To use these numbers just choose a credit card vendor below and enter an expiry date within three years from now. For the security/CVV2 / CVC / etc number just enter three random numbers.

Note: none of the numbers below can be used to buy anything.

Here’s what to do:

1. Create a Google AdWords account if you don’t already have one.
2. Redeem your voucher or deposit a small amount.
3. Create a dropbox account if you don’t already have one.
4. Go to: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals and copy the top link in the right box
5. Create a new campaign using the link from dropbox, make sure you create 4 or 5 ads it works better and faster.
6. Set max budget per day to 5 or 10 euro/dollar
7. Set max CPC to 0,01
8. Sit back, relax….

For more detailed instructions watch the youtube video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

//via: http://warnaars.com/

1. Update

Althought this one might seem obvious it is the most important security marker. Always, and i mean always, keep your blog and plugins updated. There are a lots of websites which track security bugs in WordPress and its plugins. As soon as a bug is found lots of crackers are eager to test it out on real websites. You don’t want this to be yours. If your blog or plugin stops working after an update you should fix that or find a new plugin, this can never be a reason for not updating.

2. Use your .htacces file

As a WordPress user, you probably know how important the wp-config.php file is. This file contains all of the information required to access your precious database: username, password, server name and so on. Protecting the wp-config.php file is critical, so how about exploiting the power of Apache to this end? The .htaccess file is located at the root your WordPress installation. After creating a back-up of it (it’s such a critical file that we should always have a safe copy), open it up, and paste the following code:

2.1 Protect your wp-config.php file:

<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

2.2 Protect your blog from script injections and variable modification:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C).*script.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

2.3 Save bandwith and protect your blog from content scrapers:

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

2.4 Prevent directory browsing:

Please note that it’s not enough to update the blog’s robots.txt file with Disallow: /wp*. This would prevent the wp-directory from being indexed, but will not prevent users from seeing it.

Options -Indexes

3. Create a plugin to prevent malicious url requests

Hackers and evil-doers often use malicious queries to find and attack a blog’s weak spots. WordPress has good default protection, but enhancing it is possible. Paste the following code in a text file, and save it as blockbadqueries.php. Once you’ve done that, upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it as you would any other plug-in. Now your blog is protected against malicious queries. What this code does is pretty simple. It checks for excessively long request strings (more than 255 characters) and for the presence of either the eval or base64 PHP functions in the URI. If one of these conditions is met, then the plug-in sends a 414 error to the client’s browser.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Block Bad Queries
Plugin URI: http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/12/22/protect-wordpress-against-malicious-url-requests/
Description: Protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests
Author URI: http://perishablepress.com/
Author: Perishable Press
Version: 1.0
*/

global $user_ID;

if($user_ID) {
if(!current_user_can('level_10')) {
if (strlen($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) > 255 ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "eval(") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "CONCAT") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "UNION+SELECT") ||
strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "base64")) {
@header("HTTP/1.1 414 Request-URI Too Long");
@header("Status: 414 Request-URI Too Long");
@header("Connection: Close");
@exit;
}
}
}
?>

4. Stop some standard WordPress functions

These two functions will hide your WordPress version number and stop WordPress from returning any errors when a login attempt has failed. This information could be used by hackers trying to get access to your admin.

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

add_filter('login_errors',create_function('$a', "return null;"));

I intend to actively maintain my blog in the future and this new theme is a great start in my opinion. It is still a work in progress and I haven’t got all my plugins up and running but all things will be back to normal soon. My old posts might not always look good but i’ll try fix that as soon as possible too. Until then let me know if you see something not working or anything missing. Besides that i’d like to hear what you think of the new design!

