Topics

26

Found Deals and Discounts / Pay It Forward Bundle

« on: December 02, 2014, 11:38 PM »

From now until the end of the month, get $4,500+ worth of design assets & creative services and pay what you want!

All proceeds support Watsi, a charitable organization dedicated to funding life changing medical treatments for people that otherwise might never be able to afford them.

Some highlights:

• $1,116 worth of goodies from Creative Market (worth grabbing just for this)
• Skillshare Premium Membership for 6 Months
• $1000 value StackSocial design bundle
• and more!

https://payitforwardbundle.com

27

Developer's Corner / Coding at a rate of 240 words per minute

« on: December 02, 2014, 03:34 AM »

An interesting use case for Stenotype.

28

Found Deals and Discounts / 48 hours of Learnable for free

« on: November 27, 2014, 05:30 PM »

Black Friday special: 48 hours of Learnable for free, no credit card needed.

Using the following link between now and midnight Sunday (Pacific time) will get you a free 48 hours of online access to all of Learnable's books and video courses:

https://learnable.com/join/322/account

With NANY coming up, this might be a good opportunity to brush up on your web development skills. You'll be able to enroll in as many courses as you want, watch as many videos as you want, and read as many books as you want, online, in your browser. If you decide to renew and continue your membership, it will be at a rate of $9 per month.


Disclosure: I work for Learnable but they have not asked me to post this, nor are they paying me to do so.

29

Living Room / Where do you buy your printer ink?

« on: November 14, 2014, 06:31 PM »

First of all, I know by making this post, I'll probably be inviting every ink spammer on the internet to reply, so I will only consider replies from existing members. If you join the forum just to post on this thread, I will consider it spam and it will be deleted!

That said, I am curious where you guys buy your printer ink.

I have a brand new fancy Canon inkjet printer and I need the best deal I can get for Canon PGI-250XL/CLI-251XL compatible cartridges (all 5 colors), and I don't want to get ripped off. (shipped to a US address)

Now, this is not an invitation to do a Google search for me. I am quite capable of doing that myself. What I need is for you to speak from experience, offering only those sellers that you have purchased from, that in your opinion gave you a great deal on a great product, that was as described.

Doing a Google search, I came across a seller offering a 30-pack for $38 (free shipping), and I probably would have jumped on it, but there was only 1 review on the seller/item, and it wasn't so good. The buyer complained that they were passing off regular cartridges as XLs, and when he called the seller to complain about it, he got a woman that kept repeating "we sell quality ink" to everything he said. And when he returned the product, he had a hard time getting a refund. Not sure I want to trust a seller like that.

So, can you steer me in the right direction?

30

Living Room / A Malicious Del.icio.us?

« on: October 27, 2014, 04:52 PM »

Google blacklisted bit.ly several days ago in a move that caught many publishers off guard. We started seeing spotty reports of del.icio.us being blacklisted over the weekend and it has now gone full-blown with all del.icio.us links apparently being blacklisted by Chrome as hosting malware.

[...]

Delicious has changed hands several times over the years and recently was re-sold earlier this year to Science Inc. They also rebranded several years ago to delicious.com which is not blacklisted, but there are likely a large number of legacy .us links out there. [Edit: Thanks Kelson]

Bit.ly has now been removed from Google’s Safe Browsing list which is the list that Google maintains of known malicious websites that engage in malware distribution and phishing. [Edit: Correction, we are still seeing bit.ly links being flagged by Google's GSB and Chrome] It’s also one of the data sources that Wordfence uses to scan your site’s files, posts and comment for malicious activity and infections.

http://www.wordfence...licious-del-icio-us/

31

General Software Discussion / Ad blocking add-ons in Pale Moon 25

« on: October 16, 2014, 04:29 PM »

Users of the Pale Moon browser recently discovered, upon upgrading to Pale Moon 25, that 2 popular add-ons for blocking ads (Adblock Plus & Adblock Edge) no longer worked properly. The main complaint was the disappearance of the toolbar icon.

This issue was the result of a decision of the Pale Moon developers to stop identifying the browser as Firefox variant, and for Pale Moon to have its own unique application GUID.

In most cases this caused no issues with regards to add-on compatibility, since Pale Moon does accept add-ons with a Firefox GUID, as well as those with a Pale Moon GUID.

