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How To: Do Keyword Research Before Registering a Domain

The importance of keyword research is for everyone wanting to create a website. Are you a dog trainer or a golfer? A billiard player or a surfer? Whatever niche you're in or skills you have right now, you can document them and save some for the rainy days. You can create a one-page website or a blog out of it and later on market it to respond to its financial benefits.

How To: Tie the trucker's hitch Boy Scouts knot

Learn how to tie the Boy Scouts trucker's hitch knot. The Trucker's Hitch (Lorry Knot in the UK and parts of Canada) allows the scout (or sailor or whatever) to easily tighten a rope, yet easily untie the knot. Its most common use is for tying loads (thus the trucker moniker) such as a canoe to a cartop, a tarp to trailer or any application where a very tight rope is needed. It provides the advantages of a block and tackle, without the heavy hardware.

How To: Create glossy web icons in Illustrator CS2

In this tutorial you will learn how to create glossy web icons in Illustrator CS2. Very often you will be able to download royalty-free icons from the Internet, but the problem is they are not customized to fit in with your existing web site's design. So creating your own icons is always a good way if you have the time to do it. Make sure to hit "play tutorial" in the top left corner of the video to start the video. There is no sound, so you'll need to watch the pop-up directions. Create glos...

News: Make Insulating Glass Conductive with a Blowtorch!

Have a few light bulbs and a blowtorch? Then join the folks over at Harvard in a cool science experiment on the conductivity of glass. As you well know, glass is an insulator with low conductivity and high resistivity. In the video below, they flip the switch, demonstrating how heating the glass fuse enclosure from an incandescent light bulb can create a conductive material that completes the series circuit and lights the second light bulb. In the video, the two light sockets are wired in ser...

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite, Realistic 5 - Real Hacking Simulations

Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, Realistic 5, the fifth and last in my series of realistic hacking simulation missions. This time, telemarketers are invading people's privacy, and it was up to us to stop them! The job was to get root on the site and delete the contact database in order to return the right of privacy to its victims.

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite, Realistic 4 - Real Hacking Simulations

Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 4. The fourth in a series of realistic simulation missions was designed to be exactly like a situation you may encounter in the real world. This time, we are told "Fischer's Animal Products is a company that slaughters animals and turns their skin into overpriced products which are then sold to rich bastards! Help animal rights activists increase political awareness by hacking their mailing list."

How To: Make a Change-of-IP Notifier in Python

In this article I'll show you how to make a simple IP address notifier. The program will text you your new IP address, in the event that it changes. For those of you with dynamic IPs, this is very useful. I'm constantly frustrated when my IP changes, and it's handy to be notified via text when it happens. To use the program, you'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib2, and a program called "text" (see this article here to get it).

How To: Make a Gmail Notifier in Python

In this article, I'll show you how to make a simple Gmail notifier. Python can do various things in terms of notifications; sending commands to an Arduino unit, playing sounds, opening windows, etc. The code below simply plays some music, but the possibilities of notification methods are endless. If you aren't familiar with python, there are many sites with tutorials like this one, or this one.

News: Print 3D Models of Your Minecraft Creations with Mineways

Want to see your Minecraft creations in real physical form outside of your server? Mineways is a free program for Linux or Windows users that renders all of your Minecraft builds into full color 3D model files. Those files can then be sculpted using your own 3D printer (if you have one), or uploaded to Shapeways, a company that will print your 3D models creations in colored plastic, which you can then purchase or sell in their online gallery.

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite Walkthrough, Part 1 - Legal Hacker Training

Friday's Community Byte was weird. The intent was to do a HackThisSite mission, but upon time to begin, everyone in there was programming without my assistance, with the help of Sol Gates. This is great! It's really awesome that everyone enjoys programming that much and will make the effort to learn even when I am not present. So, a tip of my hat to Mr. Sol Gates and the rest of you fine people.

How To: Nab Free eBooks Using Google

eBooks are an amazing thing, especially with Amazon's Kindle. What's irrtating about eBooks as that you have an infinite selection of books at your fingertips, but they all cost so much! Well, as always, Null Byte has a trick up our sleeves for nabbing free ebooks from Google.

How To: Carve Saved Passwords Using Cain

I've previously mentioned how saving browser passwords is a bad idea, but I never went into much detail as to why. Passwords that are saved in your browser can be carved out and stolen very easily. In fact, even passwords you save for instant messaging and Wi-Fi are vulnerable. Windows is very inefficient with the way it stores passwords—it doesn't store them in key-vaults, nor does it encrypt them. You're left with passwords residing in memory and filespace that's unencrypted.

