A Smartass Education

So I’ve been living in Prauge for a month and a half now.  At a certain point when i settled in I decided to start watching my favorite tv shows again.  To do this I was downloading torrents.  However I was still not content.  It was faster to just watch the videos on hulu. 

I started messing with all sorts of proxies and things, and eventually I figured out how to get all of them to work.  So I thought I would share.

Last.fm:

They don’t technically lock you out, outside of America.  They just give you a “free trial” and then start charging you $3 a month or so.  Considering how often I use last.fm I would probably pay this, except I found it unfair that they were only charging me because I was abroad. 

Pandora:

They won’t even bother trying to pay for people outside of America to listen to music.  It’s not as good as last.fm, but a lot of people still use it and get shafted outside of US.

BBC:
I felt like watching some BBC news at news.bbc.co.uk and those bastards wouldn’t show it to me.  News!!! come on!?  It’s all agenda driven filtered nonsense anyways.  Come on, I know you have seen the movie Network.   There are no longer nations, only corporations.  The TV tells you what to do, how to dress, how to think, dress, eat etc…

Hulu:

Now I run a video site like Hulu myself, but as easy as my site makes it to find good avi movies, it still sucks for new TV Shows.  They just get deleted too quickly, everywhere except hulu.   Hulu is first “legal” TV streaming site to be successful because there aren’t that many ads at this point.  Well this was the hardest one to get working.

Ok, that’s all about the sites.  Now to the tutorial. 

Install IP-Hider.  You get that?  That was the entire tutorial.  Okay with more detail:  Install it, open it, click the country you want to be from and that’s it. 

One note:  Hulu’s website still wouldn’t load for me with this, it worked fine didn’t gripe about country but it timed out trying to load the video.  So along comes Hulu Desktop.  Which is much nicer looking and working than their website anyways.   Just download that and it will load just fine with IP-Hider running. 

Also note that Hulu is very persistent in trying to block outsiders.  If you just go on with anonymous proxy they will bitch at you for it.  So when you see the fancy options to make yourself anonymous and turn privacy on as well.   Don’t do it. 

For everything besides Hulu if you just can’t bring yourself to use IP-Hider or it stops working, the TOR network works wonderful.  I could make a writeup on that if anybody wants it.  Though their website explains it pretty well.

I will also mention that this method works today.  As of July 14th 2009.  Blog posts get outdated as people seem to not pay attention to when they find my old time sensitive tutorials.  This works great now, but might not work by the time you read this, but I’m sure somebody will make a comment to that effect.

Enjoy, being slightly less screwed over by American bureaucracy today than you were yesterday.

Back in 1999 I made these cool mp3 cd’s that auto played when you put them in the drive.  I kept making a lot of cd’s so I didn’t want to make a new playlist every time I made a new cd, yet I needed the playlist to make all the music on the cd autoplay. 

Well it’s been a long time since then and I forgot how I made the auto generating m3u fie.  So I googled it, and I could not find anything on it.  I knew that I had done it in one short line when I made it.  Yet typing a path and  *.* or *.mp3 didn’t seem to work now.  It just loaded garbage in winamp.

Well I was annoyed and knew it could be done so I kept messing with it until I remembered how I did it.

To make an mp3 file for an entire directory you open up notepad and type . Ok in case you didn’t get that you open up notepad and type . (it’s a period).  That’s it.  Then you can double click that playlist and it will open up and play everything in your current directory.  Now if you are anal like me all your tracks are named 01 Track Name.mp3 02 Track Name.mp3 etc.. so they will all play in order too. 

Now I know what you are thinking, you want to play multiple directories, not just the current directory.  To do that you just need to type the path of the folder(s) you want to play, but be careful you DO NOT put a forward slash after the directory name (this is what was screwing me up before).

So lets say I have a folder called Tom Waits and inside that I have all his albums and I want to play all of his albums.  I open notepad and I can type a period and save it in the Tom Waits directory and it will play all the content in that folder.  Now lets say I only want the albums called Alice and Rain Dogs. 

