Possibly the best sociopolitical song of the last decade.
Aid Dealer
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Circumventing DNS-level ISP blocks (ThePirateBay – Belgium)
Today, two of Belgium’s biggest operators, Telenet and Belgacom, got a court order to block the website ThePirateBay.org, and about 20 alternative URL’s to the same site. The court ordered them to do a DNS-level block of the domain names, which is easy to circumvent. I’m writing this post because I’m against censorship on the internet (this sets a dangerous precedent), not because I’m in favor of copyright infringement or other illegal activities.
Update: In a bold move to demonstrate how silly this kind of censorship is, The Pirate Bay is now also reachable at www.depiraatbaai.be. All tips in this article can still be used to be able to access the bay from the old URL and prevent further blocks.
Sources: Torrentfreak, Tweakers.net
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Sleep Sort
Usually, the only content coming from open-message-board extravaganza 4chan is … questionable, at best, but someone pitched a sorting algorithm that’s trivial, beautiful and a bit unique: Sleep Sort. Bonus points for having a great lazy name, and it does work. It basicly forks a process and lets it sleep for n seconds, where n is the current number to be sorted. The final output is a sorted array of numbers. You can pick the timeticks smaller than seconds, and voila.
#!/bin/bash
function f() {
sleep "$1"
echo "$1"
}
while [ -n "$1" ]
do
f "$1" &
shift
done
wait
When it comes to complexity, it’s actually a cleverly disguised bucket sort, with an average case complexity of O(n+m) with m the largest number in the sequence and n the amount of elements. Am I wrong? Discuss!
Hipsters
Seriously, why would you want to have your picture looking like it was taken 30 years ago?
Cut your ‘vintage’ obsession and stop making your snapshots look like shit. But hey, don’t take my word for it, Mike Polk knows best.
Call of Pripyat
I’ve been enjoying playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Call of Pripyat lately, which is the third installment in the series. For people who don’t know the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games: they are based in the fictituous radioactive ‘zone’ which was created after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsy. You play a ‘stalker’, which is the name the book uses for adventurous people entering the zone to find anomalies, artifacts and unknown technology, which spawned when the disaster happened.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games were made by Ukranian developer GSC Game World, and they have tendency to be a little rough around the edges: lots of crashes, glitches and bugs. Sometimes it seems like the promise of an open world with non-linear story progression and unhampered discovery was a bit too much for a relatively small studio. Luckily, the internet always finds a way: an artist going by the name of Pavel has compiled a mod called “Call of Pripyat Complete“, which bundles a gigantic amount of new artwork, scripts, weather effects and bug fixes.
DD-WRT: How to turn your simple home router into an enterprise-grade system
I bought a simple D-Link 600 router a couple of weeks ago – you can easily pick them up at your local outlet for $30 or less. I specifically chose that model because I wanted to install DD-WRT on it – you can check the availability for your router on the DD-WRT Hardware Database. DD-WRT is custom firmware for routers, which basicly installs a stripped-down linux system running a web interface which allows you to configure a lot of additional services and settings on your device. Some of my personal favorites:
Boosting Wifi TX Power: DD-WRT allows you to change the Wifi TX Power. The default for my router was 71 milliWatt, but I found I could easily crank it up to 128 without
overheating the router hardware. This results in a stronger signal and less dropped packets on my wifi connection.- Added security: The ability to filter out certain cookies, ActiveX scripts and advertisements at router-level (thus protecting every machine behind it) is extremely handy.
- Easy Port Forwarding: We’ve all been there, forwarding ports for our favorite games/P2P services/ … DD-WRT offers a clean overview of the rules you installed (with no maximum amount of rules), and even shows the current UPnP rules which were setup up by applications on the network.
- QoS: By using some filters, you can make sure that your big downloads do not interrupt with streaming movies or online gaming.
- OpenVPN: On the router itself – no more fiddling around on the clients.
- Detailed overview of bandwidth usage: Even real-time graphs!
- Detailed logging
- Another linux box to log into: Always nice, no?
And much, much more. A lot of this functionality is usually only available in high-end router hardware, but thanks to the power of Linux and open-source, is now freely available for users all over the world. Heartily recommended!
