I surprised myself, but Firefox is slowly getting my attention over Apple’s Safari. The latest feature I love is a plug-in called AdBlock. It blocks advertising images and some of the pop-ups and pop-unders that Firefox can’t block yet. I used a list at http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ of what to block. So far, it is working quite well.
X-Eudora-Settings
You can customize tons of Eudora settings by using
A very useful one is:
Several years ago, I added in a Eudora setting that reads aloud the “bad” words in incoming messages. Unfortunately, that code is not publicly listed on the eudora web site any more, and I have no idea how to turn it off now. So I have to mute my computer when it starts spewing obscenities.
Idiot Phishers
Here’s an easy way to tell an email message is a phishing attempt: If the message refers to a technology that doesn’t exist yet, it’s a scam of some sort. I just recevied this attempt to phish my PayPal account info:
Your account will be suspended ! We are contacting you to remind you that on 8 April 2005 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.
Since today is April 4th, and the “unusual activity” will take place this Friday, I’m pretty sure this is a scam. Other hints include the message headers showing “Received: from paypal255.com (615270.ds.nac.net [66.246.246.62])”. Paypal email always comes from paypal.com. And SpamAssassin and demime helped protect me as well.
GTVCF ended up with 1,535 bounces
I ended up with 1,535 bounces of falsified planetmike.com email addresses.
I thought I understood web images
Just when I thought I understood how images work on the web; the differences between GIF, JPG and PNG; and when to use each type of image; along comes a new technology: color correction. The ICC (International Color Consortium) has a standard that allows for information about how an image should render by an application. Most commonly this is used by image editors like Adobe Photoshop. But now web browsers are getting into the act. See Is Your System ICC Version 4 Ready? for an example. In Safari (under OS X) the image looks fine. Under older browsers you see the different color profiles used in the image.
Aladdin’s MAMP
Cool, a stand alone version for the Mac of Apache, Mysql and PHP: MAMP.
Run DOS on a Mac
I’ve never needed to run Windows on my Powerbook, but have needed to run some old DOS programs I wrote. So I would either use the Windows XP machine at work, or my ancient Windows ME machine at home. But today, I found an alternative: DOSBox. DOSBox is a DOS emulator for Linux, Windows (why?), and OS X. Very cool.
Beware of “Internet Corporation Listing Service”
Watch out for highly annoying yet legal invoice-looking things from the Internet Corporation Listing Service. If you register a domain name, you have to give a working address. That address will be sent a soliciation that looks very very similar to a bill. This is for an annual subscription for being listed in search engine. What search engine? Oh, “14 major search engines.” Well, the major search engines will spider your site automatically, so why bother paying anyone to ask the search engines to do it? Plus ICLS.net does not seem to accept credit cards. They want checks. Once they have a check, could they drain your account? I don’t know, but be safe: 1. Don’t buy services from junk mail; 2. Always check a web site’s privacy policy before giving them your personal information. (Note that ICLS.net does not have a privacy policy – hint hint) 3. Use a credit card to give yourself some protection from fraud; and 4. Put a unique address in your domain registration information so that you know where the losers out there get the information they use.
They do provide an email address to get questions about their services: inquiries@icls.net.
Here are some other sites that comment on ICLS.
Interesting Tool
I’m experimenting with RSS Digest. It takes news feeds and allows them to easily be included on other web pages.
Can’t Copy to Paste from PDF
I am researching audio formats for the Internet Caucus and found an interesting quote in a PDF. I selected the text, hit copy and got an error box asking for the document’s password so I could copy and paste. What purpose is that? I wanted to use one sentence from the file. Instead I had to spend 15 seconds retyping the sentence. Or I could take a screen shot:
In my opinion, this is an example of how copy protection is getting in the way of a fair use of a copyrighted work.