The IT Archives
July 26, 2007
No-WWW
Long-overdue! Get rid of the www.
double-you-double-you-double-you is just a waste of money, brains and time (wombat)
marcofrom.com is at Class-B compliance level!
Posted by marco at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
Thanks Comcast
Wow! After replacing our DVR about 6 times (and thus taking away all the programming and stored shows), forgetting to move the modem to the new account (outage), forgetting to move automated bill paying to the new account (late fee( and having to replace my "couple of years old" (according to the Comcast guy) cable modem (frequent reboots), I finally got some good news today:
Comcast raised the download speed to 12Mbps for free - It used to be 6Mbps. Which you hardly ever got close to anyway ;)
They could have cut my down speed in half, for all I care, if they had instead increase my up speed! Anyway, it looks pretty darn nice on the 
Posted by marco at 9:44 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2006
DVD to iPod conversion
For Windows: I just went through this and if you plan on ripping more then 1 DVD I think it's worth to spent the 30$. I recomment the ImToo product: DVD to iPod Ripper Or another good Product is Nero Recode, which comes as part of excellent Nero Burning ROM package. The commercial products can rip directly to ipod, whereas the free solution goes to Avi (XVid) first and needs more fiddling. If you wanna go free, follow the Videora conversion guide.
For Mac:
I didn't try it on the Mac myself, Handbrake is just the Software that always comes up in that context.... here is a guide for that.
Posted by marco at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2006
Installing Captchas for MovableType: SCode
What a pitsa. I wanted to install Captchas for my MT Blog, because of the huge amount of comment spam, I recieve.
Captchas are these annoying pictures you need to decipher:
So I installed SCode, but I got a strange error message during building my site, after I put in the code into the templates:
Undefined subroutine &SCode::scode_tmp
Which turned out to be due to missing GD.pm. So I went and tried to install GD from the source, but that failed because the GD headers were missing.
What helped in the end on Mr. U's Debian Server was this:
apt-get install libgd-dev apt-get install libgd-graph-perl
And another pitfall: SCode also fails, if you don't have a slash at the end of your temp-directory, like /home/marco/tmp/
That's the problem with free software, you can't really complain about that kind of stuff ;)
Update:
Captcha discussion on Slashdot
The maintainer of SCode, Arvind Satyanarayan, commented on this entry and promised fixes and improvements in summer! Jay for free Software! ;)
Posted by marco at 10:45 AM | Comments (2)
April 9, 2006
Nato Speller
For the life of me, I can't remember all those phonetic alphabet words, when I need them on the phone to spell something over a bad line (or because people don't understand my accent).
ALPHA, BRAVO, CHARLIE, DELTA, ECHO, FOXTROT, GOLF, HOTEL, INDIA, JULIET, KILO, LIMA, MIKE, NOVEMBER, OSCAR, PAPA, QUEBEC, ROMEO, SIERRA, TANGO, UNIFORM, VICTOR, WHISKY, X-RAY, YANKEE, ZULU
To avoid this problem in the future, here is a JavaScript speller for my convenience.
Posted by marco at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)
April 4, 2006
Related links from Google
I'm checking out one of Google's newest features, Related Links. Sometimes these little automated searches produce funny results ;)
That one time I was writing about how I liked little moles and Google would surface mole trap ads....shame on you, Google ;)
It looks like this:
Posted by marco at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2006
Time for a new Domain name?
Well the sad truth is, most of them are taken (or even worse parked by domain speculators). This is an interesting read about some domain name statistics at Dennis Forbes - Pragmatic Software Development (only for .com TLD). For example you learn that there are 11,333 domains containing free and sex, not very surprising. Or that all 2 and 3 letter domains are taken and also 80% of the 4-letter-words. And that 538 domains utilize the full length of 63 characters.