Then I would type:
Rain Dogs
Alice

I would save this as an m3u file (Make sure you pull down the Save As Type thing below the file name and choose *.* so you don’t save it as playlist.m3u.txt)  and walah a playlist that plays both those albums and it does it with only one 2 lines. instead of 30+ lines to put the individual song paths in. 

Now I wanted a playlist that plays EVERYTHING in my EVERYTHING Else directory.  That was why I did this.  So I just opened notepad and made one line that said EVERYTHING Else and I saved it in my Mp3s directory.  By doing this I am able to make a playlist that even when I add new content it automatically adds that new content. 

I have seen all sorts of really complex scripts that the entire purpose is to recursively go through a directory and look for new stuff to add to an existing playlist.  All they had to do is type a path without the trailing forward slash and it’s a valid playlist file.

More Examples:
Lets assume there is a playlist file in my Mp3s directory called lovedalbums.m3u.  I right click on that file and I tell it to Open With > Notepad (browse if you don’t have that option and look in windows directory for notepad). 

Inside (F:\Mp3s\lovedalbums.m3u) it says:
EVERYTHING Else\Johnossi\2005 – Johnossi
EVERYTHING Else\Infected Mushroom\2007 – Vicious Delicious
EVERYTHING Else\Eve 6\2000 – Horrorscope
EVERYTHING Else\No Doubt\1995 – Beacon Street Collection
EVERYTHING Else\Less Than Jake\2008 – GNV FLA
EVERYTHING Else\Fastball\2004 – Keep Your Wig on
EVERYTHING Else\Eddie Vedder\2007 – Into the Wild
EVERYTHING Else\Ben Folds Five\1995 – Ben Folds Five
EVERYTHING Else\Beatles\2006 – Love
EVERYTHING Else\Amanda Palmer\2008 – Who Killed Amanda Palmer
EVERYTHING Else\Michael Lee Firkins\2007 – Blacklight Sonatas
Various Artists\Donnie Darko (Complete bootleg)
Various Artists\Elizabethtown
My Compilations\2004 – What’s Left of Me\Absolution 2.0
My Compilations\2004 – What’s Left of Me\Beautiful 2.0
My Compilations\2008\Haunt Me

Ok I probably didn’t have to put that many, but you should get the point now. 

Recap:  In Notepad type a period and save as playlist.m3u to add full directory.  To add individual ones add the paths without a trailing slash. 

Enjoy

Today I tested 2 different beta browsers. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, and Google Chrome.

Finally browsers are starting to evolve at a faster rate. Firefox 3’s “awesome bar” has become a must have feature that other browsers are working to clone and CSS support is starting to not suck quite as bad.

So first is Google’s new browser “Google Chrome”. It’s a mashup of Safari and Firefox, and wow is it fast. I mean things that work slowly on my site on a crappy laptop work much faster with this new browser. Google, being smarter than Microsoft, has opted to keep the browser open source and let a community of people develop it just like Firefox. This means, that though there are currently no extensions for the browser, there will be.

Firefox is the best browser because in it’s core it complies to standards, and then it lets people extend the functionality of the browser in a zillion different ways with add-ons. So now that Google has come along with a similar product, and they have sped up page loads and JavaScript execution.

Google Chrome has a coupe of slick new features, like clicking Shift+Esc will open a “task manager” just for the browser. It shows you the memory and cpu usage of each tab and process like flash. You can then end those processes. They extend this further by making each tab it’s own “sandbox” where one tab does not effect the others. So if a tab crashes, none of your other tabs will crash. That alone is worth the prices of admission.

Another plus for me was how right out of the box I didn’t need to install any plugins. Flash worked, the DivX player worked, Java worked. My thought is that they just copied the plugins directly from my Firefox install and are able to use the same files. I also dig the “new tab” thing showing links and screenshots of all your most visited pages.

Web Developer Note: Acid2 Test = Perfect, Acid3 Test = 77% (Firefox only gets 57%).

