Hackszine.com: Lifehacker Archives

Archive: Lifehacker

Page 1 of 4 1 2 3 4 >>

April 21, 2008

Post your Earth Day hacks

In celebration of my favorite planet, I'd like to open the comments up to any and all Earth Day hacks, links and activities. Think of it as an opportunity to quickly catalog a list of ideas and tools that can be used for the other 364 days of the year.

Here are a few simple things that you can do tomorrow. I figure it's as good a day as any to start forming a few practical habits, so for my list, I just chose a number of things that you can easily make a regular part of your day.

Bike to work. If you need to find a route, citybikemap.com is a good user contributed resource
Compost the garbage. If you don't have a composter, here are some construction ideas from Instructables: Sinmple Pentagon Composter; Mini Wooden Portable Compost Bin; Trench Composter
Avoid the purchase of anything with excess packaging
Turn lights off when not in use. Convert remaining incandescent bulbs to CFL
Check faucets and toilets for leaky valves. For your toilets, shut off the water while you are at work and see if the water level goes down in the tank. It's a common problem that's easy to fix.
Print no emails.
Bring a mug to work and use it instead of styrofoam or paper cups.
Reconnect with nature: start a garden; go for a hike; take the kids out and identify some plants and birds.
Reclaim some of the yard for native plants and grasses.
Encourage others to do the same, and share your own Earth-friendly tips and hacks.

You may be more or less ambitious, but I think this represents something that's feasible for much of the year. It'd be cool to get a read on what the hacker community is doing to make a positive impact on the globe, so make sure to post your own Earth Day hacks and resolutions in the comments.

March 28, 2008

CSS ad blocking for Firefox and Safari

Using Firefox's CSS-based chrome feature or Safari's advanced stylesheet preferences and a little clever CSS coding, you can disable most banner ads, making them invisible in your browser. This technique is considerably easier and more flexible than setting up a private DNS server or proxy to filter out images from ad-serving domains.

The trick is setting up a number of CSS rules that use "*=" substring selection on an element's properties. For instance, matching an IFRAME tag with the SRC parameter containing doubleclick would look like IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] and matching an anchor tag with an HREF containing a url with "ads." in it would look like A:link[HREF*="ads."]. Giving the style "display: none ! important" to all of the possible combinations and adding the stylesheet to your browser's chrome effectively turns off the ad-serving web. The site below has a comprehensive CSS file that's been tailored to assassinate ads from most networks.

To be honest, I didn't realize that you could do this type of parameter matching and subselection in CSS, so it's worth looking at the CSS source for that alone. If you don't use it for this purpose, perhaps the technique will come in handy for something else you are working on.

Better Ad Blocking for Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, and Safari
Ad Blocking userContent.css

February 7, 2008

FART: easy grep-like utility for Windows

The Find And Replace Text utility is a handy little command-line tool to have if you're a Windows user. It can function as a simple grep-like utility for quickly searching through whole directories of files, and you can also use it to perform mass search and replace operations on a file or group of files.

The command format is fart <options> filename search <replace>. Basic options are -r (recursive), -c (print filename and match count), -i (ignore case), -n (print matched line numbers), --c-style (interpret backslashes as c-style characters).

For example, let's say a Linux buddy of yours sent you a bunch of html files and they have unix line endings that are barfing in notepad. One simple command fixes the problem, replacing all the newlines with a full PC carriage return, line feed combo:

fart --c-style *.html \n \r\n

Or perhaps you need to quickly track down some work that is left to be done throughout a big project directory. You can use fart to recursively search a directory and spit out all the file names and line numbers containing the text "TODO":

fart -nr * TODO

It's easy to see how you could shoot yourself in the foot with this one. Make sure to fart with caution and back up your files before doing a big search and replace.

FART @ SourceForge - Link

February 1, 2008

Meta-model: tools for clarifying communication

Hackszine reader nathaN writes:

i have mind performance hacks here on my lap, and i found hack 56. you included transformational grammar, surface/deep structure, you have to be aware of this other book on my desk, next to my lap. The book describes a method of using transformational grammar to analyze statements and gather incredible amounts of information, the technique is called the Meta Model, i had to write this post after i found #56 in your book. it's out of print, i think, but it's not too hard to find used if you make a few calls. it cost ME $35, but its probably online as well, torrents or whatever =(
its the single most useful "hack" i've ever found, ive been using it for about an year and it gives me more options than i know how to take advantage of.

The Structure of Magic I, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Introduction by Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson.
Science and Behavior Books, Inc
copyright 1975

Unfortunately, the Google Books entry for The Structure of Magic I wasn't a full scanned version. There is, however, a wealth of information about the Meta-model and other Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tools on Wikipedia:

The meta-model in neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a heuristic set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person's model of the world. It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker's language.

