Geek Rant dot org

Google now offers OpenID

daniel — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:43:14 +0000

Your Google account is now an OpenID, apparently… Jeff Atwood at Stackoverflow knows what he’s talking about, and reckons you just enter google.com/accounts/o8/id when asked, and it’ll throw you to a Google logon screen.

Neato.

(Ah, I must have missed it when it was announced: Google and Microsoft both jumped on the OpenID bandwagon in October.)

Hold music down (severity level unknown)

daniel — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:22:25 +0000

I find it mildly amusing when the web hosting ISP reports through its system status RSS feed that the support phone line hold music has broken down.

But I suppose it shows they’re serious about tech support issues.

Shut up, damn ads

daniel — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 12:17:45 +0000

Usually adverts on web pages don’t irritate me. I know some people hate them, and use blockers to prevent them, but they don’t bug me.

Except those stupid, moronic, noisy smiley adverts which some GIT has decided should use sound without asking you first. IDIOTS!

It’s especially galling when you’re trying to watch (and listen) to a video, so you can’t even switch to mute.

To kill them (and I have), edit the “hosts” file. On Windows this is at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts or thereabouts. Note the file has no file extension. On a Mac, this Apple support article explains how to get at it.

Put the ad servers you want to block in there, against the loopback IP address of 127.0.0.1. In Firefox you can find them by going to Tools / Page Info / Media and look for the embedded SWF files that match the irritating ads. Use a tab character between the IP address and the server name.

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.yieldmanager.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net
127.0.0.1 b.casalemedia.com

Done. Stupid moronic noisy smiley ads gone.

Setting your privacy on Facebook

daniel — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:41:39 +0000

Facebook don’t really explain how to restrict some of your information to particular friends, but it’s not hard to do with the new privacy settings.

1. First go to Friends, and if it doesn’t already exist, make a Friends List called Limited Profile. This will be used to limit what some people can see. (You can use multiple lists to have different permissions.)

2. Put the appropriate people into it. (When confirming friends it gives you that option, too).

3. Then go into your Settings / Privacy Settings / Profile. You can customise who you want to see what, and exclude the Limited Profile people from seeing particular information — or have particular people see/not see whatever you want.

Easy.

The ultimate C64 talk

daniel — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:50:26 +0000

Never mind the present day troubles with IE, how about some good ol’ fashioned nostalgia?

For those remember coding on the Commodore 64 (rather than just using it), check this terrific essay from pagetable.com — to go with a forthcoming talk on the subject.

It took me back to bits of knowledge about 6502/6510 and the VIC II chip that I thought I’d forgotten, and I’ll certainly be watching out for the slides.