The Worldometer
April 28th, 2008 | 416 views | Published in Cool Stuff
April 28th, 2008 | 416 views | Published in Cool Stuff
April 28th, 2008 | 228 views | Published in Apple, Funny Stuff
April 21st, 2008 | 1,946 views | Published in Sports
I have been playing tennis for 5 years now. I am currently in my high school tennis team. My racket of two years’ string broke and that was an old Wilson Grand Slam ($40) and replacing the strings and having it stringed would be almost as expensive. So I thought to myself, might as well get a top of the line racket that I can continue progressing with my skills on. Pretty much 15 out of 24 players have a Babolat Pure Drive. So I might as well just land myself into buying one of these. The Babolat rackets are very nice and are very expensive however. A Babolat Pure Drive Cortex can run you about $185 (from holabird.com)
It shipped last Monday and I finally got to use it in a match last Thursday. I also used it again today where I won both times. The racket feels very solid and stiff, unlike my older racket which felt very fragile. The strings are strung higher (60lbs vs 55lbs) so I will need to get a little more use to a different serve and a full swing. I really like the design and the way it looks. Overall, I love this racket and I hope this is a smart investment I have made.

April 20th, 2008 | 297 views | Published in Electronics, Gaming
April 6th, 2008 | 334 views | Published in Apple, Cool Stuff, Electronics, Technology
April 5th, 2008 | 215 views | Published in Uncategorized
I recently needed to find an easy way to vectorize an image, or in other words make it so that I can expand or minimize an image without losing quality, easier without having to go through Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. I found this website, www.vectormagic.com and they do the exact thing that I needed. It is a simple interface and very easy to use. You simply upload the photo you want to vectorize and choose if it is a camera taken picture or a logo. Then choose the quality and in about one minute, you will have the finished vectorized image. Here is an example.
Before: 
Aft
er:
April 1st, 2008 | 1,092 views | Published in Cool Stuff, Funny Stuff, How To's
My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun.
I’m starting here by splitting the network into two parts, the trusted half and the untrusted half. The trusted half has one netblock, the untrusted a different netblock. We use the DHCP server to identify mac addresses to give out the relevant addresses.
ddns-updates off;
ddns-update-style interim;
authoritative;
shared-network local {
subnet *.*.*.* netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range *.*.*.* *.*.*.*;
option routers *.*.*.*;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "XXXXX";
option domain-name-servers *.*.*.*;
deny unknown-clients;
host trusted1 {
hardware ethernet *:*:*:*:*:*;
fixed-address *.*.*.*;
}
}
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.10;
option routers 192.168.0.1;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
allow unknown-clients;
}
}
Suddenly everything is kittens! It’s kitten net.
/sbin/iptables -A PREROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 64.111.96.38
For the uninitiated, this redirects all traffic to kittenwar.
For more fun, we set iptables to forward everything to a transparent squid proxy running on port 80 on the machine.
/sbin/iptables -A PREROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.1
That machine runs squid with a trivial redirector that downloads images, uses mogrify to turn them upside down and serves them out of it’s local webserver.
#!/usr/bin/perl
$|=1;
$count = 0;
$pid = $$;
while (<>) {
chomp $_;
if ($_ =~ /(.*\.jpg)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.jpg", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.jpg");
print "http://127.0.0.1/images/$pid-$count.jpg\n";
}
elsif ($_ =~ /(.*\.gif)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.gif", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.gif");
print "http://127.0.0.1/images/$pid-$count.gif\n";
}
else {
print "$_\n";;
}
$count++;
}
Then the internet looks like this!
And if you replace flip with -blur 4 you get the blurry-net

Taken from http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html