Personal Web Filtering Options
HTC – You Owe it To Us
Solar Power Still Sucks in a Big Way
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TodayWasAwesome – Best OfMove lots of files using rsync for fun and profit
Yeah, you're a total hacker.
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New site design
Whats this!? A new post on my blog? Your eyes do not deceive you. I’ve been meaning to blog a bit lately but every time I looked at the site I thought it could use a new coat of paint. Please let me know what you think and if you have any issues or ideas! Hit the break to see a list of features.
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Make Facebook Useful
I’ve never really liked Facebook because there’s always too much noise. No matter how many people I hide from my stream there’s always junk coming in. The problem is that I can’t set my stream to default to a group of people that I actually care about.
Fixing this takes 30 seconds
Here’s an easy little trick to get around it and only see the updates of a specific group. Just right click on the link to the group you want to follow and then set that page as a bookmark.
If you use Chrome, then setup facebook as a “search engine”.
To do that, right click in your address bar then edit search engines. Set the Name to anything you want, then the keyword to facebook and the url to the group you want. Then when you goto facebook, just type “facebook” with a space after it and hit enter. It will take you directly to the page you want.
Now just curate that group carefully for people you actually want to follow. Mine only has 16 people in it.
It’s simple I know but it helped me.
update: Upon the completion of this post Facebook immediately removed this feature. FML.
Comcast vs Fiber
I recently hooked up internet in a location without Fiber and had to go to Comcast. It’s the first time I’ve used their service since I was in high school so I was hoping it had improved.
Surprisingly they said I could get 20 Mbit fiber which was awesome. My fiber was only 15 Mbit. So I got everything setup and quickly ran a speed test
Comcast 20/5
Advertised: 20/5
Actual: 5/2
Strangely I only got 5 Mbit. I thought it might be the server so I hoped on my old fiber connection and ran the same test:
BroadWeave 15/15
Advertised: 15/15
Actual: 13/10
Traffic Shaping
I was disappointed by the big loss of speed from Comcast. I expected them to fall short of advertised (everyone does) but to fall all the way down to 5? I lost 75% of my speed while fiber sat around 15% loss. That’s awful but at least I should be able to stream video.
I connected to my file server which is where I store my legally obtained digital content and started streaming. Uh-oh, even though the server can pump out 1500 KB/s I can only get 125 KB/s when going through Comcast. I checked from a few other locations and got stellar speeds which means Comcast is traffic shaping. Other locations give me quite a bit better speed, in the 1500 KB/s range but when I hit my server all of the sudden traffic shaping kicks in and my speed tanks.
Monopoly
Enjoy your monopoly now Comcast, or should I say Xfinity, because as soon as anyone has choice it will quickly become apparent that your internet offering is subpar. I don’t need a company deciding what traffic of mine is worth my bandwidth, that’s my business. Further, I think I ought to make a complaint to the BBB about your outrageous speed discrepancies.
Personal Web Filtering Options
I love the internet and I’ve always hated internet filters because they block stuff erroneously. However, I do try to avoid certain types of material online and so I’ve done a little work to make sure that I don’t see anything I don’t want to see. Here’s what I do along with some other options.
As a side note, anyone that knows me knows that I hate censorship in a government. What I’m trying to help people do is filter out the content that they personally don’t want to see. I would never impose censorship on anyone.
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HTC – You Owe it To Us
On October 11, 2009 I rushed to get the HTC Hero on the first day it was sold. Eight months later that phone is now considered obsolete. Especially by HTC. First they took nearly seven months to update that phone from Android 1.5 to Android 2.1 now they’ve promised to never update it again.
One update is all they could give us? I really like my phone but when I bought it I thought that it would be updated for a long time to come. I had just come from the iphone where we got all the updates we wanted and when an update was released there was no waiting.
Let me cut to the chase,
Dear HTC,
You have abandoned Hero users. When we buy a phone we don’t just buy it for what it can do, we buy it for all that it will be able to do. Maybe you’ll be better in the future about keeping products updated (and updated in a timely manner) but for now you need to remember the people that made you money just eight short months ago. Here’s what you must do.
Opensource all the drivers for the Hero.
You make a lot of phones, I understand thats a big strain on your dev team to try to keep everything updated. That’s fine I guess. I’m disappointed but the least you could do is release the code for all the drivers. Be honest, there’s not a lot of proprietary value in keeping your drivers secret, especially for what is now considered an “ancient” phone.
