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Archive for the 'Net' CategoryYou can now view PDFs in Google Docs without the need for any desktop application other than a web browser. And it works and its fast. I think this is truly awesome and is just a taste of what is to come. Computers of the future will simply be “Internet Thin Clients” and everything from apps to files will be accessed online. With all our data in the “cloud”, this could see the death of personal storage for smallish files, so I have to ask… Would you trust “the Internet” with all your data? I found a workaround on Bugzilla for the problem with Firefox 3 on Mac where the Mac would not sleep after idle time if Firefox was running. You need to go into about:config and set “places.frecency.updateIdleTime” to 0. I tested this on FF 3.0.4 OS X 10.5.5 and it works. Hoo-frickin-ray! This was really annoying as I didn’t like leaving my Mac running all the time and like to leave Firefox open with like a zillion tabs open. I usually have no desire to read YouTube comments whatsoever, but recently realised this means I have been oblivious to those on my own uploads. Today, out of curiosity, I sorted them by “most discussed” and was genuinely astounded to find a flame war to the tune of 157 comments has been raging on Dawkins’ interview with Deepak Chopra. So of course I couldn’t help myself but to read a few. And this very quickly snowballed into me skimming through the whole lot. Now, I know there is a stigma out there about YouTube comments, but reading them all was actually pretty interesting. No, really. Stay with me here… Interesting in the “I am observing the humans demonstrate their primal instinct of fear” kind of way. Quite poignantly, the comments reflect what we see in the video itself: while discussions questioning people’s beliefs have the potential to be rigorous intellectual debate, they inevitably degrade into insults and defensive remarks. This observation is what prompted me to upload the clip in the first place. The behaviour of irrationally defending one’s beliefs is entirely understandable as an instinctive response to protect the safeguards one has erected to protect against fear, but this doesn’t make it justified. We suppress our instincts on a daily basis, so should have the ability to transcend them for the purposes of objective analysis. Some of my favourite comments: “Science may be a little ‘arrogant’ but time will prove that science has every right to be arrogant.” “Dawkins isn’t a fundamentalist because he knows what it would take to change his mind.” “Science will be the end of humanity if anything will be” “Why should we ‘atheists’ find evidence of a god? We are not the ones making the claim that there is a god.” “Their brains are so closed, it’s unbelievable. Eat Dawkins’ shit.” “I would liken Dawkins to a dung beetle not an ant.” One final point worth considering. Chopra’s exploits and abuse of scientific terms aside, aren’t his spiritual ideals simply reflecting what humans have been doing throughout all of history? Back when our scientific knowledge was much more limited, we developed supernatural or spiritual explanations for phenomena we couldn’t adequately explain through science. I’m starting to think this is not as simplistic as “Chopra is a nutjob and science is infallible.” …Nah, I still think he’s a nutjob. OK so forgive this post for braggyness, but I can’t help myself. That photo I took of a kitteh a couple of Christmases ago was recently on a site called The Daily Kitten. And you know what that means… I have to make it into a really funny LOLcat and get it on ICHC. How are my chances? You can help out by posting captions suggestions in the comments. Or LOLify it yourself and send in. Yay for LOLcats. And yes, in case you were wondering, I am still not over them. So there. Some memorable quotes from an article in The Age on Australians downloading TV Shows and Movies. It’s definitely worth a read. “Missing one episode of West Wing, thanks to constant schedule changes, was enough to set Mark and Kim down the road to online piracy.” “I’ve walked into a video shop twice in the last five years and, while I was in there, I made a list on my BlackBerry of things I was going to download.” “I know people who don’t go out places if their favourite show is on that night,” says Amber. “They don’t have any other access to it so they will seriously stop their life to watch this show.” “The head of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft now publicly admits the group has no interest in prosecuting file- sharers.” Oh there’s too many! Just read the whole thing! Interestingly, sections of this article appear to contradict another article, previously mentioned here on Frost Nova. I bought something off eBay and it was all good and arrived fine and dandy. Today I went to leave feedback and saw this: “eBay Note: This user is no longer registered on eBay.” I had never seen that before and it seemed weird to me that someone with 7413 feedback and 99% positive at that would just disappear overnight… Probably not that interesting but I wonder what happened. In my opinion, one essential feature of a Bittorrent client is the ability to add multiple custom trackers to torrents. This is not only useful in getting more peers, which in most cases results in faster downloads. It also adds a level of redundancy, so should one tracker go down, the transfer keeps going. I just noticed today that the Mac Bittorrent client Transmission now has this feature. Apparently it’s been there since v1.30 (I’m using v1.33). Tracker entry could be streamlined a bit though; at the moment, you need to add trackers one at a time. In uTorrent you can quickly paste several in one go. What would be really nice would be a global custom tracker list that was added to every torrent loaded into the program.
I noticed an unfamiliar icon in my Dashboard weather widget just now. Hovering over the icon produced no tooltip, so I went to the AccuWeather website to investigate. This is what I found.
Thanks for that prediction. Thunderstorms? *pokes head outside* Nope, no sign of them. *checks radar* Nope, not likely given the only rain is some light patches around Charlton and Bendigo. Excuse me while I neglect to buy a pair of snow shoes and also neglect to trade in my Corolla for some Huskies and a sled……… |
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