A clear sign that the French have taken over.
I tried to find the Egg Farmers Free Range Eggs, 550g Pk 10 at Woolworths, but the site just doesn’t work, even with JavaScript turned all the way on. And how well does the Woolworths site worth without JavaScript? Not at all well. The blind can go f**k themselves.
A ten-pack of eggs.
I can’t figure out how this is making things better. We have six-packs, so that’s not it. Please, enlighten me.
Unfortunate online advert placement. Does it ever get old?
(For those outside Victoria, Myki is the new public transport ticketing system, which has had a very bumpy ride so far.)
Source page. The ads seem to be semi-random.
Christmas Eve, and following through on an idea I had six months earlier for fantastic presents, Fridge magnets and customized T-Shirts featuring smiling images of the whole family. Gifts like these would be well received by anyone blessed by them.
I’m not a big fan of inkjets, but several years ago we needed a scanner and the cheapest way of acquiring one was by buying one of those scanners with a free, built in inkjet printer. For some reason they’re sold in the printer section of the store. Knowing that inkjet cartridges don’t like sitting unused for extended periods, I didn’t install the cartridges. Until Christmas Eve 2009.
Things were going swimmingly well, with print-head alignment and test pages coming out, looking a little odd but they were very speedy drafts. A final print of a sheet of photos (well over 15 minutes to produce) didn’t come out so good. It was obvious yellow was missing. A few attempts to clean and clear the cartridge were attempted. One Christmas Eve, I decided to go shopping for a replacement colour cartridge. We’ve seen the movies. I knew what to expect.
From personal experience I can tell you that the afternoon of Christmas Eve isn’t all that crowded. Parking was bad, but not Boxing-Day-terrible. I picked the easy, undercover park that’s a substantial walk to the shopping centre, and all was good.
The plan was to check out cartridge prices, compare to new printers, and decide what to do. Turns out the inkjet pricing tactics haven’t changed since I bought the scanner. A replacement cartridge, just one of two required cartridges, was $45. A new printer, $48 (different brand). Given I didn’t know when the black was going to fail on me, I went with a new printer and fresh cartridges.
The new printer is much faster than the old one. And it came with same photo paper too. The T-Shirts could have gone down better, but the fridge magnets went down a treat.
I’m in the process of buying another car, and it seems that the major car buying websites are stuck in the classified ads mentality; you drill down by make, model, year, limit for a range of odometer readings (you get to set a minimum! Great! Who would ever set a minimum?) and a price range (you get to set a minimum! Great! Who would ever set a minimum?), then look at what you get. Now that we’re in the 20th century, you can even sort the results by ascending price! Wow, what did we ever do without computers?
But I while don’t know what model I want to buy, I do know I want curtain airbags. Can I search for that? No. Do they have the data on that, for each and every vehicle listed? Yes. They have pre-populated the check-boxes for each feature for every model of car ever sold. That would be a handy database to search, especially in nifty combinations like curtain airbags in five door vehicles getting better than 8l/100km, order by turning circle then price.
Clearly, the presumption here is that you have the slightest idea what you want, and that you care terribly about brands, but not at all about features. For me, in my situation, this is arse backwards. However, in my researching, I discovered that the Peugeot 307 was rated 158th of 159 cars for reliability. Could I exclude that please? No? Oh.
You can do a “keyword search”, which is just a text search of the description attached to the ad – whatever the advertiser types in. Typing in curtain gets a bunch of ads with curtain airbags, which thoughtful advertisers have included in their descriptive text – repeating all the text of the various feature check-boxes – but you also get to see a bunch of Kombi vans (they have actual curtains).
And the useful values, like ANCAP ratings, RACV (or whatever) crash worthiness ratings, RACV reliably ratings, choice vehicle reliability scores, are they in the databases? Can you search them?
Must try harder.
On another note, Toyota Australia’s website is a laugh riot. When you pull up their vehicle comparison tool, they include a bunch of very amusing “features”, such as “Steering wheel” and “door handles”. I wonder if they carry any cars without door handles?
Quite amusing…
And this is an introductory film shown to dealers:
(via Patrick)
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:
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.
(via Rae… who also pointed me over to this article about recent changes by Facebook in this area.)
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.
It looks like Kaspersky Anti-Virus is blocking at least some web adverts from prominent advertiser Doubleclick, on the basis that they’re phishing.
Here’s the warning from Kaspersky itself:
And here’s what appears on the web page:
This warning is appearing on sites using Doubleclick, including Yahoogroups and Facebook Scrabble (international).
Interesting.
There’s some interesting things coming out of the bushfires royal commission; the last couple of days has highlighted the limitations of the emergency Triple-0 system, when surges in the number of calls outstripped available capacity, and overflow calls were put on hold, got recorded messages or were diverted.
The first half-hour of Jon Faine’s show on 774 is worth a listen for those interested, particularly the section from about 10 minutes in, with Garth Head, a former adviser to Minister for Police and Emergency Services. For geeks, it’s a reminder that sometimes the systems we design, implemennt and manage are sometimes critically important to those who rely on them.
See what happens if you don’t properly anticipate how your HTML email might be rendered?
Yep, the world’s thinnest and lightest 17″ notebook… featuring a really odd-looking askew display, apparently.
(GMail in Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows)
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.
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.