After yesterday's rickroll, I had an idea… what if you could get the victim's computer to play the evil track whenever you wanted, on demand? So today I fired up Visual Studio and put something together in C#. It's a Windows service (a program that runs in the background) that waits for an incoming UDP network packet to trigger it. When it receives the packet, it starts playing Rick Astley.

Once the service is installed and started on the victim's machine, I can start the song whenever I want using a simple little program that runs on my computer. I even worked out a way to install and start it remotely, so I never have to set foot in the victim's office or wait for them to leave their workstation unlocked.

I didn't work very hard to cover my tracks this time; when the Remote RickRoll service gets triggered, it writes "You've been Rickroll'd!" in the system log. It shows up in the regular list of Windows services too. My favorite part is that the service listens on port 1987, the year Never Gonna Give You Up hit the charts.

Update: Yep, I'm going to publish the source and everything else needed to get it running. It'll be on my geek blog next week. Stay tuned.

Update redux: See code in the ruins for binaries, docs, and source code!

I pulled off an epic rickroll today; it was a total success. Here's what I did:

• Grabbed an MP3 of Never Gonna Give You Up through flv2mp3.com.
• Using an audio editor, converted it to WAV format and added five seconds of silence onto the beginning
• Copied it to my buddy John's computer while he was out for a smoke
• Set the WAV file to be the sound played by Windows whenever a program is closed

He spent half an hour trying to figure out why he kept hearing Rick Astley… the five-second delay was enough to make it unclear what caused the music to start, and of course once it's playing you can't turn it off. There's no program to kill - the only way to make it stop is to turn off the speakers or shut down the computer. In the end he just restored his sound settings to the defaults.

I really got a taste for doing pranks on April Fool's Day this year. I'd never really done anything before, but this year I emailed the whole department, saying that I was going to go work for Microsoft, and professing my undying love for Internet Explorer. This is an obvious joke for anyone who knows how I really feel about Internet Explorer. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, although kind of nerve-wracking. On Facebook I pretended to be a conservative for a day.

I'm thinking that for a software developer and system administrator, there should be all kinds of ways to rickroll people that I haven't explored yet. So we'll see what else I can come up with.

As time progresses, the probability of the playlist being entirely populated with Outkast and Ludacris songs approaches one.

Not long ago, our beloved Philips DVP642 DVD player broke. We'd had it for a long time - when we bought it, it was one of the most inexpensive progressive-scan DVD players on the market. It was also one of the first to play back MPEG4/XviD/DivX video, and (a key feature for us) it can be easily converted to a region-free player, allowing us to play our European movies on the same system.

So we were pretty disappointed when, one day, it refused to turn on. The power button blinked slowly on and off, and neither the front panel nor the remote had the slightest effect. A quick Google search confirmed that this was a known problem in this model. It was caused by the failure of one of the capacitors in the player, the one marked "C316." One posting indicated that this could be confirmed by opening the player - C316 would be bulging slightly upward, and possibly leaking a tiny amount of brown fluid. Sure enough, our C316 was bulging and leaky.

But there was good news - many people had been able to repair their players by replacing the faulty capacitor with one with a higher voltage rating. C316 was rated at 10 volts, and so we apparently needed a capacitor rated at 16 volts or higher. A little soldering would fix it right up - for the cost of a new capacitor, about $1. Not too bad.

Emily picked up a 35v capacitor at Radio Shack. In the meantime, we had another problem - with the power off, we couldn't get the DVD tray open, and it had one of our discs in it. If the repair job went south, we'd need to retrieve the disc somehow, and the tray was locked tight. As it turned out, the tray could be released by prodding the unit with a paper clip in the right spot, on the underside of the player. Disc retrieved, I borrowed a soldering iron from a buddy (thanks again, John!), held my breath, and got to it. Nothing to lose, right?

This picture's a little blurry, but you can see C316 right in the middle. It's bulging and leaky:

The front and back of the circuit board, after I removed it from the case. Just three screws, one plastic pin, and four cables holding it on.

It took me forever to get the capacitor off - by the time I got one of the leads hot enough to melt the solder, the other one had cooled off. The body of the capacitor itself was too hot to touch, so I was afraid I'd damage the new one. I finally just yanked it off, leaving the leads stuck to the board. Then I removed them one at a time.

The replacement capacitor. It's quite a bit larger than the original, but it does fit.

