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Category: Blog News
News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
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Twitter no longer
I just deleted Twitter from my iPhone – I was no longer using it to check up on my friends let alone post any new tweets.
Funny how I found it so cool in the beginning. It has certain advantages over blogging (speed, location awareness, quickly catch up with other people) but I just found it too ephemeral for my tastes.
You type a message somebody else responds but an hour later the text has already been replaced by other messages.
I need to know that what I write will stay, not evaporate – and anyway, I have facebook for posting quick status updates onto.
So goodbye twitter it was nice while it lasted.
I found this great link on how to set up a thawte free personal email certificate on your mac, so that you can sign your mail (so people are sure it’s coming from you) or even encrypt it.
The article describing the process is from ‘macdevcenter’ and is here. It was written in 2003 but the general steps are still the same. For a short’n sweet recap read on, else read the article for a complete and very thorough explanation of what is being described here below.
- Go to thawte.com and in the products drop-down list, you can select free personal email certificate
- Create your user id and password, supply your emails.
- Create your certificate – I used Firefox and selected the certificate for netscape, this worked just fine and was imported automatically into my Firefox (you might have to wait a while for the certificate to be created, I was notified by email).
- Via your Firefox preferences, Advanced, export the certificate to your desktop (no need to change settings) – you do need to supply a password for this encrypted backup.
- Double-click on the certificate to import it in your Mac OS X key chain. The article suggested using a different key chain file than the one Mac OS X normally uses. This was not a problem.
- Relaunch your Mail client and notice the new icon in the top right corner – this means that your mails will be signed now. If you don’t want them to be signed, click on it and the check mark will become a cross. Click it once more to activate it again.
- If you want to send encrypted emails, you need the public key of the person you will send it to. The easiest way is for them to send you a signed mail – this contains their public key, and mac Mail will auto-import so it becomes available for use. Same goes for people wanting to send encrypted mails to you, you first need to send them a signed message.
- That’s it !
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Pain relief through 3D VR goggles
Serious burn victims get a certain amount of pain relief from playing immersive VR games while they receive their treatment.
Some do not feel the pain at all anymore ! I think this is a really neat application of games to help people heal.
More information in this ArsTechnica article.
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Ebook management software
A few months ago I searched extensively on the net for something that offered me the same for my ebooks like what iTunes does for my music.
I couldn’t find anything similar – there were a few entries but nothing that managed them centrally.
Today while reading up on the Sony ebook reader (prs-505) which is now sold via waterstones, somebody in the comments dropped the name ‘calibre‘.
It turns out to be a free opensource ebook management software that does exactly what I want it to do. What’s more it is written in Python, so it’s compatible for Linux, mac OS X and Windows!
The only thing I would change is the name – what else can I blame for not finding it a few months ago ?
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A good business idea made reality
Sometimes I wonder whether I could come up with a business idea as cool as the one described story below. I think it’s actually not the idea that is missing, but the “cojones” to start up something like that.
This is a fascinating account on how one or more guys combine their online dating sites with real, on-the-ground advertising by using their brains to focus ultra-locally.
The whole blog story reads like a detective story, and that’s what it is.
[Update : I read the comments below the original article some more, and it’s more and more looking like this is a scam operation where the signs are used without identifying marks to score cheap targeted publicity]
I only saw one of these before, the original, a long, loooong time ago, but this collection of the latest one, the old one and all the variations is simply excellent.
Assembled by mr. Michel Vuijlsteke (and not Michiel as I wrote).
Aaah, that helped me a lot, a giggling session like that.
[I’m gonna upgrade the site today, so you might experience temporary interuptions while I do a backup of the existing pages and content and replace with the newest, latest WordPress version, version 2.6.3.]
A friend of mine recently said he wanted to start blogging, and was looking at WordPress to use as a blog. I quite like WordPress, as you may have noticed. I have been using it for some years now, but there are some caveats to be aware of for a blogger new to WordPress:
- If you decide to host your own blog, be prepared to upgrade at short notice. Since WordPress has become very popular to use as a blog platform, the hackers target this much more now as well. My blog got hacked this year sometime during the two or three weeks I was vacationing and enjoying the summer, so you really need to regularly visit your blog and check it (WordPress now tells you in the admin interface that an update is available). An alternative is to use the blogging platform that WordPress provides via www.wordpress.com.
- Test any new plugins that you want to install one by one, especially if they are new or in beta.
- Disable free registration for users; this seems to be a popular way of attacking, first creating a user on your blog and then using privilige escalation to get write access to your site. If you want that other people contribute to your blog, define them yourself.
- Get an Akismet API key (free for personal bloggers) and open up your comments for all visitorss : let akismet do the heavy work of checking your comments for spam, and give your visitors the chance to react.
- Make a regular backup of both your wordpress db content and your files on the site; especially, do this before you upgrade !
There are many more tips, but these are the ones that I practice.
I just read this rather horrific childhood recollection from Exiled, a online news office that concentrates on Russia related stories.
Yasha Levine talks about his childhood memories of the russian youth camps.
Myself, I still remember the time I went to summer camp for two weeks. I was four or so and couldn’t read properly yet, so every day to get home I took a bus at random and hoped that somebody would tell me this was the right one or the wrong one. I was scared shitless of all the people I didn’t know. Most of the time I got it right, but I afterwards I had a big dislike for any more summercamps.
Yasha had a slightly worse experience. Here’s an extract :
We lived and slept in huge shacks partitioned into two—one side for the girls, the other for the boys—about twenty campers to each side. I was in the youngest category and we were forbidden to go to the outhouse at night. Instead, we had to use the half-dozen rusty metal buckets distributed in the isles everyday at bedtime. But they were only for pissing. Our handlers forbade us from “going big” in them and threatened to punish anyone that did. But it didn’t help much. Every other night some poor kid wouldn’t be able to hold his stool till morning and would sneak up quietly to the bucket—not out of respect for fellow campers, but for fear of getting caught—and squat right there in the middle of the room. Sometimes they missed and the piece of crap would lay there until morning, stinking up the room.
He goes into quite a bit more detail that’s worth reading if you want to be horrified at the traumas he undoubtedly got from those stays there. I say undoubtedly because his writing style when he describes his experiences is pretty raw there.
Hope you got over most of the traumas, Yasha. Reading yours makes me realise my experience was nothing troubling.
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The S of Sam
Yesterday morning while bringing the kids to school, Sam suddenly stopped at the school entrance, went back a few meters and picked up a metal ringlet in an S shape.
“Look dad”, he proclaimed proudly, “I found the S van Sam” !