I just read today about Gizmo Call, a potentially revolutionary new VoIP offering. Rather than having to install an application (like with Skype), or change over your phone service (like with Vonage), you simply go to their site and use the Flash application to call anywhere in the world. Apparently you get 5 minutes per day for free, and 10 minutes if you register! (more…)

I'm honestly getting sick of having to pay so much for insurance. (more…)

With my link checking tool I just created, people can use it for free, but they have a limited number of links that they can track. Paid users have more options, and can track more links. So, I needed to be able to use PayPal subscriptions, and I didn't want to have to manually initiate and track them. PayPal publishes their APIs, but I also didn't want to spend days building a PHP class to interface with those APIs! (more…)

Well I just stumbled upon a newer website called Encyclocentral. I was under the impression that they were going for the Wikipedia space, providing a vast repository of open and free knowledge. Not quite. (more…)

I just found out that my free link checking tool is being blocked by some websites. My guess is that it's because it's sending a black User-Agent string. I'm going to have to spoof it, say it's FireFox or something. Here's how to do that with cURL and PHP:

// spoofing FireFox 2.0
$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1";

$ch = curl_init();

// set user agent
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
// set the rest of your cURL options here