In the process of communicating, the mind is forced to translate a person's experiences and their internal understanding of the world into words, making language a highly optimized and compressed representation of a complex internal mental state. This translation occurs a second time, as the listener parses language and interprets that communication based on their own mental world model and past experiences.

The meta-model provides tools for quickly parsing the structure of a communication, determining implied meaning, and locating potential points of misunderstanding. When you can recognize the linguistic translation artifacts that are common patterns in the communication process, you can respond to them. On the receiving end, this helps you better understand the experiences that underlie the speaker's language. On the sending end, it helps you to better communicate without misunderstanding. Internally, it helps you to analyze and debug your own model of the world.

Meta-model (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - Link
Mind Performance Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link

January 29, 2008

Remove shake and motion blur from photos

It's a real drag when you think you've taken a great picture, only to load it up in photoshop and discover that your hands weren't as steady as you thought they were. Depending on the magnitude of your error, chances are you can correct most small camera bumps or pans using a deconvolution filter. The particular technique used depends on which package you use, but they are all built around manipulating the image in the frequency domain to reduce the photo's linear blurring.

Nathan Willis dissected three applications for removing the effects of camera movement from your photos. Two of them, Refocus and Iterative Refocus, are open source Gimp plugins. The third, Unshake, is a closed source Java application that is capable of producing high-quality results with little user effort (though your CPU will be hurting for a minute or two).

If you watch the movies, you have probably seen the impossibly accurate "computer enhancement" hand-waving that turns a blurry mess into a crystal clear mug shot or license plate for the hero to chase. Real-world image enhancement is not that good, but you may still be surprised at the level of quality a good Fast Fourier Transform and deconvolution can produce.
All three of these applications produce admirable results. Refocus is the fastest, and subjectively Unshake produces the cleanest results. It is unfortunate that among the three alternatives, one is not free software and the other two lack active maintainership. But since the math is well understood, maybe someone will pick up where the other programmers left off, and bring even better refocusing technology to the image editors of tomorrow.

The above photo is from the Unshake site. It seems to work well for predominately straight-line blurs over the range of 8 pixels or less. I haven't tried the two Gimp plugins, but I have a feeling the Iterative Refocus package could produce the best results given enough tweaking of the setting.

It's all Fast Fourier Transforms and way over my head, but it works (and frankly, if it was good enough for the Hubble, it's good enough for me).

Unshaking and refocusing your photos - Link
Unshake - Link
Refocus - Link
Iterative Refocus - Link

January 3, 2008

GrabFS: the screenshot file system

GrabFS is a clever MacFUSE-based file system created by Amit Singh that creates a live screenshot file system for all of your running applications.

When you run GrabFS, a new drive volume will appear. Inside, you'll find a folder for each running application, and inside each application directory, you'll find a tiff file for each of the application's windows. When you drag, copy or open one of these files, you get a snapshot of the application window at that point in time.

GrabFS requires Leopard and the Leopard build of MacFUSE. I think it's time for me to upgrade.

GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - Link
MacFUSE - Link

December 25, 2007

Lecturefox: free university lectures

I think MIT coined the term Open Courseware, but there are several other universities that are releasing lecture videos for free online. Now, tracking down a particular subject matter is made quite a bit easier because of a project titled Lecturefox. From the about page:

What is Lecturefox?
It's all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category "faculty mix" you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

I really like what they've done in collating these resources into a single index. Tracking the companion blog's RSS feed, you can get updates about new material that's become available. Video, audio and text courseware are included in the index and it appears to be actively maintained and comprehensive, especially for computer science and other math/science related courses.

Forget your other new years resolutions. You couldn't do much better than treating yourself to a free lecture every weekend.

Lecturefox: Free University Lecture Index - Link
Lecturefox Blog - Link
Previously: Bootstrap Education - Link

December 21, 2007

Essential hacker stocking stuffers

Like most of us, you've probably got some last-minute shopping to take care of. Or maybe there's a special someone in your life who keeps asking you for gift ideas and you need to start dropping hints to avoid another button down and a neck tie. Whatever the reason, here's a quick and dirty hacker gift guide with a variety of gift ideas that should put a smile on someone's face.

Make sure to add your own favorites to the list in the comments area and pass it along. I'm focusing primarily on smaller items that are available in local stores, but feel free to toss in whatever you think is important and shouldn't be missed.

