Life and Stuff: 2015

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Valve finally explains Christmas Steam attacks

PC gamers had a rather unhappy Christmas this year, as gaming hub Steam was affected by some extreme account vulnerability errors. Almost a week later, Steam operator Valve has explained what happened.

By: Matt Kamen,

Transcend announces ‘SuperMLC’ as an SLC NAND alternative

Transcend is prepping a new type of MLC NAND it's dubbed "SuperMLC." The company wants to combine the high reliability and performance of single-level cell NAND memory with the low cost and economies of scale that exist around traditional multi-level cell flash.

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2016

The new year is an occasion to start things fresh, to rethink current practices and habits. So why not start small? Clean up your desktop and give it an inspiring new background. We might have something for you: desktop wallpapers created by artists and designers from across the globe as a part of our monthly desktop wallpapers challenge.

This post features their artwork for January 2016. Each wallpaper is available with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Thanks to everyone who contributed their designs! And a happy 2016 to all!

The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2016 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

How to Advertise to Your WordPress Visitors from Facebook

In this article, and the attached video, I will walk you through the process of allowing Facebook to “collect” the visitors of your WordPress web site into an “audience” that you can later advertise to from Facebook.

First though, why would you want to do this? Well, when people visit your web site, they often arrive there from a variety of means, and the first page they visit can realistically be any public page on the web site. If they don’t buy or subscribe during the first visit, there’s a good chance that they may never come back.

Well, if you implement what’s called a Facebook Pixel, you can then automatically “tag” each person that visits your web site, and later advertise to them from Facebook to revisit, and fully control the page that they see first. You can do the same from Google and Twitter, and probably others, but the focus today is on Facebook.

You can of course, implement this Facebook Pixel on just about any web site, however I will demonstrate a clean way to do it within WordPress.

Adding Custom Functions Within a WordPress Child Theme

In WordPress, the code for the Facebook Pixel should be included within a template file so that it’s available on every page. You can use WordPress logic (or Facebook audience rules) if you wish to prevent the pixel from tagging the visitors that visit specific pages, but I am going to assume you want to tag all visitors to create this advertisable audience.

Also, rather than modify the parent theme, I am going to strongly suggest that a child theme is created, and the code is placed within there. A child theme allows you to make changes to your web site without directly modifying the parent theme. The parent theme may need upgrading at some point in the future with new features or security fixes, so keeping the changes in a child theme allows for those upgrades in a clean way.

With a child theme you can realistically modify any template file, but if those files need upgrades in the future, they will not be implemented, because the parent theme’s template file will not be in use, when the same file exists within the child theme. For that reason, if you aren’t interested in creating custom plugins, modifying just the functions.php and perhaps the CSS file in the child theme will keep things future proof for the most part. Note: Even though these 2 files (functions and CSS) exist in both the parent and the child, they will all be used (unlike other template files).

Since it’s well above the scope of this tutorial to create a plugin, I am going to assume that you are going to follow along by just adding a custom function to the functions.php template file of a child theme. Here’s a link to all of the info that you need for creating a child theme:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

Sometimes, the author of your parent theme will have already created a child theme for you to use, or offer the instructions for creating one for you. If not, you could follow the link above to see how to go about creating one, or follow these basic steps below that should work in most cases:

How to Create a Child Theme in WordPress

1) Create a folder with the name of your parent theme appended with “-child”

2) Copy the screenshot file over from the parent theme into the new folder

3) Add a file called “style.css” to the folder, and use the template below to add the needed info at the top of the file:

/*
Theme Name: {Parent-Theme-Name} Child
Theme URI: http://www.example.com/{Parent-Theme-Name}-child/
Description: {Parent-Theme-Name} Child Theme
Author: {Your Name}
Author URI: {Your URL}
Template: {Parent-Theme-Name}
Version: 1.0.0
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
*/

4) Add a file called “functions.php” to the folder, and start it off with the following function:

5) Upload this new folder to your “/wp-content/themes/” folder (and make sure that parent theme is already uploaded there too)

6) In some cases, with some hosts, you may have to set permissions on these new files so that they are editable from the WordPress admin (check with your host if needed)

7) Activate your new child theme

Now, with the new child theme active, we have a clean way of adding our own functions. Today we will add a function that will auto-insert the code that we get from Facebook (for the Facebook Pixel) in between the HTML “head” tags.

How Does the Facebook Pixel Work?

You get just one Facebook Pixel with your Facebook account, but that’s OK, that’s all that is needed. You can create multiple audiences though, which is helpful if you want to target your audiences differently (either within the same web site, or by creating audiences from multiple web sites). For example, you could create audiences for each category of your web site if so desired.

Today we will just create one audience for the entire domain of a web site. This could be referred to as an “all visitors” audience for a given web site. In the same way though, you could create an audience of all people that visited your “thank you” page after a purchase (or after subscribing to your mailing list maybe). Then, when setting up an advertising campaign in Facebook, you can “include” the visitors audience, and “exclude” the customer (or subscriber, whatever the case may be) audience to try and convert more visitors.

