Blocking Hotlinking of Images by Other Websites

There have been several cases of external websites embedding images from this website directly into their pages. Known as hotlinking, this results in bandwidth being used up on this website, for the traffic belonging to another website. Hotlinking is essentially stealing of bandwidth from another website, which someone else (or me, in the case of this website) has to pay for. Up until now I have been fairly relaxed about this, after all, some of these external pages were discussing projects on this website and providing inbound links. However, I have also had totally non-related websites hotlinking websites. Most recently, a classified listing on another website was using a photo of my old Compaq Presario in order to sell their item. Not only is this non-related traffic, but the photo shown in the advertisement was most certainly not of the item being sold; something that could be misleading to prospective buyers (it's clearly not a company promotional shot, so the assumption would be that it is the second hand item being sold). With this latest incident I decided that I was fed up with others stealing my bandwidth for non-related websites, and any page that hotlinks to this website now shows the following image:


Tips for Aligning Satellite Dishes

Satellite Dish ImageI have just spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up a satellite TV system for receiving Freeview, free satellite TV for New Zealand. A lot of this time was due to my own lack of experience, and the difficulty in knowing whether something is really working, or not aligned. Here are a few tips for anyone else wishing to set this up themselves. This is not a complete guide, just some ideas that should save time. It assumes that you are installing a Ku band dish for digital TV, but a lot of the advice applies to any satellite dish.


Online for a Year

Roughly a year ago this website was opened. By opened, I mean first indexed by Google and Yahoo; the web-space and domain name were registered a year and a month ago (the start of June 2008). It took about a month to get this website to the point that it was ready to receive visitors. At that point, I registered a Google Webmasters account, added this website to the list, and started creating external links.