Alien V’s Curiosity

Spotted an awesome ‘very’ hi-res image of the Curiosity Rover on Mars on Facebook last week, downloaded it and set it aside to do some Photoshop trickery on it. Here’s what I came up with, a movie poster effect with Aliens V’s Curiosity!

Before

Mars Curiosity Rover

Assets

The afore mentioned hi-res image of Curiosity
Some decent hi-res images of Aliens sourced from Google

Process

I first imported the 4 Alien pics and cut them out of their background using the Magic Wand tool. Next I dragged them to the main Curiosity pic and played around with locations that best suited their lighting, shape, size and angle. I then used the Free Transform tool to resize them. Next, I selected each Alien in turn and added both Hue & Saturation and Levels adjustment layers to their shapes and messed with colours and levels to blend them in with the surroundings a bit better.

I decided to add a fake sun top right of the pic to add a bit of lighting drama and that was achieved by drawing a white circle, blurring it, adding a glow effect then using Filter – Render – Lighting Effects on the main Curiosity layer to shine a spotlight down from the suns location.

With the light source firmly established, it was then time for some shadow. For any aliens that needed shadows, I duplicated the main alien layer, flipped the duplicate vertically, darkened & blurred it then used the Free Transform tool to mold the shadow to the required shape and angle depending on the light source. The middle, air born alien’s shadow cast over the rover was trickiest but it turned out ok’ish using a combination of simple Brush darkening, Displacement Maps and Layer Masking. I used Layer Masking again to make the middle alien appear to be behind the rover simply by erasing out his legs around the rover’s shape.

Next it was time for some touching up on the aliens, mostly using a soft Brush on an Overlay layer with lowered Opacity to add shadows and highlights with black & white colours. I used the alien layers masks to fade out their edges a bit where the sun hit them, especially the middle alien.

Finally I added a Photo Filter adjustment layer with a colour sampled from the Martian landscape on top of everything to bring all the composition together. Hope you like it.

Click the final image below to view a hi-res version and don’t forget to zoom right in!

Leon

After/Final

Alien V's Curiosity

My Online Affiliate Programs

Just a quick post on the affiliate partner schemes I’m on, influenced after attending a course recently on selling digital products and generating a passive income online. I’m with most of them a while now, some are useful, others almost pointless but you never know when they might kick off!

Google AdSense

The oldest of my affiliate schemes and not a great income anymore but still worthwhile if you have a website or 2 with decent traffic. The trick here is to add the AdSense code to highly trafficked blog posts, ie not your site’s front page but rather individual posts where the visitors are likely to be more relevant and more likely to click contextual ads.

Tribulant

These are a South African web development company who specialise in building some excellent commercial and free WordPress plugins, many of which I use myself on here and on other sites of mine. Their’s is my best performing affiliate system and pays a few online bills for me monthly. They offer a generous 30% payout and have a tiered affiliate system which means if someone signs up with them under my affiliate account, I make money on their sales too!

Themeforest

This is a directory of website templates and where I get most of my designs for client websites. I’ve found their designs to be the best around and they offer 30% payouts too.

Gravity Forms

An excellent forms plugin for wordpress that handles all kinds of functionality from basic contact forms to user registration, payments and post submission.

Bullguard

My computer protection software of choice. It effortlessly handles anti virus, firewall, spam, phishing, backup etc..and has only a small effect on pc performance. Everything’s automated too.

Template Monster

I’m not actively using this site any more for site designs because I think their templates have been well surpassed by others but it was always a decent affiliate scheme for me. You can buy items from your own affiliate account and get the discounts!

Eventbrite

Eventbrite is probably the leading online even management and ticket registration site. You can advertise your event and take credit card payments for bookings, issue tickets, put code widgets on your site to show event info and booking forms and more.

Please leave a comment if you use a decent affiliate scheme not mentioned here.

Leon

How To Hide Deprecated PHP Errors in OS-Commerce

This problem cropped up recently where an old os-commerce installation started showing “Deprecated function” errors all of a sudden. I think it coincided with a server and php upgrade here but the main reason is os-commerce being an old piece of software. The site functionality was fine but there was a shit load of php errors all over the place which totally messed up the design and layout:

Deprecated: Function ereg_replace() is deprecated in /home/nautybit/public_html/includes/classes/seo.class.php on line 1299

That particular line above is from a module I added to this os-commerce but there were other areas of the site showing errors for default os-commerce functions.

Basically, you need to turn off php error reporting in your script/app or at least change it to not show deprecated errors. I done that in os-commerce by editing the following lines in “includes/application_top.php” and “admin/includes/application_top.php”.

