Remember when Sesame Street had weird but wonderful psychadelic shorts for kids to learn from? I took a walk down memory lane on GooTube today and found some trippin’ Sesame Street memories. Check these out:

For Guin:

General | 6 Comments »

I love classic video games. Hell, I grew up playing some of the first mainstream home game consoles there were. Atari 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision, NES, SNES, TurboGrafx-16, and the list goes on. In my opinion, some of the best games ever created are from the lineup of classic games from my yester-years. Now, I can revive my favourite games of the past in one of many options available to classic game lovers. Of course there are several emulators out there and even a few pay-per-title sites but my favourite of the bunch is from Nintendo - the Wii. Retro-gaming comes alive on the Nintendo Wii in the “Wii Virtual Console Channel” that brings back all of those great hits of the past. Hudson Soft, makers of past greats such as the “Bomberman” series have recently announced that they will be offering up several classic titles on Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console channel. On the list are Bonk’s Adventure, Super Star Soldier, Victory Run, Bomberman ‘93 and Dungeon Explorer. All of the titles mentioned were originally released on the TurboGrafx-16 console. Other confirmed games include the Impossible Mission games from the Commodore 64, Sonic the Hedgehog from the Sega Genesis and, of course, several titles from various Nintendo consoles.

Enjoy a few links to some of the classic games of old:
Classic 80s Games!
Whoah…
Arcade Classics!…popups, but the games work!!!

General | 1 Comment »

My brother and his girlfriend Debbie had their first child today! Their new baby boy was born at 2:15pm today, weighing in at a not-so-whopping 6 pounds, 2 ounces. It’s a good thing he wasn’t very big as I am sure if he was any larger, he would have damaged Debbie on the way out! (She’s a slender girl) They named him Evyn Joseph Perry-Martin. I’ve never seen my brother happier and I am really glad he and Debbie are having a smiling start to parenthood. From what I understand, there will be lots of sleep deprivation and stinky diapers to be changed in the coming months. Congrats Kevin and Debbie!

General | 2 Comments »

Bandwidth usage can escalate to extremes if a few people get their hands on graphics, videos and sound files that can be directly linked from your server/website. For example - somebody really likes an image on your website and instead of asking for permission, downloading the image and linking to it on their own site, they just copy the URL that leads to the image on your website and stick the code directly into their website. This way, they use your bandwidth for free, and you get to be hounded by your isp and charged extra when your image becomes popular with a large group of people, such as a community of copycats on myspace who don’t know any better.

The solution is surprisingly easy. The addition of a .htaccess file in the top level of your site, or the addition of a few lines in your current .htaccess file will fix things up for you.

The following is what I have in the .htaccess file to protect the site from having others directly link to content that I don’t want them directly linking to:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|mpg|mpeg|png)$ - [F]

I’m not sure what the procedure is for every system, but the above will work for Apache servers. NOTE: you can put any file type in the Rewrite rule line. Just separate each file extension with a |

The above graph is for the first few days of September, 2006. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd of the month show the bandwidth usage before the addition of changes to the .htaccess file. The 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th are after the changes. The previous month showed monthly bandwidth usage at over 40 gigabytes - for a personal website site is basically a blog.

I used this article at selfseo.com for my solution.
For more information on .htaccess files and what you can do with them, check out the Wikipedia entry on .htaccess.

General, TechTips | 3 Comments »