Category Archives: Software

What happens when Imgur goes out of business?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Today, while browsing the internet and looking at some “old” guides from 2012 I came across a familiar sight: a forum thread with hundreds of inline images, all of them once hosted with ImageShack, now permanently inaccessible. For those of you too green to remember, ImageShack and PhotoBucket were the Imgurs of yesteryear. Free photo/image hosting/sharing services that stepped in to fill the void when users needed to share pics on sites that didn’t offer image uploading/hosting themselves.

Today, it is far more likely that users recognize the names of once-behemoths PhotoBucket or ImageShack not from their years of glory but from coming across images like this, the fossils that remain from the time when these two beasts ruled the image hosting world and roamed the interwebs unopposed:1

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  1. If the images below give you pause or perhaps make your heart skip a beat – know that you’re not alone. It brings us much pain and no comic relief to un-ironically embed these “image not found” images in this post. ↩

macOS-like window switching on Windows with alt-`

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Dedicated followers (and anyone making the switch from Mac to PC) – this Pi Day 2017 gift is just for you! A new day means a new free app for our favorite peeps on the internet. Meet Easy Window Switcher, our invisible window cycling utility that makes it ridiculously easy to jump between windows of the same application à la OS X with the alt` (alt-backtick) keyboard shortcut.

Easy Window Switcher (codename wincycle) imbues your Windows PC with the same superpowers that were once exclusively reserved for the ranks of Apple’s OS X users. With Easy Window Switcher, you don’t need to muck around with alt-tab trying to find the window you’re looking for amongst 40 or 50 others1 – just hold down the alt key and backtick away to your heart’s content. And moving backwards is as easy as 1, 2, 3 altshift` and done.

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  1. What? You really don’t have that many windows open at once? What are you doing here reading this post!? ↩

rewrite: a rust-powered, in-place file rewrite utility

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Let’s say you’ve got a terminal open and you want to sort the contents of a file before you email it to a friend. The file can contain anything and it could be of any length, it doesn’t matter. What do you do?

The obvious answer is to use sort. Sorting the file is as easy as sort myfile – except it doesn’t actually sort the file, it sorts the *contents* of the file and dumps them to the command line (via stdout). So how do you sort the file “in-place,” so-to-speak? Again, the obvious answer would be sort myfile > myfile,1 redirecting the output of the sort command back to the file you want to ultimately send sorted.

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  1. Don’t do this! ↩

Full range of Lenovo T570 options revealed

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Lenovo’s ThinkPad T570, the much-awaited, supposed MacBook killer that was first announced at CES in January, is now available for pre-order via Lenovo Hong Kong – meaning users can finally see what specs are available and (roughly) how much it’s going to cost them.

Let’s get this out of the way: disappointingly, once again, Lenovo doesn’t seem to have made available configuration options that feature Intel’s fastest mobile chips; the most powerful option available is the Kaby Lake-powered i7-7600U. This is almost certainly a conscious and thought-out decision, as 7600U is the highest you can go without a massive jump in TDP – the higher-spec’d 7700HQ and above all weigh in at 45W TDP, compared to the 7600U’s thrifty 25W TDP. Dell’s Precision (and possibly XPS15?) and HP’s ZBook lineups will likely be the only way to get more raw processing power for your next purchase – at the cost of greatly-reduced battery life, no doubt.

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Beware of this new Chrome “font wasn’t found” hack!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Today while browsing a (compromised) WordPress site that shall remain unnamed, I came across a very interesting “hack” that was pulled off with a bit more finesse than most of the drive-by-infection attempts. This one relies on using JavaScript to change the text rendering, causing it to resemble mis-encoded text with symbols and rubbish in place of the content, then prompts the user to update “Chrome’s language pack” to fix the problem.

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SecureStore: a .NET secrets manager

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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SecureStore is our open-source (MIT-licensed) solution to secrets management for .NET developers. It’s intended to be dead simple and boldly embraces the KISS principle. We’ve been using it in production for a while now (years, actually!), but hadn’t gotten around to officially releasing it despite its public availability on our GitHub page.

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Introducing betterpad™ for Windows

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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logoEveryone, say hello to betterpad – an open, fast, & free replacement for notepad that doesn’t suck. Inspired by text edit on Mac, this recent convert back to the Windows ecosystem needed something for random notes, quickly opening plain text files, or jotting things down – and expecting them to still be there the next time you come back to your PC.

As a text editor, it tries to remain unopinionated and keep out of your way.. while supporting whatever you throw at it. It doesn’t choke and die when it encounters a unix line ending and it’s smart enough to reopen all your old documents – saved or otherwise – after a restart or if it (hopefully not!) crashes. It’s high-dpi aware, has full unicode support, and actually has multiple levels of undo so you don’t have to think twice before hitting ctrl-z and you don’t have to smash your head against the wall when you realize a few seconds later that you didn’t copy the old contents of the buffer.

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QuickSubmit for Chrome, Redux

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Quick, if you had to pick one thing Internet Explorer has that Chrome doesn’t, what would it be?1 For us, it has been a dearth of common navigation shortcuts that can make life filling forms online much less painful. IE users have long been spoiled by the alt+shift+s keyboard combination to submit the currently active form – a luxury Chrome users have long had to live without.

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  1. I’m truly, genuinely sorry if you voted “better battery life” and I wish I had better news for you, but alas… ↩

PSA: PayPal.com rejecting connections from Internet Explorer 10 and below!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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PayPalThis is just a small public service announcement for any web developers or eCommerce website owners using PayPal Express Checkout to accept payments on their websites: don’t redirect your users to paypal.com, make sure you use www.paypal.com instead!

The reason is quite simple (and stupid): PayPal uses different SSL security configurations for the vanilla paypal.com domain and the www.paypal.com subdomain – and the former is incompatible with a lot of older PCs and operating systems, meaning your users will get an error message instead of being presented with the checkout options!

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Windows Product Key Lookup Tool 1.1 Released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Product Key ToolAn update to our Windows 10 Product Key Utility has been issued that addresses a number of minor issues. Since its initial release in December 2014, the BIOS-Embedded Product Key lookup tool has been downloaded and used over two hundred thousand times, and has quickly become the go-to tool for retrieving product keys embedded in the BIOS or system firmware.

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