Archive: General Web/Tech

Have you ever visited a website and had someone start talking to you.  No not over your shoulder, from the page itself?  I have and I'm still not decided on whether it's a good thing or not.  I ca…

When you are hiring someone for most positions a criminal background check is a high priority. Especially if the person you are hiring will interact with your family or with children. The internet ha…

Absolutely shockingly high interest rates.... Wow. The last year or so I've seen a lot of westernsky.com ads. They are an LLC that is native-american owned and operating in the sovereign nation of th…

I have been absolutely addicted. A week ago Thursday I discovered a new site. It was an article over at the makezine blog talking about the benefits of learning mandarin for what they do. I've always…

Last year I got a Sansa Clip Plus 8GB. I just wanted to do a followup post after I've used it for a while. One year on (well 11 months on....) it's still rock solid. I've had no problems with it, it …

Scanners... I had a nice microtek scanner that for the last year has refused to work and I decided to replace it. I have a project coming up that would require scanning some larger format pages so I …

I spent a bit of time lately drooling/browsing through the many different android based tablets/pads there are. Why not the ipad? I don't know - I just don't particularly like the idea of being tied …

I received a message from some at superantispyware in the last day or two that is a well timed and good heads up. Every year there is a surge in spyware, malware and rogue activity around April Fools…

This afternoon I received an email that said the following... Welcome to Midwave Products LLC! Congratulations Avery, This e-mail is to confirm your recent/successful WaveEGreetings.com order! Log in…

You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn't (or can't) reall…

Back in the day I had got a Frontier Labs Audio player... it was the Nexia predecessor to the nexblack. It really was a pretty good music player. It supported compactflash for storage (no interntal s…

As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It's not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tre…

It looks as though this evening facebook chat isn't working. In fact FaceBook has confirmed all sorts of problems with it's site and various applications. Chat apparently has been affected. Status up…

A lot of blackberry users are talking about a blackberry outage this afternoon and evening. It seems that the Blackberry internet service is unreliable at the moment with some users reporting a flat …

Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn't have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spen…

I've spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones availabl…

Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the "what if"s are probably the most intriguing. What…

I've devoted quite a few pixels to this topic over on the Online Radio and TV site, but... in the United States broadcast TV will make the move to ALL digital in February. We have cable and the only …

This is the time of year that we start thinking about that monumental trip Santa Claus makes around the globe on Christmas Eve. There are lot's of neat ways to track his progress online. One of my fa…

This looks NICE... The new Light for Life flashlight which uses an ultracapacitor instead of batteries. Because of the ultracapacitor it takes 90 seconds to charge up. It uses LED lights and can run …

If you don't know what a netbook is, it's this recent class of laptops that's very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not …

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it's December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it's spectrum to…

I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the "market share" of operating sys…

When I was browsing through Google trends the other day I ran across the phrase BlackFriday.info as a hot search term and my first thought was related to the stock market (historic drops in stock pri…

I can't tell you how glad I am to see the ultra portable laptops coming back into favor. I've got a couple of old used sony vaio's that are great little portable machines - lightweight/go anywhere...…

In the last couple months I've been "farming out" several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites a…

We've all received them.... "robocalls". Usually they fall into a couple categories.... 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me…

Qassia is an interesting social bookmarking/tagging site. What they're trying to do is have their members tag and organize websites, in return you get unlimited backlinks to YOUR websites. A very int…

I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I've built a couple livecd's (that I still use) for tech support, but I'm always thinking of one mor…

I've mentioned lulu.com before (I have several products up there - a couple cds - music downloads - pictures - calendars - etc.) They've recently had a nice revision that ups the possibilities nicely…

How many times have I seen the same chain email about who knows what... it always ends in something along the lines of "I don't know if this is true, but I figure I don't have anything to lose, so pa…

I've mentioned offline wikipedia access before mainly because for all it's flaws, wikipedia is probably the single largest, most comprehensive and best information resource out there. There may be ot…

I really don't know if I want to do this or not... but I found several sites talking about how to salvage the laser from a dvd burner and use it as a VERY high powered handheld laser. (i.e. "light th…

Display technology has come a long way, but the 3d holographic display that is so recognizable in hollywood special effects in movies like Star Wars have just not been anything within the realm of po…

For a while dnsstuff.com has been my favorite dns tools web site, but there are others. Recently I was pointed to domaintools.com.

