Category: geek

Categories
geek google tips

gmail rawks

It does, really. I mean yeah, it’s yet another web-mail thing, but seriously, take a look at it… if you’ve gotten an invite by now of course, otherwise there’s no chance of getting in any more. Plenty of invites around though, so if you Google around a bit, I’m sure you’ll find someone who’s willing to send you one (try this).
Anyway, why does it rock? Cause you get 1GB of space for one, but that’s not all. There are others that do the same thing, no biggy, but the GMail has some nifty features that make a geek like me feel all warm and fussy inside.

First they order your emails in “conversations”. Now WTF is that you ask, well, it’s simple. It’s like usenet newsreaders that group relevant posts together in a single thread, so does GMail with your emails. And it does it pretty good as well.
So whenever you receive some reply to a mailing list thread of a few days ago, you see that conversation listed in your inbox, which allows you to easily see what other people where babbling about in the very same thread. Sweet innit.

Also in GMail you don’t use folders for instance to catalogue/order your received emails. Folders are out, pass�, you use tags instead. You can tag any conversation with more than one tag. This can be handy if, for instance, you let GMail automatically add a tag to each email that comes from your, lets say, favourite gabber.org mailing list.
You’ll get a “gabberlist” link on the left of your inbox, which will work just like a folder, grouping all the labelled conversations together.
But -and here comes the neat part- you can also manually apply a second label “mixes” to all emails that contain links to mp3 DJ sets, which gives you another folder-like link, which will contain all DJ mixes for future reference, from various mailing lists (cause you’re not only listening to hardcore now are you).

Yes I know, it rawks, and that not all. The GUI is like… whow… fast.
A lot of DHTML and background refreshes using a hidden frame are done to speed things up for you, and make things blindingly fast most of the time. The pages get refreshed now and then of course, its still web based, but it’s a hell of a lot faster than Hotmail or Yahoo or any other web based email thingy I’ve used in the past.
Check out that spell checker for example, fast & easy. I actually used it to check this post for spelling mistakes… looks like I have a problem with the word received btw.

So personally, I think this GMail thing is gonna blow the competition out of the water… and it’s currently only in beta! Ha! Eat that Microsoft.
Oh yeah, and I don’t care about those ads no, cause they are so unnoticeable it took me a week to find out they where actually there… but that might be just me.

Categories
copyleft creativecommons geek

creative commons

Even though I ran into the Creative Commons licenses before (at Electrobel for instance) I never really thought of it to use it for a blog license until I ran into Neil Turners blog after some Google search.

Not a bad idea actually, even if it’s just because it looks kinda cool to have a license entry. Cool for a geek that is.

Categories
firefox geek internet software tips

mozilla firefox v1.0PR released

Mozilla Firefox has released it’s milestone v1.0 browser.
Sweetness!

Some really nice features have been added to this version, such as live bookmarking of RSS feeds, the extended search options, and a slick upgrade procedure provided by the setup program, and that built in popup blocker I couldn’t live without anymore.

If you haven’t switched browsers yet, maybe it’s time you give this one a shot.
It’s a lot more secure than IE, and it’s l33t as fuck as well :)
It runs smoothly next to IE, so if you don’t like it (which I doubt) you can uninstall it without a problem afterwards.

Categories
copyright dnb geek music rant

clownstep and John B on file sharing

I ran into this John B interview by accident while checking what kind of fun stuff could be found on Google when looking up the word “Clownstep”.
Now since the guy made some really sweet tracks in the past, and he has a new album out, I thought I’d make the effort and find out what he had to say.

It’s mostly the same stuff you read in most of those kind of articles, but his opinion on p2p networks seems a bit stupid to me.

Here’s what he has to say:

Well, if people have bought my music and want to play it out, I don’t mind what they do with it. If I found somebody who has downloaded my music illegally, that is where I have a major issue with it. I understand people are going to download stuff and there’s not a lot you can do about it, apart from flooding the file sharing networks with fake versions of your tracks, which is what I’ve been doing aggressively. I’m going to do whatever I can. I’ll put viruses in them, or just make a track identically titled to what’s out there and make it 10 seconds of the track and the rest just noise, or, “Ha ha! Buy it here, you bastards!”

Ok, well, let’s see, so you don’t mind what people do who have actually bought your music, but you are thinking about infecting mp3’s with viruses anyway…
Hmmmm, how will you tell the difference between someone who is downloading the infected tunes and has bought the album, and those who haven’t?

Luckily for John B there is no way to infect mp3’s with a virus, otherwise he could get himself in some serious trouble, and frankly, I think that trying to get bad copies out there is more hassle than it’s worth since in the long run people are going to keep getting that tune until they get a good copy. And when they do they will share that one as well (unless they’re lame leechers) which will result in more sources for the good version than the bad ones, which will automatically make people download the good version instead of the bad one(s).

Funny artist still have a problem with seeing p2p downloads as a form of free mouth-to-mouth promotion. Maybe he doesn’t need this kind of promotion any more being one of the big names in the business, but I can tell you there are a lot of drum’n’bass artists I might have never bought anything from if I hadn’t learned about them by downloading some tracks off file sharing networks.
A lot of people will simply not buy the stuff they download, that’s true, but the question is, where they going to buy it if they wouldn’t be able to download it?
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that every single download is a sale lost.

Oh, I also noticed this clownstep merchandise, in John B’s blog, which is kinda funny.

Categories
geek internet privacy tips

a bit of privacy

Registering for forums and other sites is something that is required at most of em by now. It’s a pitty because sometimes you just want to check something, or download something from one of those sites without having to go through yet another registration form, because you simply don’t intend to spend a lot of time there in the first place.
Besides, spreading your e-mail address all over the place is just a certain way to get more spam, so that’s just one more reason not to get it into another database.

While a lot of times I just refuse to register, there might be a solution to use the sites features anyway, and stay somewhat anonymous.
Check out BugMeNot, a site that provides a way to “share” user accounts for registration requiring sites. Currently they are up to 19.606 sites, which ain’t bad, but if one ain’t in there yet, you’re free to add it yourself.

There’s even a Firefox extention for it, which makes checking for a usable account so much easier.

Also interesting are ways to keep spam out of your inbox by using free services like Mailinator or SpamMotel

With Mailinator you can “create” any e-mail address on the fly, and check it later on to see if anything arived.
Spammotel works as a forwarder where you can create an unlimited (well, probably not, but I bet its plenty) number of randomly generated e-mail addresses linked to your real address. If spam starts arriving from a certain site, you’ll be able to identify it uniquely, and block it if wanted.

Sweeeeeeet!