Our Favorite Ad Blockers and Browser Extensions to Protect Privacy
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Everything you do online—from browsing to shopping to using social networks—is tracked, typically as behavioral or advertising data. But browser extensions are simple, generally free add-ons that you can use to slow down or break this type of data collection, without completely ruining your experience of using the internet.
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We’ve seen some pretty cool pendulum wave demonstrations before, but never one at this scale. Back in 2012, Appalachian State University teacher Jeff Goodman built this oversize physics demo rig using 16 bowling balls, and a series of chimes which play sounds as the balls brush across.
ISRAEL—Working at an archaeological dig in the Valley of Elah, Bible experts have come up with an interesting theory concerning the death of Goliath, hulking giant of the Philistines who fought David in one-on-one combat.
Though he did have severe head trauma and neck problems, his death is now being counted as a COVID-19 death.
“While we didn’t test him per se, he exhibited a lot of the symptoms of COVID-19,” said one Bible scholar as he carefully worked to unearth some ancient face masks from Bible times. “The wooziness, the falling down, the headache — it’s all pretty clearly indicative of the novel coronavirus.” He also stated that the virus ran rampant among the Philistines because they did not social distance, while Israel was relatively safe because King Saul declared a lockdown.
One researcher suggested that Goliath did not die of coronavirus but simply ODed, having been stoned. But then the other researchers realized he was telling a dad joke and told him to shut up and keep digging.
At publishing time, scholars had proposed that everyone who died in the Flood, the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and the flattening of Sodom and Gomorrah also died of COVID-19.
Breaking: PayPal Now Available
Many of you told us you wouldn’t subscribe until we offered PayPal as a payment option. You apparently weren’t bluffing, so we finally caved and added PayPal. Now — like the unbeliever faced with God’s invisible qualities displayed in nature — you are without excuse.
Facial mocap comes to Unreal Engine via new iPhone app
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A new iOS app for Unreal Engine uses your iPhone to capture your facial expressions and animate an onscreen character in real time. Live Link Face is designed to work in both professional game production settings, like a soundstage with actors in full mocap suits, and amaetur ones, such as a single artist at a desk, according to a blog post from Unreal Engine developer Epic Games. The app is available now from Apple’s app store.
The app uses Apple’s augmented reality platform, ARKit, and the iPhone’s front-facing TrueDepth camera (introduced on the iPhone X in 2017) to capture facial features and transmit the data to Unreal Engine. The app also captures head and neck movement.
To support collaborative work, Live Link Face uses multicast networking to synchronize with multiple devices at once. Developers promise “robust timecode support and precise frame accuracy” to further support multi-device synchronization. The “tentacle sync” feature allows the app to connect with a master clock on stage.
The post doesn’t mention whether an Android equivalent app is in the works. This could be because it would be near-impossible to ensure this mocap app would work with the dozens of different front camera setups found in the many Android phones available. Developing it for the iPhone means Epic could target the TrueDepth camera and not have to worry about variations on it.
Unreal Engine is one of the most widely-used production tools for games and other media, included in titles as big as Fortnite and The Mandalorian. Epic plans to continue making Unreal widely available, saying, “continued democratization of real-time tools for virtual production is one of the primary goals of Unreal Engine development.”
Sequel Ace is the sequel to longtime MacOS tool Sequel Pro, a popular go-to application for many developers to manage MySQL and MariaDB databases.
Sequel Ace takes the torch as a fork of the popular Sequel Pro app, (which was itself a fork of CocoaMySQL). If you’re not aware, recently, Sequel Pro has become somewhat unstable, frequently crashing for many, and developers are generally flocking for other apps.
After months of complete inactivity on this project, and months/years without any release, the time has come and community took over and forked Sequel Pro.
For months there was also no activity from Core team on Slack, so I think this was and is the right move. With almost 1100 open issues, it’s currently not likely to make this project alive again.
I updated Readme today to let everyone know what’s happening and I’ll pin this issue.
New project is called Sequel Ace and is available also on Mac AppStore.
Please refer to the new project and give it a try – https://ift.tt/3eJOgNf
If you find any issues or you have some feature request, open an issue there, not here in this repo.
Thanks for your patience over last couple of months and I hope we will be able to keep this project alive under different name.
brew install mas-cli/tap/mas
mas install 1518036000
To learn more about Sequel Ace, you can get installation instructions and view the source code on GitHub at Sequel-Ace/Sequel-Ace. We will have an eager eye out to see how Sequel Ace progresses, and hope for the project’s continued growth!
Give both a go. If you already use Telescope, I would recommend Telescope Toolbar to prevent overhead.
Otherwise I still prefer Laravel Debugbar, but if you feel it’s too heavy, give Telescope Toolbar a try!
Let me know if you have any improvements for Telescope Toolbar or (Laravel) Debugbar!
A little history
When we started using Laravel at Fruitcake, it was around the time of Laravel 3. It didn’t have Composer support yet and was a bit limited, but did contain things like Eloquent and Blade templates.
One of the things it also contained was a small toolbar called ‘Anbu’, created by Dayle Rees.
