It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Internet

  • Technology Roundup

    A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments…

  • Websites and Lost Culture

    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…

  • Podcasts I’m Listening to 2013

    I’ve cut back a lot because I have less time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I have now:   Video Games Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents…

  • When Twitter is Awesome

    The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time.  In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate.  I…

  • KDE Browswers Part 2: Rekonq

    So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now.  (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one – I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue)  So here we go: The Good -Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if…

  • Social Networking and the Family

    I heard something really sad on NPR today.  Kids are complaining that their parents are spending so much time on their smartphones with twitter and Facebook and so on and they feel neglected.  I had always assumed that parents from my generation would put away these stupid habits once we had children.  It’s part of…

  • KDE Browsers Part 1: The Arguments

    I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browser history quite a bit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user…

  • The Initial Failure and Eventual Triumph of Social Media in my Attempts to Get Tech Support to Help

    A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices.  In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix.  She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix.  We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did…

  • Automatically Posting your Top 3 Artists from Last.fm onto Twitter (with Python!)

    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…

  • Boxee: Further Impressions

    After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When…

  • Using Boxee for the First Time

    My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle,…

  • Micro-blogging: 2 years later…

    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…

  • The Next HOPE: A Defcon Prequel

    This year I attended my first HOPE conference.  HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a hacker conference organized by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly.  After hearing about the talks they had at 2008’s HOPE (The Last HOPE) when I was listening to the 2600 podcast, I knew I had to attend this year.  I was not…

  • Opera 10.5

    Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5.  I noticed a huge cosmetic change.  Observe: Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome.  The tabs are now above the address bar.  Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change.  Also, although I can’t…

  • Why I don’t Care if Free TV Disappears from the Net

    When I flew to Tampa last week, there was a magazine cover that claimed the days of free professional content over the Internet were over.  The cable companies had a way, it claimed, to control the programs available and keep us paying >$100/month for cable.  I didn’t read the article, but I have a guess…