Vancouver Scavenger Hunts

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

I have mentioned vancouver scavenger hunts before but it was mainly for Vancouver’s parks and I wanted one that is more geared towards Vancouver its self. I tried searching Google and yahoo but failed to find anything worth while so I created my own list.

Set up a scavenger hunt with your family and friends to see who can find the most items the fastest. Please do not take or disturb any of the items that you find use a camera to take a picture and help keep our city looking great.

First we should start with general the rules:

  1. Walking, Running and Translink only. No car, cabs, scooters, anything else with wheels.
  2. Don’t take anything, don’t disturb the environment. When you find an item on the list take a picture of it and write down where you found it.

Items to hunt for

Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2011

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

* I found this post in my drafts, unfinished, lost and forgotten. I decided to post it, unfinished instead of deleting it. * 

What a Amazing, fun, aw-inspiring event. Thank you everyone that put on this event, Emily Dallas, Jenny, all the volunteers, makers and sponsors. Thank you for putting on a fantastic event.

When I heard about this even a few months ago at VHS. I decide to build a RGB LED POV Globe, The same one that I have been talking about on this blog for the past few weeks. After working very hard on it with lots of help from friends, I was unable to get it working in time for Maker Faire Vancouver. Very sad but I will keep working on it and should have it ready for burning man this year.

Instead I made a few smaller projects just in time for Vancouver mini Maker Faire 2011.

There is no way I could catalog all the interesting things that I saw over the weekend so here are some of the highlights.

Luke Detheridge milk jug dragon
Built with milk jugs, wire, rivits, and a hell of a lot of creativity.  This project was hidden away in the ContainR project instead of the dark spaces witch is too bad as a lot of people didn’t get a chance to see it. I lent him the RGB LED strip lighting to make the whole thing glow and change color.

Mondo Spider
A ride-able walking giant robot spider, what more could you ask for?
In this video Luke Detheridge is in control of it running up and down the main street of Maker Faire

Robot playground
Robots, robots, and robots. In this area different robots interacted and played with each other, some nicer then others.

Music boxes
You yell a word in to a box, it records 8 secs of audio and loops it back to you.

 

Five Pirates

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

* Answer in the comments *

How to be distracted

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

I work up at the crack of noon today determined to-do three things, buy a shaver, Clear my inbox, and write a new post on my blog.

Started with attempting to clean my inbox. The first email I looked at was a reply to a post I made on Facebook. Logged in to Facebook to make a reply. My first mistake. 2hr later I have uploaded 25 pictures responded to 30 messages, researched and posed witty replies to other peoples posts.

Along the way one of my friends made a post about how she was having problems getting a computer science job. Well I listen to a lot of Stack Exchange Podcast and one of the things they talk a lot about is there Careers 2.0. I looked in to it and found that it was an invite only service, lucky I am pretty active on the Stack Exchange sites and I had an invite that I never got around to activating.

So I signed up and started filling out my profile. They have this meter at the top left of the profile telling you how much of the profile you have completed. Its madding to only have 120 out of 210 points completed.

One of the questions was; “What was the first computer that you used” for me it was an old Macintosh that we used to play a game called bolo. And after reading the wikipedia page I found out that there is a windows version of this game called Winbolo.

Of course I had to download it and lost another 2hrs. I also pinged a few friends and got them playing as well. destroying any change of them getting any real work done either.

After a few games I closed down Winbolo determined to get something useful done today. So I started closing browser windows and found wikipedia still open. Clicked on link and end lost another 2 hours.

According to my history it went something like this
bolo => Tank => Blitzkrieg => Maginot_Line =>On_Her_Majesty Secret_Service_(film) => Sean_Connery => Scottish_National_Party => Scottish_Green_Party => Social_justice => Humanism => Positivism => Common_sense => TED.com

TED.com killed another 2hrs. By this time I had pretty much given up on doing anything worth while.

This is how you kill an entire day by just clinking a single link.

SQL Injection License Plate

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

 One clever hacker realized that recent speed traps use cameras that automatically register your speed, take a picture of you license plate, and then use character recognition to translate you license plate number into something they can use as a lookup within the DMV database. With this in mind, he changed his license plate number to

(‘ZU 0666′, 0, 0); Drop Database Table.

If the DMV uses this string of characters in their database lookup it has a good chance of deleting all of the database records containing his actual license plate number, ZU 0666. This has got to be 10 out of 10 on the creativity scale, and once again showing the importance of knowing what SQL injection and little Bobby tables is all about.

Source: SQL Injection license plate hopes to foil euro traffic cameras

Ping and pong

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

Ping: A call out in to the void in search of another. To check the existence of life on the other end. To seek a connection. A normal response to ping is “pong”

Pong in answer to a ping: Yes, I do exist. I acknowledge your existence and you are no longer alone in this system. We have a connection and I am waiting for you.

Its a beautiful system.

Office Parkour and ZombinLaden

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

Insane Office Escape (try this at work!) – Biting Elbows
Interesting music video, includes: free running, parkour, interesting fight sequence and camera angles. Well worth the 3mins it takes to watch it.

ZombinLaden: The Axis of Evil Dead Short Film
What if somebody found a rotting body at the bottom of the ocean? What if they somehow managed to bring that body back to life? And what if that rotting body just also happened to be Osama bin Laden?

ZOMBINLADEN The Axis Of Evil Dead from Clement Deneux on Vimeo.

Merrie Melodies – Daffy Duck the Wizard HD

Javascript redirect when device has restarted

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

Over the past few months I have been building a sensor device with a embedded webserver for configuration and reporting. When a user saves a configuration to the device the device needs to be restarted before the changes come in to effect.

