Month: June 2008

Geohashing

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

geohashing.png

This week I went to my first geohashing event ever. Report is on the wiki. We were four people, and one person that came at a different time so we didn’t get to meet. It was a lucky break: Normally, coordinates in the Oslo graticule are at locations that are really inaccessible. This time, it was in the outdoor seating area of a pub downtown.

Bookmark Everything!

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I’ll be celebrating 16 years on the internet this summer, and as anyone can imagine that means I’ve seen a lot of crap. Even with the big storage of useless information that I call my brain, that means I have a lot of bookmarks, and with Firefox 3, I notice my habits of bookmark-keeping have changed substantially: I bookmark everything now.

Before FF3, keeping more than a few hundred bookmarks was self-defeating. Finding anything in the mass was hard, adding something to the right folder so it could be found again was getting progressively more difficult, and a Google search was almost always more efficient for finding things. FF3 changed this in three major ways:

  • By default, one click on the star icon saves the link to my unsaved bookmarks, and even if that means it doesn’t show up in any folders, it gets searched when I type a keyword in the URL bar (aka awesome bar).
  • I can now tag bookmarks, which saves me having to have any folders at all. All I do is click the star again, and tag the page with the first 2-3 associations that come to mind. This is great, and I keep adding new tags, but again, the awesome bar searches them when I need something later – and even if I don’t remember anything about an article I read, or even its title, I may remember that it had to do with cookie monster and that maybe I tagged that.
  • Foxmarks. This isn’t new to FF3, but I find that investing in a big bookmark collection is only worth your time if you don’t lose it every two years.

What about you? How big is your bookmark collection, what do you bookmark, and how many of you have managed to save any bookmarks from the 90s?

FRA-lagen and you

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Sweden voted for a new wiretapping law that gives the police the power to listen in on all traffic crossing the Swedish border – without a court order! this is reminiscent of the Great Firewall of China, and even Germany hasn’t gone that far. Obviously this is bad news for Sweden, but why is it bad for you?

 11   302 ms    26 ms    27 ms  level3-117311-s-b3.telia.net [213.248.78.110]
 12   184 ms   410 ms   205 ms  ae-11-11.car1.Stockholm1.Level3.net [4.69.135.17]
 13     *      210 ms     *     ae-4-4.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.135.22]

In my own case, my provider (NextGenTel) routes at least some of its traffic through Stockholm. Which means it’s crossing the border to Sweden, and can be listened in on by the Swedish police. Who can’t be trusted.

Which should be a reminder for everyone to use more encryption. Encrypt your mail. Use SSL where you can. And encrypt your IM sessions: If you are using Pidgin or Miranda IM, you could install plugins for Off-The-Record messaging (pidgin) (miranda).

And if you’re saying “I have no secrets”, reconsider that statement considering you lived in a country like China. You would have secrets there. And what if your traffic gets routed through a country like that, and somebody reads it? You might just end up on some no-fly list for saying something ironic about a major global power to your girlfriend. And because encryption requires everyone you communicate with to take part it’s hard to get critical mass, and it will be too late by the time you need it.

NOD32 Antivirus

~ Enno ~ 3 Comments

I decided to test another virus scanner. I’m generally not interested in them, but there are people who are, and I’d like to be in a position to give a favorable recommendation for one or the other. It’s always easy to name the ones I don’t like (NAV, Antivir), or won’t trust again (AVG), and my recommendation so far has been for avast!, although the user interface it forces on you is really, really terrible.

So now I’m checking out NOD32 (30 day trial). It gets pretty good review, the interface is nice and clean, and it seems to be much less of a system hog. I like that I can really customize what it does – I especially don’t like my virus scanner to scan every file I touch, because that seriously cramps my compile times. So far the only fault I can find is with the explorer menu, and the lack of an option to turn off the balloon that comes up every time it updates its virus definitions.

Nokia 6300: “Memory card in use by another application”

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I miss my old phoneToday when I connected my Nokia 6300 to the PC with the USB cable, I got the error message in this post’s title. The 6300 has not been a great phone for me (I miss my Ericsson W810i), but at least upload over USB had been painless until today. It’s full of really bad engineering like this:

When your background image is an animation that’s stored on the memory card, it will lock the memory card.

Yes. It seems somebody made the memory card an exclusive resource, and the code that’s playing background animations locks this resource. Solution: Reset the theme to factory settings. Upload podcasts again.