Geek Stuff category archive

Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:

I have never knowingly tweeted, and to my 18 loyal followers I say: Don’t wait up. The Globe maintains a Twitter feed for my columns which recently attracted this e-mail: “Fungie the Dolphin would like to follow your tweets.’’ Well, it’s a free country.

My laptop, which is my primary computer for daily use, is a Dell 1545 which came with Ubuntu. It works fine, and I’m a believer in “if it ain’t broke etc.”

Linux can be especially dicey as regard wireless, because many makers of wireless devices do not make Linux drivers or, if they do, they do not make good Linux drivers.

And the wireless in this thing works great, so I’m not touching it.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write some posts on Geekazine about installing and using Slackware (you can read them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6). As part of doing that, I upgraded one of my old inherited desktops to Slackware Linux 13.0 and configured it up.

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From the Guardian:

Twitter users were warned to look out for a phishing scam which sends tweeters a message saying “This you????” followed by a link. Curious recipients who click on the link are taken to a fake Twitter login page, where scammers are waiting to get their details.

iYawn.

Addendum, the Next Day:

Andy Borowitz chimes in here.

I was running errands, so I was requested to pick up parsnips.

As I wandered the produce department, i realized I wouldn’t know a parsnip from a parking ticket. I had been told parsnips would be near the carrots. They were, if being along the same wall qualifies as “near the carrots.”

So I whipped out my cell phone, fired up teh Google, and giggled some parsnip pictures.

Viola. Problem solved.

The novelty might be wearing off. Ricky Gervais:

Leaving the microblogging site after less than a month of tweeting, he complained that celebrities used it for “showing off” and he did not need to make “new virtual friends”.

For an example of a twit too fantastically stupid to comprehend, go here.

Brad Friedman in the Guardian:

Free money just to stay stuff, that doesn’t even have to be true, accurate, correct or even coherent is celebrated at Fox. Palin has just landed her dream job.

Bill Shein.

Today at about 11 a. m. EST, Todd Cochrane begins his third (?) annual 24 hour podcast. Jeffrey from Geekazine is scheduled to participate.

Check it out.

I have avoided the Tiger Woods thing for two reasons: It’s boring, and he has never set himself up to dictate the definition of virtue to others.

But it is a reminder:

E-mail is about 27 years old, person-to-person texting 16. Yet smart, powerful, prominent men in amorous situations seem unable to understand the brute facts. As in e-mail is forever. (Even if you melt down your computer, your e-mail is on someone else’s hard drive, too.) As in text messages and voice mail are not secure. Not. Secure.

Warning: Language.

Via the Outlaws.

From Reuters. (Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)

As much as I like OpenOffice, this is Rodent FAIL.

A mouse shouldn’t require a User Guide.

Fab summed it up: “If you don’t have a girlfriend, you’ll never get one if you bring this mouse home.”

Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies.

The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes, including Google News.

I love the “explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes” wording. Some exploration to remove old links may be necessary, but, at any time, search engines can be blocked by inserting the following into the header of the webpage (I inserted the period after the first < so the code would be visible):

<.META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

This is news as old as search engines.

What he really wants is to go from billionaire to gazillionaire.

In the meantime, to the extent that, at least in the USA, Fox News doesn’t show up in searches, public ignorance will decrease.

As I sit here at 6 a. m. on a Sunday morning in my robe and into my first cup of coffee, I find it good that the image of the lonely geek with no social skills blogging away in his or her pajamas may not be accurate.

The New York TImes reports on a study that indicates that

. . . people who regularly use digital technologies are more social than the average American and more likely to visit parks and cafes, or volunteer for local organizations, according to the study, which was based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,512 adults living in the continental United States.

The study found some less-than-social behavior, however. People who use social networks like Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors and 26 percent less likely to provide them companionship.

You can find the full study here.

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The fridge is not cooling properly. It’s stuck in defrost mode.

The tech says it needs a new motherboard.

Sometimes, plain old relay logic beats hell out of computers.

Details, as well as outtakes, at Scientific Blogging.

Power failure.

At the Guardian.

Error establishing a database connection.

Database maintenance.

I hate databases.