Category Archives: Internet

Nothing to do this weekend? Here’s ideas for a weekend project.

There’s nothing worse then being bored over a weekend. So in case you’re looking for something to do this weekend, give one of these a try if you have the time and parts sitting around.

Build a Raspberry Pi Buggy – One of the milestones of hobby robotics is a vehicle that is controlled with a Raspberry Pi.

Build an air quality monitor – Great way to get started with Sensors and detecting the world around you.

How to Set Up a Safe and Free VPN on Android – You know to use a VPN on your computer over public wifi, but we should all be doing the same with our phones as well.

So try your hand at building something or just try and make your phone a little bit safer on the open internet.

-DH

Bitcoin Payments with a Click

With recent Bitcoin coverage in the news and media, I’ve picked up playing around with it again. One thing that came to mind was something that would make it easier to make payments to addresses found on the web. My first thought was doing the same thing as a MailTo link on the web, click the link and the client opens up with the details in place. Granted copying and pasting the address isn’t that big of a deal, but this makes it easier to send or donate to a website.

Now I have to be honest I wasn’t sure what the correct name for the MailTo link was called. One quick Google search led me to the MailTo URI Scheme Wikipedia page. Another Google search for “Bitcoin URI Scheme” led me to this page with a technical write up of a URI Scheme for sending Bitcoin payments. Lo and behold, the samples on that page work just like I’d expect by opening the local client on my computer with the address filled in. The only problem I can see is that most sites aren’t using this already. I would imagine that this would be a no brainer, where anything that makes it easier to send you money is always a good idea. So here’s my plea to other sites to add the code needed for the bitcoin link.

Just in case anyone needs a refresher, it’s done with the <a> tag and in it’s simplest form would look like this.

<a href="bitcoin:PutPaymentAddressHere">Link text goes here</a>

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Implementing multiple Dynamic DNS providers

DNS-o-Matic LogoDynamic DNS services allow people with a dynamic IP address from there ISP (like me) to access resources using a name instead of by IP address. Most routers have support for updating dynamic DNS services, but are usually limited to one service. I use DynDNS (free, which is no longer offered) for this type of access. I wanted to switch my DNS servers to OpenDNS and while they don’t require the same type of updates like DynDNS to work, they offer some interesting features like stats and category filtering using a dynamic DNS type service. The problem is my router only support updates for one dynamic DNS service and it was already updating DynDNS. Luckily, OpenDNS also runs a service called DNS-o-Matic which will update multiple dynamic services at once. Here are some quick steps to set this up on DD-WRT.

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Getting Stuff From Free Google AdWords Credits

So two months ago Lifehacker detailed some steps to max out bonus referral space on Dropbox with Google AdWords and free ad credits. I ran this as a short experiment with SugarSync, a service similar to Dropbox, which I’ll talk about my experience with. But first a quick overview, The idea is to take free advertising credits offered for Google AdWords and use that to run text ads pointing at your referral link to get people to sign up and get the bonus space offered for the referrals.

The Lifehacker article didn’t have quite the same success as the article they originally based the idea from. It looks like they spent $60 of their $100 credit to get 8 GB of free space, the original article maxed out 16 GB using just under $10. Both of them used Dropbox while I went a similar route with SugarSync. There are some advantages of SugarSync over Dropbox. The two that stand out the most are they currently offer a larger amount of free storage over Dropbox (5 GB vs. 2 GB), and they don’t cap the maximum amount you can get from their referral bonus (which is also larger than Dropbox, 500 MB vs 250 MB).

While running the ads for about 3 days I spent a total of $43 in credits; this netted me 304 click-throughs, 33 sign-ups, with 13 currently completed that have awarded me bonus space. Of course if those other sign-ups can download the SugarSync software in the future, and I’ll get the bonus space when they do. Read more after the break for some ideas I have regarding this method along with some other ideas for using my free AdWord Credits.

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