A while ago I wrote about various ways to have an offline copy of the wikipedia. Yes, I know there are credibility issues with wikipedia, but taken with a few grains of salt and objective thinking it…

I ran across a good public record search engine (pretrieve.com) a few weeks back. They've done a good job of integrating many searches/databases into one interface.

There's an interesting writeup about bestbuy that essentially says they have 2 web sites, one is the public facing website, the other is an internal web site. No big surprise there I suppose, interne…

There are lot's of ways to get a file from one place to another, emailing is the first that many think of. (For larger files I'll usually just upload to a directory on the website and then email a li…

There are all sorts of these things out there on the market - I saw an ad for the Hawking HWL1 802.11b/g WiFi Locator... and it looked interesting (directional)... I've seen mixed reviews, but some m…

There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It's more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks a…

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that wo…

This isn't tech related except for the mail merge side of things. We got a letter in the mail day before yesterday from Discovercard. It had my name and address on the outside just as it's on record …

I wanted to make a note here about a recent news story related to a topic that's fascinated me for the ~10 years or so since I first heard of such things.... For some time there have been 3d printers…

I've noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false p…

I saw this a few weeks back and think it's a good idea. Essentially why don't we have a .bank domain registration and limit it to just financial institutions the way .gov is limited to government reg…

For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I've noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of s…

I'm tempted to say "long live the cd...", but... EMI's CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you're not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so "dead" just means "in de…

Networkworld brings us this report that exploit code removed from websites can live on for quite a while in caching servers. Which, in a way is NOT news, but it's worth remembering. Many times when s…

It's not really a surprising headline. I think anytime a proprietary vendor tightens the screws a bit to limit piracy they are going to force people to other, competing products. Especially when ther…

Shouldn'tthis and this get more news coverage? US Commerce Department computers (specifically a bureau responsible for export licenses) is under cyber attack from hackers based in China. The Bureau i…

Betanews is reporting that Samsung's site has been hacked and is currently serving up malware in some areas. user intervention is required for it to run on the users pc, but be cautious. Samsung has …

According to this story, there has been another compromise of a debian project server. (Is this the third in the last year?)... the Alioth webserver was offline most of the 5th of September... It was…

I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can t…

I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking.... This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don't k…

I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn't thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has re…

I've been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as "Internet explorer cannot display t…

It's really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100's of thousands of computers. There NEED t…

I've seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006…

Over the last couple weeks I've gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) …

They're doing what they can at Microsoft to put to rest the notion that IE7 won't make drastic strides in CSS compliance. One of the fronts they're pushing is this detailed listing of CSS fixes that …

I've seen skype I just haven't used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, bu…

NO, I didn't mean to type satellite. Stratellite. This is an idea that I've written on before and I think it has some interesting possibilities. The idea is to positition a large airship (helium ball…

The title really says most all, it looks like you can get a preconfigured mythtv box starting at $695. Prebuilt, preconfigured no muss/no fuss. (No subscription fees like the tivo's...)

There are a couple of stories on the "Google front" today. First up Coupons tied into Google location searching (maps.) More details at the Adwords blog. (BTW, this is open to US businesses, an Adwor…

Some time back, there was a Risk clone using Google maps which was interesting, but taken offline due to a legal letter. Well, I have had a long interest in strategy games.... (Risk/Axis&Allies and v…

Or lack of currently available patch as the case may be. From the previous link it appears that there was at least one previously announced vulnerability that was not addressed in the recent patch da…

Looks like RFID passports are coming very soon for the US. It was probably just a matter of time, but in light of some of the risks in the current implementation, I thought it might be delayed. The m…

Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there bei…

There was a time when people looked to shape images for political benefit. (I mean political in most ALL senses of the word whether it's domestic or international or issue oriented politics etc.) By …

Surprise.... The AP is reporting that the music industry is suing limewire. There are several companies involved and they're seeking compensatory and punitive damages. They argue that limewire encour…

The Register sums up the Black Hat briefings pretty well. The Operating System level has received a lot of scrutiny in recent years for security flaws and as a result there has been a good deal of im…

