Blog posts dated 2012 – 5 posts found:

2012-04-05: Google AdSense, Don't Be Evil!

Posted at 2012-04-05 23:07:21 by SHD

Today, another story was posted about how a startup, which depended on Google AdSense for a large portion of its income, suddenly found their account blocked and funds in the account frozen. This isn't the first such story. Google, as PayPal tends do do can block accounts and freeze funds pretty much without warning or chance for appeal. That's a scary thing as it allows these large companies to cause huge financial troubles for smaller companies or even individuals.

2012-03-05: CSS Experiment: bar graphs

Posted at 2012-03-05 22:22:46 by SHD

There was an interesting article about website bandwidth usage posted on Hacker News today. It contains some bar graphs explaining which fractions of the total download size of a site home page is attributable to text content, images, CSS, scripts etc. The author said he had "cheated" in creating those bar graphs by taking screen shots from Safari's development console. I figured this was a nice challenge to see if I could recreate those graphs in pure HTML and CSS.

2012-02-12: How to beat the boiler room boss in Aquaria

Posted at 2012-02-12 20:22:19 by SHD

Aquaria is an awesome game that I got as part of the humble introversion bundle. It's quite an expansive game and I really enjoy it, though the boss fights can be very tough. One boss in particular: the golem in the boiler room in the Sunken City, if you don't know what to do. Spoilers after the break.

2012-01-17: Browser tip: Quickly remove old autocomplete entries

Posted at 2012-01-17 12:23:44 by SHD

Here's a quick tip. If you're entering information into a web form and have outdated or incorrect suggestions in the autocomplete dropdown that your browser offers, you can delete them easily. Use the ↓ key on the keyboard to highlight the offending item, then press the Del key to delete it from the list. I've confirmed this works at least in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

2012-01-14: Accessing sites blocked by your ISP

Posted at 2012-01-14 20:53:21 by SHD

Just recently, MPAA/RIAA sock puppets Brein managed to convince some clueless judge to order two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands, XS4ALL and Ziggo to block (in)famous torrent website The Pirate Bay. TPB have put up a message that is shown to anyone visiting from a Dutch IP address, as shown below. XSALL and Ziggo have both announced they will appeal to a higher court, which is a good thing. I don't even use TPB myself and wouldn't really miss it, but I do care deeply about worthless assholes doing anything limiting my internet access. So, how would this work and what can I (or anyone) do to give these lying thieves the finger and circumvent these blocks if they are upheld by the higher courts?