I haven’t had any crashes with this beta browser yet either, which is very odd. It wasn’t able to load my OGM movies, but then again, on my x64 vista it took me an hour of dicking with Firefox to get those to load, due to the badly made plugin installer that doesn’t understand how to install itself in a “portable browser”. In Firefox when an OGM movie doesn’t load it often crashes the entire browser.

Both Google and Microsoft have added features to their browser that we will refer to as “porn mode” since it lets you browse the internet with out leaving records of where you have been. This is helpful since with the new way address bar’s are working you can almost always find your way back to someplace you have previously been.

So next I was going to give my personal views on Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, however when I tried to install it on vista x64 I was told that this operating system is not supported.

For shame Microsoft. Even if it’s 32 bit you can still make a 32 bit program run just fine. I am amazingly disappointed by this. Especially since this is your second beta. So instead of talking about their new features I will go off of what I have read about it.

Basically Microsoft has taken their “copy a good idea and make it better” to heart, and have taken to copying such features as the awesome bar and improving it by listing the URL next to the site name that it finds.

Now, I love copying and improving. So many people bitch about things getting stolen from one thing and stuck in another, but that’s what allows us to evolve. Why re-invent the wheel? Just make it last longer and not go flat.

What I want is for them to “copy” the CSS support from other browsers to their browser, because though all computer guys and web designers (real designers, who don’t use FrontPage) will use Firefox or another standard compliant browser. End users will still use whatever their computer comes with that has the word internet on it.

I run a website where I would think people would be smart enough to use Firefox, yet 80% of my traffic is from Internet Explorer. Now I will forgive you all for it since a large majority of you are at schools and offices where you cannot install things.

All Microsoft needs to do to stop being hated by web developers is 3 things:

1) Proper CSS3 support. I mean seriously you are talking in your blog and writeups about how you fully support CSS2.1 now, but who cares. I want CSS3 so I can start making vertical lines and have drop shadows under my text.

2) Open Extension format. I realize that Microsoft doesn’t like open source, and I respect that as a developer. However you can just make a SDK for add-ons, since most of the best “features” of Firefox are only there because we have added them of our own accord.

3) Remove Active-X. I don’t care how many websites use it. Those sites have ways for people to view their content in other browsers. This is the main reason people get infected with the old trick: “You are infected with spyware. Click here to remove”. Then it installs a program that adds more spyware while pretending to remove some of it.

Right now IE8 is still a beta, and browser betas are lousy. The Firefox 3 beta was garbage at supporting already existing things like JavaScript and plugins. So all I can do right now is hope that Microsoft will pull their head out of their ass and do the 3 things I listed. Then I will not have to spend an extra 3 hours on every new page I design just trying to make an Internet Explorer workaround for some positioning bug.

For now, Firefox is still king. However I foresee Google adding extensions and other web applications and then becoming the best browser. It’s already faster and doesn’t crash.

Download: Google Chrome | IE8 Beta 2

Today I just found the world’s greatest RMA process (Seagate if you are wondering). It took me absolutely no searching around and I was done in 2 minutes online without talking to anybody and it even printed me a label. I have NEVER seen something go so smoothly, so it got me thinking about all the other things that could be done better but typically aren’t. Things that we just accept as being crappy.

Below is a list of some of the things that could be easilly fixed just by a change of standards. Sorry if it gets a bit long. I will color the sections so you can just read about the ones that might annoy you.

"The Scene" and how they release files: Ok, I have been using torrents for years and have found no other viable option for multiple file distribution. However at this point (assuming you are in a country with good internet) speeds on the internet are SOOO fast that if I download a torrent with an avi file in it and I am impatient I can prioritize the order the pieces download in and watch it while it is downloading.

However if some stupid release group sticks that one avi file into a 30 part rar file; not only can I not watch it but I 1) run the risk that one of the rar files will be corrupt and the file will not extract and 2) I have to waste more space and time extracting those rar files. Then because of that I am VERY unlikely to keep seeding it, since those rar files are only wasting space on my already overcrowded hard drive.

