Tim Dupree

After needing to get my external IP address a bunch of times when setting up long distance LAN games with my brother I made a simple page for displaying it. This link simply gives you your external IP address and nothing else, no adds or other junk like every other IP address site on the net.

*note that this is the external IP address of your cable modem and/or your router, not the local IP address of your computer on your personal network. Interested in the code? It’s from the getenv() man page at php.net. Get it here. Learn about it here.

Here’s an interesting site I came across today, that lets you create isometric pixel images for fun.  No real purpose other than just a neat JavaScript experiment.  It uses jQuery for the JavaScript framework which powers the UI.

Want a quick and easy way to display a list of your most recent posts in Wordpress? Just add the following code wherever you want the list to appear in your sidebar.

<ul>
<?php
$myposts = query_posts('showposts=10&offset=0');
foreach($myposts as $post) :?>
<li>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php echo substr(the_title("","", FALSE), 0, 24) . "..."; ?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

*excuse the poor indentation/structure, having a little hiccup with the syntax highlighter

This will show an unordered list containing the 10 most recent posts. If you want to exclude the most recent post, change the ‘offset’ from 0 to 1. To alter the number of posts displayed, change the number corresponding to ’showposts’. Each post title is truncated to display the first 24 characters. To modify the display length, change the ‘24′ in the substring method to your liking. To display the entire post titles, just get rid of the substr function call which is wrapping the call to the_title().

To learn more about the other parameters available for ‘query_posts’ to fine tune the output even more, visit the Wordpress codex.

If you’re on Flickr alot you’re familiar with what a pain it can be to browse through a photo set or stream. There is a great plugin for Firefox called PicLens which hooks into a lot of mainstream websites, such as Flickr, Google, Photobucket, Facebook etc. and makes browsing through lots of photos really easy and much quicker than the usual click and load routine.  It can also handle YouTube videos as well. Video quality isn’t so hot, but its a really nice user experience.  Check it out.

Ever looked at your address bar while reading your email in Gmail and noticed that the page wasn’t encrypted (”http” and not “https”)? Google sends you to a secure page to login, but by default sends you to an un-encrypted page to view and send emails.  I’m not too sure why they do this, but there is a simple hack around it.

If you want to always browse your e-mail with high-grade encryption (AES-256 256 bit),  a more secure encryption than most banks use, just change you Gmail bookmark to point to https://mail.google.com/mail/.  You will be sent to a secure page to login, and once you are authenticated, you session will remain encrypted while you read/send mail.