Reading Material:

Make: The Best Of - a killer collection of the best 75 projects from our favorite magazine.
The Dangerous Book For Boys - this is a great book for sharing with your kids. Chock-full of essential information like how to tie knots, play poker, use a compass, build a tree house, and relate to girls.
Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition - the swiss army knife for your computer.
Illustrated Guide To Astronomical Wonders - ideal for anyone who's interested in knowing their way around the universe.
Also check out other books from the O'Reilly Hacks Series - Link

Gadgets:

Asus Eee PC - this ultra-tiny Linux laptop is just starting to appear in stores - Hacks
Linksys WRT54GL Router - the L in the GL stands for Linux. It's a $60 router that can be customized to do more than it's thousand dollar big-brothers - Hacks
Western Digital MyBook World Edition External Hard Drive - any extra storage is really nice to have, but this network-available drive contains mirrored RAID storage and a mini Linux computer that can run a web and database server - Hacks
iPhone or iPod Touch - did I really put that here? - Hacks
Broadband Mobile Card from Verizon or Sprint - they are getting super
popular, and heck, they are cheaper than an iPhone.
Nokia N95-3 - the winner of our most hackable mobile phone survey - Hacks

Toys:

Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle - remember the Picco-Zs and their clones from last year? Here's two of them in a single package, enhanced with a trigger that let's you zap your friend's heli down.
E-Sky Lama V4 Helicopter- Yeah, I'm crazy for helicopters right now. The counter-rotating models like this one are about $100, ready (and easy) to fly, and very hackable.
WowWee RoboSapien V2 - fun for the kids. More fun with a soldering iron - Hacks

Gear:

2GB or larger micro SD card, plus various SD and USB adapters - perfect for scooting files around, the size of a finger nail, and you can put a full Linux distro, anti virus software, or a Puppy Linux virtual machine on it - Hacks
Mini Multimeter - always handy.
Bike Multitool - a good one will pack allen and hex wrenches, screw drivers, and a knife into a pretty small package. Perfect for voiding warrantees in a pinch. Oh, and there's a chain tool, too - Link, Link
Soldering Tools - whether it's a new Weller or just a pair of helping hands, it'll be welcome in any stocking - Link, Link

What have we missed here? Add your wishes to the comments. Then find a completely non-tacky way to get this list into the hands of someone who wants you to be a happy hacker.

December 17, 2007

Read/write access to Linux partitions from Windows

I read today on Lifehacker about a freeware tool called Linux Reader. It provides you with read access to ext2/ext3 partitions within Windows and has an explorer-like interface that allows you to drag and drop files from a standard Linux partition.

What about full read/write access? With a little googling, I found another freeware utility called Ext2 IFS that provides full write access. It's is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows, which allows the operating system to access your Linux partitions in a more native manner.

After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

As far as I can tell, both packages pretty much ignore the permission settings on files, so you'll have full access to files across the entire partition. One caveat is that LVM volumes are not supported by the Ext2 IFS driver (and I'm assuming the same is true for Linux Reader). ReiserFS, XFS and other filesystems are also not supported. For your plain Jane dual-boot system with an ext3 partition, however, you should have no problem accessing your Linux files from within Windows.

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows - Link
Linux Reader - [via] Link

December 2, 2007

Annotate the web with ShiftSpace

ShiftSpace is an open source platform that uses Greasemonkey to place an API layer over the web. When you have the plugin installed, ShiftSpace connects back to a central server to locate "shifts" that other users have left behind for the URL you are viewing.

By pressing shift+space on your keyboard, you get a list of these "shifts", which are essentially a layer of user-contributed annotations that are layered on top of the web page you are viewing. The current tools allow you to leave post-it notes, swap images, highlight text and even reformat the html of the underlying page. To add a shift to any web page, you just hold the shift key down and a little menu appears.

Right now, the shifts you see appear to be global. In the near future, it's supposed to have the ability to filter shifts based on friend groups, friends of friends, or just you own shifts. This could make it a convenient way to take notes on pages that you view, alone or collaboratively.

The bigger deal is that the underlying API is open source, and the tools provided are just examples of what you might be able to build. The server-side is written in PHP using the SQLLite library, so it should run on just about any web server environment. If you want to hack a meta-web application of your own, you can just download the source and start coding. Just make sure to tell us about it when you've got something to show.

ShiftSpace: An Open Source layer above any webpage - Link
ShiftSpace documentation - Link

December 1, 2007

The hackers in your neighborhood

Google recently added a collaboration feature to the "My Maps" area of Google Maps. Similar to the collaborative document editing in Google Docs, when you've made a map you can click the "Collaborate" link and share your map with specific people or the entire world. What's cool is that when you do the latter, you've effectively created a map wiki that anyone can edit, expand upon, and help maintain.

After messing around with the new collaboration feature for a bit, it occurred to me that we should make a map where we hackers can add our own markers and share interests and projects with each other. It might be a good way to network with people around you, and it's also just cool to see what projects people are working on around the world.

