Monthly Archives: September 2013

Unknown search terms

From the wordpress.com Stats support page:

UPDATE: In September 2013 Google started to rapidly expand the number of searches that it encrypts, which results in a higher proportion of “Unknown search terms” in your stats. According to some sources, this expansion will eventually result in encryption of all Google searches. This is being done for privacy reasons by Google when someone searches at Google.com, before a visitor arrives at your WordPress.com site. Therefore we don’t have any way to unhide the search terms. We recognize this means a loss of stats information for you and we will look for other ways to show you how users arrived at your site.

Any blog owner would love to see the search terms leading to his blog, but I damn respect Google’s decision. Been using Google’s encrypted version for some time, but 99% of the people don’t know of its existence. And it seems now you don’t need to anymore.

sudo make me a sandwich

There’s nothing to write these goddamned days. Here’s a snippet I came across in HN:

curl https://put.honkgong.info/ed8e3df8691ec7944a878cea595e00c363079504 > Makefile
sudo make me a sandwich

In case you’re scared to curl the goddamned link, just fucking visit it.

Killing W3Schools

Though it ranks number one in most web development-related google searches, w3schools is a horrible place to learn from. Someone is trying to create a site called “The HTML and CSS Tutorial” simply to kill w3school’s search engine rank and stop the kittens from dying.

Somone points out an interesting view in the HN discussion:

W3Schools is like an old dictionary. A dictionary isn’t particularly helpful when you’re trying to learn a foreign language properly, but it’s quite handy when you’re face to face with a foreigner and you need to think up a word for “toilet paper” quickly.

But that does not justify the highest search engine ranks.

Apple’s A7 is Made By Samsung

From iFixIt:

Through the magic of decapping an IC, their internal shots revealed the A7 to be made by Samsung.

From Chipworks: “We have confirmed through early analysis that the device is fabricated at Samsung’s Foundry and we will confirm process type and node later today as analysis continues. That being said, we suspect we will see Samsungs 28 nm Hi K metal Gate (HKMG) being used. We have observed this same process in the Samsung Exynos Application processor used in the Galaxy S4. Our engineers will be deprocessing the Apple A7 as soon as they can to confirm this or they can provide different information.”

Didn’t see that coming.

Activating Falcon Pro on new Android phones

Falcon Pro, the best Twitter app for Android out there, cannot authorize more users since it’s passed the maximum users count. There’s a small hack to activate Falcon Pro though.

  1. Go to dev.twitter.com and create a new application. Make sure you set the Application type to “Read, Write and Access direct messages”, set a callback URL (any URL would do), and check the box “Allow this application to be used to Sign in with Twitter”
  2. Download and install Falcon Pro
  3. In the app’s login screen, tap the four corners. This will light up four squares of different colors. Now tap the orange one to make it turn off
  4. Shake the phone
  5. Now you will be prompted with a screen to enter the consumer key and consumer secret of the newly created app. Copy/paste from the app’s page in dev.twitter.com and save.

That’s it! Fuck you, Twitter, and your evil terms.

3D diffs in Github

STL is a standard file type used to store data about 3D objects. Like bitmaps for 2D images. Github gave the ability to visualize these files in the site some time back, now they let us view the diffs as well.

How does this work? We take both versions of the model, and using binary space partitioning, we compute the added, removed, and unchanged parts. This is done using csgtool, a C library paired with a Ruby gem via FFI. These pieces are cached and displayed by the 3D viewer we already have, though we color them differently and play with their transparency to help illustrate the changes.

How does one see diffs in 3D objects? You paint the deleted parts in red and the newly added parts in green. Ha! You didn’t see that coming. Also, the thing rotates! There’s also a slider to animate the diff.

Most popular .vimrc options

There’s an interesting research on .vimrc files in blog.venthur.de:

I downloaded 155 .vimrc files from the net (mostly from dotfiles.org and github.com), and wrote a little script which counts the number of times an option has been set.

The most popular option seems to be nocompatible, which doesn’t really do much at all. I guess the reason for the high rank is that plugin managers like Vundle ask the users to set the option before anything.

Understandably, tab-related options like tabstop, shiftwidth and autoindent rank high in the list. I was a bit shocked to find out that incsearch, which ranks number 3, doesn’t appear in my own .vimrc, but later realized that it had already been taken care of by vim-sensible 😀

Evernote will be integrated to Galaxy Note 3

The Galaxy Note was cool. The S Pen was cool. S Note (the app), not very much so. Seriously, why would anyone take notes in an app that doesn’t sync? (I’m looking at you, Vesper)

But Evernote has come for the save.

Now, all S Note users will get the benefit of immediate note synchronization from their Samsung mobile device to every other device and computer where Evernote is installed. Like all notes in Evernote, they’ll instantly become searchable, can be tagged for quick organization and shared with others.

Evernote. Galaxy Note. All primarily intended for note-taking. Note 3’s will be so much awesome they’ll explode.

The great language game

I love languages. This is the latest find on the list of awesome language websites. The Great Language Game is a simple online game that lets you listen to small audio clips and challenges you to identify the language being spoken.

Amongst the thousands of languages spoken across the world, here are just seventy. How many can you distinguish between?

The first few challenges are easy – you have to decide between totally different ones like Mandarin and Urdu, or Slovenian and Sinhalese. As you can see, if the answers belong to different language families the answers are quite straight-forward. But they become more challenging later on in the game. Not really easy to distinguish between several Slavic languages. The best score I could get so far was 600.

The site’s pretty slow though. It would help if it would pre-load the answers so it doesn’t have to query the server each time. Nonetheless, awesome game. I’m going to keep playing till I could get everything right! 😀

gingko – Feels like Evernote + Workflowy

Gingko claims itself to be “the first significant new medium since hypertext”. It’s a bold statement. I’m not going to disagree – gingko feels like a mashup between two of the most powerful tools on the internet: Evernote and Workflowy.

If you want a quick introduction to what gingko is, I’d recommend the video they’ve put up.

The possibilities seem to be endless with gingko. Markdown, keyboard shortcuts, hierarchies, collaboration: the whole combo. Except the free accounts are limited to three ‘trees’. I’d love to see they increase the limit, or at least bring in a referral system. $9 a month sounds too harsh. 🙁