Category: Cyberculture

Only in teh intarwebs!

Hashed

Db02 Comments

I have finally secured my online ID as far as I can do so while also making my passwords a bit easier to remember. It always bugged me that I had to either use the same password for all the sites or write down all my passwords so that I don’t forget. In the end I settled for a path in the middle where non important sites (like forums and social networking ones) where using the same old classic password and the important site (gmail, wordpress etc) has a customized password – and I still ended up forgetting a lot of them all the time. Even then I was not happy because I couldn’t realistically change my passwords at set intervals as I would have wanted to (well, I could but it would take me all day) and in order not to forget them easily I had to use a custom kind of mix that I could remember.

Fortunately, as I was looking around today for something to make the save dialog of [tag]Firefox[/tag] a bit better (I has unsuccessful btw) I stumbled onto this [tag]extension[/tag]. Now I can create strong passwords for evey site without having to bother remembering anything else other than the master key. Not only that but I can easily update a [tag]password[/tag] just by “bumping” the site and I can update all my passwords just by changing the master key. I’ll still have to go to each site and update the password; but it’s still easier than thinking of a new one that I can memorize while still keeping it hard to guess.

If I was feeling extra paranoid, I could even stop firefox from memorizing my passwords and it would still not be very difficult for me to type the password each time.

Oh yes, I love my firefox extensions 🙂

Syyyyync

Db07 Comments

Just started syncing my music collection with Mp3Tunes. I discovered the thing through the Amarok blog (which incidentally has a really nice article about it) and the service seems promising, not to mention [tag]useful[/tag], especially for the backup aspects of it. I was always scared that my HDD would unexpectedly crash before I had a chance to DVD-backup my current version of my collection and this presents me an excellent option.

I guess now that I have a website, I could just as easily upload everything there through ftp, but it always seemed more trouble than it was worth. With this service however which provides unlimited storage I get to back it up and also get some extra perks for it.

It’s not that I need an online streaming option since Last.fm is perfectly capable of providing me with a radio station that I’m certain to like, but it’s still nice to have the option to listen to a specific song I crave.

The funny thing is that as far as I can see, this is perfectly legal. I am not distributing my music but rather storing it for personal use. The fact that “someone” could share his password with a friend who could then easily download anything he wanted from the collection does not make any difference 😉

One could easily take the next step and think about creating a “group account”, with a shared password among several friends who could then listen to songs from a much larger collection. This group could easily pool their money to buy a premium account at a very low cost and get all the benefits at a fraction of the cost.

What also perplexes me is the way these people suppose to make money out of this. They provide unlimited space for millions of people who will use it to upload Gigabytes over gigabytes of music. Then they are going to use it to listen to said music which should create enormous bandwidth needs. I know that storage is quite cheaper nowadays but storage, plus backup is not and unless they’ve figured out the perfect way to compress music then I don’t see how they can make money by giving premium users only small bonuses like unrestricted album covers and large file size and I don’t think that the music store is so attractive either.
The whole thing smells of .com bubble.

For the paranoid amongst us, you could even think that this is an elaborate scam by the RIAA to, in effect, voluntarily implicate ourselves with our collections.

In any case, I have now been added to the unlimited storage. If any of my friends is interested in the service and wants to get an immediate unlimited storage, I have three promo codes left that I can give you to get priority.

Right now, after 2.5 hours of up-syncing, I am still at 2% of progress. To finish it would take 4 non-stop full 24-hour days of syncing which I plan to do 🙂

All that needs to be done after that is to have it record my music to last.fm and/or be playable through Amarok itself (which should take care of the former as well, for LXers at least)

Damnit, What now?

Db0

What the hell just happened to my gallery is what I want to know. One day everything is working fine and now I check it out and the layout is completely b0rked!

…

Scratch that, everything seems to be back to normal now. As a troubleshooting step, I renamed my wpg2header.php file to a _bak and copied the header.php into the same name. Format was closer to the original but still bad.

I then restored the _bak file to it’s original name and it now works…

WTF?!

Oh well…

I still need to fix the stylesheet for the gallery and add the footer in some way however.

Need. More. Free. Time!

ACP

Db0

After some discussion, the Antichristian Phenomenon has gone live. I decided to just dive in and make a start and see how things go after that. Why not? After all, it won’t cost me anything other than time since I’m not using even close to my limits on my hosting plan right now.

Right now the main site is based on WordPress (oh how I love free software) and there is room for expansion into anything else (like gallery, wiki or whatever).
I’ve installed some few basic plugins but unfortunatey the theme I picked does not support widgets currently, which is unfortunate since they have recently been put as a base feature list in the new wordpress 2.2.

Maybe I’ll change theme if it isn’t updated or I may just do without widgets as I’ve done until now. The group will decide anyway.

Who knows, maybe this will turn into something interesting in the long run.

Βοηθώντας το Blog.me

Db0

Οργανώνεται συλλογή υπογραφών για την βοήθεια υπεράσπισης του Αντώνη Τσιπρόπουλου. Το πιο ενδιαφέρον είναι οτι το τελικό σύνολο των θα παρουσιαστεί στο δικαστήριο σαν πειστήριο οτι οι “εμπειρογνώμονες” των ιστολογίων και του internet διαφωνουν με την κλήτευση.

Μέχρι τώρα που το γράφω αυτό έχουν υπογράψει μόνο 16 άτομα.

Αίντε!

Meebo

Db0

Χάρiς στο Into.the.Void, ανακάλυψα σήμερα το meebo το οποίο είναι ακριβώς ότι χρειάζομαι για να συνδεθώ απο την ECB στα ΙΜ clients μου. Δυστυχώς το gaim που προσπάθησα να χρησιμοποιήσω μπλοκάρεται απο το εταιρικό firewall και δεν έχω όρεξη να προσπαθω να βρώ τρόπο να το κάνω να δουλέψει.

Το ωραίο με το meebo είναι οτι γίνεται embed μέσα στην σελίδα και δημιουργεί το προσωπικό μου chatbox απο το οποίο μπορεί να επικοινωνήσει με IM όποιος θέλει, ανεξάρτητα με το IM service που χρησιμοποιεί ή με το που βρίσκομαι εγώ. Αρκεί να είμαι online στο meebo.

Οπότε, αγαπητοι/ες φίλοι, (ποιοί; που;) μπορείτε να επικοινωνείτε ακόμα πιο εύκολα μαζί μου τώρα. Απλά κοιτάξτε στο sidebar στα δεξιά, κάτω απο το “Other stuff”.