But with regards to Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge, there will be a need going forward for both add-ons to officially support Pale Moon, or they will not work.

You can read more about it here:

• Extensions and Pale Moon 25
• Changes to Pale Moon GUID and XUL Overlay Adjustments

Unless and/or until both add-ons begin officially supporting Pale Moon, you will either have to find other means for blocking ads, or use this edited Adblock Plus add-on, from the Pale Moon site. Please be sure to remove Adblock Plus/Adblock Edge from your browser before installing this version:

• Adblock Plus (Pseudo-Static)

After installing this version you will notice the return of your toolbar icon and that the add-on functions as it should.

32

Living Room / SSL broken, again, in POODLE attack

« on: October 15, 2014, 05:30 PM »

From the researchers that brought you BEAST and CRIME comes another attack against Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), one of the protocols that's used to secure Internet traffic from eavesdroppers both government and criminal.

Calling the new attack POODLE—that's "Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption"—the attack allows a man-in-the-middle, such as a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot or a compromised ISP, to extract data from secure HTTP connections. This in turn could let that attacker do things such as access online banking or e-mail systems. The flaw was documented by Bodo Möller, Thai Duong, and Krzysztof Kotowicz, all of whom work at Google. Thai Duong, working with Juliano Rizzo, described the similar BEAST attack in 2011 and the CRIME attack in 2012.

The attack depends on the fact that most Web servers and Web browsers allow the use of the ancient SSL version 3 protocol to secure their communications. Although SSL has been superseded by Transport Layer Security, it's still widely supported on both servers and clients alike and is still required for compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. SSLv3, unlike TLS 1.0 or newer, omits validation of certain pieces of data that accompany each message. Attackers can use this weakness to decipher an individual byte and time of the encrypted data, and in so doing, extract the plain text of the message byte by byte.

As with previous attacks of this kind against SSL, the most vulnerable application is HTTP. An example attack scenario would work something like this. An adversary (typically in cryptography literature known as Mallory) sets up a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot. That Wi-Fi hotspot does two things. On non-secure HTTP connections, it injects a piece of JavaScript. And on secure HTTP connections, it intercepts the outgoing messages and reorganizes them.

http://arstechnica.c...in-in-poodle-attack/

33

Living Room / DRM in your coffee maker, to stop you from brewing unlicensed coffees

« on: October 12, 2014, 07:42 AM »

As you may have heard, Keurig is engaged in a battle with a host of companies that aspire to provide consumers with ‘pirate’ coffee pods. And who is losing this battle? The consumer.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Keurig’s business model is pretty much the same as the business model used by most producers of desktop printers. Desktop printers have become almost trivially cheap — you can buy a laser printer for under a hundred bucks now — but the cartridges cost a bundle. That’s where they make their money. Likewise, Keurig sells its popular single-cup coffee makers at astonishingly reasonable prices, and makes its money on the coffee pods. Naturally, given that the pods are lucrative and easy to make, there have been imitators. A large number of companies have sold, over the last few years, their own “K-cups,” pods of coffee designed specifically to work in Keurig’s machines. Consumers love this, both because competition lowers prices and because it expands the range of roasts and flavours available.

To fight the onslaught of packagers of (perfectly legal) pirate K-cups, Keurig recently starting selling its “Keurig 2.0″ line of coffee makers. The 2.0 machines incorporate a digital rights management (DRM) system, designed to ensure that Keurig machines work only with Keurig branded and Keurig licensed pods, effectively shutting out the competition, at least temporarily. The result is that all those non-licensed Keurig imitators won’t work in the new 2.0 machines.

http://www.canadianb...obsolescence-ethics/

34

Developer's Corner / Sitepoint is giving away 5 annual Learnable memberships

« on: October 08, 2014, 09:38 PM »

Sitepoint is having a drawing, giving away 5 annual Learnable memberships. (That a full year of Learnable, with unlimited online access and unlimited downloads)

To enter, visit this link: http://www.sitepoint.com/competition/

You will have to complete a number of actions to earn entries. The more actions you complete, the more entries you will have in the drawing.


