How to make Angry Birds tutorials
June 8th, 2011 / 1 Comment » / by Marco
This and this are the two of the greatest game programming tutorials I have ever read.
A must read for any aspiring game programmer.
Think different campaign
April 9th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Marco
This advertising campaign from Apple is always actual, and is still inspiring nowadays.
Think different!
My first Google Chrome experiment – download YouTube videos with YouVid
April 8th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Marco
I have just released my first Google Chrome extension, it’s called YouVid. It lets you download .flv files from YouTube, so that you can save and archive/convert those funny/interesting videos.
Further info here.
Invite all Facebook friends bookmarklet
April 8th, 2011 / 8 Comments » / by Marco
That was easy: after the JS code to invite all your friends to a Facebook event, page, group, etc. I have created a convenient bookmarklet to use it.
Just drag&drop this link to your browser bookmarks bar, and click it every time you need:
How to invite all your Facebook friends to an event at once (code has changed)
April 3rd, 2011 / 627 Comments » / by Marco
In the last few days, Facebook has changed the “invite your friends” functionality, which powers suggestions and invitations to events, groups, pages, etc.
The result is that old Javascript codes that allowed you to invite ALL your Facebook friends to an event in a snap (such as this) are now broken.
To select all your new friends in the new interface you can use this code, tested under Safari 5.0.4, Chrome 10 and Firefox 4 (should work also under IE).
UPDATE: There are many reports of it working on newer versions in the comments below.
javascript:var x=document.getElementsByTagName("input");for(var i=0;i<x.length;i++) {if (x[i].type == 'checkbox') {x[i].click();}}; alert('Done, all your friends have been selected');
In order to use this code, copy and paste it in the address bar of your browser after you have opened the “invite your friends” dialog and AFTER YOU HAVE SCROLLED DOWN THE LIST.
Important note: as said, you HAVE to scroll down your friends list in order to invite all your friends: in fact the new interface only loads few friends via AJAX at a given time.
Facebook should definitely be a little more open regarding MY data, loaded on their systems… and this script opens it just a bit more.
On privacy-risks of location-based networks, again
April 8th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Marco
A few days ago I blogged about location-based services and their privacy risks and implications.
I was not that wrong, apparently, if you read this scary article about what happened to people on Foursquare.
Now I also understand why social networks like Facebook have not yet rolled out location-based features which could kill, in under two seconds, Foursquare, Gowalla & co.: it would be a boomerang for them, so don’t expect features like this to appear soon in the wild.
Interesting application of wisdom-of-the-crowd intelligence
April 3rd, 2010 / No Comments » / by Marco
via fastcompany.com
Accordingly to the article linked above, there is actually some collective intelligence in the internet to be gathered from the so-called “wisdom-of-the-crowd”.
Actually, I start thinking: what would happen if there was a better way to tap in real-time into what people are searching on Google? Probably it would be possible to predict stock-market fluctuations, that would not be that hard…
Location-Based Social Networks: Delightful, Dangerous or Somewhere in Between?
March 31st, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Marco
Please Rob Me? OK! Says Burglar
Not too long ago, a social experiment called PleaseRobMe launched, displaying the aggregated real-time updates from Foursquare users who used the service’s social sharing feature to broadcast their updates publicly on Twitter. Although that site has since been shuttered, the point they were trying to make still resonates: sharing your physical location with a public network is a dangerous and really dumb idea.
via readwriteweb.com
… but people do not seem to get it, and I wonder how many of these cases we will hear in 2010 and following, with the coming of the new wave of location-based social networks.
Figuring how to create a scraper that extracts lots of information from publicly available data is not that hard, after all.
Welcome (back)!
August 12th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Marco
After several years, I finally had some spare time that I could use to re-organize my digital life.
This is just the beginning of a new dawn, but here you can find what I have decided to call “my rantings and ramblings” about technology and stuff I find interesting.
I have preserved most of the stuff that in these years I had on my (old) site: you can find it under this page.
So… I welcome you (back), and have a nice stay!
Marco