While the device is restarting the webserver is unreachable and the users get a blank page or 404 pages, this is bad for the users. So I created this simple script to check to see if the device has been restarted correctly then redirect the users to the correct page. This script uses JQuery

Script: Redirect on reboot

<script type="text/javascript">
		function UrlExists(url) {
			var http = new XMLHttpRequest();
			http.open('HEAD', url, false);
			http.send();
			return http.status!=404;
		}

		var checkCount = 0 ; 

		function CheckServerUp(){
			checkCount++;
			$('#status').text('Checking. ' + checkCount ) ;
			if( checkCount > 30 ) {
				$('#Error').html('The device is taking a long time to reboot, <a href="/refresh2.htm">Click here to continue</a>' + checkCount ) ;
			}

			if( UrlExists( "refresh2.htm" ) ) {
				$('#status').text('Device running, redirecting...') ;
				window.location.replace( "/refresh2.htm" );
			}
		};

		$(document).ready(function(){
			setInterval( "CheckServerUp()", 1000 );
		});
	</script>

 

Burning man 2011 placement confirmed – DIVORCE & 7:30, Rites Of Passage

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

We just got our camp placement for burning man (Rites Of Passage) this year. Divorce and 7:30. If your coming, (and why wouldn’t you be) stop by and check out Retrofrolic - The place of pink pain and pleasure.

We also get to know what the street names are for this year. They also seemed to have added an extra 15mins to each side of the rings. (3:15, 9:15)

  • Esplanade
  • Anniversary
  • Birthday
  • Coming Out
  • Divorce
  • Engagement
  • Funeral
  • Graduation
  • Hajj
  • Initiation
  • Journey
  • Kindergarten
  • Liminal

Abluestar.com privacy statment

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

I record as much information as I possiably can from all my users, all the time, and I keep it for as long as I want to. I will sell it to anyone who asks and give it to anyone who puts a lawyers paper under my nose.

* NOTE: This only applies to Abluestar.com. My other sites I got out of my way to remove personal information that I don’t need so I won’t be subpoenaed for the info. Having my web server seized would definitively cause downtime. *

You should expect every other site to do the same. Privacy Icons are a way to inform users about how there information will be used on your site.

This means that your data is collected and used in ways that go beyond what is necessary for the interaction. For example, in addition to collecting your address to ship you a pair of shoes you just bought (which is an intended use of your address), the web site might also sell your address to data aggregators who sell it to junk mail companies.

This means that a website is collecting data about you and selling or trading it with another organization, government, or person. An example of this is where a shopping website collects data about your shopping preferences, frugality, and ip address and sells that info to data aggregators or to other e-commerce sites directly.

This means that a site either shares the data it has about you with marketing or advertising companies or allows those companies to collect info about you while on its site.

These organizations might provide your data to a government that asks for it without following the legally required process. They might just send a letter or make a phone call to the company to ask for your data.

 

InkPop.com, Are spammers and a security risk for their users. DONT USE THEM. They suck

Posted on by Steven Smethurst

They are spammers

I got this email 6 times this week as they spammed all my different magazines searching for SEO link backs. There is a few things that piss me off about this email.

  1. They say that they really like my website, yet they send the same carbon copy email to all my magazines making me think that they never even visited my site before contact us.
  2. A smiley face emoticon in what I guess you where trying to pass off as a semi-professional pitch? What are you twelve?
  3. I hate spammers and this is email is spam. I go out of my way to make it as hard (posts like this) and expensive as possible for spammers like this to operate.
  4. We have a system set up for sponsorship that would let them get a link on the site to their site. The correct way to advertise on a magazine, but that costs money and supports our magazine and they want it for free.

After I got this email I emailed them back telling them what I thought of them. Then copied and pasted the email on to their contact us page as well as their forms.

They are a security risk for you and your children

I had to sign up to their forms before I was able to make a new posts. I used a random password because I didn’t trust them. After I signed up I got an email with my password as plain text. That means two things;

  1. They are storing YOUR password as plain text in their database. This is really bad and there is no need for it. If their web servers are compromised then the hackers will have access to your password and personal information that they can use to try and attack other sites you are registered with. See this post for more information A perfect example of why you should use the same password on different websites.
  2. They are sending YOUR password as plain text in emails. Snooping wireless traffic is easy, Snooping for words like passwords in text makes it even easier to get peoples passwords. Anyone that is listening to your connection while they foolishly send this email, now has access to your account and your password. If you use that password in more then one place they can guess at other places you are registered at and login as you.

They don’t protect your privacy, your passwords, and put you at risk.
InkPop.com is dangerous.

There initial email

I’m Jett. I really like your site, and you’re linked to a lot on other writing/book blogs. I work for Harper Collins and more specifically InkPop.com. The site just re-launched a week ago and we’re really excited about the new look and new features. HPC editors are still reviewing submitted works in our kick-ass contests, but what’s new is the fresh badge system we have to promote individual profiles.

It’s definitely still a YA/Teen writing site, but we like to think our audience is pretty diverse, and most of all, passionate. I’m writing to you to see if you’d perhaps consider writing a blurb/mention about the new digs? We care about young writers continuing to write their best work, and HPC is devoted to producing the kind of books its readers want to read most. The editors of the site are super responsive and take all complaints/concerns into consideration. Considering the hodgepodge pack of writing communities available today, InkPop is a much-needed refresher.

Thanks so much for hearing me out. Take care.

:)

-Jett