Currently, the collision of artists and cryptocurrencies is playing out across Twitter and other platforms, dividing artists who normally praise and support each other into two camps. One camp wants to make money selling their art as NFTs, and the other camp hates the idea. If you haven’t heard already, NFTs are enjoying increasing popularity […]

Summary: By taking advantage of AWS spot instances and only running when you need to, you can have a powerful Minecraft server for as little as a couple dollars per month. I’m happy to share a set of tools we’ve created to run a cheap, personal Minecraft server on AWS! It works like this: When […]

I went to a boarding school for part of high school. (It was actually a public boarding school—weird, huh?) We lived in an old college dorm that had four floors. I lived on the 4th floor and one particular friend lived on the 1st floor. Our Internet connection on the 4th floor (and actually most […]

Heroku is trialling new pricing levels for their dynos. Here’s the verbatim text they gave: Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM. Hobby – […]

We had a hardware unit that was Ethernet enabled. To configure and manage it, the vendor provided us with a Windows program that, given the unit’s IP, could establish a TCP connection to the unit’s port 3300 and do all of its fancy management things. The only problem was, the hardware unit was a hundred […]

The new version of HipChat added support for video and screen-sharing. It also introduced the new requirement of OpenGL 2.0. On my computer, HipChat would crash on startup with repeated messages of [code] can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection [/code] I […]

(Original email at bottom.) CloudMade, a company selling mapping services (many based on OpenStreetMap data) that competed head-to-head with Google, let its users know that as of May 1st, they’ll stop serving anyone who’s not on an enterprise plan. This is rather sad, because they were one of the main alternatives for custom OpenStreetMap tiles. […]

GitHub repo: https://github.com/erjiang/tuntuntun (proof of concept status) I was trying to play Minecraft by tethering over a Sprint data connection but was having awful random latency and dropped packets. The Sprint hotspot seems to only allow a limited number of connections to utilize the bandwidth at a time – a download in Chrome would sometimes […]

Here’s something really easy to screw up: [php] <?php echo date("Y-m-d H:m:s"); ?> [/php] Spot the mistake? The “m” format code can only mean one thing, which is “months”, not “minutes”. Yet, when you’re writing code in a hurry, it’s so easy to quickly write this code and assume it works. After all, it raises […]

If you’re like most hackers, you’ve spent so much time on the computer that the jargon and lingo have become natural. You instinctively know where the OK and Cancel buttons are, and get upset when they’re switched around for no apparent reason. You scan dialog boxes and make the right decision in a second, because […]