I a while ago I saw how amazing the WordPress plug-in infrastructure was. As a privacy nut, I thought it would be rad if there was an easy way to make every page of a blog be a 404. For humans, they would not notice. For robots, they would think there was nothing there.
Without further adue, I give verison 1.0 of The 404er plugin for WordPress. Use wisely!
Much like the form Thermodynamics post, this video is good one to watch and try to figure out what it is before the camera zooms out:
If you listen carefully you can hear the sweetie say something about “sleeping a bed of quinoa” near the end.
If you’re still wondering what the video is of, here’s the answer.
As a fan of security and strong passwords, I read with interest Lifehacker’s article about how easy it is to hack passwords. In general the article is right on the money and I agree with it’s message. However, I took issue with the article on two points.
The first point they’re talking about how easy it is to either guess or brute force your passwords. Guessing and forcing passwords can be done over the Internet with out needing to compromise your (the victim’s) computer. However, the last step is “simply” to get at the cookies on your local machine:
But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)
– Lifehacker Mar 30, 2010
For me this is crossing the line from informative into fear mongering. Yes, once you have logged into some one’s computer as the user they surf the internet as, it is indeed trivial to read cookies. No, this can not be done over the Internet. No this is not a simple step to make.
The second point (now that I’m not drafting this on my phone and am using a real computer) I see that the original article was published in 2007! Just about all the info in the original article still holds true 3 years later, but I find awkward when the article on Lifehacker has items like this in the article:
EDIT: You might also want to listen to my interview on Connecticut Public Radio about password security.
Which made me think it was a Lifehacker edit in 2010, but was in fact an edit from John Pozadzides in 2007. Speaking of Pozadzides, his blog looks pretty right on and I don’t really have any beef with him (in that totally anonymous Internet beef kind of way), but I mainly take issue with fear mongering, especially when in comes to cookies.
Update: This article seems to be making the rounds on a lot of sites.
Update 2: There’s a great comment from Wangston below.
Though I’m trying to be less and less attached to my material possessions, I do have some that I love having. Two that come to mind are some of the first tools I ever got. They’re nothing fancy, they’re beat up, but I love them and every time I use them I think of all the things I’ve fixed, built and destroyed with them. I also like that the screwdriver is a bit melted from the time I learned about electricity. Pow! There goes the fuse and a chunk of my screwdriver. A few singed eyebrow hairs and I was fine. I think my fave are the dikes.
The sun was setting the other day and I had just used these two guys. I threw them down on the cement and did an ad hock photo shoot. You can see I used the screwdriver as a third leg to get a close up of the jaws of the pliers.
I need to do a better job of not being mr-jerky-cam, but my gaffers were on strike that day, so I had to do it all myself.
After seeing a post over on Engadget about the new Jolicloud, I decided to check it out. It quickly became apparent that it is just Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) with a different skin and a nice Jolicloud app. Looking at some forum posts and the comments on the above Engadget link, my opinion isn’t too novel or new. What is dissapointkng is that Engadget fronts like this is something more amazing than UNR’s latest release, which I run and like.
Me? I’m waiting for Meego 1.1 which is expected to drop in October.
Recently a reader inquired about how to set up Meego to sync with gmail mail, calendar and contacts based off me mentioning I got it working. I use Google apps for mail hosting at plip.com, so this applies to both gmail and Google Apps (domains that use gmail for their email server). Settings are based off IMAP settings for Thunderbird.
Here’s the steps I took for a clean install of Meego (see matching screenshots below too):
As I’ve mentioned time and time again, you should keep your WordPress instance up to date. Go upgrade today! I just did and it worked with out a catch. Ever since 2.7 when they released autoupgrade with SFTP support, It’s much more simple to keep things current. Don’t open up FTP to your server (no passwords in the clear!), but do open SFTP and make your life much easier.
My in-laws have an awesome back yard and against their above ground pool I found a mom and her baby spiders hanging out in their web. After finding an improv light source of an upside-down steel dog bowl for a mirror and a watering can as the mirror tripod, I had an impromptu photo shoot. Only four or five came out OK. I aspired to make them as good as Hans’, but no luck. Where’s my DSLR and macro lense?!
I know, I know you have been waiting to hear how it is going with new OS on the netbook. Well my dear readers, I have some good news and some bad news.
First the bad news. The bad news is that Meego really felt snappier and more polished. Though there’s a lot of overlap in software like Evolution is standard on both, something about the simplicity of Meego won out. Both come with a simple window manager and both can be easily extended with new apps, but Meego was more of what I wanted and less of what I didn’t. Example: auto hide task bar on Meego is nice because screen real estate is so precious. This I want. Ubuntu entire open office suite, this I don’t want. Also, Meego loads apps faster (eg Chrome) and boots waaaay faster.
Now the good news: the sleep problem is fixed and AIM totally works. The sleep fix was very satisfying, just follow the included script on superuser totally worked. Snap the lid shut and it goes right to sleep. Click the power button and it springs back to life in under a second. In general Ubuntu is quite nice.
I wonder how EasyPeasy is doing these days?