Archive of: Random
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A Simple College Prank posted August 17, 2010
Today is the day my brother-in-law leaves for college and I’m feeling a little nostalgic, so in honor of him leaving I thought I’d write a quick post about my favorite prank in college.
One of the first things that most college kids do right after moving in to the dorms is run to Wal-Mart one last time with their parents to make sure you can get as much last-minute stuff as possible without having to pay for it. Because, once the parents are gone, you can pretty much mark that down on your calendar as the day they start drastically decreasing the amount of free cash they float your way.
Now, as you scour the isles searching for anything and everything you might conceivably need throughout the next few months, chances are you will figure out sooner or later that you don’t have an answering machine. I mean… you do need an answering machine, don’t you?
Typically, there will be several options on answering machines and you better believe that everyone is going to buy the cheapest one on the shelf. Why? Because it’s an answering machine, you don’t need top-of-the-line here; you just need something to… Read the rest
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Are You a Student? Great, Here’s a Free One-Year Amazon Prime Subscription posted August 3, 2010
If you’re a student with a valid email address, head on over to Amazon and get a free one year subscription to Amazon Prime.
- Amazon Prime free for one year ($79 value)
- Unlimited FREE Two-Day Shipping on textbooks and millions of other items
- No minimum order size
- Upgrades to One-Day shipping for $3.99/item
- E-mail alerts for exclusive deals and promotions
- It’s free for students – sign up by providing your school and major
Now there’s no excuse for you to not have your books in time for class, eh?
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Disallow: /harming/humans. A lesson in Easter Eggs from Last.fm posted July 27, 2010
Adding Easter eggs to your application is a great way to reward your frequent users with a bit of a surprise out of the blue. Easter eggs allow you to have a little bit of fun with your user base without being too explicit.
The problem, however, is finding the right balance of fun and professionalism. After all, you still want to hold on to the hard earned respect your users give you for providing them with a high quality software application. Easter eggs that are too extreme, blatant, or political can end up having the opposite effect and create a negative experience for your users.
Here’s a great example of an Easter egg that Last.fm placed in their robots.txt file.
User-Agent: * Disallow: /music? Disallow: /widgets/radio? Disallow: /show_ads.php Disallow: /affiliate/ Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php Disallow: /affiliatelink.php Disallow: /campaignlink.php Disallow: /delivery.php Disallow: /music/+noredirect/ Disallow: /harming/humans Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders Disallow: /harm/to/self Allow: /
The last lines are a reference to the Three Laws of Robotics created by Isaac Asimov.
This is a very subtle and perfectly placed Easter egg that will likely resonate with the types of users that will go digging around in a site’s… Read the rest
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Creating a Google Custom Search Engine to Search Your Favorite Sites. posted July 17, 2010
I was goofing off online the other day and came across Google’s Custom Search Engine. Creating a CSE allows you to leverage the power of Google’s search engine while keeping the search constrained to a very small subset of sites. This can be especially useful if one of the sites you use frequently has very poor searching capabilities (ahem… I’m talking to you reddit.)
I went ahead and created my own Custom Search Engine to search StackOverflow and StackOverflow Meta.
If you are interested in extending what I already have or want a jumping off point for your own project, you can check out the code for StackSearch here.
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Setting an MP3 as Your Alarm on the HTC EVO posted June 11, 2010
I had a little bit of trouble with this today and thought I’d share.
If you plan on using the built-in alarm on the HTC EVO (Android 2.1) and want to wake up to the soft melodies of one of your favorite songs instead of the blasting simulated alarm sounds the EVO provides, follow these simple steps.
- Plug your EVO into your computer and select “use as drive”.
- Create a folder called “alarms” in the root of your SD card.
- Place your desired .mp3 file in the folder (I renamed mine to have the word “alarm” in the file name.)
- Disconnect your EVO.
- Reboot your phone.
Now, when you go to set your alarm tone, your mp3 file should be there. This method is better than rooting your Android phone, changing the file format of your music file, and placing the file in the phone’s limited on-board storage.
By the way, the full write-up on the EVO is coming soon, I just wanted to play around with it for a little while before I gave my thoughts. Check back for more updates.