_{Disclosure: I work for Sitepoint/Learnable, but was not encouraged or compensated in any way, to make this post.}

35

Living Room / Kevin Mitnick Is Now Selling Zero-Day Exploits

« on: September 26, 2014, 08:44 AM »

This gave me a really sick feeling in my stomach. 

As a young man, Kevin Mitnick became the world’s most notorious black hat hacker, breaking into the networks of companies like IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and other targets. After a stint in prison, he reinvented himself as a white hat hacker, selling his skills as a penetration tester and security consultant.

With his latest business venture, Mitnick has switched hats again: This time to an ambiguous shade of gray.

Late last week, Mitnick revealed a new branch of his security consultancy business he calls Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange. Since its quiet inception six months ago, he says the service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end “zero-day” exploits, hacking tools that take advantage of secret bugs in software for which no patch yet exists. Mitnick says he’s offering exploits developed both by his own in-house researchers and by outside hackers, guaranteed to be exclusive and priced at no less than $100,000 each, including his own fee.

And what will his clients do with those exploits? “When we have a client that wants a zero-day vulnerability for whatever reason, we don’t ask, and in fact they wouldn’t tell us,” Mitnick tells WIRED in an interview. “Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients for Y and make the margin in between.”

Mitnick declined to name any of his customers, and wouldn’t say how many, if any, exploits his exchange has brokered so far. But the website he launched to reveal the project last week offers to use his company’s “unique positioning among security researchers and the hacker community” to connect exploit developers with “discerning government and corporate buyers.”

http://www.wired.com...g-zero-day-exploits/

from Versioning

36

General Software Discussion / Looking for calendar software

« on: September 02, 2014, 02:47 AM »

Does anyone happen to know of some desktop calendar software (freeware) that can display events with a date range, as stripes similar to this, where you can click the stripe for more info about the event?

This screenshot is from a Wordpress plugin, and I really don't want to have to run an instance of Wordpress on my desktop, just to have a calendar like this, if I can help it.

37

Adventures of Baby Cody / A Genuine Baby Cody Sighting

« on: August 18, 2014, 11:50 AM »

Of all the photos my boss could have picked to put on the company website, he chose this one, which clearly shows Baby Cody peeking to see who needs help with learning web development.



https://learnable.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

This is the 2nd company I have worked for that has selected a DC related photo to display on their official website. The other chose a photo of me holding up a NANY mug. 

38

Living Room / To Hell with Net Neutrality: Sprint to charge extra for Facebook access

« on: July 31, 2014, 05:44 AM »

$12 A Month For Facebook – Sprint Tramples Over Net Neutrality With New Prepaid Plan

Today, Sprint dispensed with all subtlety. Without any pretense of net neutrality whatsoever, the carrier unveiled a plan with options to pay more for unfettered access to social media and streaming music, depending on the tier.

The Virgin Mobile Custom plan, sold under Sprint’s Virgin Mobile brand, provides unlimited access to one of four social media services – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest – on top of your data plan for $12 a month. An additional $10 will net unlimited use of all four, while $5 more grants unlimited streaming from any one music app. The base plan also includes 20 minutes of talk time and 20 texts, both of which can be upgraded. Lines start at $6.98 a month, $5 extra for “unlimited” access. Plans can be adjusted on the fly, even daily if so desired.

http://www.droid-lif...th-new-prepaid-plan/

39

Found Deals and Discounts / Free ebook: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, 3rd Edition

« on: July 03, 2014, 03:12 PM »

SitePoint just released a brand new 3rd edition of the book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" and through this weekend, are offering the ebook edition free of charge, bundled with a 14-day free trial of Learnable.

A credit card will be needed to take advantage of this offer. The Learnable membership will automatically renew at a rate of $29 per month at the end of the free trial, unless you cancel before that.

This link will take you directly to the shopping cart, preloaded with the special bundle.

http://email.learnab...iyilhrt-jyjiihxdt-t/

About that Learnable membership: You get unlimited online access to all of their books and courses for as long as you remain a member, plus 2 free downloads per month. Not sure if this free trial comes with any download credits, but if it does, they can be used to download additional books or sets of course videos, free of charge. So, don't cancel the membership without checking for that, first, otherwise you may end up throwing away the opportunity for another free book or 2.


