Techshare: Stack Overflow & Github

[ http://stackoverflow.com/ ]

Essentially, reddit meets forum meets wiki meets blog in the form of a programming Q&A site. Kinda like ask.yahoo.com, but useful. No registration required, even.

[ https://github.com/ ]

Project management. Elegant, efficient, and free.

Notably used for minecraft modifications, and especially useful if you want to collaborate over long distances.

Stuff I like: Lichess

[ http://lichess.org/ ].

I'm not really that good at chess- this, I'll admit.

I've been working on my game, though (after years of not playing), and this site is like the chatroulette of chess. If you can't find someone else to play with, you can try to play the machine, but it's almost guaranteed that you'll lose (so far as I can tell, anyway).

Easy mode: play against the machine at level 1, and use another tab to play against the machine as the opposite side. Pit the machine against itself, and you'll (at some point) win.

Hard mode: play against the machine at level one without any help. Expect to lose even if you're experienced with standard tactics.

Nightmare mode: play against the machine at level 8, expect to lose really quickly.

The whole concept of chess960 is really cool, but I'm even worse at that then I am at normal chess. The concept of the game being less about knowing openings and responses and more about improvising and thinking ahead is definitely a good thing, though.

Techshare: Screensharing.

Technological dinosaur that I am (not in size but in age), I used to use [ RealVNC ] for my remote desktop sorts of things.

Since the discovery of [ Teamviewer ], which is 100% free and full of awesome, it's all I use for logging in to my desktop from Germany (and elsewhere).

For tech support, there is little that beats this neat service called [ join.me ]- it's essentially no-hassle, zero-configuration remote desktop software. Easy enough for my less-than-technically-able friends to install, and even easier for me to log in.

What technology do you have to share?

Techshare: Free phone calls!

[ http://nerdvittles.com/?p=74 ]

Plug-and-play PBX technology ? Yes- and it's free.
( PBX is a contraction of Private Branch Exchange [ wikilink ] )

The idea behind using IP-PBX (internet protocol private branch exchange) is that there are already internet-to-trunk gateways that permit calls from a computer to a real-world phone (SkypeOut is an example of this), and while a major telephone company might charge to service your phone from home, if you have a high-speed internet connection, you can bypass the need for a carrier.

There's an Android app called [ sipdroid ] that allows for (essentially) free calls over wifi/3G connections.

Something worth looking into if you're interested in getting a free phone number and making calls via wifi.

Techshare: Gyazo Instant Screencaps

A niche application, perhaps- but a useful one, for sure.

[ http://gyazo.com/en ] is where you'll find something that I use all the time- a nearly instant fire-and-forget screencapture application that uses a minimalist interface to quickly upload easily selectable portions of your screen.

Minecraft add-ons!

Insta-house (and bonsai trees):

Check the entire thing out here. In essence, a use for gold in SSP- creating a house-in-a-block that can be deployed on-demand (once constructed, anyway).

Pistons! IN MINECRAFT!


Adding an entirely new facet of gameplay, check out this addon. You can push other blocks around! I also use them to create dynamic gates and staircases.

Singleplayer commands:

Adding extra functionality to singleplayer in the form of commandline-style on-the-fly modifications, this is probably less for the purist and more for the creative player. Check it out here.

What mods (if any) do y'all play with?

Techshare: Photoshop Brushes (making of)

I mentioned Stephanie Valentin a while ago- she has some free brushes available [ here ].

For creating depictions similar to her work, they probably work just fine.

I'm not actually sure where I'm taking the whole digital-tablet-art thing yet, but I figure that it'd be worth understanding how to create my own brushes for general use.

That being said, a quick google-search yielded the following:

[ http://www.bittbox.com/photoshop/how-to-make-a-photoshop-brush ]

I'll admit it's a mac-based tutorial, but the theory therein is sound.

Techshare: Bidsniping

Bidding on eBay items is an interesting process.

According to some studies, the process can cause interesting phenomena- such things as

[ http://www.gixen.com ] or [ http://www.jbidwatcher.com/ ]

are utilities that permit you to "snipe" an auction (verboten on eBay Germany), which could lead to drastically reduced price on anything you choose to acquire via eBay.

You have to trust the folks with your info, sure- but you can also save large amounts on items that might otherwise be victims of shill bidding, for instance.

What tech would you like to share?

