When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always for the content. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.

That is why I'm now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client's money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.

The guys at gravatar.com offer a nice service: for website owners, they let you automatically associate an avatar to your users, through the user's email address. The users who register to gravatars.com are able to change their gravatar and the change will be visible on all gravatar-enabled websites where they registered with the same email.

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There is a piece of information which must be made public, though. It's this 32 char string which serves as a token for your web browser to retrieve the right image. How much information are we leaking to the bad people inhabiting the internet? Can that key be used to retrieve our email?

Using an HTC Magic and Google Street View we've made a simple pair of virtual reality goggles that let you immerse yourself in distant locations. You can also use these goggles with augmented reality apps -- although you probably don't want to walk around with them all day long.

winetricks is a quick and dirty script to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries sometimes needed to run programs in Wine.

So now, if you want to get your Gstreamer-supported V4L2 video device to work with Flash (even pre-V4L2 supporting builds of Flash), follow these instructions. I admit they're a bit high-level.

Installing DD-WRT on a router in most cases is almost as simple as installing a program onto your computer. Installing programs on a router, known as firmware, are achieved by a method called flashing. This article helps you determine which installation process is for you on your supported router, as well as giving router suggestions and information about flashing each one.

Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.)

ASCII art is nothing new, but this takes it one step further by allowing you to embed another data file within the image!

The resulting ASCII art remains printable (i.e. no special unicode symbol) - this means you can print the image out, hang it on your wall, and have it look like an innocent ASCII art when it's hiding a secret document of your choice.

The Hacker's Choice, a non-commercial group of computer security experts, has released a video showing a cloned passport being approved by a security scanner at a Dutch airport. When the reader scans the passport it is revealed to belong to one Elvis Aaron Presley, complete with picture.