Unblock Google Analytics: Prevent AdBlockers from Blocking Site Analytics

I show you how I permanently un-adblock Google Analytics to get full visitor insights on my pages through some zany techniques. I thought about patenting these, but it’s more fun to share. Enjoy total visitor analytics despite regex-based adblockers and DNS blockers (e.g. Pi-Hole).


Hack the Digispark BlinkStick and ATtiny85 Microcontroller into a FadeStick

My project this weekend was to fork both the BlinkStick C firmware and the Java API to make the Digispark USB hardware with the AVR ATtiny85 microprocessor do something never done before: execute color patterns on the microcontroller, not the host CPU. I outline how I failed many times, and how I eventually succeeded with links to my Github repos and pictures of my hardware hacks.


Big Data Backup to S3 Glacier via Java SDK with Spend Evaluation

Why use AWS Glacier for big data backup? It’s exceedingly inexpensive to archive data for disaster recovery on Glacier. AWS Glacier is only US$0.004 per GB/mo, and their SDK is beautiful. Here I outline a pricing matrix for cloud storage providers, and I take a look at the Java SDK for working with AWS Glacier to effectively archive 200GB a week.


Acquiring Candle Data for Quantitative Financial Analysis Research

This would make a good interview question: There are about 120,000 public North American securities, bonds, rights, and index symbols. You have a paid API that can access all of them in OHLCV format if they are quotable. There are two critical API constraints: 15,000 calls per hour 20 calls per second Napkin math Minute […]


Algorithm: Optimized PDF Web Page Print Layout

I’d like to share my efforts to prevent page breaks in the middle of paragraphs and maximize the use of page space when printing web pages to PDF. I’ll outline how this PHP+NodeJS+Chrome tool and algorithm accomplish this. The motivation is to prevent pictures from being cut off, cut halfway through, or from being pushed […]


Download YouTube 4K Videos with PHP

Among friends let’s agree we’ll be privately caching videos and not permanently saving them, or we’ll be using them for Fair Use, and we’ll certainly not upload nor share these videos outside of the originating platform (e.g. YouTube.com). Existing YouTube downloader scripts: YouTube-Downloader (does not work with videos using a cipher signature) YouTube video downloader […]


How to Get a LINE User MID

When getting started with LINE API messaging, you need to know the mid of a message recipient. It’s not his/her username. It’s a string that looks like ub8dbd4a12c322f6c0118883d839c55a4. LINE utilizes a callback URL that you can set for your trial LINE bot. At this endpoint you can place a script, shown below, which will report […]