If you want to view the videos on hulu.com, or on sites that embed hulu videos outside the United States you’ll get the following message:

If you want to view them, you either need to move to the states or use a slow proxy, isn’t it? Well, not exactly. You can view those video’s at normal speeds (aka. about the same as you max internet speed) with a free program called Hotspot Shield. The name may sound a little bit strange in this context, and it isn’t made for this purpose, though it works perfectly. Hotspot Shield will create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which prevents hulu to see that you’re outside the sites, while it doesn’t decrease your internet connetion speed! To install it, just follow the instructions on http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield/ and you’ll be able to see those hulu videos within a few minutes!

And as you maybe already guessed, this works for all US-only sites (so you can finally use Pandora again)!

The times of slow internet connections are over and webmasters don’t have to worry about long loading times anymore. This means that background music becomes more popular. Sometimes you hear a song you like on a site, but you don’t know how the song is called and/or can’t find it anywhere on the world wide web. If the song is embedded with a Flash file, or if the whole site is Flash, most people think that it’s impossible to download the song because they can’t find a link to it. In this post I’ll prove the opposite. I’ll use the website 3121.com/jam/. It’s Prince’s official website, which features a new Jam of the Week every week. Since I’m a big fan I want the songs on my iPhone, but there isn’t a download link on the site! The following steps allow me to download the song, without a download link.

1. Download the web browser Safari (OSX or Windows) and start it.

2. Browse to the site with the embedded song (in this example: 3121.com/jam/)

3. In Safari’s toolbar, click Window > Activity

4. Scroll to the mp3 file, if there’s more than one, use common sense in combination with the file size and file name to find the right one. Double click it.

5. If the download starts automatically, the song will appear in your downloads folder, if it opens Quicktime, hit the little arrow and select safe as source. If it does something else, copy paste the URL in Firefox and go to file > save as.

That’s it! This little trick works for all embedded things (youtube video’s, background music, vodcasts, podcasts etc.)

If you know a better way, please leave a comment, though I think that this beats al youtube download pages (since it won’t go down after 2 days)

Almost all websites have them, and they are just extraordinary ugly: Dotted borders around text links. They show up when you click a link and won’t go away till you clicked somewhere else, reloaded the page or moved to another page:

Yes, I know that you saw that before… But why are all those sites displaying those ugly borders? I don’t know, because you don’t need to know any advanced techniques to remove the border! Just add the following code to your CSS document:

a {
outline: none;
}

And gone are the dotted borders!

But does that validate?

It’s easy to think that everyone isn’t using this because it doesn’t validate, though it does validate! Check it out on the W3C CSS Validator if you don’t believe me.

But why isn’t everyone using this?

Because most people don’t know that it is possible… In the past it was necessary to have the dotted border around licked links to see if you actually clicked it or not (in he past we had sow computers, so it took a while before the thing actually started downloading the new site). Today we don’t need that anymore so please add this code to your Cascading Style Sheets and stop the uglyness!