Disclaimer: I do work for Sitepoint/Learnable, but do not receive any compensation from this offer or for posting about it here, nor have they even asked me to post about it here. I just like sharing free stuff.

40

Developer's Corner / Programming on a Keyboard… a Piano Keyboard

« on: June 25, 2014, 12:02 PM »

How can you tell a programmer from a musician? Ask them what C# is.

Imagine a MIDI trigger pad doing something like this:


^{(hitting the Push key really hard makes it do a git push -f)}

If you feel brave enough, you can even try to completely replace the computer keyboard with a digital piano. All you need is to have some piece of software on the computer to translate MIDI messages into computer commands. It could be a user-mode driver, or you can create a plug-in for your favoride IDE to teach it new tricks.

Which we did. Just for fun, I developed Midichlorian, a Visual Studio extension that allows you to write code and automate VS using MIDI instruments. And, inspired by The Song of Pi, my colleague Lana composed a song which is both a melody in the key of C# minor and a valid C# computer program. Watch her in action!

Complete with sheet music, Hello World: a Suite for Visual Studio in C# Minor

http://elekslabs.com...-piano-keyboard.html

from Versioning

41

Living Room / Watch lightning strikes in real-time

« on: June 23, 2014, 02:09 PM »

Pretty cool map visual...with sound. 

http://www.blitzortu...ang=en&page_0=30

from Versioning

42

Living Room / The Onion launches new site: Clickhole

« on: June 13, 2014, 04:38 PM »

The Onion has launched a new site aimed at parodying viral news sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc.

What is the goal of ClickHole?

Let’s be honest: Today, the average website carelessly churns out hundreds of pieces of pandering, misleading content, most of which tragically fall short of going viral.

At ClickHole, we refuse to stand for this. We strive to make sure that all of our content panders to and misleads our readers just enough to make it go viral. You see, we don’t think anything on the internet should ever have to settle for mere tens of thousands of pageviews. We believe that each and every article—whether about pop culture, politics, internet trends, or social justice—should be clicked on and shared by hundreds of millions of internet users before they can even comprehend what they just read.

ClickHole has one and only one core belief: All web content deserves to go viral.  

-http://www.clickhole.com/article/what-clickhole-230

http://www.clickhole.com/

from Versioning

43

General Software Discussion / Tizen OS declared 'dead in the water'

« on: June 13, 2014, 04:23 PM »

Days after Samsung introduced a Tizen OS-based smartphone, a UK-based analyst declared the operating system a non-starter, despite its backing by a consortium of heavyweights including Intel, Samsung and LG Electronics.

"Is Tizen going anywhere? In a word, no," wrote Andrew Sheehy, chief analyst for Generator Research in an online research report.

To support his view, Sheehy said the OS is five years behind Google's Android and Apple's iOS and has the support of only a small cadre of developers compared to the millions writing applications for Android and iOS. "Watching Tizen's development is like watching a car crash in slow motion," he wrote.

In comments to Computerworld, he added, "As far as a viable alternative to Android, Tizen is dead in the water."

http://www.computerw...d_dead_in_the_water_

44

Developer's Corner / Gamify your coding with Codeivate

« on: June 03, 2014, 05:03 PM »

Doesn't support very many text editors and IDEs, yet.

Don't be misled by any of the "free trial" buttons on the site. It's donationware. Payment to help support the site is appreciated and optional.

Think about how many hours you spend each day, month, and year, at work, school or home writing code. Codeivate is designed to record these allowing you to track your progress overtime, identify trends and compare yourself against others.
The more you code the higher level you will achieve in any of the 50+ languages Codeivate records. Code without getting distracted to earn Focus points.
Install the plugin through the Sublime package manager and check your stats in realtime. Compare yourself to others in the industry on the trends page. Log in to gain insight into your performance over the last week.
Codeivate is brought to you by a small, agile, experienced and passionate team from Wellington, New Zealand. Focused around crafting an interesting and useful service for programmers from beginner through to guru. Currently in beta and under active development Codeivate encourages self-improvement and motivates you to achieve mastery at your trade.

