http://www.worldometers.info

Check real-time statistics of everything in the world that is happening right now. Things don’t seem to be realistic as it looks like an algorithm that increases the number by time. It is still pretty cool and worth checking out though.

Hmm…Maybe its not Steve Ballmer’s but Microsoft using Apple products?  touche.

Taken from flickr.

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.

Do you have trouble installing your games for your Xbox 360? Does your Xbox 360 fan noise tend to scare you at night or when putting in that Halo 3? Luckily, Best Buy can install an Xbox 360 game for you. Best part is, they can even come to your house to do it. What a bogus trick.

Oh NO!

I got this MMOR (Massively Multiplayer Online Race), called Test Drive Unlimited last year. They recently came out with a carpack called PC Megacar Pack and I purchased it. I thought I film some in-game footage of me in a Dodge Viper SRT-10 Coupe that is from the car pack. I filmed this via Fraps.

Now this is cool stuff with Apples ultimate gaming platform. It uses the accelerometers inside the device to move. This looks great! It also seems like you can do multiplayer battles with the wifi.

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:

After:

Upside-Down-Ternet

My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun.

Split the network

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.

/etc/dhcpd.conf

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;

}
}

IPtables is Fun!

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.

The redirection script

#!/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