W-Shadow.com

Behold, my lame attempt to recreate the robotic spacecraft in Spore Creature Editor! 😛 You can’t really make asymmetric creatures in the Creature Creator, so I couldn’t add all the equipment to the top surface. Also, no parts match the solar panel coloring well enough, hence no panels. Eh, it was fun anyway.

I figured I’ll give Twitter a shot. Again. My Twitter account = white_shadow I signed up about a year ago because it was mentioned in the ThirtyDayChallenge. But I never really did anything with it – I didn’t “get” the social marketing aspect promoted in the TDC, and had no actual purpose. So I let […]

According to Google Trends, people search for “google” more often than they search for “sex”. As you can see from the graph, Google beats the primal instinct by a pretty small margin. Still, damn.

Google has done it again. Just today, I discovered they have banned a specific keyword Google Trends because it was being used to estimate search volume of other keywords. This makes me, as the Cheshire cat would say, vaguely discombobulated, and willing to consider some far-fetched conspiracy theories.

As part of a little side project, I’ve written a script that determines the most “dugg” and most “buried” Digg.com comments for the day. It can also find the discussion thread that contains the most diggs. Only popular submissions are checked for comments. I’ve put it up at TheBestOfDigg.com. The idea is to post the […]

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 […]

Things to do when your bored. Have no idea about what to do when you are bored? This extra-large list of stuff might help.

My latest programming project (which I’ll discuss in a later post; it’s about DeviantArt) is still in the research phase, so today it is again time for another post of diversion and miscellany. And random music stuff. What Was A few years ago I temporarily bought into the common illusion that “it can’t be that […]

And now, for something completely different! All of my programming projects are currently in various stages of R&D, and I’ve got no scripts or algorithms to show you today. Fortunately I have other interests, too, like visual art and magic 😉 So here are some amateurish photos I’ve taken.

Touchscreens definitely have their place in the so-called modern consumer electronics market, but some people just take it too far. A recent article predicted that soon the now-ubiquitous keyboard & mouse combination would be totally extinct. All computers would come equipped with huge (50 inches!) touchscreens that would double as virtual keyboards, and you’d do all the point-and-click stuff with your fingers. Now I’m annoyed by these ridiculous predictions, so I’m going to devote a blog post (this one) to why I think they are wrong.

I read a very interesting post today. It tries to prove that science – as opposed to religion – is not faith-based. The story also got on Digg frontpage and was heavily discussed there. One comment thread in particular caught my attention, and it gave me some ideas that I feel I should write down […]

Here’s the step-by-step guide for converting FLAC to MP3. I tried out several free FLAC to MP3 converters prior to writing this tutorial and according to my testing, dBpoweramp seems to be the best choice…

It seems logical that mutual friendship could have been produced by evolution – the I help you, you help me, contract-style relationship can be seen as beneficial even from the selfish PoV or evolution. What caught me by surprise was the idea that true friendship – perseverant, everlasting despite circumstances – is also a product of survival of the fittest. This post talks about some interesting ideas in CFAI.

A few days ago I saw an IRC quote that went basically like this : When voice control interfaces finally go mainstream, the very first thing they need to do is make “Oh fuck!!!” immediately abort and undo the latest command or task. Sounds fun. Below is my lame attempt to produce some ideas along […]

Randall Munroe, of XKCD fame, just posted a very interesting blag entry (sic) about an interesting way to ensure that IRC discussion remain unique and thoughtful. The idea itself is very simple, and I sure did get the slightly annoying feeling of “damn-this-is-obvious” when reading the post. The trick is that, as far as I […]

Google has a free keyword suggestion tool that is supposed find keywords related to a phrase or a website’s URL that you enter. I tried Google.com and got some weird suggestions, like “grave images”. I’m aware of the fact that Google’s bots see websites differently than humans do, but this was unexpected. So I went and tried entering some other popular websites – just for fun. Here are the results.

A short and whimsical list of weird ways to lose some weight (mostly aimed at guys). It’s a semi-serious parody of the ubiquitous Top X lists.

I just found out about the Wikipedia “scandal” recently (by reading a webcomic), and somehow my thoughts turned immediately to how this could be exploited. Monetary rewards are unlikely, but one could get a good bit of publicity/backlinks… if they found a way to attract the attention of the same people who voted the aforementioned “scandal” to the frontpage of Digg. Here are some ideas on how to do just that.

This is something I made just for fun – a comic parodying the typical global warming, green technology and hybrid cars stories and discussions on Digg. It turned out a bit more violent than I anticipated, well, so be it. This is my first try at making a comic, so don’t judge harshly.

A short tutorial that explains what the WPS file extension is and how you can convert .wps files to .doc. There are several free WPS to DOC converters, including an online tool that you can use even if you do not have MS Word…

We have spam filters, okay, but what about stupidity filters? Surely there is a way to automatically distinguish between the “LOOOL u SUcK” junk and intelligent discourse? – that’s what the authors of StupidFilter must have thought when starting up the project. A new program for catching – not spam, but obtuse – comments is being developed. Might have other uses, too.

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 […]

…And I’m still going to post a bunch funny quotes anyway. I’m currently busy trying to improve the site structure, so instead of long-winded tech-speak you’ll have to endure my sense of humor 😉

The names have been changed for no particular reason. Here goes!

Here are some things I probably won’t do/implement – Web20Rank Alexa is inaccurate, Technorati is inaccurate, PR is worthless, inbound links can be bought. Idea – create a new ranking system based on an aggregate of things like Digg votes, del.icio.us bookmarks, stumbles and a whole lot of other social bookmarking services. Throw in the […]

I spent a while today wondering what to post about. I have an aptly named file on my desktop – “arggr.txt” (apparently I had misspelled “arrgh”). That’s where I store most of my ideas. Since I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a “feeling” for the audience/people in general, I looked through some of the […]

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: disk […]

The picture was taken by my sister a few months ago and I just recently realized that it can be used to represent the eternal conflict between search engines and blackhat webmasters, in a comical way. Or some such. Anyway, enjoy! 🙂

As I was, weary and tired, in the darkness, in the wind as weak as my hope, in the starless night, and cold enough to know the autumn. As I was walking in circles I saw someone looking at me from the eastward, forest. What do you want?, I asked grimly. Your soul, said the […]

Have you noticed the bit of the subheading up there on this page that says “(and some magic)”? It’s a kind of disclaimer; it gives me the justification to post just about any crazy rant I want. Unfortunately I don’t do that very often, if ever. It’s all programming and tutorials on this blog. Well, […]

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 […]