News: Pokemon + Jabbawockeez + YouTube = Kusarine Project

Japan has a tendency to produce things that boggle the Western mind. Its citizens are already responsible for without a question the weirdest music video in the history of the medium. With that said, here is a video reenactment of several Pokemon (Pocket Monster in Japan) games released by Japanese performance art troupe Kusarine Project: Kusarine Project and their amazing YouTube channel first became known through the Japanese video sharing site/meme originator NicoNicoDouba. Their white mas...

News: Indie Developer Fights Pirates with Piracy

No Time To Explain is the first game by two man indie developer tiny Build Games. It's a fun and very stylish platformer in it's own right, available for $10 from the tiny Build website. Articles about the game on RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, and other prominent PC sites helped it develop substantial hype and raise more than $26,000 via Kickstarter to fund development.

News: Famous Indie Game Makers Immortalized in 'The Indie Game Legend'

The indie game scene is constantly expanding, but in 2008, Minecraft, Braid and Angry Birds had not been released, along with all of the other indie games that established the financial viability of the format. Indie games were the all-but-exclusive purview of free Flash game sites and the proud users of TIGsource.com. The Independent Gaming Source is a massive forum for indie game developers to share their projects with like-minded individuals, while seeking help and approval of their games.

News: The Epic Danny MacAskill's Greatest Hits

Danny MacAskill has been a cycling and internet god since the day he surfaced on YouTube back in April of 2009. A Scottish street trials pro rider for Inspired Bicycles Ltd., MacAskill has been practicing his stunt riding for over 12 years. He gave up his job as a mechanic to ride full time, and now appears in music videos and commercials.

News: Japan's Flying, Tumbling Reconnaissance Sphere Soars at 37 MPH

Flying orbs. At first, you might think of the Tall Man and his army of flying sentinel spheres, equipped with zombie brains and a mini-arsenal of saw blades, drill bits and shooting lasers. But these flying orbs weren't conceived from the evil mind of a superhuman mortician—they were designed by Fumiyuki Sato, a researcher at the Japanese Defense Ministry's Technical Research and Development Institute—for something other than deadly deeds.

News: Artist to Schlep Mammoth Chunk of Ice from Greenland to NYC

It's an ambitious How-To project to say the least, or more specifically, an over-the-top political art installation by San Francisco artist Brian Goggin. You may have previously heard of Goggin for his "Defenestration" project—an installation of "frozen" furniture, being tossed mid-air from a San Francisco apartment building. But Goggin's latest project sounds significantly more challenging to execute, considering the elaborate game plan involved:

The Getty Museum Presents: How to Make Art from Ye Olden Days

Art Babble is a video network for artists and art lovers alike, launched by a group of curators at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The site is divided into channels, series and partners, with a wide variety of top notch videos from institutions far and wide. The Getty Museum has posted some especially fascinating content, most notably their series on modern artisans and craftsmen demonstrating antiquated art techniques.

News: To Explore New Worlds...

One of the things I enjoy the most about making tutorial videos is watching the reactions. In YouTube's backoffice, they give me great tools like Insight, Demographics, Discovery and Hot Spots. I can tell when people's attention drops off when watching. I can see what age groups and gender my audience is made up of. And... I can see where most people came from to get to see my videos.

News: Digital Picture Frame Snatches Photos from Public Wi-Fi Networks

You're sitting in your favorite café enjoying a hot cup of joe, then you open up your laptop or turn on your tablet computer to get to work, but as always you get sidetracked and head straight for Facebook. Someone just tagged you in a photo, so you check it out, then you see it out of the corner of your eye—your Facebook picture digitally displayed on the wall in a nice, neat digital photo frame.

Wheels of Steel: A Virtual Turntable in Your Browser

Wheels of Steel is a virtual browser-based turntable emulator created by Scott Schiller, a Canadian developer who works on Flickr at Yahoo. This project will appeal to those who A) dig turntablism and B) are knowledgeable in web development. I know nothing of the latter, but from what I can tell, Wheels of Steel appears to be significant because unlike its predecessors, it employs CSS3 instead of flash. Since I'm not familiar with the topic, here's Scott on the history and technical details o...

News: Enter the Weird World of Hojamaka Games

Without Japan, video games would not be very fun. Atari's early work was important, but Japanese developers, publishers, and hardware makers were responsible for almost every major advance in video games for the first 25 years of their mainstream existence. In recent years, it has often been said that they have become less relevant than Western developers. In the indie games movement— (our area of greatest interest here at Indie Games Ichiban)—Japan does not have anywhere near the presence th...

How To: Find the Perfect Beer with the BrewGene iPhone App

There are two kinds of beer drinkers—those who just want to drink and those who want to enjoy it. The former usually sticks to the same kind of beer, drinking it habitually, while the latter is always on the lookout for new varieties. They like savoring the taste of a freshly poured dark lager and the roasted aroma of a hearty stout and are always looking for that "Holy Grail" of beer—the perfect combination of hops, malt and yeast. Thankfully, there's a mobile application that gets you once ...