Rars were a fantastic idea back in the late 90’s because it let us download things from websites using our dial-up modems. It WAS a fantastic way to do it. However now, it is totally worthless.

Next, if I download a driver, I want JUST the driver. People who are not computer savvy are not downloading their own drivers anyways, they are just calling their sons and asking them to fix the problem for them.

So if I download a driver for an HP Printer (notoriously aweful / slow driver install with tons of bloat), I want a zip file with JUST the essential driver files and no install file, and no extra software. I want my operating system to be able to just look in the folder and find the needed files and be done with it.

I do mobile pc repair and if I get called out to a customers house for a problem with their HP Printer, I have to advise them that even on their brand new computer it may take up to 2 hours to install their printer due to the retarded detection process and other crappy software that it forces you to install.

HP is not the only one at fault here, ATI and several other companies make lousy install files that are required to make a piece of hardware work.

Slow installs that install into multiple directories and register files all over the place and registry: Look, if I install any of the Adobe CS3 apps on a super fast computer it will still take me FOREVER to install the files. The reason being is they are trying to be "helpful" since you might run multiple adobe programs so it is making a "shared files" directory and then registring the components with windows so it knows that they are there.

This however is NOT helpful. I own over 6TB of hard drives, and while this may not (yet) be the standard, hard drive space is increasing and we no longer need to "share files" between programs.

If you were to make an install file and had every single file required to run the program install itself into one directory, then the program will open and run properly. So what if you install another program that needs the same dll file etc…

Most of the apps I use are "portable" and are kept on my keychain, so that when i go to fix a computer I do not have to install a bunch of crap on other people’s computers just to fix their problems. By centralizing every file that is needed in the program directory, installs would only take seconds and if somebody wanted to take the program with them they could. Ok, so it’s a paid for program and you don’t want them stealing it. No big deal, they paid for it if they move to another computer they will have to type in the license key again.

At the very least you should just change the install menu so that instead of having "typical and custom" installs, it should have "portable, typical and custom". This way if I want to have all the files shoved in one directory I can do so, and the rest of the ignorant people can install it the way you want them to.

RMA process: As I was saying earlier, Seagate has an amazing process. Somewhere along the lines they must of realized that they didn’t have enough customer service reps to talk to every single person who says their hard drive is broken. Sure, some of those drives are not bad but they give you a 5 year warranty so all you have to do is enter your serial number and it then tells you how long it is under warranty. You click next and it asks you if you want to return the product, and offers you expedited shipping for a fee as well as the option to upgrade your return. Declining any of these your return is free and it instantly spits out a label for you to print out with your return address and the RMA mailing info and then gives you a PDF as an optional read for properly packaging and shipping the item back and advises you that you will get a new drive or else it will be low level formatted.

Wow. It was so simple. I didn’t have to sit on a phone while some guy from India asks me stupid questions about what I have already done. It just says, send it back and we’ll send you a new one.

I recently used Intel’s RMA process as I was told it was simple. Takes awhile to find the part replacement area, but when you do you still have to call in and wait on hold. Then you have to go through 50 some steps that you have probably already done just so they will give you an RMA #. Now they did give me one, however they didn’t give me the address. They said they would email it to me with the instructions etc.. Well I never got that email. So I didn’t have the address to send it to. Now a couple weeks later when I got around to it I called back and got it (by having them fix the email address and re-send me the info again…).

This was rediculous. If my stuff is broken, send me a new one. Don’t even pay somebody to help me troubleshoot it. If it’s not broken, send it back to me. It’s still cheaper and better for your customers than having them sit on hold to talk to somebody who might not know anything beyond the policy manual.

Okay, next since I mentioned being on hold I thought that could change a bit too. No, I am not going to be unrealistic and think I can get away from a long hold. Instead I am going to be MORE realistic and say that if I want to talk to a real person I am willing to wait longer. So all I ask on this is that when I call I am presented with 3 options:

Press 0 to talk to a real person, however be advised that there will be very long hold.

