a technical blog with some other crap thrown in for good measure
[APK] Seeder entropy generator to provide significant... I found this on the XDA website. It works amazingly well for all rooted Android phones. It will speed up your phone and prevent lagging. Made my HTC Sensation feel a lot more responsive. Hey everyone, So, I was experiencing significant lag as we all do from time to time, and decided I was going to get to the bottom of it. After tracing and debugging for hours, I...
Sky Go Android App released It certainly has been a long time coming and even though it comes with strings, Sky's "Sky Go" app has finally been released for Android. Don't get too excited just yet though. Sky Go will only work on supported Android devices running 2.2x and 2.3x. Not only that but to "ensure that our rights contracts are fully upheld we are also unable to support any Android devices...
Fixing the issue of the Asus Transformer TF101 not... I purchased an ASUS Transformer TF101 a few months ago and I have been very happy with it. That was until recently. When I plugged it in it would no longer charge. I read on multiple forums that this was a common issue for Transformer owners and some fixes included putting the transformer plug into the freezer to cool it down and also to bend the pins slightly to try to...
Google’s response to Siri is codenamed Majel, could... Interesting. I've not tried Siri nor do I know anyone that has an iPhone 4GS that can give me reports on it. By all accounts it's the dogs nutsack so hopefully this app will be just as good. Google’s response to Siri is codenamed Majel, could be released by end of year | Android and Me.
Carrier IQ: How the Widespread Rootkit Can Track Everything... This post is especially for the paranoid amongst us. Recently an Android Developer discovered a rootkit called Carrier IQ that is capable of logging everything you do and worst of all it comes pre-installed on almost all smartphones, including Android, iPhone and Blackberry. Click on the link below for more information
Carrier IQ: How the Widespread Rootkit Can Track...
No matter how savvy you think you’re being when downloading torrents there is always someone watching. This site records the IP addresses of torrent users and saves them to a database. It can tell you the name of the files that you have downloaded as well as your location and the dates that the files were downloaded. Check the link to see if you’ve been caught
This Web Sites Been Watching Your BitTorrent Habits and Can Show What Youve Been Downloading.
Category : Internet, Search Engine
Searching Google for relevant results can be somewhat of a mixed bag. Try to make the most of your searches with the tips shown in the link below.
Improve Your Google Search Skills [Infographic] – How-To Geek.
If you are at work or school and you are trapped behind a strict firewall then why not create a tunnel to your home computer and route all the traffic through that tunnel giving you unrestricted internet access.
All these directions are based on using a Linux based computer. I’m sure it can be done in Windows too I just haven’t tried it.
This post describes how to ssh to a personal server using authenticated proxy. SSH (Secure Shell) is typically used to log into a remote machine and execute commands, but it also supports tunneling, forwarding TCP ports and X11 connections; it can transfer files using the associated SFTP or SCP protocols.
Normally we use NetCat to ssh outside using proxy server but if its not support proxy user / pass to authenticate by proxy server and then ssh outside. Here we will use a package called connect.c.
connect.c is the simple relaying command to make network connection via SOCKS and https proxy. It is mainly intended to be used as proxy command of OpenSSH. You can make SSH session beyond the firewall with this command.
This can be achieved by other methods too but this works for me.
wget http://www.meadowy.org/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c
gcc connect.c -o connect
and then copy to directory in your PATH i.e /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin
cp connect /usr/bin
append following line
ProxyCommand /usr/bin/connect -H proxy.yourserver.com:8080 %h %p
It is insecure but we have to used it. If your proxy doesnt use user/pass for authenticatio, you can skip this.
export HTTP_PROXY_USER=your_username
export HTTP_PROXY_PASSWORD=your_password
Thats it now you can ssh outside without any restriction 
An in depth article on setting up SQUID to control web access on your network.
Quick HOWTO : Ch32 : Controlling Web Access with Squid – Linux Home Networking.
Category : Internet, P2P, Search Engine
It’s no secret that I love Open Source. I love the freedom it brings to a user, no licence fees, no pirating software and generally there’s a great community behind Open Source projects that help a user to find their feet. YaCy is no different.
I was reading an article about a guy that was trying to move from Google. He was trying to find an Open Source alternative to all the Google products that he used. While the article was very interesting the main project that stood out for me was his alternative to the Google search engine.
YaCy is a completely Open Source search engine that is based on the P2P model. It’s extremely easy to set up and it runs on your local machine (after installation just point your browser to http://localhost:8090)
The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don’t need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy.
I only installed it last night on my home machine and haven’t had a chance to give it a full workout but when I do I will report my findings back here but on first inspection it is an incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to install personal search engine.
*Edit* Did I mention that it is cross platform and will run on Windows, Linux and OSX?
Category : Uncategorized
I just stumbled upon a site that is giving free .free domain names. Just click on the link below if you are interested.
One of my mates converted me from Firefox to Chrome about a year ago and I must admit I was delighted with it’s speed and the multitude of extensions that it offered.
I had Chromium installed on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit and it was working fine. I was connected to the web using a password protected HTTP Proxy server. Now I’m not sure exactly what changed, whether it was an update to Chromium, an update to Ubuntu or some change that I made but one day Chromium would no longer connect through the proxy.
