Category: stuff

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What Your Internet Plan Will Look Like Without Net Neutrality

If Senator John McCain has way by defeating the FCC’s move to support Net Neutrality with his “Internet Freedom Act“, this is what your Internet plan options could easily look like:

net

Say “goodbye” to experiencing the World Wide Web as you know it, and say “hello” to experiencing it as you do your cable TV, with restrictions on what you get unless you want to pay more, and unless the content providers pay more to be listed there.

As usual, the notion that a “government takeover” and a “marxist plot” are being bantered around to generate support for McCain’s bill through fear and ignorance. It goes without saying that McCain was the biggest beneficiary of  telco/ISP money in 2008, to the tune of $894,379.

Picture courtesy of some quink at Reddit.  Click the pic for the full-size image.

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Best Buy Officially Sucks

A lawsuit has been filed against Best Buy for price match fraud. You know how they tout on their commercials that if you find a better deal somewhere else, they will match the price? Well, I guess that doesn’t count their own web site.

The Consumerist reports the details of the lawsuit and how the shenanigans occur:

1. You walk into a Best Buy to purchase a sale item you saw on their site.

2. The employee tells you that the item is no longer on sale, and shows you what looks to be Best Buy’s website, but it’s really a secret intranet that Best Buy’s corporate office denies exists. The price on the website shows that the sale is over.

3. You cry and leave, then at home you see that the sale isn’t over at all. What happened?

I have acquired a growing distaste for Best Buy and will only go there when dire circumstances require it, such as needing a new wireless router at 8PM on a Friday night. (heh)

Now I’ll definitely think about staying away at all costs.

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Avoid Microsoft Windows When Banking Online

Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit of the NSW Police says, “”If you are using the internet for a commercial transaction, use a Linux boot up disk – such as Ubuntu or some of the other flavours…It gives you an operating system which is perfectly clean and  operates only in the memory of the computer and is a perfectly safe way of doing internet banking,”

Sounds like a good plan to me, but then, I’m sure most of you reading this are already in agreement. It’s just good to see this sort of thing hitting major news sites.

Read more here…

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Personal AntiVirus for Linux – ClamAV with Fedora 11

I'm providing the original text file for ease of useGrab it here - ClamAV.on.Fedora
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Background:

This guide will use the ClamAV CLI scanner and the ClamAV-Update script (freshclam).
I wrote this to help all the HomeSOHO users (servers or desktops).
ClamAV has various tools/packages/plugins for email servers etc. but that’s another story.

If you wish to learn more visit their home site: http://www.clamav.net/

Obviously, you can change anything you want, but this should get you going.

Continue reading “Personal AntiVirus for Linux – ClamAV with Fedora 11”

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McDonald’s in the USA

This is a map representing the contiguous United States of America, visualized by distance to the nearest McDonald’s. Click it for a bigger version.

McDonald's in the USA

The farthest one can get from a McDonald’s in any direction is a mere 145 miles.

Via.

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FedExing

When did FedEx start putting drop slots in the sides of their trucks, and who can run that fast?

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Some Super Useful Apps

There are certain free apps I have come to rely upon when setting up any new installation of Windows. Some of these aid in my work, some of them just aid in a providing better Windows experience. I thought I’d create a list of my top 5 favorites. To qualify for this list, applications must be lightweight on system resources when running, preferrably open source, and free.

If you have any suggestions for apps which fit that description and make your life easier, post them in the comments.

If you find any of these tools useful, please make a donation to the author!

1. DColor is a great tool for saving space on your desktop by tweaking your icons. It allows you to resize them, and even display them in ‘list view’, as you would see a list of files in Windows Explorer.  DColor will also let you recolor the icon text and background. It’s a tiny app which takes up very little system resources.

2. Color Cop is an eyedropper color picker which can sit in the foreground of all open windows.  This comes in really handy when you are swapping back and forth between Photoshop and Dreamweaver, or are trying to pick colors from photographs. It allows for easy copy/paste to and from using your choice of RGB or several flavors of hex values. No installation — just launch it and use it.

3. ImgBurn is my favorite disc burning tool. You can run it from a command line or from the graphical interface, and it supports CD, DVD, HD DVD, and Blue Ray discs.  ImgBurn is lightweight and sports a ton of tools and options. I have yet to run across a disc drive which it didn’t support out of the box.

4. Filezilla – I never leave home without this one. Not only is it free for Windows, but Filezilla supports Mac, Linux, BSD, and more.  Providing a great interface for FTP and SFTP file transfers, it’s easy to use, lightweight, and full of options. My favorite combo of traits!

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