Press 1 to go through our automated troubleshooting service.

Press 2 to leave a message, however be advised that it may take up to 24 hours for your call to be returned.

Press # to repeat your options or * to disconnect.

I actually have a giant blog post already just to help people to talk to a real human being. It gets a lot of traffic because people hate clicking buttons forever.

If we have to be on hold, then let us just sit on hold, and while we are doing it don’t have any interruptions for the music. Don’t care if it’s crappy music or not, just music and no "your call is important to us".

Then since I have taken the effort to wait on hold for 30 minutes, don’t you DARE disconnect me or dump me to voicemail. I don’t care how bad your queue #’s are for the day. I choose to wait, so let me wait.

Video On Demand. You are just doing it wrong. Look at my website as an example. People want video on demand, and they are willing to pay for it. However it just has to be in a really convenient form.

By this I mean that if I pay one on demand service like ps3 or apple tv to download a movie or a tv show, I want to then be able to copy that tv show onto my hard drive and move it to all the other gadgets I have. To do this the download needs to be in a standard format with no DRM garbage. I want a DivX or an H.264 file to download and I want them to be in a standard avi enclosure.

Music should be in an mp3 format. Yes, better compression like aac has come along since mp3, however it never became a standard and it cannot be played on every device I already own, so i want it in mp3 format.

If you are not going to give people content in these formats, then a good number of those people will pirate the media. It’s not because they want to be "bad people". It’s because you are so paranoid that if you give them a nice easy to use format, then they will use some other service/player. Or they will turn around and distribute the media they purchased since it doesn’t have protection in it.

Well that’s going to happen no matter what format the media is in. However it’s just like somebody breaking into your car. Not everybody is going to do it, but eventually it’s bound to happen.

I’m sure I will think of more things like this, but for now if I write any more you will loose your attention span and stop reading it.

Woot, Firefox 3 is out, and not just a shitty beta anymore.

Seems to work quite well and most of the extensions I use still work. Well, the ones that didn’t I “forced” to work with “Mr. Tech’s Local Install” which has a “make compatible” option that removes the version number of the extension and makes everything work.

Well, I will be making a “Pimp Your Firefox” article on here sometime and will go over all the best extensions, but for now just download FF3 and Ad-Block.

Good Times,

Everyday that you call Cox High Speed Internet, you hear a message that was re-recorded that day saying “as of today [insert day] many customer in Arizona are currently experiencing difficulty getting to many large website, we are aware of the error and our technicians are blah blah blah”. I’m sure it’s in more than AZ that they are recording this message but don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Now I was pissed at them for a few days because they lied to me and said they hooked up my internet when they really didn’t… when they finally fixed it I was good to go to be able to see all the websites, while my neighbor who is screwed into the same exact cable splitter can’t get to most sites.

So I went and figured out why I am better than everybody else.

I use different DNS. Yep, though I start on their server I jump to different DNS servers than everybody gets when they connect to Cox. I have 2 very different alternates in fact. So all you need to do is hardset your Internet Connection’s DNS to what I use and your problems should be solved.

Primary DNS: 208.67.222.222 (this is from opendns.com you could also use 208.67.220.220)
Alternate DNS: 4.2.2.1 (this and 4.2.2.2 have worked FOREVER)

If you don’t know how to do this then you simply need to open the Network Connections Folder > Right Click on your Network Connection > choose Properties > Highlight (TCP/IP) and choose Properties > Click ‘Use the Following DNS Server Entries’ and enter the numbers.

Look. I am sick of every people making something, and then making a really sloppy way to use it. If you go to youtube or googlevideo they give you this “embed” code. The Embed tag DOES NOT VALIDATE. I write my code by hand and don’t want it to be sloppy. So when I wrote Rip-Off Theater I didn’t want to have all my players using some clunky Embed crap when there are perfectly good ways to do it using Object instead.

