Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:

I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).

As I did last time, I wanted my web browser post to contain both news stories about browsers that have caught my attention and my thoughts on the newest web browser I’m trying out. Let’s start with the news.

As you probably have heard if you’re paying any attention to browsers, one of the selling points of using Brave is that they replace tracking ads on the net with their own ads and then “pay” you for viewing those ads. You can then take that money and pay it out to the creators you care about and continue to support the web while not being tracked and not just blocking all ads, keeping the creators from getting paid. Sounds too good to be true? Well, this article argues that it is. Here’s a screenshot of the new tab page on Brave on my Linux computer:

It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.

I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2
• Vivaldi Part 3
• Brave on Windows Part 1

Vivaldi vs Brave on Windows

Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their ad blocking and ad replacing tech. On the other hand, I’ve been using more and more of Vivaldi’s features. I just started using their Web panels - this allows you to have a web page on the left that loads up in a small section - great for pages that you would like to reference here and there without cluttering up your tabs. I’m using it on my Windows computer to keep some Web panels with notes on what I’d like to do in some games - like Civ VI, Darkest Dungeon, and Cities Skylines.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2
• Vivaldi Part 3

I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2

Vivaldi

I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while now, but the recent Vivaldi update blog post spurred me to go ahead and write it. Vivaldi continues to do a decent job for me on Windows. As I’ve been planning on posting, I don’t do much web browsing on Windows. It’s mostly just uploading videos to YouTube and looking up various sites related to the games I’m playing. Pretty much any browser could fit in there. That said, in Vivaldi’s blog post they have a video demonstrating their new pause mode and before they pause things, they have the tabs tiled. I had completely forgotten that was a thing! It would have changed the way I did my FunkWhale vs Ampache video. That is, of course, a common issue with Vivaldi (and its predecessor, Opera). It has a million features and if you aren’t always making use of them, it’s easy to forget about them.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup when squished to a half 1080p Window while trying to upload YouTube videos with the tabs on the right. I also had to close the bar on the left. Here’s what that looks like:

This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.

Running Vivaldi for the first time.

For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.

It’s been a while since I last considered web browsers. I wrote this post in 2008 about which browsers I was using. And in 2011 I wrote this post about KDE Browsers. So that’s at least 9 years since I wrote about browsers. What is my current situation?

Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:

For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.

Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.

I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.

Here’s a funny fake-news video reporting on the mass-migration of teens from Facebook (where their parents have migrated) to the comments section of a slow-motion Youtube video of a deer running. While I don’t think there’s going to be mass-migration of all the world’s teens to one comment board, there’s a grain of truth here. My old Informationweek editor, Mitch Wagner, once discovered some young girls holding a gossipy chat in the comments section of an old blog post of his; when he asked them what they were doing there, they told him that their school blocked all social media, so every day they picked a random blog-post somewhere on the Internet and used it as a discussion board for the day.

If you’ve been following Internet news recently, you know that the World Wid Web is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. Lots of people have been talking abou tthe first websites they ever set up. Unfortunately for me, my earliest sites were not captured by the Internet Archive. But I started on the web around 1995 or 1996 on Angelfire. From there I went to Tripod and Geocities. Eventually, I joined the two so that I could have a whopping 20 MB of hosting space between the two providers. I’ve mentioned it many times before, but my first web presence was a Squaresoft fan site - mostly revolving around Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) and Chrono Trigger. I also used it here and there in High School for various things. When I got back to Tripod in college and found that Tripod had deleted that site, I created a personal site for the first time.  Around 2003 I started messing around with running my own server using Fedora Core 1. And since 2005 I’ve been blogging here at It’s A Binary World 2.0. And in the last few years I’ve had a web comic and a site that comments on commercial comics. It’s incredible that we’ve gone from 10 MB at Tripod to my current host giving me unlimited storage because it’s gotten so cheap. I’ve gone from one website to 3 with more to come in 2014.

I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.

Lots of technologist have been suggesting that the entertainment industry should view illicit Internet sources of their products as indicative of unmet demand. Netflix is doing just that.

Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each territory, because that’s where the demand is.

It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:

[caption id=“attachment_7119” align=“aligncenter” width=“618”] Choqok[/caption]

I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.