I tried the usual “turn it off turn it back on” and uninstall and reinstall the browser but none of it seemed to work. After spending about an hour trying to get it working I just went back to using Firefox, that was until today. Today I was looking at different browser extensions when I came across one that I wanted to try out. Unfortunately for me it was only available for Chrome. This brought me back to the original problem that I had.
I fired up a terminal and entered chromium-browser into it to launch the browser. I was keeping an eye on the terminal as I changed the proxy settings in Chrome when I spotted this line
Major: (0×00020000) An invalid name was supplied | Minor: (0x96C73AF3) Cannot determine realm for numeric host address
Category : Uncategorized
There are a lot of websites out there that allow you to stream TV to your computer for free. This is another one of those sites! Magnet, an Irish broadband provider, is providing RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 and 3e for free once you register on their website
This will definitely be of great benefit for those people that are trying to rid themselves of TV licence fees. I’m unsure for how long this service will be free or if indeed it will be working this time next week but at least for now it lets you watch the Irish TV channels on your computer.
Category : General
No doubt you’ve seen the image to the left before (there’s one sitting in the top right of this website). Perhaps you have but you’ve had no idea what it does. That’s where I come in. The image on the left is the icon for RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is extremely useful in aggregating all your news feeds into one place.
In this article I am going to show you how to use Google Reader to streamline the content that you read everyday without constantly having to refresh your browser on your favourite news website.
First of all I would like you to log in to your Google account. See the reader link at the top with all the other navigation buttons? I’d like you to click on that.
This will show you all of the RSS feeds that you are connected to. If this is the first time that you have clicked on Reader in Google then you will most likely have nothing in your reader page.
The next step is to subscribe to an RSS feed. For this example click on the RSS icon on the top right of this website.
Once you click on this icon you should be prompted with a screen like the following (this screen will only be shown if you use Firefox)
Highlight Google from the drop down menu and select “Subscribe Now”
Once you click on Subscribe Now you should be redirected to a page that will ask you if you want to add the page to your Google Homepage or to Google Reader. For this example we will choose Google Reader but if you want to add it to your iGoogle page then go ahead and choose Google homepage.
After choosing Google Reader you should be redirected to the Google reader page that will show you all the articles from the website that you have just subscribed to. Instead of visiting all the sites seperately just click on the Reader link within Google and you will have all your news articles aggregated on one page.
I’ve designed a few sites in my day. It was only yesterday that I was reminiscing with a friend about the days of editing HTML in Notepad! Things have changed a lot since then.
Years ago, I’m talking late 90′s here, search engines used to index sites based on meta tags that were put in to a websites header. This obviously was open for abuse whereby people that had a teddy hospital would put non related tags in their HTML headers so that their site would show up regardless of the search strings that a user would enter. The internet of those days was a lawless wild west type of place!
Then a small company from California tried their hand at indexing websites to return relevant results and as a result Google was born. Google revolutionised the way we search for content online and as a result they revolutionised web design.
This article is going to try to explain the best practises for getting a good rating on Google (known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO)
1. Try to create relevant original content on your website. If you have a website that is dedicated to D.I.Y then write articles on D.I.Y. Keep an online diary of projects that you’ve been working on and the pitfalls that you encountered and how you overcame them.
2. Trade links with like minded websites. If you keep a blog on your website then link to relevant articles that people using your website will enjoy or find useful. Building up relevant incoming and outgoing links can be a slow laboursome task but with some persistance you will get there.
3. Keep your content fresh. An ideal website is one that engages the readers interest almost immediately. People will stop returning to your site if after one or two visits they don’t see any new content. In this day and age where online access is so readily available you need to keep up-to-date. A great way to do this is to link your website to your Twitter feed or Facebook or to create a forum whereby your readers keep the content of your site fresh for you.
4. Create articles that are descriptive and not too generic. This is common sense. If you have a D.I.Y. shop in Dublin, Ireland then there is no point in creating a page or article that just says D.I.Y. Shop. This search term will bring back results for D.I.Y. shops right across the world. To get good results you will need to be specific such as D.I.Y. Shop, Crumlin, Dublin, Ireland. Unless you are a global supplier of D.I.Y. equipment you will want to rank higher on local searches than global ones.
5. List your website on local buy and sell websites. The best way to do this is to enter a search term in Google that you would like to be listed on. Check the first 10 results. Are there any online directories listed on that first page? If so then why not advertise with those sites that way even if your site doesn’t show up on the first page of a search at least your website will be listed if a potential client clicks into an online directory.
6. List your site with Google places. This is a really good way to get your website listed higher on Google. I designed a website that was on the second page of a Google search. When I added the business to Google places it turned up as the first result on page one. It wasn’t a link to the website but it was the first result of the first result (which was a Google places search result)
7. Harness the power of Twitter and Facebook. This is not an easy thing to do but if you can configure your website to automatically update your Facebook pages and Twitter pages at least that way your followers know that there is fresh content on your site.
8. This is probably the most important lesson that I can give … be patient! Unless you have an endless supply of money to spend on advertising you might find that you will spend months of your time and will have very little to show for it. If this is the case try to analyse your methods and tweak them until you find something that works for you.
They are probably the best tips that I can give for anyone that is building a website and trying to get it to rank on Google (or any other search engine)