Techshare: ShadyURL (and other URL shorteners)

URL shorteners are interesting technology.

Given the advent of new internet users, more websites, and the complexity of some URLs, it's sometimes easier to hyperlink a short (if somewhat nonsensical) URL that is indexed by a service with a longer URL.

If you use Twitter, which limits how many characters you can use, something like [ http://bit.ly/ ] is useful- instead of putting up the whole URL, you can use a service that has the same effect (so long as your audience can catch or is fine with retyping the URL).

At any rate, if you're feeling like creepin' it up, check out [ http://www.shadyurl.com/ ].

A URL "shortener" that turns the simple into the suspicious.

Techshare: Clonezilla

Once upon a time, when Windows 95 was new, I owned a piece of software called Norton PartitionMagic.

This baby was an excellent, efficient piece of partitioning software that did its job excellently- when all you've got to format is 10 GB, it works snappily and had a high-resolution 640x480 application, too.

These days, I use a desktop with a resolution of 1600x1200 (and a few others), and have disks that are anywhere between 150 GB and 2TB. In keeping up with the times, I discovered CloneZilla, an open-source piece of software that supports partitioning, disk cloning, and more.

Check it out at [ http://clonezilla.org/ ].

Techshare: Kuler / Adobe

Adobe's the company responsible for the ubiquitous Creative Suite software bundles- I've had the good fortune to work with the packages at school but don't have access to quite the funds required to purchase such things given the budget that I have the good fortune of wielding.

Fortunately for design-minded folks like myself that also enjoy free stuff, Adobe's given the gift of kuler to everyone. It's one giant crowd-sourced swatch-generator, and it gives rise to plenty of ideas for designing neat things.

I like the template I'm using here, but I'm considering designing my own when I upgrade.

I have to learn CSS and PHP and JavaScript sometime; why not now?

It's amazing what folks can do with five solid colors. (Search zen on the kuler, for instance...)

Any graphic design resources you'd like to share?

Techshare: JDownloader and Hamachi.

Oftentimes large downloads (MMORPGs, I'm squinting at you) are split into separate parts for easier user-end consumption. Normally, this is okay- but when a file has, say, 45 parts of equal size hosted on a provider that makes you wait before starting a download (Megaupload and Rapidshare, for instance) and doesn't permit concurrent downloads, a healthy (free and legal) option is to use a neat application called JDownloader. It's a Java-based batch downloader that even supports all sorts of useful functionality, like grabbing links from your clipboard, parsing pages for more links, and more!

One of the handiest applications that I've discovered.

Also nice for gaming sorts of things is Hamachi. They offer a few different flavors, but the type I endorse is their noncommercial free-to-use version. Hamachi creates a virtual Ethernet adapter that allows virtual LANs to be created on-the-fly, permitting solutions for users behind firewalls or other internet interfaces to network in a fashion that doesn't require complex things like portforwarding.

What tech would you like to share?

Techshare: Cloud and Cluster computing.

These are things that have fascinated me since I learned of their existence:

Cloud computing: essentially, your terminal acts the interface between you and some godtier beefy computers. By utilizing servers that share content, resources, and metaphorical horsepower, you can achieve superior performance and scalability. The benefits of using such systems include the ability to ignore location as a factor, so long as you have access to the resources. This is good if you're in an urban environment with reliable internet access- all of the heavy-duty processing and electric consumption takes place offsite. If you're in the boonies, this may present a problem if your connection is poor and/or slow. Examples include such things as the Amazon S3 cloud or Microsoft's Azure.

Cluster computing: the HHHNNNNGGG of heavy-duty computing utilizing ordinary resources to achieve extraordinary results. If you've got a computer that can divide up portions of a task such that it's computable by several different systems, you can network things such that results are expedited and individual workload is minimized. For optimized systems (or simple ones), this can result in amazing things- case and point, [ http://www.wolframalpha.com/ ], which is like a better version of Google (for certain bits of factual information).

Wikipedia's got pretty good articles on all of these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)

What sorts of applications could you see for this sort of tech?

Unrelated: What technology would you like to share?

Paranoia: common sense for the security-minded.

I will admit that I am somewhat extremely concerned wherever my security and privacy are involved. Given what I understand of the internet, it's often better to remain low-key or hard to find. An easy-to-follow "e-trail", as a few friends of mine call it, is an invitation to be investigated. So's being deliberately secretive and letting other people notice. The plainly clothed John Doe strolling down the street probably attracts less attention than the disgruntled youth (complete with trenchcoat) quickly striding down the boardwalk.

