Categories
gadget geek rant tips

ip-cam considerations

Security Camera SystemsIP cams are great. They keep an infrared eye on your stuff while you’re not around and find out what keeps pooping on your driveway (a cat it turns out). But sometimes things can get a little out of hand.

So here’s a list of things that will trigger the IP cam motion detection you didn’t think of:

  • Cats parading on your driveway like they own the place.
  • Spiders shaking their arachnid booty in front of the camera while doing their webbing thing.
  • Spider webs moving in the wind, up close. All f-ing night.
  • The occasional bird.
  • The occasional insect in mid-flight. Sometimes even a mot at night caught in the infrared beams.
  • Trees and bushes shaking their leaves and branches cause it’s windy as hell.
  • Shadows of trees and bushes shaking their leaves and breanches because it’s windy as hell and sunny too.
  • Rain showers. Possibly in combination with freaky winds blowing it horizontally in places you didn’t think rain could get at.
  • The sun playing peekaboo with some clouds, causing abrupt changes in light levels.
  • Car headlights lighting up random bushes, walls and other stuff as they pass by your house.
  • Reflections of cats in the cars shiny exterior (what a great excuse for not washing your car).
  • Reflections of moving clouds in a puddle on the concrete at the right lighting conditions.

So watch out where and how you send those automated alert emails from the camera. GMail for example doesn’t like it when you send hundreds of emails a day using one account. They find it rather spammy. When this happens, they can block you from sending any more messages that day. This really blows if you have an urgent mail to send. Other mail providers have similar rules.
Uploading the images to a remote FTP server is another option. But make sure you have plenty of space there, and download those images regularly if you don’t want to run out of space.

Photo by Armend Krasniqi, cc-licensed.

Categories
geek google internet privacy rant software

bursting out of the search bubble, or not

Space Helmet Bubble!

The search bubble. That thing where Google puts you in so your results are tailored to your preferences and habits. It’s kinda creepy and cool at the same time isn’t it? One of DuckDuckGo‘s main features is that they don’t put you in a bubble. So they don’t track your past queries, they don’t spy on your social media accounts to figure out what you read, like or retweet and they don’t tailor your results.

This video shows pretty nicely what that Google bubble looks like btw.

Scary isn’t it? The problem is however… it works so damn good too.

I know my results are customized, but when I look for .NET related stuff (which I do all the time at work for example) whatever I’m looking for is usually in the top 3. I know it’s biased, but heck, it works like a charm.
Outside of the bubble, I get more stuff I don’t want or isn’t what I’m looking for.

So it all depends on what you want doesn’t it? But it is a good thing to know that the bubble is there and that it learns from your queries. It’s also good to know that you can escape the bubble if you want to. And just logging out of your Google account probably isn’t good enough.

Photo by Rachel Titiriga, cc-licensed.

Categories
geek google rant software

it ain't cool if you just dump your files

One thing that continues to bug me about some software is that by trying to be user-friendly and idiot-proof, assume they can just make choices for you. Like where to install the software and where to store the files or databases created by it.

The installation folder for example is something I like to choose myself. I also do not like it when everything is just stored by default under the “Documents and Settings” folder. It might be common policy, but some databases or files just grow to damn big to be stored right there.

TomTom backups for example. The damn things go in your Documents folder FFS. Or the Picasa picture database. Too damn big I tell ya! It’s bad enough already that Windows keeps downloading service packs and Internet Explorer updates and stores them by default somewhere on the system drive. But if everyone starts stuffing it’s data on the classic C-drive where your temp-folder and your profile folders are also located you’ll be running out of disk space in no time.

So please think of the poor people out and their limited hard-drives and put one of those nifty questions in there that allows you to select a folder where you want them to put your stuff. You know what? You can even suggest a default location if you don’t want to bother the user with making choices. How awesome is that? I think I’ve even seen that a few before actually.

Photo by scottog, cc-licensed

Categories
belgium internet rant telenet

the belgian limitless internet charade continues

So Belgacom announced to be the first to start offering a limitless, flat rate internet account. Yay! Turns out it’s also the most expensive format they have. Yay? Telenet of course soon had to follow with it’s own limitless formula, which also turns out to be the most expensive on they have as well.  Euhm. Ok, at least they are also boosting the cheaper formats which means that everyone will be enjoying a more luxurious bandwidth soon.

Well, at least it’s getting a bit better now and perhaps next year we’ll be seeing the cheaper accounts being sold at flat rates as well and the two duopolists will start competing each other on prices. Just maybe.

Funny they both came out with the same idea so close together. With fully prepared add campaigns and all. I wonder how long they had those lying on the shelves already.

Picture by Rob Sheridan, cc-licensed.

Categories
belgium politics rant

belgium is going digital tax crazy

Belgian politicians are going bonkers over the digital world the last month it seems. First Mr. Q decides to start taxing all digital carriers because hey, you might be using them to store copyrighted material. You know, the same tax they have for VHS and audio tapes. The difference just is that those tapes were actually used to store as good as nothing but copyrighted material. But a USB stick or external HD is a completely different deal. Lot’s of non-copyrighted material on there, but we’re still paying for it…

Now there’s a proposed bill from the ecological parties to start taxing downloads to cope with illegal downloads on the net. Yep, we’re all criminals again. In fact they are talking about legalising illegal downloads. Funny. I wonder how Hollywood is going to react to that. For a small fee we’re allowed to rip any movie? Nice. Let’s set up Piratebay.be! The worst idea in the bill is that they want to avoid the ISPs from simply charging this tax to the consumer by blocking raises on the monthly subscription fee on our broadband internet connection. Great, so by blocking already way too expensive internet fees you’re going to avoid us from paying too much? Euhm. We already are paying twice what they pay in Holland, so I doubt ISPs will give a fuck.

What’s next? A blogging tax? We need a damn Pirate party I tell ya. Arrrr!

Photo by Jeremy Brooks, cc-licensed