By the way, this same pixel is all that needs to be placed to track “conversions” from Facebook advertising as well.

In addition, you can advertise to Instagram users from the Facebook advertising dashboard as well using your newly created audiences.

How to Create a Custom Audience and Get your Facebook Pixel Code

Follow the video or the steps below to create a custom audience in Facebook. Also in the video I walk through creating a child theme in WordPress, as well as placing the Facebook Pixel code into the child theme after creating it.

Login to Facebook
From the left side, click “Ads Manager”
Click “Tools” and then “Audiences”
Click “Create Audience” and then “Custom Audience”
Click “Website Traffic”
Next to “Website Traffic” choose: “People who visit specific web pages” (or instead, you could place the pixel code first, then the domain will be available and you could choose “Anyone who visits your web site” and then select the domain)
Enter your plain domain (domain.com) next to “URL contains”
Enter the number of days next to “In the Last x Days” (you could keep people in this audience for up to 180 days, the default is 30)
Give the audience a name and optional description
Click “Create Audience”

OK, after creating the “rules” for this audience (which, if you played around a bit, you will have noticed can get very complex), then you can get the code to place the pixel. Remember, this code will be the same across all your web sites (unless you want to track different Events for each audience). It’s just the audiences that need to be unique for your specific requirements.

Here are the steps to get your Facebook Pixel code:

After you create your new audience using the steps above, select it in the list
Click “Actions” and then “View Pixel”
Click inside the large text box at the top, the code will highlight, copy it to the clipboard
Paste it into a text file for safe keeping

How to Add the Facebook Pixel Code to WordPress

For this step, we will add the Facebook code to a variable, and then output it between the “head” HTML tags using a custom function and a WordPress hook (as opposed to editing any specific template files).

To do this, we will modify the code slightly. The code contains both double quotes and single quotes, so it’s cleaner if we choose one over the other. There are less double quotes, so we should change all double quotes in the code to single quotes. You should have pasted the code into a text file, so go ahead and modify those quotes now.

After changing double quotes to single, you should be left with something similar to below:

Now, below is the function that can be added to the functions.php template file of the child theme that you created in the above steps.

add_action('wp_head','tthq_hook_fb_pixel');

function tthq_hook_fb_pixel() {
$output = "


";
echo $output;
}

Of course, “xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” in the above should be the number that is specific to your Facebook account. Plus, the functions may not be exact, because Facebook may have made some changes. So be sure to copy your code exactly from Facebook and modify just the quotes as explained above.

Now, once you re-save the functions.php file (of your child theme) with the above function/hook in place, the Facebook Pixel should be placed.

You can test this by visiting your web site, and clicking “View Source” from the context menu, and looking for the placement of the code within the “head” HTML tags. Beyond that you can go back into your Facebook account and click on the audience name to see if it says “Active” next to “Status” at the far right. You can also view the audience size, and any other relevant data, at any time within there as well. Once your audience reaches 30 people it will be eligible for advertising. Another way to test placement of the Facebook pixel code, if you’re a Chrome user, is to use this extension by Facebook.

Remember that people will eventually “fall off” the list, and since the list can have people on it from Day one (because Facebook could potentially add past visitors to it), it might at some point fall below the eligibility point for low-traffic web sites.

At any rate, it’s best to try and reach these visitors within a short while after they visited your web sites (and didn’t perform the desired action the first time around). So, get to advertising! If this is your first time advertising within Facebook, you might notice too that you can create custom audiences in many different ways, including bulk uploading a list of email addresses. If any of those email addresses match those of any logged in Facebook user (or Instagram), they are eligible to be advertised to. Exciting stuff!

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Oculus Rift comes with an unlikely free game

Virtual reality platform Oculus Rift still doesn't have a set release date, but we now know something that everyone will be playing on it whenever it does arrive -- Lucky's Tale. A 3D platformer suitable for all ages, the game will be included with every headset, for free.

By: Matt Kamen,

Fighting games will be reborn in 2016

While all eyes are turned to (or perhaps rather, encased in) virtual reality as being the next breakout gaming trend, there's a smaller, quieter, but arguably equally exciting shift brewing. As the release calendar currently stands, 2016 is poised to be the year when fighting games make a strident resurgence -- and that could be a very good thing for gaming as a whole.

By: Matt Kamen,

This photographer wants to be the first artist in space

"Space travel has been a lifelong fascination," says German photographer Michael Najjar. "Now fiction has become reality".

By: Oliver Franklin-Wallis,

This factory is leading London's vinyl revival

WIRED's series on tools for trades comes to a factory at the forefront of the vinyl revival.

By: Rowland Manthorpe,

This company is making haptic controllers a reality

Ultrahaptics' palpable sonic sensations could bring about new ways to control a car or play computer games

By: Gian Volpicelli,

Twitter changes its rules to ban 'hateful conduct'

Twitter has updated its rules in an attempt to crackdown on abuse being dished-out online.

