I’m amazed that FidoNet is still going. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember my FidoNet address and my BBS isn’t listed anywhere. Must look harder I guess. Meanwhile, if you had a modem in the 90′s (in Ireland) you’ll recognise the names here!
It makes me happy that images like this can blow my mind and give me pause for thought.
I just reported my first Chrome bug but it looks like it’s been known for quite some time, unfortunately.
When Chrome is configured to open the home page on startup it forgets any recently opened tabs if you don’t open those pages before you close the browser again. I’m fairly certain it used to do the right thing before and remember those pages but I’m not sure when that behaviour changed.
Unfortunately Firefox does the same thing. Go to History->Restore Previous Session and it will restore the home page in the same circumstances. I’m almost certain that browser did the right thing in a previous release.
If one were pedantic, the previous session was the single homepage tab and not the dozen tabs I had open before my browser was closed but it’s not what I expect. I’ll close my browser down when I’m doing something intensive but then click on a link in Tweetdeck, laugh at a rage comic and close the browser again before I realise my mistake.
The other thing Chrome has changed is when you have multiple windows open. It only shows the recently closed tabs for one of those windows. Open the home page again and you’ll see the “recently closed” link again where you can open tabs from other windows. You can also press ctrl-shift-t to restore closed windows.
If you hadn’t closed many pages before you shut your browser down you can also use the History page to open previously closed pages selectively. Unfortunately that won’t help if you had pages open for days that you just meant to read when you had time but never found the time. I find myself shoving pages into Read It Later just so I can get back to them at my leisure.
I’ve tried a few Chrome extensions that promised to save my browsing sessions but none worked in the way I’ve described. Does such an extension exist?
The latest Humble Bundle is out and features Android as well as Windows/Linux and Mac versions of the following games: World of Goo, EDGE, Osmos and Anomaly Warzone Earth.
Games are a hell of a lot easier when they’re trained! Ghosts ‘n Goblins was one of the first games I dived into to see how it worked back in the day. Earlier I played a remix of it’s soundtrack and fired up the game afterwards. I remembered it was hard but compared to games today it’s a demon!
Luckily it was trained and my son and I had an enjoyable half hour shooting the baddies and jumping from platform to platform. I wish the compatible joysticks from back then had more than one button, left/right and up to diagonal jump is a PITA!
In case you’re wondering, a trained game is where the game has been hacked and various cheats added. Usually a fancy intro with swirling graphics and music is added at the start and the group that has hacked the game give you the option of adding infinite lives, time, invulnerability or whatever suits the games. Practically every C64 game you’ll find online has these features now. 
Before the end of this month the Irish Government will introduce a very vague copyright protection law. It won’t be debated in the Dáil as it will be enacted by a ministerial order. Protection of copyright is a laudable endeavour but when so little is known about the amendment or how it’s implemented it’s impossible to figure out how it will affect us. Once IRMA get a whiff of any more power or influence you just know they’re going to abuse it! Remember the infamous “3 strikes” rule?
Before I go any further, here’s how you can help. Sign this petition or use this contact form or this list to contact your local TD to express your misgivings and anger at this law being pushed through so quickly.
From the stopsopireland.com website:
SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, recently proposed in the US. It caused an Internet-wide outcry due to its far-reaching implications; way beyond simply closing access to outlaw file sharing websites, it would have enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage.
A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.
Instead, the law is being enacted by ministerial order. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.
As I mentioned in my Wikipedia post, this law might already be illegal:
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.
Minister Sean Sherlock will be on drivetime (RTE Radio 1) after 6pm this evening to talk about this law. I hope he comes to his senses.
Oh, it is very easy to bypass any spying the music and movie industries force on Irish ISPs. All you need is an encrypted tunnel to a remote host outside the country. If Irish ISPs ban users from using tools like that then you can say goodbye to a huge number of IT jobs. I rely on these tools every single day of the week to do my work.
More links:
No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin.On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.
Next in the firing line of laws that will limit consumer freedoms is ACTA but let’s get one bad law stopped before we move on to the next one, ok?
The image above taken from No Shit, Sherlock website. Thanks Sean Sherlock.
Android has had VPN support for donkey’s years but I could never get it working. I tried pptpd and xl2tpd but pptpd didn’t work (and has security holes) or the configuration is daunting and lengthy when all I want is a simple proxy.
There’s also HTTP proxy support built into Android. It’s exposed in Samsung and other ROMs at Settings->Wireless and Network->Wi-Fi Settings, Advanced. Apparently this app sets things up correctly too. I’m not sure if it’ll do authentication however unless you add the username:password in the hostname. I also don’t want to install Squid on my public internet server!
So, the holy grail of proxying would be doing so through ssh. Nothing else to install on my server and I get an encrypted tunnel through the internet and out of Ireland which might be a good thing to protect my privacy from the prying eyes of the Irish Government. A far more mundane reason is the security of my data from others on a public wifi network. (Aside, on what will the record companies blame the falling numbers of CDs sold when the Irish version of SOPA is passed?)
The good news is that you can now create an ssh tunnel from your Android device. The bad news is that it has to be rooted to make the most of it. Go grab the SSH Tunnel app and you’ll be sending data through your remote host in no time. There’s also a beta version that uses an OpenSSH native binary rather than a Java implementation. I haven’t tried that yet, the stable version worked fine for me.
You can stream Netflix through it, and browse the net, post to your blog or whatever else takes your fancy. All through a secure tunnel to a remote server.
In case you’re interested, it’s simplicity itself to do the same thing on Linux or Mac computers using the installed ssh client. On Windows just use Putty!
Are there Skyrim fans in the house? Sure there are! You’ll recognise the town of Whiterun in the video above, all built in Minecraft. It looks pretty good too! Download link for the map in the description of the video!
If you want to load a large file in Vim you should disable the swap file to speed things up. It’s simple to do as well:
Vim -n file.txt
If a file is over 4096K or so and I have enough system RAM (not usually a problem) I’ll do it this way as it avoids Vim creating a potentially huge .swp file.
Holy Shmoly! is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache