Author Archives: hac

Google Book Downloader Update: Page ranges

Posted on March 27, 2012 by hac

You can now specify a range of pages: Download here.

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Google Book Downloader Update: High Quality

Posted on September 13, 2011 by hac

Until now, Google Book Downloader has used the default image resolution provided by Google, even though books.google.com allows you to zoom in on pages to see higher resolution. Version 2.1 fixes this, finding the highest resolution available for every book … Continue reading →

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Google Book Downloader Update: Version 2.0

Posted on August 29, 2011 by hac

Google Book Downloader 2.0 is out! What’s new: much faster, fewer bugs, and less important things. To download, see the product page here. If you are into the technical details, maybe you are wondering what went on behind the scenes … Continue reading →

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[OS X] Install Pwntcha

Posted on January 8, 2011 by hac

Pwntcha is an open source tool for breaking CAPTCHAs. While it is a few years old and only works for very simple CAPTCHAs, it’s still and interesting project and would be a good place to start if you wanted to … Continue reading →

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[Ruby] Automate Facebook

Posted on January 4, 2011 by hac

Using the Ruby Mechanize library, I have been writing a Ruby class to allow automation of parts of Facebook like friending, status updating, and messaging. You can get the class here and use it like so: #!/usr/bin/ruby # Require FacebookBot.rb … Continue reading →

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[OS X] View MHTML Files

Posted on January 3, 2011 by hac

Using code from the UnMHT QuickLook project, I put together an app that renders MHTML files using WebKit on OS X. Features: print, export to PDF, and export to webarchive. Download App Source Code

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Google Book Downloader Update: Download JPEGs

Posted on December 2, 2010 by hac

Google Book Downloader is my app that downloads Google Books/Book Previews in PDF format. The major problem with it so far has been that when it encodes JPEGs from Google’s servers into PDF format, there is a loss in quality … Continue reading →

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Replacing C Functions with Dynamic Linking in OS X

Posted on October 24, 2010 by hac

Say we wanted to make a command line program like date use a fake time instead of the current one. We could do this by supplying a time() function to replace the time() function in libSystem. How do we know … Continue reading →

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Upcoming OS X App: Music Player/Downloader

Posted on October 24, 2010 by hac

Here is a screenshot of an app I plan on releasing soon. As you can see, it has an iTunes-like interface, with some extra features for downloading music. You can search YouTube for songs, and download them from YouTube directly into … Continue reading →

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[PHP] Get Google’s Cache of a URL

Posted on August 30, 2010 by hac

This PHP function fetches the contents of a URL as it exists in Google’s cache: function cachedHTMLForURL($url) { // Request the cache from Google. $googleRequestURL = "http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=" . urlencode("cache:" . $url); $googleResponse = file_get_contents($googleRequestURL); // Return false if Google did … Continue reading →

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