Geek archive

Is Your Pipe Wrong?

Something that came up in conversation this weekend (well, this is what happens when you get more than one geek in a room)… on many keyboards, the pipe is in the wrong place. The pipe — that’s | to you non-geeks — is just to the right of the left-hand shift key on UK keyboards…. read full entry »


Earning Bells in Animal Crossing

Bells are the in game currency for the various Animal Crossing games. They’re used to buy items for your house, clothing for your little character and somewhat more importantly, pay off your mortgage so that you get can get a bigger house! This guide was originally written as a top ten list of ways to… read full entry »


Improved Related Posts in Sidebar

If you checked out the comments on yesterday’s post — WordPress Related Posts in Sidebar — you’d have noticed that the “related” posts code I use was flawed. Namely, it didn’t exclude the post you were on, so the chances were that only 4 out of 5 would be things you hadn’t already read. Anyway,… read full entry »


Your Outsourced Support Sucks

I was trying to renew a domain for work earlier this week. After logging in to the control panel, I clicked the “Renew Domains” button and was presented with: Database error: Invalid SQL: SELECT * FROM domains dom, members mem WHERE dom.dom_id = AND (dom.dom_registrant = ##### OR dom.dom_admin = ##### OR dom.dom_technical = #####… read full entry »

cURL to bypass allow_url_fopen off

One of the requested features for NinjaLinks was to allow users to specify a link button that will be used to link back to a site instead of / as well as normal text. As the button will be hosted on a remote server, I was thinking of using cURL to bypass allow_url_fopen restrictions. (Yes,… read full entry »

Desktop TD Game

I’m hooked on the tower defence flash game this evening. Completed easy; can’t get past level 16 on medium (high score: 461)


PHP Security Tips

Because you can never know too much, and it’s about time I wrote a follow-up to my PHP Script Checklist article. 1. Never include sensitive data in a .inc When I started my current job, one of the first things I did was move all of the database connection details (yes, that includes passwords) from… read full entry »


Retro Gaming – Transport Tycoon

Karl mentioned to me that Transport Tycoon Deluxe was available to download on Abandonia, so I hooked myself up with the download and expanded it with the free, open source OpenTTD (a fantastic project). Transport Tycoon is one of those games that I’ve heard a lot about but never actually played before. However, given my… read full entry »


Google Analytics Plugin

If any of you out there are running the ‘Google Analytics for WordPress’ plugin, and have upgraded to WordPress 2.6, make sure you also upgrade the plugin. Although it doesn’t ask to be upgraded and the upgrade version is the same as the previous, it is changed. For the updated plugin to work, make sure… read full entry »


PHP Game Programming

I am very interested in creating some PHP-based simple text/image games, like hangman, guessing games, “higher or lower”, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, resources seem few and far between to get me started on the right track. I’m sure I could sit down and eventually drill something out but it’d save me a lot of… read full entry »