Geek Stuff category archive

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.

The San Jose Mercury-News’s Troy Wolverton is not impressed with “Facebook Home,” the newest assimilation tactic from the Zuckerborg.

If you want to do more on your smartphone than just use Facebook, then you don’t want Home.

Detailed review at the link.

The stupid, it burns.

We are doomed.

Via Noz.

At the Guardian, Steven Poole explains how the Faceborg’s “Home” is a glass house.

If Facebook is a home, it’s furnished by Ikea, in calming blue and white: minimalist, reassuringly boring. But it also has no curtains. Modern technology increasingly encourages a peculiar kind of information exhibitionism, defaulting to making you “share” your every digital move, not only with the drone-bots of the corporate cloud but with everyone you know. Some users of the new Blackberry Z10 have been mildly discombobulated on learning that the phone’s video player was alerting their friends that they had been browsing sites such as pornhub.com, which is (or so I understand) very much Not Safe For Work.

Video via Delaware Liberal.

The whole she-bang is run by teenaged boys (and immature ones, at that).

Pandora wonders whether the Faceborg is on the way to the Myspace space.

Sometimes, good things happen through Facebook. (One even happened to me.)

“They took my left kidney,” she says with a mixture of awe and pride.

Actually, nobody took it – Coe gave it, willingly.

And there’s the story, modern, quirky and a little bit funky, just like Coe.

The match was made on Facebook, the recipient was the stepmom of an old high school classmate, and the tale was documented in a short film with a great title: “Does Anybody Need a Kidney?”

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, April 4.

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)

I will be making a little presentation, dispensing some Enlightenment.

Enlightenment 17 on Slackware–Current

The radio talker and occasional newspaper columnist wonders why he is being stalked by the spirit of Ann Richards, late governor of Texas.

It all started when he visited the website of a play about her life . . . .

“The way it often works is this: An advertising network makes a deal with a website (say, that play’s website) to place cookies – little anonymous ID files – into the browsers of the computers that visit the site,” Turow explained. “That same firm has negotiated the same right to do that on hundreds of thousands of other sites. When you arrive at other sites where the network has those ‘tag’ rights, the network’s computer sees its cookie and records that you have been there.

This is one reason I have my browser set to delete all new cookies upon exit.

In the Guardian, Heather Brooke calls out the news outfits who fell for the DDoS that broke the internet story this week.

A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber “warfare”. As with any type of politics it’s important to know precisely who is making the claims and what their interests are.

In whose interest is it to hype up the collapse of the internet from a DDoS attack? Why, the people who provide cyber security services of course. And looking at the reporting, almost all the sources are directly involved and have a vested interest. The claims about the scale of the attack are from CloudFlare, the anti-DDoS firm hired by Spamhaus to ward off the attack. Eschewing subtlety they blogged about the event: “The DDos that Almost Broke the Internet”.

As soon as you have a source with a direct involvement, scepticism should be your guide. Sadly, reporters don’t always have the time or space for scepticism, and increasingly they are judged only on their ability to fill space at speed. In this environment there is no incentive to challenge a good yarn.

The sad truth is that many persons who call themselves “technology reporters,” at least outside the highly specialized tech media world, have no clue how computers work. To them, computers (and smartphones, tablets, what have you) are still magic boxes; the “technology reporters” don’t even know the right questions to ask.

They may know what the newest overpriced hunk of iJunk is, but they couldn’t assign a static IP address to their home computer for love or money. Heck, they probably don’t even know what a “static ip address” is (Google it).

And these are the people shaping tech news for the public.

Follow the link. Ms. Brooke offers a list of questions that you can ask–and that the “technology reporters” did not–the next time a story like this is spawned by the Society for the Full Employment of Security Consultants.

Like, you know, like this explains, like, why you seldom see me, like, log into the Faceborg.

(I’ve mentioned this story before, but Thom presents it clearly and succinctly.)

Sexist twits, reprise.

And, once again, a woman gets punished for pointing out that men are, or at least often are, pigs.

It’s a mad mad mad mad men world.

Sexist geek twits.

A female tech developer who outed men on Twitter for making what she described as inappropriate sexual comments at a Santa Clara technology conference Sunday is being hailed as a champion for women in technology.

But the backlash against Adria Richards has been brutal and swift. Richards, who is based in San Francisco, has been fired from her job as a “developer evangelist” at SendGrid, a Colorado-based email delivery company, according to tech blog VentureBeat. And she has received disturbing comments on her Twitter feed and violent images referencing rape and murder.

There seems to be a certain coterie in geekdom who think that sitting at a console typing code into a text editor is somehow reserved for macho, macho men.

On the way to the MySpace space:

According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, more than three-fourths of teenagers have a cellphone and use online social networking sites such as Facebook. But educators and kids say there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Facebook for teenagers has become a bit like a school-sanctioned prom – a necessary rite of passage with plenty of adult onlookers – while apps such as Snapchat and Kik Messenger are the much cooler after-party.

More about the shiny new things at the link.