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Archive | Tips

Quake Live Tips

Sunday, February 21, 2010

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Quake Live is a free, manly game to play. QL is a version of Quake 3 that runs as a browser plugin for Firefox, Safari, and IE. It features a skill-matched game finder, a friend’s system, and other modern features. Think a Lite, browser-based version of Steam. Quake 3 came out in 1999, and people [...]

Learning to Program on Your Own

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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Learning how to code is like learning anything else – You have to do it. The hardest part is figuring out where to begin, and then you need some mechanism to show you that you’re making progress. The latter is important because it motivates you to keep going. First, have a goal. I initially wanted to [...]

Small Vim Shortcut for PHP Tags

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

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The short tags in PHP have been deprecated as of 5.3.0. Short tags provided a shorter alternative to the annoying-to-type <?php and <?php echo. Instead, you could use <? and <?= respectively. This was great but it caused problems when working with XML files, and the short_tags option was disabled in the PHP config by [...]

The Gmail Captcha is Optional

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

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When you try to login with bad credentials, Gmail gives you a captcha to fill in before your next login attempt. Not only does this captcha appear randomly (keep putting in the wrong username and it will sometimes appear, sometimes not) (update: now it appears to be more consistent), but it’s also optional*. Just put [...]

Bash Tips for Power Users

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

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Every Geek site needs an obligatory Bash Tips post Copy Files Securely Between Two Machines I used to always forget the syntax for this, until I realized that the syntax is exactly like the standard cp command. In fact, you can copy files like you normally would using scp, on your local machine. The following are equivalent: $ [...]

Do You Keep Old Programming Books?

Monday, June 1, 2009

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I knew HTML and learned ActionScript (actually ActionScript wasn’t out yet. Flash only had basic scripting support) , and around 1999 I wanted to learn Javascript. I ended up getting a book on Java, thinking it was Javascript. It didn’t take more than a day to figure out they’re completely different languages, but for some [...]

Bash Script to Force an Empty Git Push

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

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Sometimes, like when you’re testing hooks or trying to create synced remote and local repos, you’ll find yourself touching empty files just to get a git push going. This script automates this task by creating a unique temporary file, committing it, pushing, and then removing the file. #!/bin/sh TMP=tmp-`date +'%m%s'` touch $TMP git add $TMP git commit $TMP -m '(forced [...]

How to Maintain Static Sites with Git & Jekyll

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

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Static sites in this context just means non-database driven sites. Your static site can be an elaborate PHP script or just a few markup and image files. For this I am using Jekyll – A neat Ruby gem that makes your static sites dynamic. It lets you create layouts and embed custom variables in your [...]

Burning Xbox 360 Games on Linux (Stealth!)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

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You could run ImgBurn in Wine, or probably burn the games in VirtualBox running Windows, but that’s no solution… you’re reading this because you want to burn Xbox 360 games on Linux using native tools. It’s surprisingly easy! The games are usually an ISO file, along with a little DVD (.dvd) file that tells the burner [...]

Create Unique Email Addresses From One Gmail Account

Thursday, March 5, 2009

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Many sites won’t let you use one email address to register multiple accounts. Sometimes you have legitimate reasons to, and other times you just wanna spam build backlinks. Either or, here’s how you can get around this… Gmail accepts email that has a ‘+’ appended to the username of your email address. Text can be anything [...]