perl script, which will replace the images on every HTTP request with cat GIFs from  TheCatAPI.com . Watch as befuddled users are both intensely frustrated, yet strangely calmed. Here’s the BBC, post-cat modifications. Making a WiFi Network Since this part of the tutorial is exactly the same as the  DIY Onion Router , please follow the instructions there up to the point of  Install Tor . The only small change we need to make is to broadcast an open WiFi network instead of one secured with WPA. Once