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How to recover or export cached passwords from the Opera Wand password manager. While the Wand does not have a built-in recovery function you can use free third-party tools or simple JS hacks to restore Wand passwords.

A list of free tools and tutorials that will let you convert your disk image files from various proprietary formats (e.g. MDF, NRG, DMG and so on) to the universally supported ISO format.

HTTP redirects usually have the response status 301 or 302 and provide the redirection URL in the “Location” header. I’ve written three complementary PHP functions that you can use to find out where an URL redirects to (based on a helpful thread at WebmasterWorld). You don’t even need CURL for this - fsockopen() will do [...]

ImageShack torrent service does not support download resuming for the HTTP download links. However, there is a way to work around that if you are tech-savvy…

DeviantART is a huge artist community. Twitter is a huge… blogging thing. Obviously some kind of combination/mashup is mandatory, so I figured out how to get your deviations automatically posted to Twitter. Yeah, I’m bored.
First, you will need to figure out your DeviantART RSS feed address. The generic form is this :
http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=by%3Ausername+sort%3Atime
Replace “username” with [...]

A simple PHP function that can make TOR switch to a new identity. The script also supports TOR authentication.

A short guide that describes how to add the Identify as Opera/IE/Firefox user agent options to the Quick Preferences popup menu. This method works in Opera 9.5 and, hopefully, later versions.

I was looking at some search stats and noticed that this question (how to become a vampire?) was more common than you might expect. Every day, nearly 100 people were looking for a way to join the ranks of the stylish undead. “An interesting topic for a little tutorial”, I thought. Hence this post.
It seems [...]

I’m currently lacking real “bloggable” ideas, so here’s something simple and hopefully useful - a PHP script to get the blog search results from Google. The script is provided strictly for educational purposes, blah blah blah.
And by the way, if you only need the top X results, it would be simpler to use the Blogsearch’s [...]

Google Image Search doesn’t get as much time in the spotlight as the “normal” Web Search, but it’s still useful for things like finding suitable illustrations for an article (Flickr also comes to mind). Whatever you use it for, you can often get results faster with a bit of automation. Here’s a simple PHP script that can parse and return the results of any Image Search query. For education purposes only.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a lossless audio compression format. It’s often used to digitally store and transfer music without any loss in quality. The files tend to be rather large though - for example, 3 minutes of audio could take up around 18 Mb.
On the other hand, MP3 is a lossy [...]

A review of a free Opera plugin that can highlight nofollow links, display Alexa rank and PageRank, show the number of backlinks that a page or a domain has, and more. Basically it is a full-featured SEO toolbar for the Opera web browser.

Over the last few days I’ve been tweaking my AdSense ads and trying to improve their relevance, with good results - last Sunday was the highest-earning day for this site since… well, since ever. There was no large increase in traffic, so it’s really because of the changes I made. Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation…

The are many reasons why someone might want to detect if users are accessing their site via a proxy. For one, all spammers use proxies. Proxies can also be used to cheat voting systems, create multiple accounts when only one account is allowed or make it appear like the user is browsing from a different [...]

Description of the WPS file extension and how you can open WPS files or convert them to DOC format. There are several free WPS to DOC converters, including an online tool that you can use even if you do not have MS Word or are using a Mac.1

The UIF Format
The UIF file extension stands for Universal Image Format. An UIF file contains a compressed disk image - basically it is an exact copy of a CD or a DVD. Just like the more common ISO filetype, the UIF format is typically used to create CD/DVD backups. The UIF file format also offers [...]

If you hadn’t noticed, Half-Life 2 : Episode Two has just arrived. I’ve been waiting for this since Episode One (as have many thousands of gamers, I’m sure), and what happens when I want to finally buy it on Steam? Turns out I had stupidly installed Steam in the default location, and my C: [...]

I’ve noticed that whenever I search for a “php upload script” or “how to upload files”, the first page of Gogle results is full of pages that tell you how to handle file uploads = letting users to upload something to your server. But what if you actually want to create a PHP script that [...]

Sometimes it is necessary to verify that a page really contains a specific link. This is usually done when checking for a reciprocal link in link exchange scripts.

Sometimes I just feel like killing something, and I’m not the only one. So what do people do when they want to do something and don’t know how? They google it! Here’s a list of most popular killing-related search queries people type in Google. I used Wordtracker’s free tool to find the keywords and GTrends [...]

Free PDF to Word converters are hard to come by - in fact, until recently there was absolutely no way to do this conversion without either buying an expensive propiertary tool. Today I discovered a great online tool that will convert any PDF file to a Microsoft Word document, and it’s completely free.

Everything you need to know about what DAA files are, how to open a DAA file, how to convert DAA files to other formats and even how to play them as if they were normal CD or DVD disks. Useful if you got a copy (image file) of a DVD movie or game and don’t know what DVD software to use to open it.

I’ve decided to discuss free WinZip alternatives and .zip software in general. While WinZip is by far the most popular program for handling Zip files, it is only one of many. In fact, if all you need is something to open .zip files and you don’t need the additional “features” of WinZip (like FTP uploading or DVD burning which can both be handled by other software), you can easily make do with free Zip software and might be better off for that.

Got a RAR file and do not know how to open it? This article about free RAR extractors will help you find the best .rar extractor for your operating system.

Say you want a PHP script that will make the browser to download a file instead of opening it. This is useful for common filetypes that would normally be displayed in a browser, like .html, images, PDFs and .doc files.
You can find a lot of scripts that do this on the web but one thing [...]

Here’s a relatively simple PHP function that will check if an URL really leads to a valid page (as opposed to generating “404 Not Found” or some other kind of error). It uses the CURL library - if your server doesn’t have it installed, see “Alternatives” at the end of this post. This script may [...]

The 3 Easy Steps

Create an application
It doesn’t have to be anything special. One way is to find a free screensaver builder and use a bunch of royalty-free photos to make your own slideshow screensaver. Make the application freeware - it’s easier and faster. If you actually create something worthy, you might set up a vendor [...]

What would you do if you wanted to run several instances of a PHP script that each work on a portion of a MySQL table, without interfering with each other and trying to grab the same rows? I don’t know the correct answer to this, but here’s what I did. It’s a rant, yeah.

A PHP function that extracts all URLs from a page and another one that translates a relative URL to absolute URL. Originally I wrote this for a crawler script.

If you’ve ever written a server-side script intended for distribution (as opposed to personal use), you’ve probably encountered the problem of needing to write a tutorial detailing the installation and setting up of the script. There are several typical tasks that you might need to describe - setting file permissions, creating a database, etc.
Don’t [...]