Geek Fuel!
Healthy Coffee – www.perkins.organogold.com
It’s always a real pleasure to drink good coffee and tea
Subeta – Your Very Own Virtual Pet
Tagged subeta, virtual pet
How To Remove A Non-Empty Directory in Ubuntu
It’s really very simple.
Bring up a terminal window.
At the command prompt type sudo rm -r <directory-name>
So, if you wanted to remove a directory called ’spare’ that was in the directory ‘etc’ which is itself off the home directory you would simply type without the quotes ’sudo rm -r /etc/spare’
The system will prompt you for your administrative password. Enter that, hit enter, and the job is done.
Tagged Linux, removing non-empty directory, sudo, terminal, ubuntuCharleston Co-Working Group
Wikipedia says: "Co working is an emerging trend for a new pattern for working. Typically work-at-home professionals or independent contractors or people who travel frequently end up working in relative isolation. Co working is the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space."
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Google Public DNS
Google has announced the launch of Google Public DNS. It’s an alternative domain name service available to any Internet user.
IT can replace the DNS that are typically provided by Internet Service Providers or Domain Registration companies
Google’s Announcement says “Google Public DNS [can] serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back… Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages… Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.”
Anyone who wants to give the new service a try and knows how to reconfigure their network settings should use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as DNS addresses.
Tagged DNS, domain names, google, google public DNS, nameservers, setting up DNSEmergency Cell Phone Charger
Visiting friends this afternoon, they wanted to go to their local Big Lots.
Now I’m not one for shopping unless I want something, but I thought best not to be unsociaable and wander along with them anyway.
It took me under ten minutes to go around the whole store. Just before I finished I found this one useful gadget.
It was only five dollars, and it has an LED light that cab be used as a flashlight, and with the attached cable and adapters will fit many phones including my Blackberry.
While it wouldn’t be feasible to try and recharge the cellphone battery completely, a cranking of about three minutes will give up to fifeteen minutes of talk time depending on the brand of phone.
How To Tweet From Google Wave
Using Tweety-Wave
Add “tweety-wave@appspot.com” to your Contacts.
Create a new Wave and drag and drop Tweety-Wave in to the Wave.
Then the Gadget will be automatically be opened within the box.
Remember to enable popup(s) for the Wave webpage.
A Twitter oAuth page will appear asking you to authorize Tweety-Wave
You can tweet directly from this wave.
Through TwitterGadget
Create a new private wave. Click on the “Add Gadgets by URL” and enter “http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml”
Comcast Complaint
I’m not by nature a particularly secretive person. In fact, I probably talk too much. I’ve got nothing to hide; no skeletons in the closet, but I do like to decide what I tell people about myself, and what I don’t.
The same goes with my contact information.
Personally I’ve never seen much of a need for residential telephone subscriber books. If I want you to have my telephone number you’ll have it. I will have given it to you. (Not that I use the phone much these days in any case; I prefer to text or email, but that’s another story for another day).
I’ve not had a landline for some years.
I’ve got a cellphone, with loads of daytime minutes, and I get free domestic calls from 7pm to 7am and all weekend. I have Skype too, and also Google Voice, so why would I want to pay a shedload of money each month for a landline?
The begging AT&T junk mail goes from mail box to trash where it belongs. Comcast kept calling to sell me digital voice for only $39.99 a month. I told them Skype was way cheaper – I can call 36 countries around the world for $9.95 a month, and use my cellphone to do that as well. I’ve done the math.
Still, Comcast offered their triple HD package, which is only a couple of bucks more than what we already had. Except it had HD TV, and more channels (a couple of which I might actually watch from time to time), and the Digital Voice package is thrown in.
We have a cordless phone system in a box gathering dust, so we said OK.
Now, I’ve now complaints about the phone service. It works as advertised.
But to get to the point of this story…
I looked at the online account page. It says the number is published. I call Comcast. They tell me it will cost a few bucks to have it changed to un-published. Not very happy about that, as I didn’t ask for it to be published in the first place. Then the stinger. It will cost up to $4.95 a month to keep it unpublished!
So, I have to pay almost $5 a month to stop the pond scum telemarketers calling? I’ve never ever had them call me before, as I’ve never been listed anywhere. My cellphone number was never listed, and Skype nor Google Voice is (and I can block incoming idiots on Google Voice in any case).
Now, I could perhaps see the logic of getting charged for an entry in a phone book, but to be charged each month to NOT appear is nothing short of a scam.
Moreover, Comcast, like many other companies like to trumpet their privacy policy, yet they don’t seem to care much about the privacy of their customers.
No, I don’t trust the ‘Do Not Call’ registry either. Quite simply, this should be an opt-in option, not a chargeable opt-out. Comcast, this sucks.
If I had known this at the beginning, I’d have told the sales guy where to put their Triple Play!
Facebook Gains A Friend
One positive side of Facebook’s aquisition of Friendfeed might be to assure its longevity in these uncertain times.
Those of you that know me, know that whilst I use Facebook, I am no fan of it, preferring regular email, blogs and websites.
I’ve taken to Friendfeed and Twitter though as they easy to use from a regular site, are much easier to search and navigate.
The takeover is, of course, good news for the Friendfeed Dev Team at this time.
I am wary of the direction that Friendfeed may now take, but it would be silly to condemn Facebook until we see what transpires down the road.
Time will tell.
Tagged facebook, friendfeed
Does Twitter Encourage Disloyalty?
A few days ago I read a comment from Jesse Stay in which he was suggesting that Twitter encourages disloyalty.
He feels that Twitter encourages potential blog subscribers to not subscribe, but rely on Twitter links instead to reach the content that they want to read.
I’m not so sure that this is vastly different from subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, and then only reading the articles that have headers that look potentially interesting. We’re using the RSS feed as a filter in that case, and surely this is what we’re doing with Twitter.
Combined with search strings and hashtags, this does make using Tweets to find the content you want very appealing. It’s certainly much quicker than wading through a whole blog, and perhaps even quicker than scanning down a list from that RSS feed too.
If you’re already a frequent Twitter user, you’re probably already set up with a Twitter client such as Seesmic or Tweetdeck, where it’s easy to set up these searches. I have a few set up in Tweetdeck, in a separate column.
Of course there are many other ways to find content, search engines being the obvious one. There’s also real-time search such as Collecta, and services such as Backtype. I use these two.
Having said all this, if I find a really interesting blog, with a high proportion of posts of interest to me, then I will subscribe, and it goes on my small reading list. (I have to keep it small or I’d never read most of it, and that would defeat the point of having a reading list in the first place).
Tagged backtype, blog disloyalty, blogs, collecta, jesse stay, twitter