Posts

Bringing back desktop themes

On a whim, I decided to write a script that converts Microsoft Plus desktop themes into HTML pages. Amazingly, it actually works.

Inside Your Computer desktop theme

Here’s a live demo of the Inside Your Computer theme as a HTML page.

I’ve made the code available on GitHub if you’d like to give it a try.

A Gmail invitation from 2004

Looking through my old stuff, I found this Gmail invitation I sent in 2004.

A little piece of Internet history.

Daniel Ruscoe has invited you to open a free Gmail account. The invitation will expire in three weeks and can only be used to set up one account.

To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-5e1741427d-ab7c845067-1c6d8d5a2f

Once you create your account, Daniel Ruscoe will be notified with your new @gmail.com address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!

If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail service that offers:

- 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage
- Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
- Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into "conversations"
- Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your messages

Gmail is still in an early stage of development. If you set up an account, you'll be able to keep it even after we make Gmail more widely available and as one of the system's early testers, you will be helping us improve the service through your feedback. We might ask for your comments and suggestions periodically and we appreciate your help in making Gmail even better.

Thanks,

The Gmail Team

To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/benefits.html

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser).

Development screenshots from Dark Hill Museum of Death

These are some early screenshots from what would eventually become my game, Dark Hill Museum of Death.

Ancient Egypt screenshot
Ancient Egypt screenshot
Celecration of the Dead screenshot
Entrance screenshot
Execution screenshot
Graveyard screenshot
Headstones screenshot

Writing to a floppy disk in Linux

Here’s a quick and simple way to write a disk image to a floppy disk in Linux.

First, find your floppy disk drive:

sudo fdisk -l

You’ll find something like /dev/sdb in the list. Make sure the description matches the floppy drive you’ve attached.

Assuming you want to write a disk image called MYDISK.img, run:

sudo dd if=MYDISK.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=sync ; sync

Replace /dev/sdb with your floppy disk drive if different.

Just the headers with cURL

There’s a very handy cURL flag if you just want to get a URLs headers; -I

curl -I example.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 316273
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2023 23:53:25 GMT
Etag: "3147526947"
Expires: Fri, 27 Jan 2023 23:53:25 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
Server: ECS (sab/5799)
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 648

If you’re using an operating system that allows for aliases, you could create a handy alias:

alias ch="curl -I"

Unexpected no-cache header on nginx hosted site

If you’re hosting a site on nginx and you unexpectedly see cache-control: no-cache being inserted into your site’s headers, check for this line in your host configuration:

expires: -1

This tripped me up for a while. expires: -1 will disable caching even if you have another cache-control header set in the same host.

See this documentation for more info.