Geek Stuff category archive

I’ve removed some RSS feeds from my sidebar, mostly big feeds such as Reuters and MarketWatch, for which the content is readily available elsewhere.

I’ve also removed a couple of blogs that have become relatively quiescent of late. And I’ve added the food recall feed from FoodSafety dog gov, which I learned about from somewhere I forget where I’m trying to remember.

Had to reinitialize the modem.

That means unplug it and plug it back in.

The end of Eden?

Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging site now seeking ways to make money, expanded its terms for users on Thursday to allow advertisers to reach the Internet site’s more than 45 million monthly visitors.

I have published a tour of Opera v. 10 at Geekazine in two parts. Check it out ahd discover the ultimate Internet experience.

Part One.

Part Two.

Gag me with a spoon.

I think I’ll download the Live CD just for grins and giggles.

But they have to march in formation.

A South African IT outfit has shamed telecoms operator Telkom by sending 4GB of data 60 miles by pigeon in two hours – faster than it arrived by the ISP’s broadband service.

According to the BBC, Unlimited IT dispatched 11-month-old Winston from its call centre in the town of Howick to its Durban office. The bird carried its data payload stored on a memory stick, and in fact made the trip in just one hour and eight minutes.

All joking aside, an hour to download the equivalent of a standard DVD is not so bad. In the States.

Elsewhere, it’s lousy:

The United States lags behind many other developed countries in Internet download speeds. As of October 2007, according to an article at Ars Technica, the average advertised speed in Japan was 93.7 Mbps, compared with 8.9 Mbps for the United States. This is mainly because Japan provides hefty tax subsidies to high-speed fiber-optic networks. Average residential Internet speeds in the United States are even lower than 8.9 Mbps — more like 2.3 Mbps, according to a 2008 survey by the Communications Workers of America.

Updated to the current version of WordPress and doing server maintenance (backups and the like). It things are a little slow, it’s because the network connection is really busy right now.

I found a neat free and open source ebook reader. It’s not big on eye candy, but it is quite functional.

It was designed for Android, but has been ported to both Windows XP and Linux desktop versions. I reviewed it at Geekazine.

I decided to mention it here because I know that my two or three regular readers also read books.

. . . you see an automobile commercial talking about RPMs and you think of “Redhat Package Management.”

I’ve been working on a website for a friend of mine and, as I have tried to clean up the last couple of things so I can invoice so it can go live, I haven’t had a lot of luck.

Then I found Opera Developer Tools. They come with Opera. I just never stumbled over them before.

It shows the css, the rendered page code, and the scripts, as well as lists page errors and all sorts of other neat stuff.

Click the image for a larger picture.

Afterthought: I’m hardly a web developer. But I’m a pretty good editor.

Twitter passes My Space in the UKofGBandNI.

I logged into my bank tonight and was informed that it wants me to use a new browser.

What a list.

Internet Explorer, which has never met a back door it didn’t leave open; Safari, the walled-garden Mac thingee that rivals IE for security; Firefox, which is okay except for the clunkiness; and AOL (there’s still an AOL browser?).

Since I use the current version of one of the most consistently secure browsers available, I must assume that they are promoting insecurity.

And that they wish to lose a customer.

(Yes, I would change banks over this. Not because of the browser. Because of the stupid.)

Afterthought:

Browser upgrade, my anatomy.

Afterafterthought:

I tried clicking the “Feedback” link at the website. It didn’t work in Opera or in (drumroll) Firefox.

Words fail me.

Afterafterafterthought:

If you are a competent webdesigner, the browser doesn’t matter. What matters is what your website serves up to the browser.

If spamming is so lucrative, why can’t spammers hire competent translators?

Received in my spam trap account:

Geeky ramble follows

I was looking for a defunct website at the Internet Archive and stumbled across a place that had squatted on the name of the site.

That page redirected to one of those fraudulent sites that pretends to scan your computer for malware so it can trick you into buying their anti-malware product. Most of the time, their product is actually more malware.

I clicked “Cancel” scan and it pretended to scan anyway while popups cascaded. One give away was that the phony scan’s progess bar moved faster than a scan from a local disk would have allowed, let alone a scan over the net (and I have used internet AV scans from reputable vendors such as Trend Micro and Symantec. It then told me that I had oodles of trojans, viruses, and other assorted baddies on my C:\ and D:\ drives.

This box runs Ubuntu Linux with Fluxbox. I don’t have C:\ and D:\ drives; I have sda1* (a very small boot drive) and sda3* (everything else). I don’t have a “My Documents” folder.

Here’s what it claimed to see:

Here’s what’s actually there:

__________________

*sda1 means “SCSI (or SATA) Disk A, Partition One.” sda3 means “SCSI (or SATA) Disk A, Partition Three.” There is no sda2. You’ll have to ask Ubuntu about that.

Twitter fails to trademark “tweet.”

Several months ago, I noticed that my bank’s ATMs were inhaling and exhaling cards much more slowly than previously.

Thinking something was screwy, I reported it to the information clerk at the branch. She told me that they had slowed down the feeder motors to defend against skimmers. I guess it’s related to the same thing that causes you to have to swipe the card again if you swipe it too slowly.

What a ATM skimmer looks like:

Not very noticeable, is it?

Click the picture to see more and to read the article.

Via the Network Security Podcast.

Who’s trying to take over the internet?

Follow the links to learn more.

Scroll down here and click the “Off” switch.

As a professional presenter, amongst other things, I loathe PowerPoint, amongst other things.

This article explains why.

Be sure to read the comments.

Ya know, there might be an upside to Twitting after all:

At least that’s the buzz on Twitter, where airlines are discovering that fuming passengers who have been stranded, delayed or just plain piqued are increasingly letting their undiluted rage fly around the Internet, often from the confines of their cramped airplane seat.