Geek Stuff category archive

Execrable twits.

In which I bake honey wheat bread.

What’s yours is theirs.

Facebook is proposing new changes to its policies that will allow Facebook to use your name, profile photo and content in ads without compensation.

The proposed update is set to go into effect in about a week, in September.

A judge mandated the clarifying language as part of Facebook’s recent $20 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought on by users who said Facebook was using people’s information and images for advertising without consent or compensation. Some of those users were under 18.

Details at the link.

At the end, she asks for twits.

Remember, the “user” is not the customer; he or she is the product.

Status update: Charged.

An 18-year-old is facing a slew of charges for allegedly stabbing a family dog and his pregnant teenage girlfriend — and authorities plan to use his Facebook account as evidence, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

E17 on Slackware –Current with real time Conky status and weather updates and Konsole open to the Conky weather script. Weather script courtesy of Raging Penguin.

You will be assimilated.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department is arming some of its officers with tiny cameras that can be pinned right onto their uniforms or their sunglasses.

CMPD says the cameras are better than traditional dashboard cameras because they can go where the officer goes.

Everyone who has been following Windows 8 saw this coming.

Pretty much everything Ballmer has touched from the Windows phone on has failed miserably, not just as technology, but as a commodity on the marketplace.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who succeeded founder Bill Gates as CEO, will retire within the next 12 months.

The world’s biggest software company did not name a successor.

Microsoft Corp.’s stock shot up 9 percent in premarket trading following the news.

In which I talk to my LUG about HPR.

Loose lips sink ships get student banned from social media for five years.

That should work out well.

Shrink-wrapped twits.

As far as I am concerned, any good that Oprah Winfrey has done is outweighed by her unleashing Dr. Phil on an unsuspecting world.

Another guy gets zucked.

Not what it’s cracked up to be, he said oxymoronically:

“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article and a faculty associate at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “But rather than enhance well-being, we found that Facebook use predicts the opposite result—it undermines it.” The researchers concluded as a result of their study, that the more participants used Facebook over the two-week study period, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.

In which I talk about the magic of Mageia.

Extremely skeevy, highly predictable.

Nicole March, who says she took the nude photos for an art course, is suing Best Buy after her nude pics appeared on the Internet.

According to the lawsuit, March took the computer to a Tuscaloosa Best Buy in August of 2011 and paid $131 for the Geek Squad to salvage data from her hard drive.

They salvaged the data, all right, then decided it deserved a wider audience.

According to the story, she’s suing because she found the store manager’s response less than adequate. According to the story, the manager is a “him.”

Men are pigs.

Oh, my.

Marc and Lauren Gilbert told ABC News that a stranger gave them the scare of their lives when he hacked into their baby monitor and began cursing and calling their 2-year-old daughter filthy names.

A case of infantile Facebook.

Oh, wait.

That’s redundant.

One of my favorite reads, the San Jose Mercury-News,* has recently redesigned their website to make it more streamlined, modern, and usable (at least, I expect that’s what the consultant told them).

One of their enhancements was a script that spikes my CPU like mad. NotScripts tells me that it is a native SJM script, not a third-party script. In this screengrab of Conky, you can see what happens when I close the Mercury-News tab.

There is no sign that the script is in any way malicious. Running top shows no unexpected processes or activity.

In another oddity, I have to enable scripts from denverpost.com in order for mercurynews.com to work properly, but denverpost.com does not spike my CPU.

As the director said, “Rewrite!”

___________________

*I particularly enjoy the Roadshow column because the columnist is just a damned fine writer.

Apple patents a new piece of iJunk, designed to further wall the garden.

Police forces around the world have had the problem that when their officers get a bit carried away and start pepper spraying tied captives there is someone on hand filming the event on their mobile phones.

(snip)

But they may not need to fear scrutiny much longer – Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, whenever they like.

All the coppers have to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed “sensitive”, and needs to be “protected from externalities” and Apple will switch off all its gear.

Apple, walling off the internet, one electron at a time.

Via Thoreau.

Don’t believe them likes:

How much do you like courgettes? According to one Facebook page devoted to them, hundreds of people find them delightful enough to click the “like” button – even with dozens of other pages about courgettes to choose from.

There’s just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand “likes” at his “click farm”. Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year.

George Smith’s term, “the culture of lickspittle,” is an understatement.

By the way, courgette is Brit for zucchini.