When Laravel 4 came around the corner, it was pretty great with Composer support etc. But there were 2 main issues we had with it:
After toying around with it, I quickly got a proof-of-concept working. And just before the official Laravel 4.0 release at the end of 2013, Laravel Debugbar was released, already providing most of the features you use today:
During the last 7 years the layout changed to make it Laravel specific, new collectors have been added and functionality has improved (also upstream to debugbar).
5 years after (November 2018), Laravel released Laravel Telescope, giving Laravel developers a first-party tool. Not a direct replacement for Debugbar, but it does have similar functionality.
During the last 7 years, the core of Debugbar didn’t change and was still using a lot of jQuery. I looked into the Symfony toolbar as modern alternative a few times, but it didn’t warrant such a big rewrite.
When Telescope launched, I liked the general approach with Storage etc and Symfony Toolbar was now decoupled enough to use stand-alone. Thus Laravel Telescope Toolbar was born.
I recently did a poll to see how many of my followers use Telescope or Laravel Debugbar, and the majority at this moment still uses Debugbar (which is great!)
Technological differences
Laravel Debugbar uses Collectors to gather data during the request cycle. At the end of the request, all data is collected, formatted and stored (usually in the storage dir, but DB can be used). For normal requests, the data is then flashed in the session and rendered on the next requests. For ajax requests the ID is passed in the headers and loaded through an EventListener on XHR requests. All gathered data is loaded and formatted directly by the Debugbar, which can cause delays for large datasets (eg. 1000+ queries). This usually isn’t a big problem, but more of an indicator that you should optimize 😉
3rd party libraries are used (Font Awesome, Highlight.js, jQuery), but these are scoped to avoid interference.
Telescope Toolbar only displays data that is already gathered by Telescope. The data is always loaded async, after the page has loaded, for both normal and ajax requests. No external dependancies are used to prevent library collisions, just plain Javascript and SVG icons. The Toolbar content is rendered by PHP (Blade templates), so it doesn’t freeze your browser when displaying a lot of data (that much), and it’s easier to show just the summary and redirect to Telescope for the rest.
In short;
Debugbar is both the toolbar and the detailed info, Telescope Toolbar is just the toolbar and leverages Telescope for the rest.
Telescope Toolbar is less browser-heavy, but doesn’t show all information in the toolbar itself.
Features
Both toolbars provide the same basic functionality:
Debug queries
Show current route/controller
Request data
Views, Mail, Gates, Cache, Auth etc.
But I’ll highlight a few differences.
Debugging Queries
Both Debugbar and Telescope Toolbar show the query (with replaced bindings), duration and caller.
Debugbar also uses syntax highlighting to format the query.
While Debugbar has some extra features (like more backtrace info, or EXPLAIN calls), the most common case is covered for bot.
Showing Ajax Requests
Both toolbar will catch and load Ajax requests automatically. With Toolbar this can be toggled off.
Telescope Toolbar even shows the running requests + details while Debugbar only adds the entry to the list (and switches data).
Debugbar also offers a Browse function, but for Telescope Toolbar you can just look in Telescope itself.
Timeline
Telescope does not offer a Timeline (yet), but with Laravel Debugbar you have a Timeline by default where you can add your own measurements.
You can also render Queries or Events in the timeline, to see where a lot of processing time happens.
Dumping data
Some people prefer dd() Driven Development, but this breaks the request. I prefer debug() Driven Development.
Both toolbars have a debug() method that work just like dump() but outputs it in the toolbar instead of die()‘ing.
Both use the great Symfony Vardump (like dump() and dd()) to create nice dumps.
Telescope Toolbar is limited to what Telescope provides. It’s not really easy to extend Telescope with custom collectors, so your best hope is to create a PR that is accepted.
With Debugbar you can add your own collectors, or also submit it as a PR, most recently the Model Count from @reinink
On the other hand, Telescope provides nice features like Exception tracking and Queue/Commands
Alternatives
An alternative approach is Clockwork, which doesn’t inject a toolbar directly. All data is rendered by a Chrome Extension.
So you might need to install some more, but could prevent some overhead
Access websites and collecting basic information of the web is too complex. This wrapper around Goutte makes it easier. It saves you from XPath and co., giving you direct access to everything you need.
Examples
Here are some examples of what the library can do at this point:
Most other information can be accessed directly – either as string or an array.
Scrape Content, such as Images:
Some information optionally is returned as an array with details. For this example, a simple list of images is avaiable using $web->images too.
More example code can be found in the sidebar or the tests.
Installation
As usual, done via composer:
This automatically ensures the package is loaded. You can now use any of the above noted examples.
Contributing
Awesome, if you would like contribute please check the guidelines before getting started.
Tests
The code is roughly covered with end-to-end tests. For this, simple web-pages are hosted under https://ift.tt/2Z9wyO4, loaded and parsed using PHPUnit. These tests are also suitable as examples – see tests/!
This being said, there are probably edge cases which aren’t working and may cause trouble. If you find one, please raise a bug on GitHub.
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All is clear! So far so good.
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Digital marketing is now a must for increasing brand awareness and sales. Moreover, you’ll find countless platforms, apps, software programs, and other marketing tools to help. In fact, experienced marketers rely on many of these tools and platforms to boost their sales.