Note: Always save a backup of your registry before making changes (File > export):

• Download AC3Filter & install (full or lite version) – http://ac3filter.net/
• Download Radlight’s Filter Manager right here
• Open FilterManager & look for AC3Filter under DirectShow Filters.
• Copy the CLSID.
• Open Regedit (C:\Windows\Regedit.exe – Run as Admin).
• Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\FilterExceptions
• Right-click FilterExceptions -> Permissions -> Advanced -> Owner tab
• Change owner to your <username> account. Apply.
• Go back to FilterExceptions, & create a new key.
• Rename the new key to the CLSID previously copied.
• AC3Filter will now be used to decode AC3 & DTS streams on WMP12. :)

Optional for x86 installations, obligatory for x64 installations:

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to “C:\Windows\system32\” and locate the file name “MP3DMOD.DLL”. Right-click to bring up the menu and choose: Properties > Security > Advanced >Change ownership to your user account and/or  administrators group. Then rename the file “MP3DMOD.DLL.bak”.  This will disable the native filter and can be reversed by changing the file name back at any time. X64 installations will have to repeat this step for the: “MP3DMOD.DLL” file in  “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\”

Method is the same for ffdshow, just copy CLSID of ffdshow.

After my good old TomTom Go 700 passed away I got a new TomTom Go 740 Live and soon found out it’s really easy to play video on a TomTom navigation device. This way you can use your navigation as an in-car entertainment centre. With TomPlayer you are able to watch full screen video’s in AVI (divx or xvid) or MPEG video and listen to mp3 or ogg audio files.

The documentation on tomplayer.net can be a bit confusing and installation is not the same for all TomTom models. In this post I will explain how to install and configure TomPlayer on an external MicroSD memory card. This method will work for models Go 740/750/930 Live and will probably work for a lot of other models. At the end I will explain another configuration which might work for your model.

Installation

1. Insert SD-card into TomTom slot
2. Download the Tomplayer zip archive and extract it
3. Connect TomTom to PC and quit TomTom Home
4. Copy The Following folders to your external SD-card: audio, tomplayer, video
5. Rename the folder “SDKRegistry” to “SdkRegistry” and copy this folder to the root of your TomTom internal memory

I’ve read the different descriptions for installing on the internal memory and on an SD card, and I was still a little confused by the terminology… especially references to /mnt/movinand and to /mnt/sdcard.

It seems like:
1 – /mnt/movinand refers to the removable storage (i.e., SD-card)
2 – /mnt/sdcard refers to the internal memory.

On Windows PC, these show up as external drives H: and I: respectively. So when we modify the configuration files taking these assumptions into consideration, Tomplayer worked correctly.

Configuration

1. Open tomplayer.ini (the file is in tomplayer/conf/ folder)
2. Change:
   video_dir                      = /mnt/sdcard/video
   audio_dir                      = /mnt/sdcard/audio
   to:
   video_dir                      = /mnt/movinand/video
   audio_dir                      = /mnt/movinand/audio
3. Open tomplayer.cap (the file is in SdkRegistry folder)
4. Change:
   AppPath|/mnt/sdcard/tomplayer/|
   to:
   AppPath|/mnt/movinand/tomplayer/|
5. Disconnect your TomTom from PC and restart it

Now you will have a fourth screen in your TomTom main menu. Start TomPlayer by pressing the icon. On first start TomPlayer will start with screen calibration. Touch the crosses and proceed. Last thing to do is to copy some audio and video to their respective folders on the SD-card. Have fun!

An alternative method is to copy all files of the distrib folder to your external SD-card. The ttfilesytem (do not copy this to your TomTom internal memory!) will load your TomPlayer as soon as the SD-card is inserted and normal TomTom will load when it’s ejected. This didn’t work on my TomTom Go 740 Live, even worse it made it crash, but I have read this method should work on most TomTom models. You can also install TomPlayer to your TomTom internal memor. I did not do this because I don’t to run out my internal flash read/write cycles. If you have any problems installing or configuring TomPlayer visit the tomplayer.net forum for more help.

If you want to watch video on your TomTom convert your video’s to avi or mpeg. Try MediaCoder as it’s free and it has everything you need. TomTom screen resolutions are 480*272 for the widescreen models (TomTom XL or GO) and 320*240 for fullscreen models (TomTom ONE).

First the ‘ easy updating’  part. I found a great service that does all the hard work for me, Pixelpipe. This great service allows you to upload messages and multimedia to a lot of services. More than 120 services as we speak! It works very simple, before you begin you have to add your profiles and services to PixelPipe and add some tags to them (eg. Photo, Family, Blog, FTP). After this first step which takes a bit longer to setup it is very easy to post to multiple destinations using the tags you have entered before. So when I want my family to see my newly uploaded photo I send my picture with the @family tag and Pixelpipe knows where to send it. Another big advantage of PixelPipe are the numerous possibilities for uploading your content, this can be done via e-mail, mobile phones, Firefox plugin, Picasa, Windows context menu plugins, sms/mms or the website itself.