A little less than a month ago Ars had a story about Skype’s text messages being insecure. This is pretty devastating considering how many political activists are using Skype to stay secure from governments like China and Russia. The article doesn’t mention anything about the voice communications, but I would be a little cautious if your life actually depends on it. It turns out that Microsoft is scanning messages between users to make sure they aren’t spam or other bad messages. The problem is that your system is either 100% secure or it’s insecure. If Microsoft can see the messages then anyone else can by hijacking Microsoft’s servers. (And countries like China and Russia definitely have the skills to do that) This is a good reminder that you should make sure to read EULAs because this information has been there since Microsoft bought Skype. I wonder what technology political activists could use to stay safe in light of this revelation.

There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.

I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in a weird place right now in our culture - everything is digital. If there were to be some sort of catastrophic apocalypse, any aliens that came to Earth would think we stopped inventing stuff in the Industrial Revolution.  (Only a slight exaggeration) Even if we just look at humanity - if something were to wipe out technology (see many sci-fi stories including the manga/anime Nausicaa and Trigun) all the information we know - all the petabytes on the net would be inaccessible and lost forever.  But if we dial it back a bit and forget about those doomsday scenarios - it’s important to see that culture is informed by what came before it.  (Super heroes are just modern day greek gods, and so on)  It’s why the Library of Congress collects important works of culture for preservation.

I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete.  So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta.  When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.

[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me.  I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.  Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook.  I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot.  In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar.  I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year.  It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring.  In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task.  I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up.  A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash.  I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora.  There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program.  So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.

Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

[caption id=“attachment_2634” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“I guess it’s in Beta because they haven’t removed the Jesus module yet”] [/caption]

While looking up driving directions on Google Maps from Barcelona, Spain to Madrid, Spain, I clicked the option for “walking” directions out of curiosity’s sake.  This is the quickest route they gave me for walking.  I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to go.  First of all, I can’t walk on water.  Second, why not go straight over land.  That appears to be a shorter route.  What makes this hilarious is the statement in yellow:  “Walking directions are in beta.  Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”  Missing is, “We may send you walking over water.”

I don’t even remember what I was going to search for in Google, but here’s what came up when I typed “why”.

This is becoming a huge “sport” on the net - to see what Google gives you when you type something into the search.  It’s the first time I got something fun.

Saw this one day when I was in gmail (click on it to see it full-sized):

If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing.  No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs.  They will lease it all from the cloud.  (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter.  I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home)  There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone. Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography.  I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos.  I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others.  It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive.  I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment.  I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality.  Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus.  So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them!  Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit.  It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer.  This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone:  bandwidth limits.

As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging:  One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all.  Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it.  In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother.  I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services.  Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter.  And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica.  So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce.  On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services.  I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for.  So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.

Another micro-blogging post?  What’s going on here?  Well, when I first did my micro-blogging post, Identi.ca had just gone public and I didn’t think there was a reason to join yet another micro-blogging service.  But two things came together to convince me to check out Identi.ca.  First of all, I’ve overcome my reluctance to using micro-blogging services.  Second, I heard an interview on Linux Outlaws with the creator of Identi.ca.

As you can see, it’s pretty much inspired by Twitter.  It has a very similar interface and reply mechanisms.  I got a good vibe from it - as I did with Twitter.  Something about the aethetics just made me want to use it - just like Twitter and unlike Pownce.  Of course, there are some negatives with Identi.ca being inspired by Twitter.  Chief amongst these is the reply functionality.  Only Plurk (with Pownce in a distant second) have correctly implemented replies in a way that makes sense.  Without a threaded reply, it’s pretty hard to correctly follow the conversation that may come out of something posted on Twitter and Identi.ca.  Of course, maybe that’s done on purpose.  Perhaps replies are an afterthought because that’s not what these micro-blogging services believe micro-blogging to be about.  I’d LOVE to see a mode in Identi.ca (just another tab, really) where posts could be viewed in a threaded fashion to be able to follow the conversation better.  That would help Identi.ca leapfrog over Twitter in useability and functionality.

It’s been about a month since I signed up for a bunch of micro-blogging websites. So what do I think after about a month? Let me start off with Twitter.

In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future.  So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.

A lot of websites have funny page-not-found (404) and maintenance pages. I got a good chuckle out of Plurk’s maintenance page.

[caption id=“attachment_1387” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Plurk Maintenance Page”] [/caption]

I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.

I’m uninstalling BitTorrent 5.0.9 from my Windows computer because every time the computer starts up, if I don’t exit from the program, all of my internet-related programs lose their connections. This is way too misbehaved and I’m sick of it. I’m moving to Transmission or one of the other ones that aren’t crap. I can’t believe the original program has been surpassed.

Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering.  Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos.  I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.

When most people think of the GPL, if they think of it at all, they tend to think of Linux and perhaps other operating systems.  However, there are many benefits to using the GPL for programs on a smaller level.   For example there is a Go Application in Facebook.  This programmer could have gone through the near impossible headache of creating an implementation of Go.

However, as Wikipedia mentions, it is very tough to create sofware to play go, “While the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players ( Deep Blue beat the world champion in 1997), the best Go programs only manage to reach an average amateur level.”  This has to do with the high complexity level of the game’s strategy.

The jokesters over at Johncow.us let us know: (click the image for a full-size version)

This is a test post for a blog post I’m writing about flock 0.9.  It should appear in the next 30 minutes or so after I finish up.   This is bold, underlined, and italics.

• This is bulleted

1. and this is numbered

also, it should be tagged “flock”

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock

Got the following email yesterday from a desmond1.100@hotmail.com:

Dear Friend, Better days greetings to you and your entire family and i pray that may the almighty lord guard you and your family. In our search for a trustworthy individual to work with us on a very important and confidential project, we came across your esteemed profile.I want to use this opportunity to introduce myself well to you, I am DESMOND EYADEMA,The Ex late PRESIDENT SON OF TOGO, I call you in respect of my consignment boxes in NEW YORK, which I want you to assist me and stand as my foreign beneficiary to receive my fund over there in NEW YORK, this fund am writing you about is $38.5million U.S.Dollars which my late father deposited under GHANA HIGH COMMISSION or I and my mother,and Mr.JOHNSON ASCOT who was suppose to receive this consignment in NEW YORK, Was demanding for 50% which I and my mother did not agree on for any reason,that was why we have to stop the delivery to him immediately, and search for another Beneficiary who can help us on this.I will give you 20% for the total fund involve for your assistance,because that was the former agreement we have with our foreign partner.Mr.JOHNSON ASCOT before he later change is mind because of his greed that is why i and my mother put a stop to the delivery to him ,please if you are willing to help us, kindly reply me for more details.Thanks and God Bless. Yours Sincerely, Desmond Eyadema.

Check it out! Someone recreated a church with legos and it is very accurate.

Most of you tech readers have heard of The Jargon File in which esr maintains the best of geek jargon and the lore behind their etymologies. What most people didn’t know is that esr also maintains a science fiction jargon file. It’s not as funny as The Jargon File or as comprehensive, but it’s pretty neat and a fun read. Perhaps if enough people read it, he will elevate it to the level of The Jargon File - so go read it!

To see a graph of search trends of any search term on Google, just mozey on over to www.google.com/trends and separate any search terms by commas. It’s quite a bit of fun!

Alright! Google Earth 4 has been released. This time around Google has not let us Linux users high and dry! In fact, they have released Windows, Linux AND Macintosh versions of Google Earth! I think I will finally download it - I had been waiting for the rumored Linux version. Read the exciting announcement here and look for me to be blogging about it in a few days.

AOL and Yahoo have announced they will allow companies to pay them money to guarantee their emails will get past the spam filters and appear certified. I don’t like this at all. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s all too easy once this kicks in for companies who aren’t paying to get past the spam filters to suddenly find themselves sucked in. Kinda like the Mobster movies where the shop owner who doesn’t buy “protection” gets his store trashed. And what’s to stop them from extending this to us, the normal guys? Email is wonderful and powerful because it’s free! I can shoot off as many emails as I want all over the world without paying $0.39-$2 to get it to the person. Therefore I can send an email just to let someone know I’m thinking of them. I don’t have to come up with a whole letter to justify the cost. I hope I’m wrong. Darn spammers messing up the net for the rest of us!

If you want to play Civ4 in the most unique way I’ve ever seen, then head on over to Demogame.civfanatics.net. What do they do? They play a civ game where a group of people act as a president and cabinet controlling what goes on in the game. In other words, I play for a few turns and do stuff based on what we decided to do as a group. I’m guessing that they paint the broad picture and I get to do whatever in the details that gets us in that direction. It is certainly much more involved than the way my brothers and I used to play. It’s very neat and I suggest you check out their page to at least get a feel for how involved their rules are.

