Computing
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Shorter Git Remotes
Use shorter URLs for Git remotes using your SSH config file.
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Detecting Character Encoding
I occasionally find myself having to determine the character encoding of a file, either for foreign-language content or other data files that don’t identify their encoding.
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Google Home So Far
I’ve been playing with Google Home quite a bit recently, with mixed success to say the least.
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New Site (Again)
This isn’t the first time I’ve moved my personal site; the first post I still have was after I lost some old blog posts, and I moved to WordPress in 2012 to avoid supporting a separate blog and page builder. However, it was still running on my VPS, and I’ve been trying to remove all production content from there for a while.
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An Analogy of DNS Resolution
Imagine that you own a store in the high street. Now, for people to find your store, they can’t just look it up, or walk down the street or anything. They have to rely on some guy (an “informer”) who stands outside their house and says, “The Widget Shop? Yes, it’s on the high street.” People will be able to get to your store, and they’ll remember what the informer told them, but only for a week or so. After that they’ll be like, “Where’s The Widget Shop again?” and have to ask the informer.
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Computer Names
I started this list at D because this home desktop was the fourth computer I or my family owned, starting with the Amstrad, and it seemed like they deserved a gap to be left for them!
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Facebook Events in Google (Apps) Calendar
I subscribe to a number of third-party calendars in my own Google Calendar, one of which being my Facebook events. However, there are a couple of issues to work around to get everything working perfectly.
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How I Use Smart Playlists to Manage My iTunes Library
I have a fair amount of music in my library, and because I’m a massive nerd I like to keep it in some sort of order. (My pre-iTunes library has some 20,000 tracks, half of which are utter garbage. I’m slowly moving over the good stuff.)
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Using Ant and Phing in the same repository
Here’s the scenario: you use Apache Ant for some of your automated build process, but you also have some tools in Phing. You run both
ant
andphing
from your repository root. Because you use Ant most, the Ant targets are inbuild.xml
, and Phing has to usephing.xml
. Sure, you can runphing -f phing.xml ...
, but where’s the fun in that? Enter the following build file: -
Everything Changes
Motivated by a number of reasons, I’ve begun to move everything from my old VPS to what has been my development server until recently. It’s been a complete digital spring-clean of all the old sites I used to maintain and hopefully the result should be an improvement. Here’s a list of the main changes:
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Word Clock v2
I’ve seen a few nice-looking representations of clocks around, but when I saw Gumuz’s word clock I though I could make some improvements to it. Here’s a couple of the changes:
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Mootools Hash.setFromPath
MooTools More implements a
getFromPath
method inHash.Extras
, but doesn’t provide a corresponding setter. Here’s an implementation: -
Spacing out CamelCase in PHP
Here’s a nifty function to put spaces in your CamelCased words:
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2B or not 2B
…that is the question. The answer?
FF
. -
Things I Learnt Today
- That Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is a goon;
- that his early stuff is, if anything, funnier than his paid stuff for The Escapist;
- that I there will always be something on the Internet that I haven’t seen, and that someone will think I have been living under a rock to have missed it.
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Get a Grid for Transparent Images in Firefox
Here’s a useful bit of Firefox hackery for you all.
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Yay, xkcd
Makefile:
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Firefox 3 World Record
The Firefox team are going for a new world record — “Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours.” The (currently beta) version 3 of their popular web browser is due to be launched in late June. Visit the Download Day 2008 page for the official date, and to make your pledge!
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Dell & Linux
I was never a big fan of Dell, mainly because it really annoyed me that they only shipped Windows with their machines. Reading The Microsoft File made it clearer, if no more acceptable; Microsoft bullied retailers to shipping tied processor–product bundles, effectively forcing other operating systems out of the market.
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Samba and Vista
Vista’s lock-down strikes again…
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Enough Packaging?
After some trouble with our Belkin router recently, we managed to get it replaced under the lifetime warranty — a very satisfying result! The router arrived today, and the packaging that brought it can only be described as overkill:
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Ooh, Vector Art
Today I stumbled upon this vectorising tool, called textorizer, that converts images into SVG format. You can specify your own text and size, as well as playing around with the edge-finding sensitivity.
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MySQL Joys
1NF teaches us that we should not store repeating groups in fields. Given that we have a table satisfying 1NF containing values as such:
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My Favourite Number
I love the Internet. I love how countless code monkey hours are wasted trying to stop the inevitable. I love how people actually think it’s possible to remove information from the Word Wide Web.
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Gmail in Multiple Clients
Gmail has always confused me that when opening POP emails from multiple clients, only those opened in that client show up. In other words, if you open up an email using client A, you can’t open it in client B — you have to view it in webmail.
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Blog Accepts Media Network Commenting
This blog now allows you to comment using your Media Network profile — just select “Media Network” as the login method and enter your user name and password. Your account must be activated to make a comment.
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Internal Anchors
Well, it was an interesting hour that resulted in this…
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PHP Snippets
Whilst browsing the old Invisible Shadow network, I was looking to see if any of the old stuff existed on there. One thing I remember was a section for code snippets, both Visual Basic and PHP. It seems that Logan has started it up again. I always recommend that the best way to learn to program is to read others’ code — this kind of website helps with that.
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OpenID Now Working
After my attempts earlier this week, I have managed to get OpenID working on the blog. I haven’t yet sorted out any linking of an OpenID with either a Media Network profile or a tag profile, but it’ll be added in soon.
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Adapting for OpenID
Adapting for OpenID is no fun. Especially when:
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Laptop Digital Picture Frame
Happy Christmas!
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IE7
After downloading Internet Explorer 7 today, I have spent the morning sorting out a few CSS bugs across the Media Network. One thing I like is that the
:hover
pseudo-class is supported across all tags now, rather than just anchors; alsoposition: fixed
seems to have been sorted. -
Microsoft vs Apple Advertising
With the launch of Windows Vista looming, Microsoft have released a viral marketing campaign featuring Demetri Martin, called Clearification. The hiring of an American comedian to advertise their product was matched by Apple, who hired Demitri’s The Daily Show co-correspondent John Hodgman — alongside Justin Long — for their “Get a Mac” campaign.
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Faith Restored in WLM
I have re-installed Windows Live Messenger today, after attempting to get it working before and being a bit miffed. For one thing, the contact list seemed to have lost any control over showing display pictures as per MSN Messenger 7.5, and plugin control for Messenger Plus! Live was handled rather differently.
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Firefox 2.0
I have just installed and started playing with Firefox 2.0. I’m afraid to say that the first thing I did is install the Winestripe theme, which is essentially the FF1.5 default theme — I wasn’t impressed with the 2.0 default!
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Dell Laptops Suck
I hate Dell PCs.
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Mosaic Images
Whilst browsing the Facebook Developers’ Directory, I happened upon a product called Photomosaic.
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Back Up & Running
It now seems that the server is back up and running rather well.