Geek Stuff category archive

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, June 6.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Earlier this year, Psychology Today carried an interview with a man who makes people disappear.

He can’t use an eraser, because once it’s out there, it’s out there. So he uses misdirection.

A nugget:

In fact, you help people bury their online identities. How do you do it?

Usually I’m hired by people who want to hide something embarrassing online or by wealthy people who fear abductions—so a predator trying to plan a kidnapping won’t find any real information about their family on the Net. I take my client’s name and create fake digital identities for it with Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs, business websites. The idea is to make the false identities dimensional and give them a strong Internet presence. Then I take the content to be hidden and manipulate it. If something negative happened to Joe Johnson in L.A., I make it Chicago, then spread it online. I make it appear that the negative info is about Joe Johnson in Chicago—not the one in L.A.

A fascinating read.

(This post arose from George Smith’s comment here.)

Microsoft and Apple have used two different strategies for marketshare: “lock” vs. “lure.”

Microsoft, which has never innovated anything ever, bought promising software and re-engineered it so it only worked with Microsoft products. IE and the infamous “optimized for Internet Explorer” websites were probably the most successful example of this strategy. Eventually, though, the law and the escalating complexity of the engineering caught up with them. The silly *.docx format was probably last gasp of this.

Microsoft is now reduced to trolling Android patents for revenue.

Apple hasn’t innovated anything of note, either, at least not since the Apple II. Tablets, web-enabled phones, and music players were around before iJunk, but Apple did it prettier. Despite the eulogies, Steve jobs was not a tech genius. He was a marketing genius.

Apple build an orchard full of flowering fruit trees, invited people in, then closed the gates to the orchard behind them. And the fruit trees are so pretty that most Apple fanbots don’t even realize that their garden has a wall.

In many ways, Android is similarly locked down, but Android devices typically cost half what equivalent iJunk costs and Google, for all that it’s not a paragon of web virtue, is not nearly so predatory as Apple. Google also wants an open web–open so that they can peek in the windows, true, but open nonetheless.

There are a number of reasons I’ve migrated almost completely to Linux (I do have one Windows computer, over there, in the corner, but right now it’s booted into Linux Mint, which is where it spends most of its time). Among them is that Linux, once you stop thinking in Windows, is simpler and easier to use, more configurable, and ultimately more logical than Windows.

A big one though, is cost: Not just the dollar cost for software ($0.00), but the cost translated into time and freedom.

When I set up a computer with Linux, it is mine to use as I see fit within the terms of the GPL. I am not prisoner to unreadable EULAs; no manufacturer can suddenly revoke my “license” and make legal software (which, in Windows world, I may have paid big bucks for) inaccessible to me.

I don’t kid myself that Linux will be the next big dog. Most computer users have never and will never install an OS. It’s not difficult, but they are petrified by the prospect. Most Linux installers, because their designers know that they may be used by persons who are unfamiliar with the process, are, indeed, designed to be easy to use, but how would persons new to Linux know?

Until a prospective user can see and test Linux as easily as he or she can see and test an Android phone or tablet (how many persons know that Android is Linux?), Linux for home use will continue to be the domain of software engineers, sysadmins, and knowledgeable hobbyists.

A report from the Dutch Television Network:

Via LQ.

But the end is clearly nigh.

After all, the potential buyer is the company that spent millions to convince the public to use a brand name to mean “web search.”

And now the public does a brand name to mean “web search.”

Read more »

In which I achieve Enlightenment.

Another brainstorm from the folks who would sell you things you don’t need at prices you can’t afford. From MarketWatch:

How else to explain the announcement from Hammacher Schlemmer, the 165-year-old catalog dedicated to “offering the Best, the Only and the Unexpected,” that it’s now selling an “iPad Commode Caddy”? The $99.95 chrome-steel stand holds both a roll of toilet paper and an Apple iPad, thereby eliminating “the clutter created by magazines and newspapers,” as Hammer Schlemmer general manager Fred Berns explains.

Picture, if you give a damn, at the link.

If this thing catches on, it’s only weeks until some bozo releases a hack for the iWebcam. And a dollar to a doughnut it will be called “iSpy.”

Phishing comes to cell phones.

Like “phishing” scams, which seek personal information over the phone or via e-mail, “SMiShing” uses text messages, technically called “Short Messaging Service,” to fraudulently acquire sensitive personal information.

