Latest blog posts

If you have multiple monitors and use Firefox to view a HTML5 video (using the <video> tag, such as in the YouTube HTML5 player) or perhaps have a WebGL game that runs full-screen, you will find that the moment you click away to another window on the other monitor, Firefox leaves full-screen mode. This makes it completely useless for watching video while doing something else. There is a fix for it.
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This weekend, I posted a brainteaser, promising to pay $100 to whomever solved it. Although the decoding algorithm has not yet been discovered, Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, who found my puzzle through Reddit, did manage to figure out what the second landmark was. He generously suggested that I donate the prize money to Doctors Without Borders. That is an excellent destination for the money, so I was only too happy to oblige:
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For years I've had an idea in my head about a way to hide some information in a bunch of numbers. I actually got around to coding an implementation and figured I'd run a competition. The first person who figures out what the famous landmark is described by the second set of numbers below and posts the correct answer in the comments wins $100.
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With some free time and a spare laptop on my hands, I figured I'd try out running a Linux desktop installation once more. Although I've used Linux on servers for more than a decade, all of my regular desktop machines have been Windows and Mac OS. Now, most people running Linux on the desktop seem to be using Ubuntu. I fully intend to give that a try later on, but for now I went with the distro I've been most familiar with for the past 12 years, which is openSUSE. Although I've been able to set things up to the point where it's viable as a proper workstation for me, I'm sorry to say the experience fluctuated between pleasant and dreadful. Here's some of the stuff I encountered and what I did to get things to a usable state.
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When indie developer Sos found his game being pirated on the infamous Pirate Bay he did something very unusual. Rather than complain, he actually posted in the torrent comments and gave out a couple of free registration codes for the game. Some may call it a clever marketing ploy, but from everything Sos wrote in the Reddit AMA shortly afterwards, it seems like he just really enjoys seeing others enjoy his game. I'm not going to write a post in praise of Sos' reponse (awesome though it was), but just a little bit about the game itself. How does one save the day, the McPixel way?
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