Archive for the ‘Geekery’ Category
On Ads
I really, really, really dislike online advertising.
I find the claims made by many ads1 to be offensive to my intelligence, and I am not remotely interested in teeth whitening or novelty means of losing weight2. Fad diets and colon cleansing are right out.
No, I don’t want to punch the monkey or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden. I don’t want poorly-made faux Windows XP ads warning me that my registry isn’t optimized. I am certainly not the 1,000,000th visitor to a particular site, and I know I have not won any sort of prize. See “Free Lunch, No Such Thing As A”. Making them blink, flash, or vibrate around in ways that induce seizures will not make me click them. Sites that host such ads will likely have me take my eyeballs elsewhere.
I understand that advertising is an important means of funding the operations of many sites, large and small. I don’t begrudge non-intrusive advertising that tries to be somewhat related to what I’m reading. If I’m reading a page that’s talking about, for example, astronomy, advertisements for telescopes would be on-topic and related. So long as they’re not obnoxious, don’t blink, flash, pop-up, expand, make noise, or cover/crowd out content, I’m ok with that. If ads for teeth whitening or weight loss come up, that irritates me. If I’m reading a gunblog and there’s an ad for ammo, that’s fine…indeed, I might click the ad to see if the site in question has good deals. If the ad’s for some new TV show, I could care less.
Over the last few years, I’ve routinely used Adblock Plus, an outstanding Firefox add-on that allows one to block ads on pages one views. All this time browsing the web ad-free has been fantastic, and really sped up my browsing.
However, I realize that my actions may have resulted in a financial loss to several of the sites I visit, so I’ve decided to do an experiment: I’ve turned off Adblock Plus and removed the “opt-out” cookies from various advertisers3 so they can “target” ads toward my “interests”. Google makes it really easy to view and modify the categories and interests that Google associates with your ad-viewing habits. Cool.
First impressions:
- Holy moly, there’s a lot of obnoxious ads out there. I really don’t care that George Clooney and Anne Hathaway are “geeks”, nor is it relevant to my interests that a site exists for “Geek 2 Geek Dating”. Such ads are not remotely related to my reading of the news. Flash ads can go die in a fire, as can ones that play sound.
- On the other hand, there’s a lot of great, on-topic ads. Take, for example, this page. The site allows car owners to enter information about their fill-ups and does some neat stuff with it. On the left there is a color-and-style-matched Google text ad that blends in with the overall layout. At the time of my browsing, it was showing subtle ads for Honda Civics (hey, the page it’s being displayed on is about the Civic! Fancy that.), Hyundai Elantras (a competitor to the Civic), and a few other car-related ads. Not obnoxious at all, and relevant to the topic at hand. I approve.
I’ll continue this experiment for the next week or two, after which I’ll turn back on the various protective measures. Based on my results over the experimental period, I’ll consider allowing ads on specific sites that I frequent and that don’t have annoying ads. Those that have irritating ads will be blocked.
Additionally, I’m going to make the following statement: unless it’s absolutely necessary from a financial/operational standpoint4, I will not display ads on this site. In the event that I do display ads, they will be subtle and as on-topic and relevant as I can make them. Fortunately, this site requires on the order of $20/year for hosting, domain costs, and other related expenses, so such expenses are barely worth talking about.
That said, I do use services like SiteMeter, Google Analytics, and QuantCast to get some interesting information about visitors. Basically, I like to see where visitors are coming from, mostly so I can edit a post to say “Hi, visitors from [referring site]!”. That, and I like looking at shiny graphs. Having a third-party service do this is far less of a hassle than analyzing server logs, though I’m considering turning off Google Analytics, as it doesn’t do quite what I want it to. I don’t seek to gather any personal information. Hopefully this is not objectionable.
- “Obama wants you to go back to school!”, “Obama wants you to refinance your house!”, etc. [↩]
- If I was, I’d be talking to my doctor, not clicking an ad. [↩]
- This add-on for Firefox makes your choices permanent, even if you clear cookies. [↩]
- Or someone is willing to give me an absolutely outrageous sum of money. [↩]
Downtime
Sorry for the recent downtime.
My host says the explanation for “Saturday morning’s downtime was caused by the hardware failure of a not-as-redundant-as-claimed power supply. Monday morning’s downtime was caused by a software error triggered by the rebuild process that occurred after the system came back online. On Saturday morning, we fixed the hardware problem, and now we are addressing the software problem.”
Things are stable now, and they’ll be moving the disk cluster from the existing hardware onto new hardware in the near future, hopefully increasing reliability.
Whee.
Security Reminder
The internet can be a dangerous place.
Although one’s primary defense against internet badness should, like in the real world, be ones own brain, that is often inadequate due to the cleverness of malware out there. Even so, be smart, stay away from shady websites, and don’t engage in shady behavior.
If you don’t have anti-virus/anti-malware software, particularly if you’re using Windows, please install some. The free Microsoft Security Essentials is an excellent choice and I highly encourage its use. Also, ensure that your automatic updates feature is enabled.
This post is brought to you by the people who get viruses due to their own irresponsibility and then come crying to Yahoo! Answers Computer-Security forum for help and ignore the dozens of previous posts about the identical issue and then post a new question.
How to Handle Copyright
We’re all familiar with the heavy-handed tactics of the music recording studios — suing people for hundreds of thousands of dollars for having downloaded a few songs off the internet.
Fortunately, it appears that at least some of them have gotten the memo that (a) the internet exists, (b) their content can be, for better or worse, easily distributed and copied on the internet and (c) suing people only alienates their customers.
