June 27th, 2009
Posted in Web · Tags: music
Grooveshark is another online music site, however I isn’t like all the other radio sites online. Let’s say you find a band you are interested in from Pandora or Last.fm. Pandora won’t let you just listen to one full song from a band in particular, only short clips. Last.fm will let you listen to whatever song you want, but you have to do a lot of clicking to listen to a bunch of them. Even if you add them to a playlist and going through the process of their “pseudo-popups”, you still can’t just tell Last.fm to play each song from the playlist (or at least I was unable to figure out how). This is where Grooveshark comes in. Grooveshark will let you listen to as many songs from a particular band that you want and you can even do it based on one of their albums. This is really great for exploring a band that may have peaked your interest.
However, it is not without faults. The biggest problem right now is that there are duplicate music files, because many songs are spelled differently or differ by a few seconds. It’s really annoying to try to clean up your queue of the duplicates, because you end up losing how far foward or back you are in the navigation. The other issue is that their music library isn’t as in depth as Pandora and definitely not as huge as Last.fm’s. I’ve also noticed that the “Recent songs listened to” RSS feed you get will only pull songs if they fit a certain time period, so if you go without using Grooveshark for awhile that feed will be empty, rather than remembering what you last listened to.
June 14th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized
Is it me or are these the best ballpoint pens ever made?
Paper Mate ballpoint pens have been pretty much what I’ve used since late highschool. Unlike Bic pens they don’t dry out or leak. They also work until they are out of ink, which I can’t say for Bic pens either. Plus they are very inexpensive. Perhaps it’s because Paper Mate is in mostly just the pen, pencil and eraser business, whereas Bic makes pens, shaving blades and lighters; thus, Bic is used to making stuff that is just disposable and only gets a few uses. Whereas, Paper Mate knows how to make a pen that lasts. The only change they’ve made to this model of pen is the coloring. Instead of being white with the cap and tip colored the same as the ink, the full plastic casing is now the color of the ink.
April 27th, 2009
Posted in Software, Web · Tags: firefox
Everyone else might be writing articles about the top 10 or 50 Firefox extensions you must have, but this is about uninstalling some extensions so your Firefox can run a little faster and use less memory.
Do you really need the Delicious extension installed on every browser you use, or can you get by with the Delicious bookmarklets? Chances are the computer you use at home and work (and possibly any other installations or virtual machines) have many of the same extensions, but you probably only need the Delicious extension on your main machine. You really should use the bookmarklets if you have Firefox set to clear “Offline Website Data” when Firefox is closed, because that will wipe out any data it synced from Delicious.
Use the program Faststone Capture instead of the Colorzilla or Fireshot extensions. Faststone Capture will let you grab color from not only your browser but anywhere on your computer. It will also take screenshots from anywhere on your computer, including your browser and it will scroll down to grab the full page. It also has a magnifier tool you can use also. However, the last freeware version is 5.3.
Use the Lipsumlet bookmarket rather than Dummy Lipsum, it doesn’t have as many options, but gets the job done.
There are bookmarklets to send the URL you are on to other browsers, so you can eliminate the IE View or IE View Lite as well as OperaView, Safari View Win (or for OS X), Chrome View or Browser View Plus extensions.
Also, its a good idea to get to know the Web Developer extension a lot more. I’ve seen so many extensions out there that do 1 simple thing such as showing a ruler.
There are plenty of great bookmarklets out there that you can execute from your toolbar very easily and customize the placement as well. The only thing I miss is not being able to make a cool icon for bookmarklets very easily, although I know there is an extension to do it. 
April 27th, 2009
Posted in Web · Tags: fraud, scam
I was wanting to get rid of some old collectibles I no longer needed and I came across the Works of Life Charity site, I was suspicious so I haven’t bothered to donate. I tried to call and got some voice recording and didn’t get a response. I figured I’d try to see what I could find and I came across a Works Of Life, With Causes – PossibleScam?? blog. The site lists his name and his lengthy criminal record however I wasn’t able to figure out how he got a hold of the information. Perhaps he donated to them or actually talked to them on the phone after leaving his phone number on the answering machine.
The sites in question are:
Works of Life Charity
Online Car Donation
Real Estate with Causes
Collectibles with Causes
Boats with Causes
Computers with Causes
Timeshare Donations
All of the web sites use the same phone number and are set with domain privacy registration. None of them offer anything more than that phone number and a contact form. None of them link to a specific church or organization, just to each other. The sites seem to be heavily optimized with SEO (Search Engine Optimization – so they rank high in search engines for certain keyword searches), while that is normal for web sites to do, the fact they repeat the links so often on every page multiple times to the point of trying to manipulate their ranking on Google and other search engines. The Works of Life Charity shows “© Copyright 1999-2009″, however it was registered in 2006 along with Collectibles with Causes.
I definately don’t plan to donate because the best thing to do if you are unsure of a scam is not to bother with it. However, I wanted to share this information so others don’t donate to something very suspicious.
April 24th, 2009
Posted in Web
This won’t be just a reblog of news out there, because I plan to cover all the tidbits of how people used GeoCities. But incase you haven’t heard, the big leader in free web site hosting GeoCities will be closing down later this year. Yahoo still plans to offer web hosting though.
GeoCities logos over the years
When the web was still in its infancy people wanted to be on it. I’m not sure why, but they did. I’ll admit I was one of them, but I didn’t make a site about myself. Many people at the time had no clue how to setup a real web site, but that is where the free web hosts came into play. There was nothing like finding the coolest animated gifs, grabbing that 50×50 pixel plasma-blob tile as your background image and setting up your guestbook. If you were really a pro you had a sweet MIDI playing in the background. There was plenty of competition in those days from sites like Angelfire, Tripod, FortuneCity, Xoom and others, but the king of them all was GeoCities.
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