Why would you do something like this? Because you can.
Category: Geekdom
Stop Microsoft From Calling Home
Don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when any of my software calls home. Now you can officially disable Microsoft’s Geniune Advantage from checking in with Microsoft — and they’re giving you directions on how to do it (wonder who forced them to do this?).
Why is Geniune Advantage a bad thing? Read on.
Punch Card Curtains
I think I remember Jen saying that she might have some punch cards (or at least she worked with them at some point). I think you should decorate your house with them. Link via Make Blog.
Water Cooled Xbox 360
I only wish I had the talen to pull of impressive modifications like this guy who managed to modify his Xbox 360 to run more than 50-degrees cooler with the help of a fully internal water cooling setup. The paint job and the flashy LEDs are pretty slick, too. If you don’t want to read through the whole thread, the final product pictures are on this page
Finally I Can Take A Deep Breath
I’ve been busting my butt recently on a few huge projects (if you’ve noticed, my post quantity has gone done considerably the last several months), and finally have a major part of one of them done, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.
I’m working on the back-end for a site that is going to serve as a central Web site for the rental homes from four different companies here in Sunriver. It’s been a nightmare trying to get the inventory and availability data from four different companies, all of whom have different software systems, servers, and ways they do things. Today was the final phase of it, trying to figure out an automated way to pull availability data on an automated fashion from an Excel spreadsheet accessible via a URL. To complicate matters, the Excel file was behind non-standard password protections that checked if you were using MSIE before it even allowed you to login (it’s a very stupid system, but it’s what they have an it works for them). I gave up trying to figure it out myself, so I got a programmer off ScriptLance and had him deal with the mess (and a mess it was — cripes, I can’t translate what that code is doing for the life of me, thanks to Excel’s complicated file format).
But it works, and I have the home and availability data for all the companies loading and synchronizing properly. Now if the front-end guys will hurry up and do their thing (I was just in charge of the back end), I can sleep much better. But it’ll be by far the best vacation rental site out here (it’ll be fully AJAX-powered — it’ll be really sweet).
Meanwhile, I’ve got a busy weekend with the aforementioned concerts (with several rehearsals), appointments on Friday, my sister-in-law’s high school graduation, my niece’s ballet recital, and so much more. We’ll just have to see how it goes.
Associated Press Violates The First Rule of Fight Club
Because we all know that you do not talk about Fight Club, even if this is different because it involves geeks in the beat downs. Thanks Dave for the link.
Free File Hosting And Sharing
Wikiupload looks like an interesting service (though I can foresee piracy and copyright violations running rampant through it):
WikiUpload’s goal is to build the largest library of open-content video clips, music and media files, and shareware in the world. To accomplish this goal, WikiUpload needs your help! We encourage all visitors to share their free resources.
Unlike other libraries, there are no geographic or financial barriers to accessing this information. Everything on this site is free! This will help everyone benefit from each other’s contribution in a digitally democratic format. We will rank files based on their popularity to showcase the most useful contributions.
The growth of this website will be dependent on volunteers. We will need your help in contributing files and reporting files that violate our terms of service.
In the beginning, after uploading your file we will keep it forever as long as it is accessed at least once by anyone in 30 days. As the site grows and resources are added we will be able to allow bigger file sizes than 5GB and longer time periods of 30 days, 45 days and so on. Please, help us fulfill this mission!
Thanks Jo-Anne for the link.
Want to create one of those infamous load bars?
Here’s a neat little app that will do it for you.
Yet Another Link Shortening Service
Why is this one different? Because I’m hosting it. Why? Because I use shorter URLs in e-mails quite a bit and didn’t want to always have to rely on tinyurl.com or the multitude of other services out there (not that there’s anything wrong with any of them, I just don’t want to always have to rely on them). I just decided to make my own using a short domain I already use.
So I present sh.orty. Get it, “Shorty”? Kind of like the other types of services that use periods in their name (the most popular, as far as I know, being del.icio.us
I took the script from here, the CSS hacks from here, and color scheme from just a random color I picked here.
The script is simple, slick, and fast, uses MySQL for the data, and also will reuse URLs if a URL you’ve submitted has already been submitted before. But my goal was to make it simple and fast, and I think it’s doing that just fine.
I was just going to use this for my own purposes, but I figured I’d make it public. If there is any abuse of the thing, I will take it down and ban the IP of the person who abused it — simple as that.
But go ahead, try it out, and let me know if you encounter anything weird.