Please do this, then I can compile from source myself with a 2.2 rom or a 2.3 rom or whatever rolls down the pipe. You want to abandon us? Fine, at least leave us with the tools to pick up the slack.
Signed,
Dan a, until recently, loyal HTC fan.
BTW, this isn’t a suggestion really, HTC required by law to opensource their kernel. I’m asking nicely but really they’re obligated to.
Solar Power Still Sucks in a Big Way
My numerous (and very vocal fans) will remember that I already wrote a post on how much solar panels suck. But someone who “works in the industry” told me how totally wrong I was. That post was from 2008 so technology should be totally different now right? Almost everyday there’s a story about solar panels reaching new and incredible limits in efficiency.
Please Solar, PLEASE!
I want it to work so bad. I would love to get rid of my electricity bill. Understand, I have a vested interest in solar power being awesome, if it were awesome then I could just throw some panels up and free myself of the utility company. Maybe one day that will be possible, please I wish it were. Even if I could cut it in half I would be thrilled.
So, let’s figure out what that would take. Because if it’s cost efficient, I will do it right now. Luckily for me there’s an organization that has done all the work for me and created a calculator using the latest in technology and current industry costs. Great.
Right now I use an average of 37 kwh per day. That’s slightly above average in the US (don’t ask me how my 1800 sq/ft home does that). Now to get half of that, now remember I’m using this calculator, I need about a 4.1 kW array. So how much does that cost? Luckily they have a calculator for that too.
It’s Totally Cost-Effective
So you're an investment banker huh?
So, the grand total is $32,800 to get rid of half my electric bill. But don’t worry, there are tax breaks for this, the federal government will give me almost 10,000 dollars so it ends up being 22,960.00 (I said almost 10,000).
Great, so now if I spend $22,960 to save $35 dollars a month I will recoupe my investment in about 60 years. That doesn’t include stuff breaking, or what happens if we get less than the optimal amount of sun. In reality it’s probably twice as much.
Sorry solar, until the cost is low enough that the investment can be recouped in a year, maybe two, you’re just not worth it.
Actually, I’ll go one step further and say that the government should stop paying people to throw their money away on a technology that isn’t ready. I’m all for more efficient panels and more research but right now it’s just burning money on a technology which probably is way worse for the environment to make than just burning the coal for the electricity.
Prove me wrong and I will love you. Until then, sorry solar, you suck.
Broken Timbuk2 Bag
I have sent the following letter to Timbuk2.
Dearest Timbuk2,
About 3 months ago I achieved my life long dream of owning a timbuk2 bag. I had long watched, and planned for the day when my computer would be protected by the best bags in the industry. Pining away, I began to dream of the quality, the unparalleled craftsmanship and the utmost attention to detail and style. Surely, with this bag I could be successful, my wife would love me more, my coworkers offering me more respect. Even my community would finally recognize my achievements.
After I got my bag, I rejoiced. These were the halcyon days. The sun shone through the darkness of winter, piercing and warming my heart with epic success. With my timbuk2 bag in hand there was no stopping me. And then the darkness fell.
I still remember that day, I went to pick up my bag by it’s handle and in horrific slow motion it snapped. I looked on in horror, disbelieving that my golden fleece would be so taken from me. It is with a somber heart and forlorn eyes that I look to you, harbinger of hope. May my bag be repaired? Is it covered by warranty? It is the answers to these questions that brings me humbly before you.
Or in Haiku:
I love my great bag
One day the handle broken
Please fix my black bagRespectfully yours,
Dan Garfield
History 1700 Midterm
I’m diverting from my normal fare to work on a study guide for my History 1700 Midterm.
The book used is “The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People Concise 6th Edition”
Guide after the bump
Egypt Sucks
For those that have already seen this, I apologize, I posted it in Reader a few minutes ago.
Today was the first day non-latin tlds have gone live. TLD = top level domain eg: .com .net .org .us .whatever
The first one to go live is .egypt, which is in arabic مصر
I wanted to find the domain and see how it wokred in my browser so I did a search but apparently if you remove the last character (the one furthest to the left) it means something else entirely
مص = sucking
مصر = egypt
so all this porn came up in the search results because I copied and pasted it slightly wrong.
I thought for a minute that the BBC got punked and was provided dirty words in arabic for their news story.
The moral of the story? Egypt is only one character off from “sucking”