Inspired by this I now have a new email-address: marcodeppe (a) abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com (beware they might send you spam, but it was free).They advertise the following benefits of getting an email address there:
- Some Webforms do not work with your email
- Some Email Software Cannot be configured
- People Cannot Remember your email address
- Companies think that your email address is fake
Posted by marco at 11:10 AM
March 13, 2006
How to burn a Mac DVD using Windows
If only your Windows machine has a DVD burner, you can still burn a dmg in Windows. You need macdrive and Daemon Tools and Nero. Mount the dmg in Daemon Tools and use Nero to make a Disc to Disc copy of your DVD. Voila, you have a bootable copy and don't have to convert the dmg to iso first. I guess this should also work with a CD, no reason why not. Other links concerning this topic:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_21090878.html and http://www.macosx.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-28226.html and http://www.computing.net/mac/wwwboard/forum/10311.html
Posted by marco at 8:23 PM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2006
Use Google Talk to store information
With the new tighter integration of Google Talk and GMail, you get an easy way to archive information, like interesting Websites/URLs, quotes, addresses, etc.
- get yourself a second GMail-account, add it to your friends list in Google Talk.
- log into GTalk with your alter ego to approve your new friend
- you also need to enable "Save chat history" (Settings/Chat) for both accounts! (You can also set that in the GMail settings)
- Now log back into your regular account in GTalk and rename your contact to something helpful (like "Logger")
- All you have to do now is open a chat with Logger and as soon as you close that window, you will have a new entry in GMail, like this:
- You can forward, star and label these conversations just like any regular mail and feel very organised ;)
Posted by marco at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2006
Pheromone Trails
Check out the little Pheromone Trails badge I added to the right nav,
It's a pop-up showing all the incoming and outgoing links to my site - provided by Pheromone Trails.
What are Pheromone trails?
In the same way that ants create trails between the nest and food, helping other ants find the food quickly, PheromoneTrail.com helps web users find the best places on the web by creating trails, based on user-navigation.
Posted by marco at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2006
Crash Different
Wow, there are actually people that don't like Macs! Watch this very entertaining video of an editor who rants about all the little oddities of the Mac (Thanks to Duke for passing along) :
Myself, I'm still torn between liking Macs and being used to Windows. Tini has that little iBook, which is fun to play with, but I think I'd rather convert to Linux....so far. Also, because I'm not so much for design, which is what Apple is all about in my opinion ;)
Für alle ausserhalb von Amerika: http://marcofrom.com/images/whymacsucks.wmv
Posted by marco at 5:46 PM | Comments (1)
January 9, 2006
Stay in touch
Even if you work behind a very restrictive firewall, you can still use most of your favourite Instant Messengers all rolled into one nifty Ajax-Webinterface with Meebo.
AIM or ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger ,Jabber or GTalk, MSN are all supported and it's ad-free so far ;)
Posted by marco at 6:12 PM | Comments (0)
All you need is ... Google
Google Pack is a nice compilation of essential programs every fresh Windows install should have. Check it out :)
Posted by marco at 6:09 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
Bad Customer Service - Comcast
I really hate that: You take a lot of time to formulate a good email to any customer service and what do they do? They scan for the first recognizable keyword and send your their standard reply. In my recent conversation with comcast that was Spam: So I got their standard text "you would like to know how to prevent spam".
Incidentally, I had anticipated every single one of their suggestions and NO! that wasn't waht I wanted to know.
I wanted to know how my Comcast email account got swarmed with spam (150 Spam mails, only 7 of witch got caught by their lousy spamfilter) and about 10 of Comcast's own newsletters (which are opt-out, so you could consider those spam, too). Even though I had never given my address FirstnameLastname@comcast.net to anyone.
Here is what they sent me:
- Keep your anti-virus software up to date
- Install a firewall
- Only give your primary e-mail address to friends and family
- Use an additional e-mail address for form submissions on the internet
- Do not post your e-mail address in message boards and newsgroups
- Do not reply to unsolicited e-mails
- Let friends and family know that you do not want your e-mail address shared with anyone
- Do not post the e-mail address you use on personal web pages.
- Avoid 'unsubscribing' to emails received from an unknown email address.
Posted by marco at 4:42 PM | Comments (2)
December 8, 2005
Dumbeetle.be - how to get here?
At EuroDNS from the 1st November 2005 to 31st January 2006 the .be domains are for free for our European, US & Canadian customers! You can get up to 20 domains. After a year you'll have to pay if you want to keep your domain...
I took advantage of this deal, so you can get to this page following a number of nice links now:
Posted by marco at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2005
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 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)
October 28, 2005
Money for Blogs?
My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?
Posted by marco at 11:42 PM