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If you don’t care about amatteur philosophy/self-development/logic, I recommend you ignore this post. This is a pure rant, so I’ll try to keep it short. There’s this unbelievably popular self-development blogger Steve Pavlina. Some of his posts are quite insightful and have practical uses. Some make we want to embed my head in a concrete […]

Recently I ran into a situation where I needed to convert some relatively obscure archive files (e.g. RAR) to the ZIP format. That’s easy enough if you only need to deal with a single file – just extract it using your favorite archiver and re-compress the extracted files as .zip. However, manually converting dozens of […]

I promised (in the Tree Link project) to post the “Trees For The Future” certificate when it arrives, so here it is 🙂 On an unrelated note, I’m having trouble with my wisdom tooth. Posting frequency will be diminished for a while.

As I discovered just a few minutes ago, Google Image Search has a feature that lets you restrict your search only to images that contain faces. However, it looks like the algorithm still has a few kinks to be worked out… Take a look at the first result of this image search query : I […]

December has just passed, so here’s and update on my experimental charity project. According to my stats, the Tree Link received nine links, which means I have to sponsor nine new trees. That’s not a lot, but it’s a start. And, since it’s New Year (more or less), I’ll throw in some additional $ and […]

Take a look at this cool homemade keyboard. Plus an accompanying rant about how surely there has to be something interesting in the gap between QWERTY and a brain implant.

Christmas – the time of goodwill and gifts and all that philosophical stuff – is coming. So, in the spirit of the season, I’ve decided to start up an unusual charity project/experiment. Here’s the idea in a nutshell – for every link you point to this page, I will sponsor one new tree through the […]

Optional Intro [skip straight to instructions] It all started in the ancient days of 5 Years Ago when I, as a poor university student, couldn’t afford a spacious 1TB hard drive. Instead I used CDs and DVDs to store and transfer large files, e.g. movies and music. Over the years, I accumulated huge stacks of […]

Meta : A snowstorm has killed my Internet access, so I couldn’t answer emails and comments – sorry! Should get my uplink working in 4-5 days. In the meantime, here’s some delicious filler delivered via an unreliable GPRS hack… In this post you will find a small collection of potentially interesting or useful links. I […]

Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Even if the name doesn’t ring any bells you’re probably familiar with the basic idea : stupid people tend to overestimate their competence and underestimate the competence of others. The effect was famously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by two researchers (Justin Kruger and David Dunning) in […]

In the last few months I’ve spent about $100 on PC games and about $40 on sci-fi books. In the same period, I’ve spent exactly $0 on research that could actually bring about the future envisioned by those games and books. What about you? In a recent article, IO9 paints a bleak picture of our […]

Indeed, my inescapable tendency for invention procrastination has given us yet another piece of useless but potentially amusing statistics. The idea is simple : take 5000 recent comments from both Digg and Reddit and create two tag clouds using Wordle. In theory this should provide a bird’s-eye overview of the topics discussed by users of […]

Browsing popular science/tech news sites often creates an impression that great new advancements and products are just around the corner, but somehow they seem to never actually arrive. Common examples include super-efficient solar cells and cures for cancer or AIDS. If one is to believe the news stories there is a new breakthrough nearly every […]

If you frequent science and tech-related sites you will have noticed that some topics seem to come up all the time. Genetic engineering, AI, nanotechnology – there’s one breakthrough discovery after another, all promising the next Industrial Revolution very soon indeed, probably within our lifetimes. The revolution(s) may actually arrive – there’s definitely plenty of […]

I’ve noticed there is a cycle of information creation and information consumption. When I run out of ideas I can’t simply sit there and wait for some bright thought to pop into my head – ex nihilo nihil fit. I start going on walkabouts, playing with things and looking for interesting material online. Receiving new […]

After reading a recent article about how the Internet could become alive I started wondering what it would be like if it actually did and wrote down some of my musings. Note that this is more of an outline than an actual article. (Internet map image via Wikipedia) Network Subconscious We, as humans, are not […]

These are not the droids you’re looking for. Let me clear this up for all the people looking for .rar file converters (and trust me, there are many) : RAR files are simply archives, just like ZIP files. They contain other files and folders in a compressed form. The compression, encryption and volume splitting features […]

Yay, another tutorial. In this short how-to I will show you an easy way to convert FLV files (AKA Flash video) to AVI. We’ll use a freeware video converter that is designed specifically for converting from the FLV format and works on most versions of Windows. So, without further ado, let’s get started. 1. Download […]

I’ve seen this question a few times on various Linux forums – how do you play FLV files (AKA Flash video) on Linux? – so I figured I’d write up a short post about my favorite Linux FLV player. As you would expect, it’s open source and it can also handle lots of video formats […]

A short web series of comedic sketches about an extremely angry astronaut stranded on the Moon. The good aspects include ebjoyably predictable plot twists and cliches set in an unusual environment. The bad aspects… well, pretty much the same. The whole thing (all 6 episodes together) is less than 20 minutes, so you probably wouldn’t […]

If you get the error saying “Regedit has been disabled by the system administrator” when trying to use the Windows XP registry editor, fear not. There is an easy way to re-enable regedit. Click Start -> Run… and enter this command (all on one line) : REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 […]

In some FPS games the players view will move slightly from side to side (or up and down) when walking or running. This is known as “camera shake” or “headbob”, a so-called “feature” that is supposed to add realism to the game. The most extreme example that I’ve seen is in S.T.A.L.K.E.R : Shadow of […]

I checked my blog this evening and discovered that every page redirected to some stupid malware site (offline now, was http://scanner.antivir64.com/?aff=1050). It was immediately obvious that I had been hacked. Fuck, that’s a first. Emergency Measures It took me about 30 minutes to get the site back to normal and start investigating. WP 2.6.1 has […]

I’m busy with an AJAX+PHP+Google Trends experiment this week and I can’t bring myself to write a complete post, so here’s a random assortment of interesting links instead 🙂 High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity Lucid thouhts on online anonymity and why TOR is not a panacea. […]

I don’t have a consistent stance on copyright and intellectual property – I suspect most people don’t. We just make do with shaky beliefs and half-assed ideals. So I decided to finally think it through and come up with some sort of philosophical basis on this issue. Below is the the resulting epic rant. If […]

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.

Here’s something funny I found today : pic div fade in slow shadow current menu show find content replace all span div append to table row Shamelessly stolen from this Russian site. Okay, so it’s not syntactically correct 😛 I’m sure you can still reconstruct the original JavaScript if need be.

Yes, I’m talking about backlinks, the spawn of evil. Everybody craves them, craves the promise of power, wealth and getting laid that links offer. And this craving is both abhorrent to and blessed by the mischievous higher powers, a dangerous path leading into the darkness. Outrageous! Here’s further proof that links are the cause of […]

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.

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 […]