I saw this by way of SunbeltBLog yesterday.... workfriendly.net.... you basically enter a web address and choose which "microsoft office theme" you want to use and the page is presented as if it was …

SANS has an answer to last months browser vulnerability a day blog... for August they'll present a security tip a day. So, if you haven't visited the handlers diary, this may be a good time to "tune …

For those of you that aren't aware.... Bleeding Snort is a collection of "bleeding edge" snort signatures. Snort is an intrusion detection framework. This note is by way of SARC that the bleedingsnor…

Lately, I've tried to make use of my phone's voice command system for calls. I've had a couple long drives and used a headset and tried to do something that works better without the headset.... "Name…

Well after a bit of a roundup of some of the security news items the last week, it's time to sum up the Google front.... Googling Google tells us that Infinite storage is on the horizon.... they cite…

I've detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for Wordpress can be found in the following posts (reverse ch…

I've been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they've released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as…

I've seen a couple places referring to some improvements in the way google maps handles zooming and so I decided to take a look in Firefox. The zoom handling of Google maps is the one thing that I've…

Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the "slow boat" free shipping option.) I've had it long enough to charg…

From time to time I've done product reviews on this site and I'm getting ready to do a first impression review on something else. I'd like to take a step back though and give you my thoughts on produ…

There are articles out about the demise of official Windows 98 and ME support would be a boost to linux uptake. Realistically, I suppose it may, but I personally am not holding my breath. Here's why.…

Looks as though Google (as in... "I've spent the afternoon googling for information on ski vacations.") is now officially part of the English language according to the Oxford English dictionary. Of c…

The last few days I've been heavily researching the purchase of a camcorder. I guess I can't just go out and pick something, I have to research at a number of levels. (Editorial reviews, user reviews…

Sometimes you just want to cry... I found this email exchange via sunbeltblog.... Essentially, the product manager and marketing director at some unknown company have just become aware that the "Abou…

The great firewall of China may be just an illusion in technical terms. This article describes the details of how things work.... Basically when "banned content" is detected, both ends of the connect…

Gbuy, Gcheckout, Google Payments etc.... the news has been circulating for months - Google will compete with Paypal. Well, Google Checkout has finally launched and is being covered by most every outl…

There are a few Google related stories of the last few days to catch up. 1)55 Ways to have fun with Google is an e-book available for purchase on Amazon or Lulu.com, but it's also avaiable as a free …

Sometime last week, the news story of a French competitor to Google Maps called Geoportail.fr caught my attention and I took a look at the page. It caught my eye because the initial article boasted 2…

What follows are some notes taken on vmware server. Most are related to an install on ubuntu-server (NO GUI INSTALLED).... the main point of this is to have the host system take as FEW resources away…

What follows are some notes that I've taken on the Vista beta that I installed into a VM. I've got a lot of toying around yet to do with it (and at least one Internet Explorer bug I want to mention.)…

I've heard rumors of how the 802.11 pre-n wireless networking hardware really KILLS nearby 802.11 wireless b/g networks. Today George Ou has some details. I really think this is a serious problem wit…

The last couple days, there's been a virus spreading making use of yahoo mail's interface. Usually web mail is considered a fairly safe way to get email, but in this case all that was done was the us…

After spending about 5 days using wget to resume the download of the vista beta 2 .iso file (which is a bit over 3 GB). I finally gave up seeing as how that 5 days had netted me about 2-3 MB of data.…

A while back there were rumors of Google Payments, a Paypal competitor on the way. Well, if this is right, it will be named GBuy and will be launched June 28th. Also, it sounds as though there may be…

According to reuters data on US Nuclear Safety Administration employees (*some 1500) was stolen in a computer cracking incident. The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department and also gu…

These days, big inventions aren't entirely new creations, but improvements on an old idea. This latest in a string of interesting science/technology breakthrough stories is about just that. Researche…

For anybody that didn't notice, the World Cup has gotten underway in Germany. (For those that haven't heard - every 4 years there's a world football championship (here in the US we call it soccer).) …

It went un-noticed by most people for a few years. After all, the ones that were affected were just those that were "asking for it". Where to start. Let's see, back in the day there were some that se…