In this post, we introduce you to some important tools you should turn to if you want to increase the return on your marketing investment in the months to come.
Ahrefs
There are plenty of marketing tools that can help you boost your SEO, or search engine optimization. Different sites and apps use various metrics to analyze the quality of web pages and social media networks.
There might be a small variation in the results of different tools. However, most marketers are satisfied with Ahref.com.
Ahrefs is a startup founded in 2011. It provided the first edition of Site Explorer and thereby changed approaches to backlink analysis. Now it is widely used among software developers and SEO experts and is one of the world’s best analytics tools.
However, you don’t have to go all the way to the Ahrefs site to analyze web pages, websites, and keywords in terms of SEO metrics. Instead, you can use the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar, a Google Chrome extension. This will provide you with the most important keyword metrics right on the SERP (search engine results page).
These metrics are:
Search volume, both global and country-specific
Keyword difficulty (KD)
Clicks
Cost per click (CPC)
Moz
Moz is another useful tool if you want to create SEO-optimized articles that will bring traffic to your website.
It has been called the biggest SEO community in the world, and it is building tools to make content marketing easy.
Moz also has a Google Chrome extension that can provide you with free analytics data such as page authority (PA), domain authority (DA), spam scores, and so on. This makes it the best tool for learning about a site’s authority.
Google Trends
With this marketing tool, you can better understand how to use Google data to tell your stories in a way that better promotes your brand.
Google Trends is a website that provides analyses of the popularity of top search keywords in Google Engine. The website provides graphs where you can compare the search results of different queries over time in different regions and languages.
Google Analytics is a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform. It tracks and reports website traffic.
With this tool, you can check the return you’re getting on your investments in marketing, content, and products. Then you can optimize your performance accordingly. Google has unparalleled insights and machine learning capabilities. These can be vital for your business.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you access to sales experts, marketers, and businesses. Here, you’ll gain a wider reach and can thereby better search for potential customers.
Since it is an employment-oriented network, it gathers together a whopping number of individual users, professionals, and companies. Therefore, the Sales Navigator can be of great use for generating leads and converting them into sales. This makes it a powerful marketing tool. It has also a Google Chrome extension that facilitates the process.
Grammarly
Content generation is a must for every marketer and business owner. Therefore, every marketing campaign needs writers to continually prepare compelling and creative content.
As you know, grammatical mistakes are every writer’s nightmare, and content marketers are no exception.
But Grammarly is an efficient tool that provides free automatic grammar checking, whether you’re writing a marketing piece or an email. Using its Google Chrome extension, you can easily bring your content into a Grammarly sheet and check your grammatical mistakes.
However, you might become addicted to using this tool. Many people cannot imagine a working day without it. This tool will improve your copywriting. Perhaps even more importantly, it can suggest essential edits for your professional emails.
Social Media Automation Tools
Nowadays, every marketer and business owner needs social media automation tools for their online marketing strategy.
Here is a list of several popular automation tools, each of which provides different important and useful features:
Awario is basically an analytics tool for social networking sites and apps. It covers all the top social media services in the world. Also, this tool helps you to easily search for relevant influencers and build long-lasting relationships with them, which is a powerful way to boost your marketing reach.
With this tool, you can be aware of recent mentions about your niche and brand. Monitoring the most active advocates in your industry is a useful feature that Awario will provide you with. Basically, this tool is good for finding influential people in your niche.
Just search for the relevant keywords, and Awario will sort social media influencers and bloggers based on their reach, their number of followers, or their blog’s traffic.
Social Tradia
One of the most crucial parts of embarking on a new business is to establish social media accounts and gain followers. If you want to do it by yourself, it can be tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, acquiring and customizing well-known accounts can be a wise course of action.
Social Tradia claims that they are the ultimate hub when it comes to transferring Instagram accounts. If you follow the social media market, you know that transferring social media accounts via public channels is nearly impossible.
Social Tradia was born in 2016 in Toronto, Canada. It provides safe and secure transactions over verified accounts. Actually, they do everything you need in the process of acquiring and customizing an Instagram account. This includes screening, safety, anonymity, and quality control.
You probably know that many people enjoy multimedia content such as images, videos, infographics, and so on. Use these to break up long and otherwise tedious texts. As the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
You need to generate creative visual content if you want to keep your followers. Of course, you cannot produce all of this content by yourself. That would be far too costly and time-consuming.
However, there are a lot of useful tools and sites which provide you with high-quality images at no charge. For example, Unsplash.com and freepik.com are two popular sites that provide thousands of images in various categories.
Make Use of These Digital Marketing Tools to Increase Awareness of Your Brand
These tools will help you with your online marketing. However, there are many other tools besides these. Take time to learn about them and you’ll go far in boosting your business.
Always remember, however, that no matter how good a tool is, you need far more to create successful digital marketing. For example, you also need to learn how to build a sales funnel, generate leads, and build customer trust.
So bookmark the Business Opportunities site and come back often. The content we offer here will help you learn what you need to learn in order to boost sales for your business.