Features

•     Tracks 50+ languages including:
•         C++, Ruby, CSS, Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML
•     Community stats how are you doing vs the world?
•     API access see http://codeivate.com/beta-api or https://github.com/codeivate/api
•     Dynamicly updated signatures www.codeivate.com/users/paul/signature.jpg
•     editable from github.com/codeivate/signature
•     Online summary, compete with your friends
•     Personal detailed dashboard, whats your most productive time of day?
•     Easy installation through Sublime package control
•     Cross platform Sublime text integration
•     No hassle, passive recording
•     Range of notification settings growl, notify-send
•     Coderbits support

Benefits

•     Based on the recognised 10,000 hours philosophy
•     Trains you to focus
•     Makes coding into a game
•     Helps you to analyse and improve your work habits
•     Encourages self-improvement
•     Allows you to compare yourself with others in your industry

Roadmap

•     Developer team dashboards
•     More personal analytics
•     Improved cheating detection
•     Other IDE integrations
•     Ideas welcome.

http://www.codeivate.com

45

Living Room / The Internet With a Human Face

« on: May 27, 2014, 10:26 AM »

INTRODUCTION

Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference.

"Marc," I told him, "my talk is perfect for closing the conference! The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it's turning us all into lonely monsters.”

“But in the second half, I'll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I'll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we'll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world.”

Marc said that sounded fine.

As I was preparing this talk, however, I found it getting longer and longer. In the interests of time, I'm afraid I'm only going to be able to present the first half of it today.

This leaves me with a problem of tone.

To fix it, I've gone through the slides and put in a number of animal pictures. If at any point in the talk you find yourself getting blue, just tune out what I'm saying and wait for one of the animal slides, and you'll feel better. I've tried to put in more animals during the darkest parts of the talk.

Look at this guy! Isn't he great?

http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

from Versioning

46

Living Room / Netflix’s shame is the Internet’s gain thanks to SummaryBug

« on: May 23, 2014, 12:58 PM »

It’s no great revelation to say that our lives have become so dependent on technology we’re helpless without it. Who among us hasn’t lost his or her shit when the wi-fi went out for a few hours? But not all technological glitches are catastrophic, even by first world standards. Some are downright comical, like the bug Washington, D.C.-based computer programmer Bob Lannon discovered on his TV’s Netflix app. The bug causes the last sentence of a program summary to be switched with the last line of the next program’s summary, resulting in such jarring third-act shifts as “Director Sophie Fiennes and philosopher Slavoj Zizek journey into the epicenter of ideology through their interpretations of a need to battle the Green Goblin.” Netflix has yet to address the error, but that’s all the better for Lannon, who collects the amusing glitches on his @SummaryBug Twitter account and on the SummaryBug Tumblr page. They’re pretty great, and must do battle with sinister forces from another dimension.

from Versioning

47

Living Room / Everything Is Broken

« on: May 22, 2014, 08:38 PM »

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1

from Versioning

48

Living Room / Correlation is not causation

« on: May 10, 2014, 01:05 PM »

You have heard that said, maybe even said it yourself. But there are those that still don't get it. Spurious Correlations will help illustrate it in a way that others can understand. 1000's of examples. Have fun finding the craziest ones.

http://tylervigen.com/

49

Living Room / Wooden toy teaches preschoolers to code before they can read and write

« on: January 17, 2014, 07:15 PM »

Hoping to teach children the basics of coding from as young as three years of age, Primo is on the surface a wooden toy for children, but is in fact a robotics kit that uses a visual block-based language to enable kids to learn how to program.

The play set features a small, motorized cube called Cubetto, which is wirelessly connected to a wooden board with several slots in it. The board acts as the programming interface and children control Cubetto by placing the code - color-coded instruction blocks - into the slots. Once the blocks have been placed, pressing a red button on the side of the board executes the code and sends Cubetto to the programmed destination. The four blocks of the code include forward, turn left, turn right and a function block. The programming board includes a separate section where users can create a ‘saved’ sequence of code they can call at any time - when the function block is placed into the main code, it replays the piece of code stored in the function box. This replicates the way languages such as PHP and JavaScript use functions. This feature can even be hacked to create infinite loops.

Video: http://vimeo.com/82620072

http://primo.io/

h/t Rich Pollett

50

Living Room / MOVED: Faith under the microscope.

« on: December 20, 2013, 05:56 AM »

This topic has been moved to The Basement.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34701.0