I made the DivX code based on a Quicktime hack I did. Basically I am putting 2 objects on. One for IE and another one for Firefox etc.. To make IE not be stupid you need to use some css to tell it to not display both objects.

I figure If you are reading an article on XHTML I figure you need me to tutor you through the process. You just want the bloody code:

<!-- Start CSS Code -->
<style type="text/css">
/* hides the second object from all versions of IE */
html object.mov {display: none;}
/* displays the second object in all versions of IE apart from 5 on PC */<br/>*
html object.mov {display: inline;}
/* hides the second object from all versions of IE >= 5.5 */
html object.mov {display: none;}
</style>
<!-- End CSS Code -->
<!-- Start XHTML Divx Web Player -->
<object classid="clsid:67DABFBF-D0AB-41fa-9C46-CC0F21721616"
codebase="http://go.divx.com/plugin/DivXBrowserPlugin.cab" height="400" width="600">
  <param name="src" value="">
  <param name="custommode" value="Stage6">
<object type="video/divx" data="inserturl" class="stupidie" height="400" width="600">
  <param name="src" value="">
  <param name="custommode" value="Stage6">
  No video? Get the DivX Web Player for
<a href="http://download.divx.com/player/DivXWebPlayerInstaller.exe">Windows</a>
or <a href="http://download.divx.com/player/DivXWebPlayer.dmg">Mac</a>
</object>
<!-- End XHTML Divx Web Player -->
<!-- Start XHTML Quicktime -->
   <object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" height="400" width="600">
     <param name="src" value="inserturl">
     <param name="controller" value="true">
     <param name="autoplay" value="true">
     <param name="scale" value="tofit">
     <object type="video/quicktime" data="inserturl" class="stupidie" height="400" width="600">
      <param name="autoplay" value="true">
      <param name="scale" value="tofit">
      <param name="controller" value="true">
        Sorry, shit happens... download quicktime from apple.com/quicktime
     </object>
    </object>
<!-- End XHTML Quicktime -->
<!-- Start XHTML Flash -->
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="inserturl" height="400" width="600">
<param name="movie" value="inserturl">
<param name="FlashVars" value="playerMode=embedded">
</object>
<!-- FYI, that super small flash code works on everything
from youtube / swf's / all other movie sites...-->
<!-- End XHTML Flash -->
</object>

Ok so I have had my own method of getting YouTube FLV files before today, but thanks to Google and their wonderful archiving of all things there is now an easier way! A way that could be automated (hint hint). Flash videos are not only sexy, but they come without the ugly YouTube players so you can use your own. It’s so easy you can probably remember how to do it without looking it up!

FLV link for YouTube videos! – http://cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=

Example YouTube Address – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0kz8MCxq6A

Becomes - http://cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=t0kz8MCxq6A

What’s the point you ask? Go to Rip-Off Theater > Click Flash > Click *Will it Blend.

Looks about a million times better fullscreen on my site (requires flash 9.028 or higher for fullscreen) than trying to watch all 50+ videos on YouTube’s slow ugly pages, in their little ugly player!

Update 7/6/07: OiNK just decided due to their dns problems to change their url.  Instead of oink.me.uk it is now oink.cd.  The instructions below still apply since they kept the same IP’s.  I have updated it to list those as well.

Ok.  Right now OiNK’s registration shows up as suspended.  This makes it frustrating to get to the world’s greatest private music tracker.  I am not here to explain it, +if you don’t know that’s your problem.  I am just show you how to get to it. 

First to get there:  http://85.17.40.71

Then even getting there won’t make your torrents trackers correct, so you will need to make sure your computer knows how to get there even with fucked up DNS. 

So in Windows go to Start > Run > Type: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts > It will open and ask you what to run it with, choose: Wordpad (or notepad) > If your hosts file is not messed up it will probably be mostly blank except for some comments and then a thing saying 127.0.0.1 localhost

Simply hit enter after this and paste the following in:
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk
85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.71 oink.cd
85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.cd
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.cd

Save and exit, then restart torrent program.  Oh if you have stuff in yours hosts file already that you did not put there it is either redirecting to 127.0.0.1 which tends to be done by anti-spyware / advertising software and is ok because it eliminates junk sites.  If it’s anything but you might have been hijacked and I would highly recommend deleting the entries you aren’t familiar with.