So after making it a bit easier for me to post content to my social networks I want my networks to grow and be able to follow them easily. Here’s where my new lifestream comes in. This lifestream will be an automatically updated stream of all (well, at least most of) my online social activities. I currently have updates installed for Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Wakoopa, LinkedIn, Blip.fm and Hyves. My lifestream still needs a lot of tweaking before it’s finished but is working good enough for going public with. Be sure to add it to your favorites because I will be adding more social services and functionality soon! One of which will be a new website header showing generated polaroids from images found on my social accounts.

I’m very excited about it and very happy to be given the chance to work on internet applications (on all platforms, including webbrowsers, mobile phones, game consoles and more) using new technologies. In example the NOS are the first european broadcaster who offer an iPhone application with live videostreams of the Tour de France. Besides being excited about my future work it is very cool te hear that an organisation as the NOS thinks you are the best of all people who sollicitated. Even you guys helped out a little withouth even knowing! When asked for some html/javascript work I have been doing this blog was one of the items I submitted. So thank you for coming back here and reading my articles.

So if you like my articles there’s a new blog to follow: http://weblogs.nos.nl/nieuwemedia/ . On this blog M. Stekelenburg will write about all the fun stuff we will be working on in our department (New Media). For all people who are shitting their pants right now because they are afraid my current work and services will be stopped or deleted can take a breath because I won’t do that. Altough I will not accept any new projects (unless extremely well payed or challenging of course ;p) support will be there for projects I have done.

Congratulations are more than welcome in the comments… ;p

We went to TT Assen yesterday to go see Valentino Rossi win his 100th Grand Prix in the MotoGP race. We had a great time and were able to see Rossi celebrating with a big banner showing photos of all his wins because we where next to the special “Rossi” stand.  Luckily the rain came just after we left the circuit. My video report is on youtube and I’ve created a celebration wallpaper for Rossi’s 100th GP win. You can download the wallpaper at: www.baronsoze.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

When visiting my blog the last few months people might have asked themselves, so where’s Kaiser? Well, I know I haven’t posted anything for about two months and I’ll tell you why. I have been in surgery twice which cost me a lot of effort to recover from. Luckily I fully recovered and I’m feeling better then ever!

So although I was at home I didn’t had a lot of time to write articles for my blog I didn’t. This is because I was working on a few big projects. The first one I’d like to tell you about is WDTVC.com, this is a brand new community for owners of the great WD TV HD media player. I started of coding an AJAX/PHP movie thumbnail generator for the WD TV which became insanely popular within just a few days. Because of this I decided to put some more effort into it and build a whole website around the thumbnail generator. Currently we we have about 3,000 unique visitors and still growing everyday. We offer tutorials, forums and a wiki so come visit us soon!

Another project I have been working on is the website for the beautiful Yachtclub Restaurant Bonaire. This restaurant was opened last year by my good friends Rick van den Broek and Kim van Dijk. As you can see it is located on the island of Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. It’s a popular holiday destination and if you’re lucky enough to go there don’t forget to stop by the restaurant.

Some of you might know I’m a Dutch multimedia student. Although I almost finished my studies at the Hogeschool of Arnhem and Nijmegen I decided to quit for while. This was because of numerous reasons, and looking back at it, it was the right thing to do. But after some time I knew I had to go fiend an internship and finish my study. So I did, I’m currently employed at Instore Broadcast who offered me a great Internship. I have to do usability research on the current online video manager. I’ll also be designing a new GUI for a new version of this system. If allowed I’ll post some screenshots on my blog when it’s finished.

Last but not least I have been working on an vista look-a-like AJAX menu but I will tell you more about that on my next blog post. First I have to get the demo up and running. Anyways, now you know what I have been up to lately and why there weren’t any blog posts last two months. All I can say is I’m back and I will be writing for my blog again soon!

Greets,

KaiserSoze