Take, for example, this video:
Several years ago, I managed to find a WMV-encoded video of a bunch of people having fun shooting machine guns in Roanoka, VA. The video happened to have an audio track of “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band. I didn’t create the video, but figured that others might want to see it, so I uploaded it to YouTube. Since then, about 280,000 people have viewed it. Cool.
Rather than suing me for a video that had a copyrighted piece of music, BMG and YouTube have instead put a small, closable ad on the bottom of the video that allows one to purchase the song at iTunes or Amazon. Not a huge intrusion, and it makes them — in my view — look a lot better than if they had issued a DMCA complaint, taken the video down, or sued me.
I trust that other recording studios will follow in BMGs footsteps and recognize that essentially nobody makes money from YouTube videos, but that they (the recording studio) could use the popularity of some videos to promote their works. Win-win for everyone.
Google Voice for the Military
As many of you may know, Google Voice is available on an invite-only basis. Unfortunately, it can take some time to receive one’s invite after one signs up.
For military members1, however, Google Voice is available within a day of requesting an invite. This is fantastic for deployed soldiers, as people can leave voicemails and texts for the soldier, something that’s a bit difficult with the existing phone systems on base. As a US number, callers to one’s Google Voice number only have to pay normal domestic phone rates.
While voicemails and text messages are no substitute for a live phone call (which, in turn, is no substitute for face-to-face interactions), it’s better than nothing.
My hearty compliments to Google for recognizing this need and doing something about it.
- Verified by means of one’s .mil address. [↩]
Cell Service
My contract with Verizon Wireless runs out in November, so I’m scouting out other providers. (I do this regularly with all services I use just to ensure I’m still getting a good deal.)
The only problem I’m finding is that even though Verizon does the occasional thing to annoy me, my service with them has been nearly perfect. I find no compelling reason to switch for just basic phone service (and I can’t afford an iPhone or BlackBerry), especially when my two-year-old Motorola W385 phone keeps chugging away with no problems other than a 9-12 month battery life (and since I can get replacement batteries for $5 including shipping, this isn’t a big deal).
Now, if only Jack Bauer’s cell company offered service to the public, I’d switch in a heartbeat. That guy’s phone seems to work everywhere, whether on an airplane, in an underground bunker, or in the middle of the bloody woods.
Electronics Repair
Knowing how to repair things is one of the more important tools a prepared person can have. While increased miniaturization and performance of electronics has resulted in many devices being cheaper to replace rather than repair, there’s quite a few things which one can do to keep ones electronics in top shape while also saving a bunch of money.
Take, for example, my Garmin StreetPilot c330 GPS unit. It’s served me well over the last three years, though after enduring a blazing Arizona summer (or two), the internal lithium-ion battery was no longer able to hold a charge.
Garmin wanted $150 for an out-of-warranty replacement of the battery, which I thought was a bit hefty, so I did a bit of research online. It turns out that the battery was an “18650″ lithium-ion battery, which is available at a number of retailers, including the local BatteriesPlus store. Fortunately, the local shop also had a model (PDA-210LI) of the battery which included the necessary plug to fit the circuit board of the GPS unit. While it was a bit pricier than the bare battery, it made life quite a bit easier.
Installation was rather easy: I simply needed to de-solder where the wires from the original plug (which was permanently connected to the battery) connected to the internal speakers and solder the speaker wires from the new plug to those same points. After that, it was a trivial matter of plugging the battery in and closing everything up. The battery charged up as expected and runs the GPS just fine.
This particular problem was quite simple and required only the most basic knowledge of soldering, but it ended up saving me $120. Oftentimes problems found with electronic devices are fairly simple (blown fuses, dead batteries, worn-out wire, etc.) and can be repaired using inexpensive, off-the-shelf tools (e.g. a soldering iron) and basic knowledge.
In addition to saving money, knowledge of basic electronics (and their repair) can be quite fun.
Starting Anew
For all its flaws and quirks, there’s still something immensely satisfying about a fresh Windows XP installation1.
Next time I need to reinstall Windows on this old PC, I should see about just making an image of the installation when it’s still fresh so that I don’t need to go through the lengthy installation process. Oh well.
- Particularly one that’s going to be used to play old (pre-2005) video games that don’t run well under GNU/Linux or Vista. [↩]
Some New Goodies
While yesterday was BAG Day, between paying off a little bit of debt and putting money away for the wedding, money’s been tight, so no new guns for me.
However, I did put a little bit away for the last month or so that I ended up using on Tuesday: my laptop needed a new battery, so I replaced the standard 6-cell battery with the extended 9-cell battery. My old battery had enough juice to run my laptop on the “Dell Recommended” power settings at low usage (typing, web browsing, etc.) for a bit more than an hour. The new battery has a >5 hour capacity, which is nice.
Additionally, I picked up a few electronic goodies at RadioShack1 : an auto-ranging multimeter, some test leads, a breadboard, some jumper wires, and a few little electronic components — I’ll need it for some projects, both around the house and at the lab. My philosophy on electronics is the same as my philosophy on tools: if you buy and keep the tools required for a specific job, over the course of several jobs you’ll end up with a pretty well-stocked toolchest.
Of course, I’ve been using the multimeter to measure various electrical properties of things around my house. For example, I have a hand-to-hand resistance of about [math]1.7 M\Omega[/math], and I can work up a 1V potential between the leads if I rub one vigorously on the leg of my jeans2. More geekery as I get it.
- Yeah, I know they’re not really the highest-quality stuff, but the stores are ubiquitous and reasonably priced. [↩]
- Yes, I use my pants for science. What of it? [↩]
They Should Have Sent a Poet
I present the BA-K-47, a 1:1 replica of an AK-47 made entirely out of bacon:
I had no idea there were bacon blogs out there.