For Linux simply type:

echo ‘85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk
85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.u
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk’ >> /etc/hosts

echo ‘85.17.40.71 oink.cd
85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.cd
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.cd’ >> /etc/hosts

Ok, so with my page it’s not just images people try to link to, it’s entire pages. Why? Because a lot of them look pretty damn good as stand alone pages and are just much easier to work with inside iframes.

So I saw this guy in my statistics that was hotlinking directly to my Sega Genesis and Nintendo pages. Well that really pissed me off because it took me a LOT of time to put those bloody games on there. If you want the NES on your page, you can download it yourself. If you want the Sega Genesis on your page, well there you are kind of screwed, since it is licensed and the guys who made it promised me updates and then disappeared like a fart in the wind. Anyways, this is getting off the subject.

I looked around and only saw ways to prevent hotlinking to image files, pages seemed a little more obscure. So I figured I would write it up. We will use the asshole who did it to me as an example.

RewriteEngine on # I had this on earlier in my htaccess, but if you didn’t you will need to add it to rewrite anything.
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?baddomain1\.com [NC,OR] #Uncomment this line if you have more than 1 asshole linking to you, and copy it if you have several.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?aw3bo\.net [NC] #This says look to aw3bo.net (NC = Non case sensitive)
RewriteRule \.(php|htm)$ http://www.thesmartass.info/hotlink.html [R,L] #This says if he links to my pages to force him to my hilarious hotlink page..

Basically my actual pages are never named anything but php or htm, so this will make all my actual pages that he links to force him to see my hotlink page. Be careful, I screwed this part up at first… All requests coming from his site asking for .php or .htm are getting redirected.. So you have to name your file extension you link to something different. I eventually went with .html

It’s much more entertaining than sending them to just an image. Originally my hotlink page did a meta refresh after 10 seconds, but then I noticed that my page still looks good even in a tiny frame since the images are proportional etc… So I removed that for just an old fashion giant link under the probably offensive image.

You can modify the rule where it says php|htm to add additional extensions by adding more pipes jpg|gif|png etc.. But if you redirect an image make sure that you are redirecting them To an image…

Some other nasty things you can do to the people you dislike in .htaccess include:

#Redirect IP’s Somewhere Else
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 2.21.1.19 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 70.200.40.157
RewriteRule /* http://www.uglypeople.com [L]

#Just straight up block users from accessing the site… not quite as fun but still useful
order deny,allow
deny from 80.76.55.21
deny from .spammers.com
allow from all

UPDATE 7/16: People seem to keep doing this. Stop it Mo-Fo’s… I have been researching the .htaccess more and have found a way to simplify the rewrites to use a lot less code, and much less confusing syntax.

#Hotlinking Assholes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (aw3bo|spotlightarcade) [NC]
RewriteRule \.(php|htm)$ http://www.thesmartass.info/hotlink.html [R,L]

Notice that now I have 2 different sites listed, separated by a pipe and inside (). That’s it. I don’t need to put the exact syntax or even the .com’s etc.. anymore… If you are refered to me by a site with that info, you get zapped to my screw you / meatspin page.

UPDATE 7/19: Here’s a rule I just changed. I have been adding TONS of rules to prevent overall nasty people from being on my site. Now I had these guys redirecting to “-” but that just sends them to my 403 page… Screw that, Instead I have decided that from now on I shall be updating my rule to link to the most recent hotlinker. So all of my crappy traffic will get sent to the people who are trying to steal traffic from me to begin with. Below is the current rule, remember there are countless RewriteCond before the actual rule, if you try to add this rule without a condition you will send all your traffic there…

#sends all my shitty traffic to most recent hotlinker
RewriteRule /* http://www.spotlightarcade.info/sega/ [L]

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