Google Hosted Email not accessible, wtf!

http://www.google.com/hosted is redirecting to google.com, Google’s main page. Damn! my mails are all inaccessible.

Saving Streaming Windows Media

Many times (or always?) the videos (especially wmv) streaming over internet are not downloadable as Windows Media Player disables the save menu. Windows Media files are usually served through an .asx metafile. ASX is a simple XML format which stores the path to media file(s) to play. e.g.

<ASX version="3.0">
     <Entry>
        <ref href="mms://rx-lvl3-wa37.rbn.com/farm/*/ibmpdc/pdc/open
                   /wmdemand/mar06/rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv"/>
     </Entry>
</ASX>

Now, the media files are served over mms protocol, which cannot be saved directly. Here comes the saviour FlashGet. Just put this mms url in FlashGet’s ‘URL’ field and save the file. Done!

IBM’s “Anthem”

I loved this “Anthem” TV advertisement from IBM.

Direct link to “Anthem” (Windows Media Player required) :
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=ibmpdc/pdc/open/wmdemand/mar06/
rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx

(Remove line break from url to play)

Quick Proxy Browsing

When: Your ISP is stupid enough to block sites it shouldn’t.

How: Create a bookmarklet of the following JavaScript code. All the line breaks below needed to be removed for this to work.

javascript:void((function(){window.location.href=
'http://www.boxofprox.com/index.php?q='+base64_encode(window.location.href);})());
function%20base64_encode(str){
var%20alnum='ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789._';
var%20out='';var%20t,x,y,z;for(var%20i=0;i<str.length;i+=3){t=Math.min(3,str.length-i);
if(t==1){x=str.charCodeAt(i);out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));
out+=alnum.charAt(((x&0X00000003)<<4));out+='--';}
else%20if(t==2){x=str.charCodeAt(i);y=str.charCodeAt(i+1);
out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));out+=alnum.charAt((((x&0X00000003)<<4)|(y>>4)));
out+=alnum.charAt(((y&0X0000000f)<<2));out+='-';}
else{x=str.charCodeAt(i);y=str.charCodeAt(i+1);z=str.charCodeAt(i+2);
out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));out+=alnum.charAt((((x&0x00000003)<<4)|(y>>4)));
out+=alnum.charAt((((y&0X0000000f)<<2)|(z>>6)));out+=alnum.charAt((z&0X0000003f));}}
return%20out;}

This little code lets one browse with a base64 encoded url to bypass any phrase blocks. Use it on your own risk etc. Thanks ‘someone unknown’ for base64 encoding function.