It's the twenty-first century and let's be honest-things are a little disappointing. Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia, a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our promised moon colonies? Our servant robots? In Where's My Jetpack?, roboticist Daniel H. Wilson takes a hilarious look at the future we always imagined for ourselves. He exposes technology, spotlights existing prototypes, and reveals drawing-board plans. You will learn which technologies are already available, who made them, and where to find them. If the technology is not public, you will learn how to build, buy, or steal it. And if doesn't yet exist, you will learn what stands in the way of making it real. With thirty entries spanning everything from teleportation to self-contained skyscraper cities, and superbly illustrated by Richard Horne (101 Things to Do Before You Die), Where's My Jetpack? is an endlessly entertaining, one-of-a-kind look at the world that we always wanted. Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D, has a degree in Robotics from Carnegie-Mellon. He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

A hilarious pop-socio-cultural history of the greatest invention that never was, the jetpack, and a participatory journey through the bizarre subculture of jetpack enthusiasts in search of a working model

Tracing the remarkable history of a certain kind of flying machine—from the rocket belt to the jet belt to the flying platform and all the way to Yves Rossy's 21st-century free flights using a jet-powered wing—this historical account delves into the technology that made these devices possible and the reasons why they never became commercial successes on a mass scale. These individual lift devices, as they were blandly labeled by the government men who financed much of their development, answered man's desire to simply step outside and take flight. No runways, no wings, no pilot's license were required. But the history of the jet pack did not follow its expected trajectory and the devices that were thought to become as commonplace as cars have instead become one of the most overpromised technologies of all time. This fascinating account profiles the inventors and pilots, the hucksters and cheats, and the businessmen and soldiers who were involved with the machines, and it tells a great American story of a technology whose promise may yet, one day, come to fruition.

A fun and creative answer to the question "what would YOU do if you had a jetpack?" perfect for fans of Boy and Bot and How to Train a Train. Having a jetpack is fun--if you know what to do with one. If you had a jetpack, you could: Teach your brother how to build one too. Demonstrate its usefulness at Show and Share Time at school. Give your principal a ride home. Fly south to visit your nana. Visit the astronauts on the space station and help with anything that needed fixing. Join one inventive little rabbit as he and his brother put their new jetpack to good use! "An energetic, crowd-pleasing read-aloud that can be revisited again and again."--SLJ "This vivid picture book will leave kids longing for jetpacks, while taking off on their own flights of fancy."--Booklist

Geek-meets-chic in this stylish, informative guide to the most outrageous, brilliant, and fascinating mad scientists--both real and fictional--and their diabolical inventions.

Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide is an introductory Android book for programmers with Java experience. Based on Big Nerd Ranch's popular Android Bootcamp course, this guide will lead you through the wilderness using hands-on example apps combined with clear explanations of key concepts and APIs. This book focuses on practical techniques for developing apps compatible with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and up, including coverage of Lollipop and material design. Write and run code every step of the way, creating apps that integrate with other Android apps, download and display pictures from the web, play sounds, and more. Each chapter and app has been designed and tested to provide the knowledge and experience you need to get started in Android development. Big Nerd Ranch specializes in developing and designing innovative applications for clients around the world. Our experts teach others through our books, bootcamps, and onsite training. Whether it's Android, iOS, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, Mac OS X, JavaScript, HTML5 or UX/UI, we've got you covered. The Android team is constantly improving and updating Android Studio and other tools. As a result, some of the instructions we provide in the book are no longer correct. You can find an addendum addressing breaking changes at: https://github.com/bignerdranch/AndroidCourseResources/raw/master/2ndEdition/Errata/2eAddendum.pdf.

New York Times Magazine cartoonist Tom Gauld follows up his widely praised graphic novel Goliath with You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, a collection of cartoons made for The Guardian. Over the past eight years, Gauld has produced a weekly cartoon for the Saturday Review section of Britain’s most well regarded newspaper. Only a handful of comics from this huge and hilarious body of work have ever been printed in North America – exclusively within the pages of the prestigious Believer magazine. You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack distils perfectly Gauld’s dark humor, impeccable timing, and distinctive style. Arrests by the fiction police and fictional towns designed by Tom Waits intermingle hilariously with piercing observations about human behavior and whimsical imaginings of the future. Again and again, Tom Gauld reaffirms his position as a first rank cartoonist, creating work infused with a deep understanding of both literary and cartoon history.

Start building native Android apps the modern way in Kotlin with Jetpack's expansive set of tools, libraries, and best practices. Learn how to create efficient, resilient views with Fragments and share data between the views with ViewModels. Use Room to persist valuable data quickly, and avoid NullPointerExceptions and Java's verbose expressions with Kotlin. You can even handle asynchronous web service calls elegantly with Kotlin coroutines. Achieve all of this and much more while building two full-featured apps, following detailed, step-by-step instructions.With Kotlin and Jetpack, Android development is now smoother and more enjoyable than ever before. Dive right in by developing two complete Android apps. With the first app, Penny Drop, you create a full game complete with random die rolls, customizable rules, and AI opponents. Build lightweight Fragment views with data binding, quickly and safely update data with ViewModel classes, and handle all app navigation in a single location. Use Kotlin with Android-specific Kotlin extensions to efficiently write null-safe code without all the normal boilerplate required for pre-Jetpack + Kotlin apps. Persist and retrieve data as full objects with the Room library, then display that data with ViewModels and list records in a RecyclerView. Next, you create the official app for the Android Baseball League. It's a fake league but a real app, where you use what you learn in Penny Drop and build up from there. Navigate all over the app via a Navigation Drawer, including specific locations via Android App Links. Handle asynchronous and web service calls with Kotlin Coroutines, display that data smoothly with the Paging library, and send notifications to a user's phone from your app. Come build Android apps the modern way with Kotlin and Jetpack! What You Need: You'll need the Android SDK, a text editor, and either a real Android device or emulator for testing. While not strictly required, it's assumed you're using Android Studio, which comes with the Android SDK and simplifies creating an emulator. Also, a few examples require JDK 1.8 or later, though all of these pieces can be completed in other ways when using JDK 1.6.

Join Carmen Sandiego and decide where in the world to go next in this globe-trotting, daring caper Stop VILE from stealing the superior jetpack technology you've developed and using it for nefarious deeds. With twenty possible endings, your adventures can take you all over the world--or out of the game. Which will you choose? In this choose-your-own-caper set in the world of Carmen Sandiego, you are unwittingly working as a technician developing a highly maneuverable jetpack for VILE. The prototype is almost complete when Carmen sneaks into your lab to steal it. That's when she tells you about VILE and their dastardly deeds. You decide to help Carmen try to keep this cutting-edge technology away from anyone who'd use it as the ultimate thieving tool. Or do you? Twenty different possible endings keep readers coming back for more adventures with Carmen Sandiego

Fark.com has taken the Internet by storm by featuring real, funny news. In his first book, founder Curtis exposes the stranger-than-fiction media patterns that prove just how little reporting is going on in the media world today. His 12 entertaining but undeniable patterns include fear-mongering in the absence of facts, the bogus press release and media-fatigue. His book is a witty wake-up call, exposing the news that was never fit for print in the first place. Curtis' website has 40 million page views a month and is a top 100 English language website.