Some Guy Decides To Save TechTV
http://antig4ttv.com/buytechtv.htm
Some website (antig4ttv) is taking donations to buy TechTV from comcast. When I first read the news blotter I thought, this could be cool…but then after looking at their site, it looks like some kid made it.
They estimate they will need “400 million to 600 million dollars.” Thats a pretty big range! Yeah…I’ll just give this guy some money…I trust him…and I’m sure his PayPal account should be able to handle “400 million to 600 million dollars” going through it too right?
Daisy Duke
Superficial got a hold of some shots from the production of the Dukes of Hazard movie. Jessica Simpson couldn’t have been a better choice. (See Picture 1 and Picture 2)
I’ve never been a fan of the Dukes of Hazard, but I am a fan of hot blonde girls in short shorts…this might be worth the $7.50.
Smallville 2.0
(In case anyone finds this post via Google in the future: No this is not about that crappy show that only bares the slightest resemblance to the actual Superman story.)
Ok, disclaimers out of the way. For those of you that don’t read here regularly I recently tried to get a linux box going in my home network as a test server for my various activities. I ran into trouble from the first step with my old, pretty crappy, machine and eventually I put it aside for the time being because of my troubles. (See: here, here, and here)
Well, Smallville, the name I gave my little crappy linux server, is back. And this time it seems to be a bit more stable (/me knocks on wood). Granted this post might be jumping the gun just a bit as I just installed Red Hat on the little guy last night, but it was purring and installing MUCH better than the first or second time.
This time Smallville got a bit of an upgrade: I found a “new” HD to put in it. Actually I found two that I was willing to give it a shot with and actually setup a software RAID on the system 2 days ago, only to have MORE problems with the drives. So I ripped them out and opened up Norton Disk Doctor and gave all a furious surface scanning. One out of the three survived, guess that give me a winner. I also found some old RAM that I thought might be too big of a stick for the mother board in this old P II 333mhz Dell, but it ran and read all of the memory so I guess I’m just putting to use all kinds of old crap I have laying around!
So far its working well and seems a bit faster (because of that RAM in there no doubt). Hopefully writing this post hasn’t caused any bad voodoo or karma to go to my house and destroy poor Smallville! If it didn’t then I get to spend an exciting Friday night watching movies and working with the config files for Apache and SSH and all kinds of other fun programs that I work with all day at work!
Yikes. I’m really cool. Looks like I need to make some friends that don’t still live or go to school in other places than me.
MSN Spaces Owns Your Thoughts!
Well the new MSN Spaces is already blocking some dirty language, but now someone noticed that their terms of use includes this lovely little paragraph:
For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a “Submission”), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.”
Wow…just make sure you don’t write anything good on MSN Spaces. Of course with them editing it for you, that shouldn’t be too hard to do.
Lycos and Their Huge Balls
Apparently Lycos Europe created a screensaver that works like SETI@HOME but instead of working on data to find ET, this screensaver commits Denial of Service attacks on known SPAMers’ servers. Lycos says they checked and they say its legal, but a big company DoSing servers?
Lycos Europe: Balls…Huge balls.
Link: CNN | Lycos screen saver attacks spammers
Site: Make Love Not SPAM(Site currently down…by Lycos?)
Finally: You Can Watch “America’s Next Top Model” In Uganda!
There is a great article in the New York Times (sign up required, but you can use bugmenot.). It is about a Russian inventor nameed Ken Schaffer. He invented a wireless mic that worked and went on-tour with The Rolling Stones at one point.
Now Schaffer is finishing up his latest creation TV2ME. This box, that runs Windows (but I won’t hold that against him), can take you cable TV signal and pipe it over the internet so that you can view it anywhere you want that has an internet connection. In fact he invented this because he missed his Russian TV shows when he was in the United States.
It works with MPEG 4 compression to get the quality a close to origional TV as possible. MPEG 4 is the compression that is used in many applications today, such as the popular DIVX 
codec.
The big question is: How do the cable companies feel about this product?
“On a personal level, I paid for this cable.” What separates him from other cable subscribers, he said, is simply that “I have a long extension cord.”
Schaffer has built in blocks to make sure you can only view your cable and not share it with others, but I’m sure, once it gets cheap enough for public consumption, someone will hack it and there will be web sites with TV feeds from all over the world. I can’t imagine that the cable companies would think that is kosher. Hopefully, they won’t be any more forward thinking than they were when Tivo came out, and maybe I can get my hands on one of these boxes before the big cable companies squash them.
Sony also has a version of this product in production however the article states that Schaffer’s verision has better quaility, but a higher price.
Link: I Want My Moscow TV
Maybe when this is released people in the US can just watch BBC instead of watching all their shows translated over via TLC!
The Chink In Pop-Up Blocking’s Armor
A will written entry over at decaffeinated.org has broken a work-around in Firefox’s pop-up blocker (and for that matter everyone elses’ pop-up blocking software). A work-around that will probably never be able to chased down and walled-up becuase of the nature of the work-around. What is it? Pop-up that are generated by ActionScript embedded in a flash file.
For those that don’t know, flash is the language that produces those nice little games and movies and such on sites all over the place now. ActionScript is the language that now drives many of those. With ActionScript a programmer can insert code that pop-up (or pops-under) an annoying window. The reason that Firefox or any pop-up blockers can’t stop it is because the program can’t see the ActionScript code. Pop-up blockers work by seeing and supressing the javascript code on the website that creates a pop-up…but becuase ActionScript is side of a Flash file, the blocker can’t see it and thus can’t block it.
…what the hell does flash need to make a pop-up for anyway?