By: Matt Burgess,

Disney's robot car uses propellers to climb walls

The aptly named VertiGo is a small wall-climbing robotic car that uses a pair of propellers to keep it on vertical surfaces and drive along like gravity is no obstacle.

By: Matt Burgess,

WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 30 December

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, Twitter has updated its anti-harassment policies, Spotify is being sued for unlawful music distribution, the disruptive weather patterns of this year's strong El Niño could cause an international humanitarian crisis and more.

By: WIRED.co.uk,

Revisiting Firefox’s DevTools

If you do any kind of development for the web, then you know how important tools are, and you like finding tools that make your life easier. Developing and testing new browser features, however, takes time. Between the time a useful tool first appears in an experimental nightly build and the time it’s available for everyone to use in Firefox, a while has passed.

That’s one of the reasons Mozilla released Firefox Developer Edition in November 2014 as the recommended Firefox browser for developers. It gets new feature updates more quickly so that you can use the latest tools.

The post Revisiting Firefox’s DevTools appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

AVG Antivirus broke Chrome’s security, and Google’s furious about it

AVG's Web TuneUp extension for Google Chrome fundamentally compromised the browser's security and broke SSL. Google, needless to say, is not pleased.

NASA under orders to build a deep-space habitat by 2018

Congress has instructed NASA to step up the development of a “habitation module” that can take astronauts on deep space missions.

The Force is with this amazing Star Destroyer PC chassis

Ever wanted an enormous PC chassis with liquid cooling, fiber-optic lighting, and turbo laser batteries? Now's your chance.

Google plans to remove Oracle’s Java APIs from Android N

After a long legal battle, Google is moving to a completely open implementation of Java in Android N.

No, Microsoft isn’t uploading your cryptographic keys so it can hand them to the FBI

Worried about Microsoft's full disk encryption? You probably don't need to be -- and there are ways to stop the program from uploading your recovery key to the cloud.

ET deals: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 14-inch Ultrabook for $929

If you're looking for a lightweight laptop with all-day battery life, you need to check out the ThinkPad X1 Carbon from Lenovo. It weighs less than three pounds, measures just seven-tenths of an inch thick, and holds nearly 11 hours of battery life on a single charge. And today, we found a coupon that will help you save hundreds of dollars off the list price.

Robots can now learn household tasks by watching YouTube videos

The RoboWatch project is teaching computers to learn complex house hold tasks using instructional videos posted on YouTube, and could potentially lead to robotic butlers and caregivers.

Big Data and computational medicine: Who guards the data?

At the end of Moore's Law, with security breaches and the exposure of personally identifying data on the increase, what can computing do for medicine that it hasn't already done?

New malware sets up anonymous proxies on infected PCs

ProxyBack stealthily uses your bandwidth to route traffic from a shady Russian proxy seller.

Updated Google Glass pops up on FCC’s website

Google is prepping a new version of Google Glass, but will the device find success this time around?

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Classic Pokémon trading cards are making a comeback

Prepare for playground wars to erupt once more -- the original Pokémon trading cards are getting reissued, as part of the 20th anniversary of the franchise.

By: Matt Kamen,

Design Principles To Evaluate Your Product

A company proves that it has a strong creative process by developing successful products repeatedly. We see this in companies like Apple, BMW and Google. Founders such as Steve Jobs formed a corporate culture with an intense focus on creativity and design. This culture highlights two core elements in the creative process: the ideas and the team.

The creative process can be described in one sentence: Ideas begin with a small team of creative people at the heart of the company who communicate easily with each other.

The post Design Principles To Evaluate Your Product appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

ET deals: Dell Optiplex 9020 Micro desktop PC for $782

Desktop PCs are a powerful and affordable computing solution for the office and at home, but the bulk and weight associated with traditional towers can be a real hassle. Whether you're cramped in a cubicle, or looking for more space on your desk, you should definitely take a look at this quad-core OptiPlex 9020 Micro from Dell. It's small, lightweight, and shockingly powerful.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Game of Thrones tops 2015's piracy charts

In what is fast becoming an annual tradition, Game of Thrones has once again won the extremely dubious award of being the most pirated television show for the year.

By: Matt Kamen,

For VR to succeed, it needs evangelists. Will it get them?

Countless developers are dedicating thousands of man-hours to make brand new titles for these shiny new platforms. This isn't just a fun novelty anymore -- it's big business. And what it needs are evangelists.

Generating SVG With React

React is one of today’s most popular ways to create a component-based UI. It helps to organize an application into small, human-digestible chunks. With its “re-render the whole world” approach, you can avoid any complex internal interactions between small components, while your application continues to be blazingly fast due to the DOM-diffing that React does under the hood (i.e. updating only the parts of the DOM that need to be updated).

But can we apply the same techniques to web graphics — SVG in particular? Yes! I don’t know about you, but for me SVG code becomes messy pretty fast. Trying to grasp what’s wrong with a graph or visualization just by looking at SVG generator templates (or the SVG source itself) is often overwhelming, and attempts to maintain internal structure or separation of concerns are often complex and tedious.

The post Generating SVG With React appeared first on Smashing Magazine.