BanThePhoneBook dot org has set up a petition for an opt-in program for receiving the White Pages Phone Book. Your first instinct may be to think that the WhitePages is desperately trying to hold onto their old ways, but they’re not Murdocking at all. If you take a look at the WhitePages’ own blog you’ll see news about their mobile apps and tools for online searches. It’s good to see them embracing the future.

You can skip to the closest key frame in a youtube video by supplying the time you wish to jump to as part of the URL. This is quite handy for sending someone a video where you want them to see a specific part. Instead of sending a link and saying jump ahead to 3 minutes and 14 seconds, you can just send them a link that does it for them.

Changing your sleeping habits by adjusting your clocks to the destination time may be one way to help avoid jet lag but it’s not always possible. Other methods used in combination with fasting may do the trick. Try to stay hydrated, avoid alcohol, eat foods high in protein after you arrive at your destination, and avoid staying indoors if you arrive at your destination during the daylight hours.

Instead of storing whole dd images, even if they’re just backups of small partitions, you can save space and bandwidth by piping dd into a compression utility like gzip. You can then unzip the files straight into sha1sum to get a checksum of what you just backed up.

First you’ll narrow the possible combinations from 64,000 down to 100. But you don’t have to try each of those 100 combos. There’s a simple task you go through to figure out the actual combination in a matter of minutes. Or just make a shim out of a coke can and pick it in 2 seconds. Now that you know a simple combo padlock is basically just a deterrent, you shouldn’t ever use one to lock up anything of real value.

Choose from white noise, pink noise, or brown noise and adjust the volume to your liking. At first I thought this is crap, but it actually blocks out the noisy fan from my laptop and the hum of the next door neighbors air conditioning unit even at a low volume level.

How to make a ninja mask out of a tshirt. There’s a few ways to do this, and none of them involve cutting any holes in your tshirts. So simple even a caveman can do it.

Python’s keyring lib supports Windows win32crypto, Mac OS X’s SXKeychain, KDE’s KWallet, Gnome’s keyring, and encrypted or unencrypted password files. When your application wants to store or fetch data from the keyring, it will just work.

I like it. It’s so simple and flexible. Define it with none, then assign sys.argv in place of argv.

Download a Fedora 12 DVD image from a fedora mirror. Install it on a system with the packages you want to be installed on your custom DVD distribution. Install isomaster. Edit 2 files, replace them in your image and burn. Yes, it’s that easy.