/dev/random

For a long time I was unable to view ustream.tv on my MacBook Pro, even though I have the latest version of Flash player and other sites work OK.
I noticed that I had local storage disabled in the Flash Player settings. Enabling it fixed the problem.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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A lot of people have been posting referrals to a new site called bux.to on Twitter & elsewhere. It works by having you click ads and stay at the site for 30 seconds. This is click fraud, and it’s against the terms of service for Google AdSense and every other ad service.

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Today I happened to notice the RSS icon in Safari’s address bar while I was using Google Reader. I found that I could subscribe to that feed to get an aggregated feed of all of my subscriptions. Of course reading that feed doesn’t mark the items as read in Google Reader.
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Anyone can now register at my2unz.com, although the site is still in beta and not feature complete. I’ve finalized the database structure and cleaned up a lot of stuff. Uploading iTunes playlists & exported libraries should be a lot more reliable now.
Other site features include music discussion forums, buddy lists, and private messages, I plan [...]

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There has been a lot of kvetching about Google Reader’s shared items feature. People say that it ’sends their shared items sent to people in their mailbox’, which isn’t true. You need to explicitly add friends to Reader so you can see their shared items.
Uploaded with Skitch!
When you add someone to your friend list, you [...]

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If you read Daniel Brusilovsky’s blog, you may have seen his announcement earlier today of a new podcast, Teens in Tech. This is the first podcast hosted at my new network, Techblast.tv.
Techblast.tv uses Wordpress MU with several plugins and themes optimized for podcasting. I hope to add more podcasts and line up sponsors in the [...]

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I decided to try out Lijit, which Scoble briefly mentioned and I’m impressed. I just had to enter my blog URL and usual nickname and it automatically located my profiles at Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Digg and others I had forgotten about completely such as ma.gnolia & StumbleUpon. It also added my entire blogroll [...]

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This morning I discovered a new Gmail feature I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet. The More Actions menu has a new item, “Filter messsages like these”. It takes you straight to the Create Filter screen with the search criteria filled in based on the selected messages.
That was one of my favorite features of Eudora, so [...]

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Slashdot reports that a student has been given detention for using Firefox to do his classwork. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork [...]

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About a year ago, two kids named Brandon and Erik had a podcast called Mr. Mac Geek, which was usually fairly interesting. As often happens, they became involved with other products and stopped updating their podcast.
I never bothered unsubscribing and it recently came back to life. However, it now appears to be owned by someone [...]

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Earlier this afternoon I was a guest on The Teen Web 2.0 Podcast with Taylor McNeil and Daniel Brusilovsky. We talked about PHP & Drupal, among other things. Unfortunately the sound quality from my Plantronics M3000 Bluetooth headset was pretty bad. I’m getting a Jabra headset in a few days, which should be better.

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I’ve uploaded the changes to the live my2unz.com site and updated the database. All of the original content is still intact. I disabled playlist import, however, since that feature hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
I’m now using standard CCK fields & standard views, along with the content template module for track, album, artist, and playlist forms rather [...]

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I received a pingback in my Akismet moderation queue a little while ago that led me to a splog that’s stealing content from this and many other blogs. It simply reposts blog entries verbatim and inserts google ads in each post. It grabbed my previous post just a few minutes after I posted it. I [...]

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I was up late last night working on some programming changes to my2unz.com.
I’ve removed the content & view related functions from my iTunes module where the same functionality could be implemented using standard CCK & Views features such as nodereference fields. I still need to get iTunes XML import working the same way again and [...]

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Taylor McNeil interviewed me for his new podcast, Tech Bucket. We discussed a few Mac related stories and I talked about LoJack for Laptops.
Taylor is a local 16 year old podcaster & blogger. Until a few months ago, he lived in my condo community. Taylor’s family was one of the few Prius owners in here.

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Things have been pretty quiet with my2unz.com lately, but I have some big programming changes planned. I finally got a chance to do some work on it over the weekend.
The site uses a custom Drupal module for iTunes integration. In addition to importing iTunes playlist or library XML files, it also defines several content types [...]

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Sony believes that fair use, as it has been understood for several decades, doesn’t exist.
jennifer Pariser, Sony’s head of litigation, says:
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying ’steals [...]

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I had disabled this site’s contact form after some spammers started abusing it, thinking they were sending to a list of addresses when in reality all of the spam was sent to me.
I forgot about it until Daniel reminded me. It’s back now. Instead of using a form that could possibly be abused, I now [...]

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When I was having trouble with DreamHost a few days ago, I signed up for a Grid Server account at Media Temple to try it out. After trying it, I decided to close my Media Temple account and stay with DreamHost.
I created a mirror of this site (which you can still see here until the [...]

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Daniel Brusilovsky, the host of Apple Universe and Tech Today is now writing for MacMegasite. If you haven’t heard of Daniel, see this interview with Scoble.

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