What I mean by that somewhat obtuse metaphor is that it's often better to develop secure and safe habits than attempt to implement security as a policy only when it is thought of as necessary.

In that vein, I'd like to introduce the following bits of useful tech:

Tor, available at [ http://www.torproject.org/ ], is pretty much the best thing ever for anything internet-privacy related. It's a SOCKS proxy interface that has nodes located all over the world. Essentially, the connection is end-to-end encrypted and bounced across multiple nodes, allowing bypass of any incompetently-implemented filtering technology that isn't on the machine you're using to browse.

Also useful:

Iron, slightly paranoid cousin of Google's Chrome, is available at [ http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php ] and is my browser of choice. It retains all the functionality of Chrome and is what I use for all browsing where security is not the chief concern at hand.

Wherever security is of the utmost concern, I break out Firefox with Torbutton. The addon allows simple on-off usage with easy visual recognition of whether or not you're browsing via Tor.

I maintain two internet browsers so that the attitude that I use with each is compartmentalized- reading blogs and e-mail doesn't require a secure connection- but I make sure that if there's anything in question about the folks I'm interacting with, I route the data through Tor.

Related, but not really that important: alternate GMail accounts, lots of them. I have at least 5, one of which is for work, one of which is for personal e-mail, and the other 3 are mules that I use to interface with folks I don't regularly converse with.

That's all for now.

Techshare: Last.fm, Pidgin, VNC

This post (and its sequels) are intended to introduce readers to interesting bits of technology and/or software that's available for free that I find useful and/or interesting.

I'm sure that most people have heard of Pandora. It's one of a few popular free online radio services that provides streaming content to viewers (or listeners, if you prefer) and has a built-in recommendation service.

What I've seen less often (except in online communities, of course), is the use of [ http://last.fm/ ], which is another online radio service that is slightly less accessible than Pandora, but is plagued by fewer ads. Furthermore, it includes a social networking component through which you can compare your tastes to other folks around the internet.

TL;DR: Last.fm is a cool guy and plays free music. Minimalised advertising and more social networking capabilities.

I'm not so much a chatting machine, but I have a few instant-messaging accounts registered on different networks, to accommodate the rather large number of folks that I connect with online that are spread across different networks.

I previously used [ http://ebuddy.com ] for my multi-network chatting needs. It's a good cross-platform solution that utilizes webpages and an account management interface to allow for multi-network and multi-account usage, but it's a cumbersome webpage and some of the advertising doesn't act exactly as intended- occasionally doing things like covering half of my contact list. Not-so-bueno, to be frank.

I re-discovered [ http://www.pidgin.im/ ] a few weeks ago and have found it to be a much more simple-to-use application for all of my chatting-related needs. It also permits multiple-account and multiple-network behavior without error, and has none of the ads that discouraged me from using ebuddy. I also have the Psychic plugin enabled, so I get notified of people messaging me before they send it. It's probably a bit creepier on their end, but saying "Hey, what's up?" right before they've hit send is often entertaining.

TL;DR: ebuddy's good on mobile devices, pidgin wins hands-down as an open-source application through which account management is relatively simple and intuitive. It also has neat plugins.

Closing this post out, I thought I'd bring up what I think is arguably one of the best remote desktop access applications: VNC. Virtual Network Connection, available over at [ http://www.realvnc.com/ ] is pretty much an all-in-one comprehensive solution. When the server is set up on a machine (networkable through a VPN, which I'll post about later), it permits remote access as if you were sitting at the desk and using the computer. Depending on the connection speeds at both ends, the use of a VPN can permit access from anywhere that has internet access, even if both computers are behind routers and firewalls.

I use VNC to manage a gaming server that I run offsite, and it provides virtually unlimited access- including the ability to lock the local mouse and keyboard out such that one can work remotely while remaining relatively undisturbed.

The connection is encrypted in both directions, so connection-snatching is unlikely unless you are the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack and using an insecure password.

TL;DR: If you need RDP-level access to a machine, RealVNC is an easy, low-hassle solution that only requires the server software on one machine and the client software on another.

That's all for now; I plan on making these sorts of posts semiregular.

What tech would you like to share?