Today's nerdtacular tip is brought to you by the letter π and the number e: if you telnet into port 80 of a webserver, you can write your HTTP requests by hand. I haven't quite figured out how to use this to my advantage yet, but I'm pretty sure it's there somewhere... I can now fill in my own custom values when submitting forms, without bothering ( Read more... )

Whoops! When I wrote about voting last week, I mistakenly said the election was on November 9. It's actually on November 7. Sorry for the confusion, and please remember to vote!

There is a fantastic tech talk about how to teach computer science to kids. Too often, they see the name and think it's about programming, and are consequently turned off to the subject. This kiwi teaches CS without using a computer, but has all sorts of fun, hands-on activities for kids to do as they learn about sorting and compression algorithms ( Read more... )

Woah. Yesterday was bridge club again, and it was the highest turnout that we've had since I joined. We had 2 tables going pretty much the entire time. It's not enough to play a "real" game of duplicate yet, but we at least had to start keeping score (with one table where the partnerships switch every hand, there's not much point in keeping score ( Read more... )

So... it just occurred to me that I should put some national news up here again. At the moment, I'm reading through an article about the job crunch in America. Despite what our current administration is saying, the economy is still in a recession. People are still losing their jobs, and the few new jobs that have been created pay significantly less ( Read more... )

So here's an odd problem - the power button on my monitor is broken. At the moment, this is ok because it's on and it displays things just fine; but I can't turn it off. This will be a problem at the end of the year, however, because once I unplug it, I doubt it will turn back on without some tinkering. Well, it can't be that hard to replace a ( Read more... )