Amok in Speedo’s
Disclaimer: following post is in Dutch, because it’s about a local issue. Google translate to the rescue if you’re interested!
Normaal beperk ik mij op deze persoonlijke blog tot het schrijven van lichtjes geeky stukken over graphics, programmeertalen en nuja, stukken die ergens alleen interessant zijn voor mensen die eenzelfde interessegebied delen. Ik voel me daar OK bij – schoenmaker, blijf bij je leest.
Ik ben geen begenadigd schrijver, laat staan een inspirerend opiniemaker, maar de kwestie rond de overlast in het BLOSO-domein van Hofstade, de media-coverage van het probleem en de zogenaamde ‘oplossing’ heeft de laatste tijd zoveel hypocriet stof doen opwaaien dat mijn ogen tranen. En ja, dan schrijf ik – tussen de zoute tranen door – eens een opiniestuk – hoe verhakseld en stijlloos het er ook moge uitkomen. U bent gewaarschuwd.
Boosting Wifi signal by picking a different channel
Here’s just a small writeup of a good way I found to boost your Wifi signal. If you’re living in a residential area, you’ve probably noticed how more and more people have their own wireless networks. Unfortunately, most of the hardware which is distributed today is set to transmit data in channel 6, which is the band around 2437 Mhz. You can check this excellent site for more info about Wifi frequencies.
Wifi frequency bands (from Geekzone)
You can probably see where this is going: a lot of hardware transmit data in the same frequency band, which causes a bit of trouble. If you’re suffering from a lot of connection loss, it might be a good idea to switch the transmit channel on on your router. It seems like the recommended tool for Windows is Netstumbler. If you’re using Linux, the regular iwscan can reveal what channels your neighbouring networks are running in.
I personally used the excellent Wifi Analyzer for android, which gave me a nice graph about the channel distribution in my neighbourhood. Caution when picking a new channel: some of the bands overlap, as you can see in the picture above.
Douglas Adams: How To Stop Worrying and Learn to love the Internet
Happy Towel day everyone! I think this is the right day to quote some parts from a column the great Douglas Adams wrote in The Sunday Times in 1999 – mind you: more than a decade ago!
What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Another great quote:
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
You can read the full text here. RIP, Mr. Adams. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Cecial: A mixtape
Here’s a mixtape I did this weekend. Contains a lot of music/samples I consider to have a great atmosphere. I also managed to cram in my remix of Nina Simone’s Don’t Explain (around 25:03) and the Noise version of Doves’ Firesuite (around 51:22). Full tracklist behind the cut.
It’s all pretty obscure stuff, and definitely not for easy listening.
Main tracklist, cuts and snippets not mentioned:
Radiohead - The Butcher Massive Attack - Paradise Circus (Gui Boratto Remix) Burial - Street Halo RJD2 - Smoke & Mirrors Mylo - Sunworshipper Moby - I Love To Move In Here DJ Shadow - Blood On The Motorway Royksopp - 40 Years Back Come Nina Simone - Don't Explain U.N.K.L.E - Be There Laurent Garnier - Greed (Avril Radio Mix) The Antlers - Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out Luke Slater - Walk The Line James Blake - I Mind Trentemöller - Always Something Better Faithless - Pastoral Gill Scott-Heron & Jamie XX - NY is Killing Me Doves - Firesuite (Noise Version) Four Tet - Angel Echoes Royksopp - A Higher Place Luke Slater - Weave Your Web Gorillaz - M1 A1 Burial & Thom Yorke & Four Tet - Ego Thom Yorke - The Clock (Surgeon Remix) These New Puritans - We Want War (SBTRKT Remix) Massive Attack - Karmacoma (Portishead remix) Junior Boys - When I'm Not Around Secret Agent Gel - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise) DJ Shadow - Stem (Cops & Robbers Mix) The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Part 2) RJD2 - The Horror Santagold ft. Diplo - Guns of Brooklyn (Doc and Jon Hill Dub) Moby - Pale Horses DJ Shadow - Broken Levee Blues
Mixed using Audacity.