It’s almost been a month since I went to Cancun, Quintanilla Roo, Mexicao. I meant to blog about it, but at first I was busy getting my married life and my room back into order. While in Cancun I decided not to rent a car in case the drivers were as crazy as the ones I’d heard about in South America. They actually ended up driving just as good (or bad) as people do in Tampa and arguably a lot better than how they drive in Miami. Since I wasn’t actually in Cancun, but in Puerto Aventuras (Adventure Port) we had to take a taxi to get anywhere Interesting.

There’s a reason why open source is so awesome - by providing other programmings with the inner workings of your program, they can create new and amazing uses for it that you could never imagine. One of the best examples of this is the fact that Google has release the API (aplication programming interface, I think) to their new map program. People have been using this in all kinds of interesting ways. A new real estate website uses the program to show users exactly where their offerings are on both the sattelite map and the road map. This article talks about some of the other ways that peole have been using the APIs.

I recently began listening to the followup to The Lexus and The Olive Tree, entitled The World is Flat: A Short History of the 21st Century. The latter was written in 2005 so the author has had time to absorb the true impact of the internet, while it was just getting revved up when he wrote the former book. His key point in the first part (of three) of the book is that there have been many events which have caused the world to flatten. This flattening is a metaphor for a leveling of the playing field across many different industries. For example, Linux has leveled the playing field in computers by allowing poorer people to afford computers since they don’t have to pay for an operating system or programs. Fiber optics have leveled the playing field for India by allowing data to be transmited so quickly and with so much bandwidth that companies are able to do more and more abroad, allowing educated Indians to have jobs of a caliber they could not have before. You get the point.

Andrew, on a dare from some of his mates in the Galactic Irregulars, tried to outdo the Numa Numa guy with his own lip sync to a song. Personally, I don’t think it’s whacky enough. He’s driving and the music is playing while he sings to some of the lyrics. It is kinda neat to see the cars over his shoulder, but nothing that I think would unseat Jersey boy. Andrew may have once looked comical (as we all do when we are in are early teens), he now looks like someone who could probably put up a good fight. Perhaps something a little whackier would be funny, but you can be the judge!

According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.

I was looking at the stats for my server and I saw that four people had come here by searching: “a mexican and asian guy singing the numa numa remix”. I googled it myself and saw that you guys had been tricked by Google. I had written about Asia in one post and Numa Numa in the other. None of the other search results had anything to do with it, and mine was one top. I was very happy to be the top item in the search, but felt bad that people coming here weren’t getting what they wanted. I looked around on the Internet to see just what this Mexican and Asian Numa Numa dance was all about. Turned out to be quite hilarious! So, I decided to copy the video and put it on this server for you to be able to see! (Because it was on some weird site that was full of weird ads.) So you can access it here!. Save it to your computer and then enjoy the Numa Numa happiness!

Yesterday there was one bright spot in the gloom and doom of the death of my grandmother. I saw the real music video to the Numa Numa song. It’s a European video, so it’s pretty cheesy, In fact, it’s hard to say which is funnier, the real video or the new one on the internet. I found a place containing the real video as a realvideo format. You can view it here. I will be copying it to my server soon so that it can always be experienced.

Remember when I talked about Numa Numa guy getting his big break on tv? He’s got a name now and it’s Gary Brolsma. (Well, he always had a name, but now we know it!) Following is a CNET article I found about him and my comments following any paragraphs I feel warrant comment.

Internet fame is cruel mistress for video dancer 02/26/05 | 07:24 AM PST Jason George

Here is the cautionary tale of a guy from New Jersey who made the grave mistake of uploading a clip of himself lip-syncing.

The Numa Numa guy, who I wrote about in my first blog here, was on the news today on MSNBC. He was also on VH1’s best week ever. Whether he intended to have this video shown all over the internet, or whether it was accidentally put into his file sharing folder, he is now a huge celebrity on par with the Star Wars Kid.

It’s pretty interesting how these videos explode online. First of all, they are only being passed along by word of mouth - either emailing your friends about this crazy website or through IMs. Yet, soon everyone knows about it. I’m hard pressed to find any engineering students who don’t know what Numa Numa is. In fact, while waiting in line to see Mo Rocca, someone was singing along to Numa Numa. It was a cool conversation peice. Yet, it’s the Tv news who’s always slow to report on such things. Anyone who goes to see Numa Numa based on the the tv coverage is a late adopter. These are the people who didn’t buy DVD players until almost everyone had one.