Sorrell’s office is reminding consumers to be wary of text messages and calls they did not initiate. And consumers should never give out personal information to an unverified source.

All the computer security in the world can’t overcome stupid.

El Reg:

Facebook’s experiment with branded hardware may be coming to an abrupt end, according to a report that AT&T is discontinuing sales of the HTC First handset after finding that people won’t buy it – even for 99 cents.

Another stop on the road to AOLville.

Heh (emphasis added).

Manager of the Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA Keith Chuvala is on the record saying, “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable — one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could.”

You can follow their lead. It’s free.

ISO mechanic.

Albert was arrested back in September after posting messages on his Facebook page and his website offering rewards for anyone who would kill Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, FOP President John McNesby, and other police officers.

Whirly twits.

Since I decreased the comment window for posts to seven days and closed all pages to comments (“Other Stuff” on the sidebar), the amount of comment spam that Akismet catches has decreased significantly, averaging under a dozen spam comments a day.

The amount of overhead in my MySQL database has dropped from three to four megabytes every few days to kilobytes, so much so that I’ve increased the interval between instances of database checks/repairs/optimizations/backups, which involve logging into my hosting provider and almost five minutes of clicking, from every couple of days to every three or four days.

When I get a round tuit, I want to change the comment link to inform visitors that comments are closed after seven days and that, if they have a comment on an older post, they should email me. This will involve mucking about in the CSS and in the theme files and a lot of testing on my test system (the logical place for testing), so it might be a while before I tackle it.

First, I have to record my next podcast for Hacker Public Radio, do a test recording for Librivox, and update my Debian box, which serves as my file and media server, to v. 7.0, Wheezy, which was released last weekend (Debian releases are named after characters from Toy Story), not necessarily in that order.

My local rag reports that area schools are starting to pay attention to their twittering twits’ twittery. (The story notes that one local high school–high school, mind you–player has over 800 “followers.” There’s a whole nother post lurking in that bit of trivia.)

Coaches, teachers, and administrators are concerned, in particular, that athletes might damage their standing and their scholarship pro$pect$. One of them contributed this gem:

“I might have written something on the bathroom wall about a teacher,” Freeman said with a laugh. “But I didn’t sign it or put my picture next to it.”

Not the following, the fool-lowing.

The most common spam I receive to the email address for this website (see the “contact” link at the top of the page) contains offers to improve my SEO. SEO consultancies are inherently scams and frauds.

I do check my stats from time to time. Yesterday, I had 401 unique visitors and 4714 pageviews. The search terms that brought the most visitors were about “mushrooms, onions, and red wine sauce.” Most users were using WinXP or Win7, but iJunk was next (which I found mildly surprising). Mozilla browsers had the highest rank, outnumbering Windows Internet Destroyer in toto. And so on.

Nevertheless, since I’m not in it for the money, I don’t care that much about my SEO. I’m too lazy even to use tags on posts, even though tags are legit.

If you enjoy visiting this site (or visit it because it infuriates you), I welcome and value you. But I’m not going to use subterfuge to trick someone into thinking I’m something other than what I am: an opinionated nobody shooting his mouth off over the inner webs.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, May 2.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Afterthought:

Today, I set up my girlfriend’s Android phone to communicate with her Windows 7 computer.

I just plug my phone into the USB cable, swipe the notification panel, and select “Disc Drive.”

What an ordeal!

I had to download drivers and software and wait and wait and wait while Windows did its thing. It took the better part of half an hour.

I had forgotten what a unmitigated kludge Windows is.

On the way to the Myspace space?

You know that it will happen.

For a good time, like this.

Marty Moss-Coanne discusses digital etiquette with Emily Post’s great-great-grandson. From the website:

It’s probably happened to you – a friend answers a text at dinner or checks their email in the middle of a conversation. Maybe you’re the guilty one. Sometimes it seems like good manners have fallen by the wayside in the age of twitter, cellphones and YouTube. But certainly the rules of polite behavior still apply even with the advent of smartphones and the social media. Today DANIEL POST SENNING, the great-great-grandson of Emily Post, offers some advice on good etiquette for our tech-filled lives. He’s the author of “Emily Post’s Manners in a Digital World: Living Well Online.”

Follow the link to listen or download for later listening on your podplayer.

Redundant twits once more all over again.