How to record Youtube live streams on a Linux server

Coachella streams a load of their sets every year on Youtube and nobody seems to record them all. So I had to volunteer starting in 2015. Some rips you find are one-off screen recordings using some software like Camtasia, which nearly always drop frames and are kinda shit. You have to record directly from the […]

Ticketmaster Ticketfast Barcode Format

If you’ve ever bought tickets to a big sporting or music event, you’ve probably had to deal with TicketMaster and their extortionate handling fees. They charge it even if you’re using the print-at-home eTicket format called TicketFast. These tickets have a 16 digit number and barcode that is scanned at the gate against a database […]

How to serve files with a simple and quick PHP BitTorrent tracker

I needed to share some raw video files with a friend lately so I uploaded 17GB of data to my webserver and sent them the HTTP link. Problem was the video files were scattered over several directories and the directory structure was important so the end user would have had to download each one individually […]

How to disable Clickberry appearing on your Youtube videos

Like me, have you suddenly started seeing a ‘tag’ feature on your Youtube videos, that when clicked show a ‘Share moment’ and ‘Share object’ option and a little icon of a berry appears on your Youtube play bar? And when you click this berry icon, it brings you to clickberry.tv? Looks like this: I thought […]

How to use Overplay and other VPNs as a cURL proxy

UPDATE May 2015 When I posted this tutorial two years ago, I gradually got comments that the OpenVPN interface was setup successfully but curl traffic through the interface timed out. I tried to help but responded with the cliched ‘works on my machine’, with my machine being Debian Squeeze and kernel version 2.6. Recently I […]

iMessage is a handy way to show people you’ve the money for an iPhone

When someone text me & my bubble don’t turn blue I instantly pity them lol — Ju$t (@justcobain) November 30, 2012 I get soo excited when I text someone and see my messages turn blue!!! Such an upgrade on life!!! — Cherish Williams (@Cherish_this) December 3, 2012 I judge people when I text them for […]

ryanair leaving money on the table with no customer registration

I’ve booked loads of Ryanair flights and every time they ask you for your name, address, mobile and when you check in online, they ask for your passport number and date of birth. Why do you have to do this everytime? Why can’t you register an account on the ryanair website and have all this […]

php curl debugging – seeing the exact http request headers sent by curl

In my many of years of php/curl use, I’ve hammered my head off my table countless times trying to debug scripts that weren’t emulating the browser like it was supposed to. This was pretty hard without seeing the exact HTTP request header sent by cURL each session, but this is possible now from PHP 5.1.3 […]