Getting the new capacitor installed was a lot easier than removing the old one. I barely used any solder at all - I heated up each point enough to punch the lead through, and then clipped them short once I had the new capacitor seated on the board. The tricky part was not letting the solder overflow to other points on the board, which probably would have killed it dead.

Here's my messy solder job on the underside of the board. It's the two points in the middle.

So it looked bad, but…

It worked!

When I plugged the board back in and fired up the player, it worked like a charm - no problems at all. And it was incredibly satisfying to resurrect some dead hardware for $1 and half an hour of my time.

I recently discovered metapixel, a tool for making photomosaics - it takes a single source image, slices it up, and replaces each piece with a similar image from a larger gallery of images. So you end up with a version of the source image that is composed entirely of smaller images.

The resulting images are very cool, because unlike most digital images, they actually have higher resolution at lower sizes. When zoomed out, or seen far away, they appear to be very close to the original image. But as you get closer, the smaller images become apparent, and you start to lose sight of the larger picture.

I use Amarok to manage and play my music collection, and it has stored the cover artwork for nearly every album I own. So I had the idea to use metapixel to make photomosaics of album covers, using the entire cover collection as the gallery.

I won't get into the technical details much here (perhaps I'll post later on code in the ruins), but I'll post some of the results. It turned out pretty well, I think. Click on the thumbnails for the full images (note: they are fairly large: 7 to 24 MB).

Any requests? Let me know.

From my last.fm profile last week:

In my inbox just now:

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

In Rainbows is, of course, the new Radiohead album. I am beside myself with excitement about this. For me, any new Radiohead album is cause for rejoicing; but this one comes with an added bonus: this is the first album that Radiohead has released outside of a record contract. Because of this, they can offer the music as a DRM-free download under the "it's up to you" pricing scheme. This is exciting in itself; In Rainbows is a valuable opportunity to find out what major-label music is like without the major labels.

I thought a lot about what price to pay for this album. I believe records are overpriced, because I believe that the services record companies offer to musicians are overvalued and encourage the production of crappy music. I think artists are not compensated enough for their work. And I've always talked about how great it would be if there was a way to send money directly to the artist.

I certainly wasn't going to pay the minimum price (1p) - I'd find that pretty insulting as an artist, I think; and besides, that would just give the record companies cause to shout about what would happen if everyone cut them out of the process.

I thought about paying what I think records ought to cost - say, roughly about $10 (with a significantly larger percentage going to the artists). That would be fair, certainly - Radiohead, after all, would see nearly all of that, instead of the minuscule cut they'd get from a label album.

But In Rainbows is more than just the music. It is, as I've said, an opportunity to try something new in music production and distribution. Everyone knows the old system can't sustain itself. The Internet has empowered the artist again - it's the biggest distribution and marketing network ever created, and you don't have to pay to play. It is entirely conceivable, these days, that a determined artist could go from unknown, to cult favorite, to international superstar, entirely without the involvement of record companies. It hasn't happened yet, not really, but it will; and it is going to take bold moves by artists like Radiohead, Prince, and Nine Inch Nails to pave the way. They can afford to drop their contracts and experiment with alternatives, and once we figure out what works, it's going to become a lot easier to get noticed on the Internet.

I want Radiohead's grand experiment to be successful, and I want people to take notice. I don't want it to make as much money as a label album; I want it to make more. And I want to express my appreciation to Radiohead for doing this.

So I'm proud to say that I paid £20, or just over $40, for In Rainbows. It's already worth every penny to me, and I don't even have the record yet. Tomorrow morning, when I stumble out of bed and start downloading it, is going to be the start of a new era in the music business. And I'm beside myself with excitement.

I love that the page for The Doors on FoxyTunes Planet pulls pictures of doors from Flickr. Right now it's some garage doors from different angles.

It would even be better if the page for Riders on the Storm had pictures of storm doors, and the page for Light My Fire had pictures of fire doors. But they don't. But it would be cool. You know, if they did.

I'm really curious what Flickr would have for The Revolting Cocks. But I can't bring myself to look.

Tony Gambone,

As someone who has purchased or rated books by Stephen King, you might like to know that Trust the Process: A History of Clinical Pastoral Education as Theological Education will be released on September 28, 2007. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Trust the Process: A History of Clinical Pastoral Education as Theological Education
King Stephen
Price: $29.00

Release Date: September 28, 2007

I like that this probably just got sent to untold millions of people.

Comcast has come through. We are solidly online.