Nothing Up My Sleeve

O'Reilly Network: Home Office Envy

Peeking at how others have arranged their home office is fun and educational. For details, see Home Office Envy

O'Reilly Network: Timely Travel Info in Your Pocket

Use your Mac and your iPhone to ease travel planning. Check out my Timely Travel Info in Your Pocket for the details.

O'Reilly Network: Cidney - Distributed Caller ID for Macintosh

A new Caller ID program for the Mac, with several interesting features, covered in my article: Cidney - Distributed Caller ID for Macintosh

Big Book of Apple Hacks

Congrats to Chris Seibold, author of the forthcoming Big Book of Apple Hacks. You can order it now, and enjoy over 600 pages of diverse Apple-related solutions and clever idea (ie: "hacks") when it ships. I contributed some home automation-related goodies, and I can't wait to see what else the book has to offer.

O'Reilly Network - A Peek Inside an Automated Home

If you're curious about the mind of a home automation enthusiast, you can see inside by reviewing two articles from Smart Home Hacks. See A peek inside an automated home for details.

O'Reilly Network: Relief for Mac-based Ceiva Customers

I've written about the great success, and great irritation, I've had with the Ceiva digital picture frames. Out of the blue, they decided to release an iPhoto plug-in last week. Read more about it in my article at O'Reilly Digital Media.

O'Reilly Network - Meet Hazel

I've finally had enough with computer file clutter, so I turned to Hazel for help. For details, see my article Meet Hazel

O'Reilly Network - Proxify your home

If you want to schedule automated tasks on your Mac, the free application Proxi will help you do that, and a lot more. See my Proxify your home article for details.

O'Reilly Network: Standalone Home Automation

If you don't want to dedicate a computer to run your home, you don't have to! Read my Standalone Home Automation to learn about another approach.

Twitter as a Moral Compass

I recently learned a new word -- "splog." A splog is "spam blog" that takes content (often via RSS) from other sites and re-publishes it as their own, hoping to draw traffic to their own site.

You see, I've been splogged. A piece I wrote for 43Folders.com was republished by a blog in the Netherlands without crediting me or Merlin's site. I'm usually flattered when someone likes what I've written well enough to quote from it, and grateful when they acknowledge its source, but just taking an entire piece and reposting it is bad form, to say the least.

I tried to contact the owners of the offending site, but to no avail. Eventually (may my childhood pastor forgive me) my thoughts turned to revenge. The thieves are being lazy about swiping the content, so an image embedded in the piece is still pointing to its source on my server. (A practice known as "hotlinking.") I thought about getting revenge by substituting the correct image with an inappropriate one, as a way of communicating (albeit in a juvenile manner) my displeasure.

But I wasn't sure that I should so I turned to Twitter and asked my friends, and all of Twitter by inclusion, what they thought of my proposed reaction. "Do it! Do it!" came the replies, reminding me of a mob at a college party cheering on the drunk at the receiving end of a beer bong.

There were a few Twitterarians that suggested a more subtle approach, such as sending a smeared or odd-sized image, but no one suggested that I turn the other cheek.

Thus, having once again confirmed Differential Association theory, I began learning how to use Apache's "rewrite" module to make sure that the thieving website, and and no other website, displayed an alternate image when my stolen content was displayed.

My webhost offers a way to configure my site so that only approved sites can load my images, but I wasn't interested in whitelisting everywhere I want my content to appear. So, I had to write my own rewrite code, and I quickly found Stop Stolen Content with Apache mod_rewrite. This too was a whitelist approach, but it helped with the arcane rewrite syntax.

The example at SEO Black Hat was very useful, because by using the Borkweb Apache Rewrite Cheatsheet I was able to modify the code to key off the referrer header instead of the offending site's IP address. All that left me to figure out was how to intercept references to just the single file I was looking to substitute.

Here's the rewrite code I'm using:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.example.nl/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^SandyInDock.jpg$ http://www.g2meyer.com/blogsupport/thief.jpg [NC]

In this code, the thieving site is www.example.nl. (changed here because I'm not going to help publicize their actual domain). The file SandyInDock.jpg is the graphic that is referenced in the HTML they swiped, and the file thief.jpg is the substitute image that I'm sending instead of the original. (It's just a blank image in this example, I'll spare you from the rude version.) That's all there is to it. Stick this code in the .htaccess file for the directory where the images are served from, and you're all set. When a viewer loads the page at the remote site, they'll get a little surprise, instead of the original image.

Oh, and the next time you want to be talked out of a questionable idea, don't turn to Twitter.