So I went ahead and created the hackers in your neighborhood, an open-access collaborative map that we can use to map the hacker world. Some of my favorite hackers at Make and Craft have added themselves to the map already, but I'd love to see how far we can push this... maybe it'll become too many data points for gmaps to handle.

Just connect to the map, log in to your Google account, and you'll find an "Edit" button on the left. Clicking this will put the map in edit mode, where you can drag a new marker onto the map for yourself. Toss your name into the title and put your interests and project websites in the description field.

If you have a programming or robotics club, toss that in there too and give it a red marker or something.

I should mention something else about the collaborative feature. As you can see above, it looks like PT from Makezine has tagged my digital hood with some mapfiti.

The one downside of the collaboration feature is that someone might end up vandalizing your work. In reality, though, most of these open-collaborative projects end up working really well just on good faith and community policing. It's why large open source projects work. It's why Wikipedia works. Frankly, I think Phil's Make: tag looks pretty sweet over Minneapolis anyway.

The Hackers in Your Neighborhood - Link

November 25, 2007

Recovering a dead external hard drive

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

November 15, 2007

HOWTO: using tabbed bookmarks in Safari and Firefox

A friend of mine was commenting today on a common scenario that a lot of us run into. When you're actively working on a project, you often times have several tabs open in your browser solely related to that work: some API documentation, a couple versions of a site you are working on, a google spreadsheet, a project resource/status page, and things of that sort.

When you change gears to work on something else, you might have another entirely different set of pages that you keep open all the time. If you juggle several projects at the same time, it can be a nuisance (not to mention a waste of time) to constantly be closing and opening all those windows throughout the day.

This isn't new news, but Firefox and Safari both have a really convenient--and often overooked--feature built into their tabbed browsing and bookmarking functionality that makes managing groups of commonly viewed documents really simple.

In Safari, just create and fill a folder in your bookmarks menu for each group of sites. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open in Tabs. Clicking that will open the entire folder's bookmarks at once, each in a tab of the active window.

Firefox makes it even easier. Just set up your tabs the way you normally would, then click on Bookmarks->Bookmark All Tabs. Firefox will create a new folder in your bookmarks menu and automatically import all of your current tabs to the folder. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open All in Tabs. This works just as you would expect, conveniently loading all of the documents in the bookmark subfolder.

November 9, 2007

HOWTO - Use rich fonts in your web design

Only Two Cross-Browser Web Fonts
If you want to choose fonts that will look similar across most modern browsers you have two choices: Georgia and Verdana. Yeah, there are a few other fonts, such as Times, Arial, Helvetica, etc., that are available on all platforms, but they tend to look really nice on one platform and really crappy in another. Or they look nice in both, but the kerning or the letter height will be different for the exact same font size.

The web is a boring, two-font world.

Here's the thing though. Georgia and Verdana are really decent screen fonts. For large blocks of body copy, they provide you with a very respectable serif and sans-serif font option. When it comes to titles or navigational elements, however, you often want something that will stand out from the rest of the copy on your page.

Fonts in GIFs: The Old Way
The typical solution is to create your titles and nav buttons in Photoshop, then cut GIF images for placement in the web page. This lets you use any font face you desire, ensures that things look exactly the same in all browsers, and takes an extraordinary amount of extra effort.

If you want to put slick looking titles on your blog posts, this method will probably have you in a big white coat with extra long sleeves before a month is up. Even worse—hey, some of us look good in white—if you're using images for navigation or titles, the text isn't selectable, it isn't search friendly, and it's probably a nuisance for people who use screen readers to navigate your site.

sIFR: The Better Way
sIFR is a little Flash/CSS/Javascript hack created by Shaun Inman and maintained by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. It uses Flash's font-embedding and rendering capabilities to place whatever typography you like in your site. What makes it different from the GIF method is that you develop your site with plain-ol' HTML, apply normal CSS classes, and if your browser supports Javascript and Flash, sIFR replaces the text on page-load with the desired typeface.

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
If Flash isn't installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you've designated as something you'd like "sIFRed".
Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

Essentially, you can have the titles on your site render in any font you like by just adding a few lines of Javascript to the page template. Search engines and screen readers will still see normal HTML text, you can still use traditional fonts in your CSS classes so that it degrades gracefully on unsupported browsers, and the other 95% of browsers out there will render your site exactly as you designed it, regardless of platform. Oh, and you can select your fancy text too.

Seriously? Flash can used to improve web design _and_ promote web standards, accessibility, and indexability... This has been available for a couple of years, but I'm still left scratching my head.

Links:
Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - Link
Download sIFR - Link
sIFR Wiki Documentation - Link
sIFR Example Page - Link

October 3, 2007

HOWTO - read RSS with a POP email client using FreePOPs

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

Read full story