Reven’s blog

One of my photos, titled “Reflejos” (Reflections)

has been selected to be part of the 3rd edition of the Schmap Barcelona guide. If you haven’t already, go check the guide and get to know a little bit more of Barcelona (and to check my photo!).

For a time now I’ve tried to keep two separate blogs, one in English and the other in Spanish. This has proved to be unsustainable.

I’ve now decided to integrate the English blog in my primary site, and though I don’t think it’s the optimal setup, at least I can dedicate some more time to it.

In the next couple of weeks I’m going to do a deep clean up of the old posts and comments and maybe I’ll polish some styles and templates while I’m at it. If you do actually read this, bear with me.

Hi all. Just in time for X-mas I’ve found some X-mas DIY goodness! Check out this DIY Nativity scene, download the PDF and have some fun! It’s being released under a Creative Commons license.

A lot has been written on hotlinking. One would think that by now those leechers would have got the idea and that they would have learned enough netiquette to stop SHOUTING IN FORUMS and to not steal your images (and your bandwidth). But, hey, they haven’t. No fuss, we’re smarter. Let’s fight back.

One of the best articles on how to prevent hotlinking was published by “A list apart” (Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention). It’s a really professional, complete and accessible solution based on a little php coding and some htaccess hacking. I really recommend this approach. But I wanted something meaner, because we want to fight it but we also want to get this idea trough: “Hey! Stop doing that!”. And besides, we want to have fun This can alos be done with htacess rules, but we are not *that* bad, so we are going to tolerate a little bit of hotlinking if it’s a fair use (i.e. the person mentions our site or links back to us).

So here’s my approach: we’ll write a script that checks our logs for hotlinks, we’ll set a cron job to run that script just before our logs are rotated and then mails us the results. After we check the hotlinks we’ll decide if it’s fair use and if it isn’t we’ll give the thief a little surprise (“goatse” is the keyword here). Let’s go.

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This is a collection of images made from the results of Google images on well known words or phrases. Results were averaged together. You can see by the results which meme is more extended: the clearer the resulting blend of images, the stronger the meme is.

Really cool effect. It just amuses me how Google can tell so much about our culture.

read more | digg story

Hi guys!

I got linked from Make for my POV post! That was a great start. I’ve had a lot of visits and even some mails!

I have absolutely no time at all to post or even to continue work on my projects. I’ve just got a whole too much of work on my to-do list.

Promise to post back as soon as possible. Maybe one or two weeks.

BTW, does anyone know where to get USB-A female plugs? Maybe sampling some electronics provider? Molex just doesn’t answer.

See you soon.

Originally uploaded by Reven.

Yesterday I received my minipov kit from adafruit industries (MiniPOV 2 kit). I just love it.

It is very easy to make. Clear instructions on the web with lots of great photos (I definitively need a tripod). It’s easy to program too and all the source code files have a lot of useful comments. Overall it’s a great gadget and the price is quite good. I did have to pay $6.60 for postage, though. At least adafruit does post overseas.

I did some tricks in front of a mirror. Almost had more fun taking photos than building. I’ve even set up a flickr POV set. For your pleasure.

Behold! A few days ago I was making some toasted cheese sandwiches and one nearly got black. In my new house I’ve got a vitroceramic hob and it cooks amazingly fast. Well that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. My sandwich survived, I’d say miraculously… Just when I got another sandwich done, I turned the plate so as to fit this one, and suddenly there it was, there HE was. OMG! Jesus!

No, I’m not going to sell it on ebay. I was… eh… quite… hungry. Yes I was. Don’t look at me like that! I do have a strange aura since then, so for a symbolic price you can come to my house and wash the Jesus-related dishes… Donations are welcome and will be used to fund future Jesus related sandwich affairs. Thanks.

You’ve got to admit it has been a long time without sandwich appearances.

Hi again.

I’ve been quite busy these days and I haven’t had any time to continue style and lay-out editing. I’ve got plenty of things to do in my real world job, so I won’t do anything with the web at least until next week (expect major changes for then…).

Today I’ve just created a few categories, and this is a sort of a preview of them (see them on the side bar), so that you can get an idea of the things I’ll be talking about.

I’ll also add some kind of how-to section. I already have a few how-to’s in mind, like for example: how to make an RCA-iPod dock adaptor, how to get started with Ajax (that buzzy thing!)… Who knows? Hey, I even accept suggestions…

I’d also like to comment on the English pages/blogs I read: why I think they are great/stink, what just doesn’t seem real of the things American blogs publish from this side of the pond or what things make us so so close… I thing this could be an interesting exchange.

Well, we are going to have a lot of fun.