Monthly Archives: July 2009

Windows users: Stop buying Apple products

Funny: Danny Katz’s hilarious call for Mac users to rise up and rebel at the legions of Windows users buying iPods and iPhones.

But then in 2002 along came the Apple iPod and oh, how quickly did their attitudes shift? Suddenly PC people all wanted to strap an iPod to their jogging arm AS IF THEY WERE ONE OF US. Then in 2007, along came the Apple iPhone and ah, how quickly did their Mac contempt wane? Now they all wanted an iPhone to flash around among their doofy mates AS IF THEY WERE BORN OF OUR ILK.

Read the rest

Do you want to appear in adverts on Facebook?

Want to appear in adverts to your friends on Facebook?

I don’t. I don’t see why an advertiser should be able to imply that I use or recommend their product. And I had been wondering why people I know started showing up in ads like this:

Stupid Facebook ad

Note that all three suggested dates are wrong. Pretty stupid.

Anyway, you can stop your profile image appearing in adverts by going to this Facebook settings page.

Or if that doesn’t work, go to Settings / Privacy / News feed and wall / Facebook Ads. Nicely obscure, isn’t it.

Facebook advert options

(via Rae… who also pointed me over to this article about recent changes by Facebook in this area.)

Lessons from video games

This week isn’t just the 40th anniversary of the first moon landings, it’s also the 40th anniversary of the video game Lunar Lander.

Having a go at this excellent remake (for Windows), I learnt an important lesson that one can use in real life:

Try pressing Shift to start if nothing else seems to work No, that’s not it.

Don’t go for the bigger fuel tank. Upgrading to the more efficient engine is a better buy.

Lunar Lander 2

Actually that’s got a fairly narrow application, hasn’t it.

Oh well, the game was fun.

Bye bye Teletext

In Australia the 7 Network’s Austext teletext service is to shut down at the end of September, with only Supertext subtitles/Closed captioning continuing to be transmitted. (I wonder if they’ll move them from the current page 801 to the default 100, to make them easier to use?)

Over in the UK, ITV’s Teletext service is to shut down in January 2010.

The BBC’s Ceefax will last until analogue TV is switched off in 2012.

Hardly surprising really. I’m sure demand for text-based news and other information has plummetted since the widespread adoption of the Web. In fact I’m surprised teletext has lasted this long — I struggle to think of anybody I know who uses it.

Youtube – What the…?

Oh great. So Youtube has been running flawlessly all day, allowing my kids to watch any number of videos, but the moment I want to upload something it starts having problems.

Right now, youtube.com is responding to me with this joyous news:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Also, please include the following information in your error report: 

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What the hell that means is anybody’s guess.

Wikipedia featured article

Oh bravo Wikipedia, well done. Today’s Wikipedia featured article (found highlighted on the front page) is Gropecunt Lane.

Wikipedia's featured article 9/7/2009

That should do wonders to help convince doubters that Wikipedia is an authoritative resource able to be used by everyone, particularly families and those behind company firewalls with over-zealous administrators.

Now, I’m no prude, and I don’t think the article should be excised from Wikipedia or even censored. But I do think that if you want your product to be mainstream, you probably need to keep what is generally considered the single most profane word in the English language off the front page.

Right on Commander!

I’ve been trying out Oolite, the open-source Elite clone.

It’s got its niggles, but it’s a very good copy of the BBC Micro original — I took a look at that again to compare. I’ve found myself wanting the original keyboard controls, and may go ahead and reconfigure it to match.

While playing around with the BBC version (actually the slightly-enhanced Master version) I refreshed my memory of how to dock without using a docking computer. I was a bit rusty, but managed to do it without too much trouble. (Well, okay, it was actually my second attempt — BeebEm includes an option to record output to an AVI.)

Use FoxIt Reader in Chrome

Chrome fast. FoxIt reader fast. But by default they don’t work together so well, insisting on PDFs being saved to disk before FoxIt will open them.

Here’s how to get read PDFs inside Chrome using FoxIt reader:

  • Copy the file npFoxitReaderPlugin.dll from C:\Program Files\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\plugins to C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\plugins
  • If the plugins directory doesn’t exist, then create it
  • C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome… only exists if you’ve used the Google Pack version of Chrome. If instead you’ve got the version that (oddly) shoves it into C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ then you’ll need to find the right place under there for it.
  • Restart Chrome

(Source: Chrome forum post, and some fiddling/experimentation)

UPDATE: As commenters have noted, unfortunately the relevant files may be in place only if you installed the Firefox plugin with FoxIt Reader — which may not offer to do so unless it detects Firefox is installed.

Jumping the gun

Fairfax got a lot of flak for revealing Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Iraq trip before it happened, something normally not done due to the security risk it entails.

But they weren’t the only ones. Sky News online also reported the “secret visit” before it happened.

Sky News reports Gillard's Iraq trip before it happens