Lance Corporal Craig Lundberg was blinded by a rocket propelled grenade while on patrol in Basra in Iraq during 2007 but thanks to new glasses which is called the Brainport, the Blind soldier can now navigate his surrondings using his tongue. This new device is a mere technological marvel, the Brainport is a miniature video camera and sensory equipment works by converting visual images into a series of electrical pulses which are relayed to the wearer via their tongue. Different images are then built using different strength pulses then relays them to the wearer which allows him/her to navigate around objects or grab on to them and pick them up.
Presently the Brainport is only a prototype stage and sends information to 400 points on the tongue which the designers plan to increase to up to 4,000 points for clearer images in the future.
A simple Google search and you’ll find dozens of really good PHP scripts on the Internet to help you create proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that you require a web server to host the proxy scripts and second, you also need a domain name to act as an address for your proxy site.
If you don’t own a domain or server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge.
Create a Free Proxy Server with Google App Engine
Here’s one such proxy site that you can build for your friends in China or even for your personal use (say for accessing blocked sites from office). This is created using Google App Engine and, contrary to what you assume, the process is quite simple.
Create a Free Proxy Server with Google App Engine
Step 1: Go to appengine.google.com and sign-in using your Google Account.
Step 2: Click the “Create an Application” button. Since this is your first time, Google will send a verification code via SMS to your mobile phone number. Type the code and you’re all set to create apps with Google App Engine.
Step 3: Choose a sub-domain* that will host your proxy server. Make sure the domain is available, agree to the Google Terms and click save. The sub-domain is also your App ID that will uniquely identify your proxy application.
For this example, we’ll use blog4info-server as the App ID though you are free to choose any other unique name.
Step 4: OK, now that we have reserved the ID, it’s time to create and upload the proxy server application to Google App Engine. Go to python.org, download the 2.6.4 MSI Installer and install Python.
Step 5: Once Python is installed, go to code.google.com, download the Google App Engine SDK for Python and install it.
Step 6: Download this zip file and extract it to some folder on your desktop. The zip file, for the curious, contains a couple of text files (written in HTML and Python) that you can read with notepad.
Step 7: Start the Google App Engine Launcher program from the desktop and set the right values under Edit –> Preferences (see screenshot above).
Step 8. Click File –> Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the directory that you created in Step 6. Click the Edit button and replace “YOUR_APP_ID” with the ID (sub-domain) that you reserved in Step 3.
Step 9: Click Deploy and your online proxy server is now ready for use. You can experience it live and if any of the steps don’t make sense, please refer to the following video screencast (available in 720p HD).
You can edit the main.html file to change the appearance of your proxy server and you can even add Analytics and AdSense code to your proxy server in case it gets popular on the web. The application is currently open to all users but you can add a layer of authentication so that only users who are logged-in into their Google Accounts can use your web proxy server.
If you have made any changes to your HTML files, you can upload the latest version to Google App Engine either by clicking the “Deploy” button again or use the following command -- appcfg.py update
Credits: The proxy server uses code from Mirrorr, an open-source web caching project by Brett Slatkin. Thanks Pratham for your help! & Labnol.org
