Category: Tips & How To’s

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How To: Watch Comedy Central Videos From Canada

UPDATE 05/2012: If this isn’t working for you anymore, you might want to try this new method.

UPDATE: Some visitors are reporting that this works for Hulu as well.

The relationship between Comedy Central and Canada’s Comedy Network is the worst example of what can happen when rights owners assert copyright on the internet, based on national borders. If you are not aware – like Hulu, TV.com and others – Comedy Central videos will not play in Canada, but it’s worse. ComedyCentral.com – the entire domain – is unavailable to Canadian IPs! When you try visit it, you are redirected to comedynetwork.ca.

I found a workaround to this buried in a comment thread on reddit. Firefox users only:

For Canadian viewers, if you are using firefox, install the following addon:
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967 then:

1) In Firefox, Go to tools->modify headers
2) From the drop down box on the left select add
3) Then enter: “X-Forwarded-For” in the first input box without the quotation marks
4) Enter: “12.13.14.15” in the second input box without the quotation marks
5) Leave the last input box empty, and save the filter, and enable it
http://imgur.com/Feb4.png
6) Click the ‘Configuration’ tab on the right then proceed to check the ‘always on’ button.

Close the Modify Headers box and it should work.

[orginal post]

Works like a charm!

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Tips & How To's

How To: Exclude Words Like “An, A, The” From Alphabetized MySQL ORDER

When ordering lists of names or titles it’s sometimes desirable to exclude articles or other words from the order clause (eg. you want “The Burning Hell” to show up before “Great Lake Swimmers” in a list ordered by name). Early on in my career I must have assumed it was not possible and never bothered to look into again because I don’t recall ever ordering a list like this.
Anyways. Here’s how you do it:

SELECT name FROM artists ORDER BY TRIM( LEADING "a " FROM TRIM( LEADING "an " FROM TRIM( LEADING "the " FROM LOWER( name ) ) ) )

[thanks metafilter]<

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Tips & How To's

How To: Cold Brew Coffee

Now that summer has finally reached The True North (strong and free), I decided to finally attempt cold brewing some iced coffee. Turns out it’s one of the easiest operations I’ve ever attempted in the kitchen. Basic recipies is as follow:

– 1cup coarse ground coffee
– 4.5cups water
– combine, leave in fridge for around 12hours
– filter
– drink

I brewed it in my french press carafe overnight – with a saran wrap lid to keep out any potentially nasty fridge smells. In the morning I used the french press as usual. Unfortunately, this left the coffee more gritty than when using a french press with hot coffee, the cold water must keep the smallest grinds in suspension more readily. Next time I’ll either forgo the french press altogether and directly filter the coffee through a regular filter, or possible dual filter it (the later seems less messy).

[ Original Recipe From Internet Food Association via Lifehacker]

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Tips & How To's

Quickfire Productivity Tip: Bookmarks

Don’t use them!

At the very least, don’t bookmark distracting sites. After a recent hard drive failure, I found myself without a bookmarks backup. I’ve discovered that just the act of starting to type the url of some productivity sucking site is enough to make me think twice.

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Apps Tips & How To's

First Impressions of an iPhone Developer

I haven’t see a whole lot of information around the intertubes about what it’s actually like to deploy an iPhone App. Sure there are stories every other week about Apple’s ridiculously inconsistent censorship, and talk of developers not being paid. But there is not a lot of information about the actual process of getting App into the iTunes Store.

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

Continue reading “First Impressions of an iPhone Developer”