Change:

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);

To:

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_DEPRECATED);

Leon

My Own Hitler Downfall Video

The Hitler downfall video meme has been doing the rounds now for some years and is basically a parody of a scene in a German WWII film made in 2004 called “Der Untergang”. There have been hundreds if not thousands of parody videos made and put on youTube showing the scene from the movie with different subtitles over it, usually mimicking some currently topical/trivial news item in a humorous manor with titles like “Hitler reacts to…”. The scene from the film basically shows Hitler receiving some bad news from his officers, throwing a massive wobbly then calming down at the end.

While I know it’s not pc to put Hitler and comedy in the same context, it’s hard not to laugh out loud at some of the downfall videos and as soon as I spotted a website that generates Hitler Downfall videos last week, I knew I’d have to do my own one! The website generates the final video and connects to your youTube account to upload it on your behalf but there’s a lot of work to be done inputting the subtitles for nearly 4 mins of video. The best ones seem to take a topical news item, usually trivial and apply it to Hitler. Basically, anything that Hitler would never react to in such an over the top way! I chose the recent news item regarding Colorado and Washington’s public vote to legalise Marijuana. It was a quick and rough effort and I’m no comedy genius but some people seem to like it. Let me know what you think:

How to Remove ‘Eval Base 64’ Virus Code From Your WordPress Site

I use WordPress a lot and any time mine or a client’s WordPress site gets hacked, it seems to be the same way, ie multiple blocks of code get injected into all the site’s files, particularly files in the ‘wp-content’ folder, so your theme and plugin files. The code always seems to start with “eval(base64_decode” followed by a long string of random looking characters. I won’t pretend to know how the code works, what it does or how it gets in in the first place but here’s how to get rid of it.

Removal:

First off I would do a manual upgrade of WordPress core as opposed to using the auto update function in WordPress admin which probably only updates certain files. A manual upgrade involves deleting all wordpress files and folders off the server via ftp EXCEPT the following ones:

  • wp-content
  • .htaccess
  • wp-config.php

And any other files you’ve customised or added, eg – Google Webmaster files, etc..

Then upload a fresh set of files from the latest WordPress version taking care not to upload any of the skipped files above or you’ll overwrite important settings and content.

Visit http://www.your-website.com/wp-admin and you’ll be prompted to upgrade the WordPress database so do that.

Next, download the above files and folders, wp-content, .htaccess & wp-config.php. You may need to turn off your anti-virus program as I did or it won’t let you download the files. It’s safe enough to do temporarily. Look in one or two of the downloaded php files for virus code similar to below:

Virus Code

Select & copy one instance of the virus code and use a program capable of doing Search and Replace in multiple files. I use Dreamweaver as below which lets me search for the same code in all files within a certain folder and replace it with blank space, which is the same as just deleting it. So I pick the root folder that contains all my website/wordpress files:

Dreamweaver

When Dreamweaver’s removed all the dodgy code from the site files, same them and re-upload.

Secure Your WordPress Site:

Now that you’ve cleaned out your viruses, make sure they don’t get back in by doing the following:

  • Change your Hosting, FTP, WordPress Admin & Database passwords.
  • Pick a long password (12 characters) and include upper & lower case, numbers and even symbols.
  • Add some security plugins to WordPress, WP Security Scan & SI Captcha Anti-Spam are 2 I use.

Stay safe.

Leon

Anti Spam Questions Your Spam Bot Can’t Answer

I had the difficult experience recently of having to try find a way to block spam on a phpBB forum website. Nothing seemed to stop the wave of spambot user registrations. I tried messing with the default ‘Spambot Countermeasures’ settings that come with the latest version of phpBB including choosing different catpcha complexities, sizes, shapes etc..to the point where I couldn’t even read the codes myself but still they came! I also tried different spam plugins, captchas, etc but nothing seemed to work. I eventually settled on a Question & Answer system thinking that an automated spambot couldn’t possibly answer a question. But guess what!? They can now..

I happened to mention on Twitter that spam bots seemed to be able to answer questions these days and Rahber replied and said that they can only answer Googleable questions. In fairness this is mentioned on the configure screen for the Q & A spambot countermeasures plugin, which I never read!:

These questions should be easy for your target audience to answer but beyond the ability of a bot capable of running a Google™ search.

What this basically means is that a bot can probably answer a question like “What is 2 + 2” because Google can answer this too but they can’t answer a question like “What is the address of this website” which requires a bit of thinking rather then searching.

Here’s the list of questions I’ve put in for the time being which seems to be working, at least until the bots become self-aware. Hopefully, odd as some of them are, they won’t fool too many humans!

The larger the list the better:

  • What is the address of this website? 
  • What are the last 2 words in this question? 
  • What colour is a blue apple? 
  • What size is a ‘big’ dog? 
  • If a piece of string is 1 foot long, how long is it? 
  • What is the very last letter or symbol in this question? 
  • How many legs has a 3 legged spider? 
  • How many strings has a 9 string guitar? 
  • My dog is a spaniel, what breed is he?
Leon