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November 28, 2005
Worst Email Address ever
This is one of the nice telescopes you find at Alki Beach. If you notice the enlarged section below, you see that it contains one of the worst email-addresses I've ever seen: www.POVtelescopes@comcast.net.
It violates several good practices:
- Don't put www. in front of an email-address, or people will try to put it into their browser.
- Don't capitalize any letters - otherwise people think usernames are case-sensitive.
- If you are a business, get a domain.
It fits into the picture that there is not a single hit with google, when you search for POVtelescopes...
OK, actually, now there is one ;)
Posted by marco at 4:22 PM | Comments (0)
Quake2 for Java = Jake2
This is cool - you can now play Quake2 on any PC that has JRE 1.4 installed.
On my Windows XP Laptop I get about 37 FPS on timedemo 1, which is almost three times as fast, as I was able to play Quake2, when it first came out.
However, on my Linux machine, that is not graphic-accellerated, I takes about about 2.5 SPF ;)
Posted by marco at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2005
Aggressive
Let it all out! With BUBBLEWRAP
Do try the Manic Mode ;)
Posted by marco at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2005
Pandora opens her music box
Have you tried Pandora, yet? You'll tell them one or more of your favourite artists or songs and they'll play music with similar features. This is not only a good way of having a radiostation that plays the music you like, but it also helps you discover new artists and songs.
Initially this was supposed to be a payed service, but now thay moved into an ad-supported model - you can still pay to get rid of the ads. Check it out!
Posted by marco at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2005
Analytics - Get on the couch with Google
Google Analytics is yet another cool tool from Google.
Sure you can get a free counter and Visitor Tracker from a lot of companies for free, but the ones that offer what Google is giving you are usually payed!
Click image for screenshot
Special Greetings go out to my one visitor from Kampong Tebing Terjun, Singapore! :)
Posted by marco at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2005
Mechanical Turk: Earn money for some clicking
This is so cool: There were some projects that let you donate your idle computing power to search for aliens or compute proteins, like Google Compute.
Then there are programs where you get payed for surfing, or basically looking at advertisements. But now Amazon invented something totally new:
The Amazon Mechanical Turk
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The idea of the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is to give developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.
So now, everybody that has a computer and is somewhat bored, can earn a couple of bucks ;) Or if you work on it during your regular day job, you even get payed twice! *just kidding*
Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos has already completed 34 of the HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that pay $0.03, so the Multi-billionaire has earned over $1 already! ;)
Posted by marco at 6:27 PM | Comments (0)
November 2, 2005
Comment Spam
Spam in my inbox is bad enough, although my filter is pretty good now and I hardly have to look at it anymore. But what I really hate is Comment Spam, because there is still a lot of work involved in removing it. I do have a filter and most comments end up at least in moderated, but still it's annoying.
But today a new series of comments caught my attention: They all feature a social component, because at least the first two sentences says, what every Blogger likes to hear:
- You have a very talented and skilled writting. I had a great time reading your comments. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail:
- Reading your content just made my day. Keep the good work. although I am bringing a change of underwear:
- brilliant site! happy to be here. Be at war with your vices:
- Cool stuff. Keep up the good work. that get all the publicity:
- Excellent! I enjoyed reading your material. substances that cure you:
- Very interesting! I liked it! It's the other lousy two percent:
But the most interesting thing about those comments was, that the links they refer to appear to be websites that wouldn't spam (because they don't sell anything), like quotationspage.com. Speculation: It think they are training a new comment spam script and monitor the google ranking of some randomly pciked pages. Soon they will use that for a brought spamming of Blogs, Guestbooks and Wikis. *Shudder*
The IP used was telweb.t-online.de and I found a bunch of SpamWikiEntries and other blog and guestbook spam, when I googled for that hostname. So if you can, put that hostname on your blacklist!
Posted by marco at 2:31 PM | Comments (1)
Marketing Promises not kept: 1 month free Netflix
In an email to it's current and former subscribers Netflixed announced it's reaction to the lawsuit " Chavez v. Netflix, Inc.":
Allegedly "Netflix failed to provide 'unlimited' DVD rentals and 'one day delivery' as promised in its marketing materials".
Current members get a months worth of charges back and former members get a month for free. See www.netflixsettlement.com.
Posted by marco at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)