Geek Stuff category archive

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.

Read more »

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.

I am a member of this group on Facebook:

We Support President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

(Aside: And I do support the prize. Even though I think it was premature, as I said, it would be incredibly churlish not to support the receipt of such an honor by one of one’s fellow countrymen–but we have no shortage of incredible churls. And, despite the gnashing of churlish teeth, a Nobel Prize is not the type of thing that one turns down.)

The page was created by a fellow from Philly whom I know from DL.

Here’s what’s freaky:

When I Google “We Support President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize,” the link that comes up, awash in all the news links, is the URL for the Canadian Facebook page in French; the page itself is not translated, but the American English headers are replaced with French ones.

Here’s the link again:

http://www.fr.facebook.ca/group.php?gid=180691720019&ref=share

(Aside: Microsoft’s Bing! couldn’t even find that.)

The American English page does not show seem to appear in the first three pages or so of the Google results. Does this mean more French-Canadians than others are searching for the topic?

Inquiring minds want to know.

At the Guardian.

Found one.

I mean this article here, which attempts to equate the development of social networks to a Darwinian process of evolution.

Rant below the fold

Here.

Via Linux Basement.

Like I care.

Following the lead of the NFL and NBA, the NHL said it was close to making recommendations that will prohibit players from using communicational devices for social media activity — including Twitter and Facebook — 30 minutes before and after games, practices, meetings and media access periods.

. . . then make a back up.

From time to time I scan for viruses and other malware with AVG for Linux. I decided to automate the process, so I wrote a script to scan my home folder and save the results of the scan to my home folder. If this works, I’ll see about automating a weekly scan for the entire computer (a complete scan takes several hours, because it also scans my 250 GB external hard drive).

Here’s what the script does:

1. Declare a variable (“$NOW”) to give the report file a unique name and store it in a unique location.

2. Make a directory to hold the report.

3. Start the scan.

4. Save the report to the selected directory.

The scan command parses as follows:

avgscan=scan

-r/home/[username]l/AVG/$NOW/scan$NOW.txt=save the report to this directory with this file name.

/home/[username]=scan this directory (folder)

“Echo” means to display a line of text in a terminal.

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

#Set the variable NOW

NOW=1

#Define now as today’s year-month-date-hour-minute.

NOW=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M)

echo “Now = $NOW”

#Make the directory to hold the backup file.

mkdir /home/[username]/AVG/$NOW

echo “Making the directory ~/AVG/$NOW for the backup.”

#run scan home folder

echo “Scanning your home folder”

avgscan -r/home/[username]/AVG/$NOW/scan$NOW.txt /home/[username]/

echo “Scan completed and report saved.”

The script works. Then I put this line in my crontab file

* 2 * * * /home/[username]/scripts/vscan.sh

so that the scan will run automatically at 2 a. m. every morning.

I also put a line in my root crontab to update the virus scanner every morning at 1 a. m.

* 1 * * * /usr/bin/avgupdate

We’ll find out tomorrow whether the cron job runs.

Addendum:

I have some trouble to shoot.

The cron job ran. And ran. And ran. There were multiple instances of the script still running this morning. I’ve added “exit” to the end of the script and will see what happens the next time it runs.

Beware of Facebook messages asking whether you are in a video and purporting to link to a video; you aren’t and it doesn’t.

They may take you to a fake Facebook page that tries to pwn your computer.

I wrote about my investigation at Geekazine.