Pretty much every celebrity photo — save for the unflattering ones on gossip sites — is so heavily touched up nowadays that this bit of adbusting from Germany is freaking genius as far as I’m concerned. And I don’t know about you, but all the detail that they put into this (like the layer list) really makes me wish that I’d see stuff like this pop up in the US more often.
I told myself that I was going to wait for the reviews before I rushed out and bought myself a pair of Nixon Nomadic headphones. Sure, the product page made them look dead sexy — but could they possibly live up to the marketing hype?
2 weeks on, my patience was wearing thin. Not a single word had surfaced and I was getting antsy. No. I wasn’t going to give in. If they were good, I’d hear about it eventually. Patience is a virtue, and I was going to stick to my original plan.
A week later, I had them in my grubby paws. Fuck patience. My want overruled any plans I might have had. And while I might be weak, at least I had a shiny new way to listen to music.
So how are they? Surprisingly good, actually. The first handful of tracks that I listened to had the right amount of punch along with just enough nuance. Even the audiobook that I’m currently consuming sounded great.
On top of that, they’re solidly built. The ball and socket joints manage to swivel freely while not getting too squirrelly and the memory foam ear pads contour quite nicely. The fact that the headphone cable detaches for easy packing and the right ear has an independent volume control built-in are just icing on the cake.
Oh, did I mention these were iPhone compatible? No? Well, they are. And the mic, I’ve been told, sounds fantastic. Like a heavy one-inch button, there’s really no fumbling for it to change tracks or answer calls. Your hand just sort of gravitates to it.
Other than feeling just a little tight on my Charlie Brown sized head, these are pretty much flawless. They’re seriously my new favorite headphones — and well worth the $120 I shelled out for them. If you’ve got the cash to burn, I highly recommend them.
While hacked sites happen, the hacks are fairly benign. Normally, folks with hacked sites see a few spam links at the bottom of their pages. That sort of thing can normally be cleaned up with an upgrade. When I have to deal with them, it also involves a rap on the knuckles and a lecture on the importance of staying on top of upgrades.
I’ve never seen a hack crop up with the tenacity of “remv.php” tho. Seriously, it’s kind of scary.
I haven’t really had time to go over what all the “remv.php” script does, but I do know that it can be harnessed to send out DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks to unsuspecting sites. How do I know this? Well, about an hour after tossing in “They Live“, I hear Kitchen typing furiously and ask him what’s going on.
There’s a site’s getting DDoS’ed — but the attack is coming from predominately from our own servers.
Shit. Was it a nasty 0-day worm? Not so much. Just a bunch of zombie blogs banging away at this poor bastard’s site. And what did all those blogs have in common? “remv.php” was hanging out in their “wp-content/themes” directory.
So in the interest of spreading the word, I’ve got a quick and dirty guide to dealing with sites infected with this nasty little script.
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'myoldpassword');If it seems like a lot of crap to go thru, just remember that this wouldn’t be an issue if you kept on top of security patches and made sure your plugins were up to date. If you really want to avoid doing this again, subscribe to the WordPress Development Blog‘s feed and check it religiously.
If you have any more info on “remv.php”, let me know in the comments and I’ll do what I can to keep this entry up to date.
Update: It looks like “remv.php” is phpRemoteView. Apparently, it’s pretty popular with the script kiddies, but it’s not the actual exploit that’s being used. Still, it’s a bad thing that needs to be removed if you find it in your WordPress install. If you’re interested in getting the gist of what the script is capable of, check out this page translation.
Ever since I’d heard about History Hacker, I’ve been geeked about it. Now, maker extraordinaire and super rad video blogger Bre Pettis, is getting a crack at the big leagues when his show airs on The History Channel this Friday at 8 PM.
The pilot involves Tesla and his back and forth feud with Edison and has a style that seems like it was made for the ritalin set. So if the promo video above looks interesting at all, consider adding it to your DVR and checking it out.
While there are a lot of URL shortening sites out there, I’ve actually grown quite fond of tr.im recently. It’s a little thin on preferences right now, but there are three things that set it apart from the other services out there:
Whenever you shorten a URL — thru the bookmarklet or their site — tr.im does the standard behavior and copies the output to your clipboard. On top of that tho, it also offers you the opportunity to sign in to your favorite microblogging platform and post the URL directly from tr.im itself. Removing the extra steps of opening up Twitter and pasting a link into the window makes me a very happy camper.
Want to save your settings but don’t want to make another account? No worries! tr.im accepts both Twitter and Identi.ca logins. Saving a couple minutes of my time by not having to sign up for yet another service is rad to me in a way that words can’t quite describe.
If you’re signed in to tr.im, you actually get stats on the number of times a link has been clicked. So if you’ve direct messaged or emailed a friend with a link and want to know if they’ve given it a look, there’s no need to bug them about it. Just load up the tr.im homepage and see if they have or not. Simple enough, right?
It also has the added bonus of being a super short URL that isn’t abstract like is.gd or zz.gd are. Seriously dudes, what’s up with those names? I mean, bravo for scoring a 4 character domain. That’s a feat in and of itself. Still, if what your site does isn’t fairly obvious from the URL, it kind of fails for most passive users before it gets out of the gate. tr.im actually manages to be nice and descriptive without being too heavy — and that, coupled with the reasons above, is why I like it.
So give tr.im a try and see if it integrates with your workflow. Even if you’re a bit skeptical about something as basic as a URL shortener, you might actually be pleasantly surprised at just how well it works.
I’m not sure what I like more, the legibility rant or the use of the word “motherfucker”… [via]
Every so often I feel like I miss out by not making the trek down to Comic-Con. This is one of those times.
Sorry about the bit of downtime this morning and afternoon, folks! I’ve been trying to spread the hosting for my domains across a few users and I managed to take down my site in the process. Apparently I forgot about the quirks involved in running WordPress under mod_php. D’oh!
Things are back up now tho — PHP as CGI FTW! — so no worries.
As far as I’m concerned, this video is absolute genius. Of course, I might be a bit partial due to the fact that I’m totally in love with the new Girl Talk album — but that’s really beside the point.