In an unusual combination, the British Library has formed an alliance with Amazon.co.uk to sell to the public catalogue listings of over 2.5 million literary works from its collection
I’ve known of the notorious Nigerian scam for years. The first time I actually saw physical evidence of the scam was when a letter arrived at work.
We were a small branch office, so everyone got to see the poorly photocopied document. One of the engineers said that they used to send them out of classy looking faked stationery. Not this scammer, but if was nice to see that they’d kept up the time honoured tradition of fake stamps.
The gist of the letter was much the same as the continual pleas from Nigerian widows you get in your inbox now. But at least they’d made the effort to match the content to our company business. Surprisingly enough the company did have business in the region mentioned, but contacting a minor sub branch halfway around the world for transfer of funds was never going to work when we had a head office who was constantly miffed over our stationery expenditure.
The Green Man has pointed out a group that goes out of their way to bait the scammers.
New laws allowing Singapore to launch pre-emptive strikes against computer hackers have raised fears that internet controls are being tightened and privacy compromised in the name of fighting terrorism
iPod’s Dirty Secret (Quicktime video) tells the story of a 18-month-old iPod with a dead battery. Apple will fix it…
This guy bought an iPod about 18 months ago and the battery is now dead. Apple charges about $255 to replace the battery. So he goes around and adding this info to iPod posters. The battery saga is not cool but:
a) iPod runs on essentially a laptop type battery. It will lose its ability to recharge over time, as do PDA’s, mobile phones and laptops.
b) There are other options for when your babys battery dies, you are not at Apples mercy. Yes opening your iPod means you kiss your warranty kaput, but unless you’ve bought Apple Care, iPod probably aint going to die within warranty time (1 year).
The article I’ve linked up the top of this entry has some links worth checking out including this one www.ipodbattery.com.
This is something Apple should look at, either dropping the price of replacement batteries (somehow), or making DYI kits available. Or maybe this is something Sony could look at as the internal batteries are Sony. They’ve just missed out on creating something iPoddy so they might as well capitalise on the accessories.
Some other iPod accessories worth checking out is the back up battery by Belkin. With this baby you can power your other baby with 4 AA alkaline batteries, for about $70. Nice one.
Another stroke of genius is this baby, the Belkin iPod Media Reader. You can transfer images from your digital camera to your iPod on the go so you can free up more room on your camera. Now this is a fucking must have if you’re like me and carry both iPod and digital camera everywhere you go, and it’s $200. Yes another fucking nice one.
‘Tis always a pleasure to visit The Joy of Tech and chortle at its rather amusing comics.
Here are some Mac related samplings:
Mac eye for the Windows guy
Panther Party
Windows Hell Freezing Over
Daniel Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco’s blessing
A Toronto man is the first to be charged with theft of communications for downloading child pornography using someone else’s residential wireless network. The War Driver was caught naked from the waist down driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with a laptop in hand
Soon to be on Slashdot…
A man inundated with penis enlargement spam has been arrested for threating the lives of the alleged spammers. The 44 year old programmer verbally threatened employees of the penis-enlargement company Albion Medical with a variety of horrors including anthrax, castration, shooting, and torture with a power drill.
Internet portal Yahoo may want to think about changing its advertising slogan from ‘Do You Yahoo?’ to ‘You Do Yahoo’. In e-mail messages that began going out last week, Yahoo advised its users that their account preferences had been changed, by Yahoo, to indicate that they wanted to receive advertising solicitations through spam, snail mail and telephone
E-mail security hardware maker IronPort Systems will announce next week it is buying anti-spam firm SpamCop for an undisclosed sum, and plans to invest more than $1 million into the company to keep it running. An interesting business proposal, considering that IronPort makes a specialised computer with the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages
Do you know what to do if your internet connection goes down? This article includes many helpful tips, including a functional use for AOL disks
A growing movement aims to stop or regulate software that surreptitiously monitors computer use
A US civil rights group fears legal threats from Diebold, an electronic voting company, are having a chilling effect among ISPs, students and voting rights advocates
If you’ve hung around the Internet long enough, chances are you’ve encountered the Goatse guy — google it if you’re curious, but don’t say you weren’t warned. Slashdot has added whole volumes of code just to keep users from tricking each other into opening this photo. That said, someone is fond enough of the image to create a Goatse case mod. In a far more tasteful display of case modding style, Joe LeBlanc turned a junked Mac into a G4 Cube Aquarium
China has announced a government-funded project to promote an alternative to DVDs and attack the market share of the global video format. The rollout of the long-planned project, known as EVD, or enhanced versatile disc, was timed to coincide with the beginning of what China calls the golden sales period — known elsewhere as the Christmas shopping season
The new 20-inch iMac has been released. That’s right, the flat panel iMac now comes in 15 “flat screen”, 17 “widescreen” and 20-inch “cinematic” screens.
$3,898.00 AUD will get you the new 20-inch iMac with a super drive (DV-R/CD-RW), which I think is pretty good. For under 4 grand you’ve got a dvd burner and nice big screen, and you know the screen/video card combo is good cos it’s a mac.
That’s just one of the reasons I like macs, good quality screens and video cards are just fucking standard. No fucking around with inferior video card and a reasonable monitor, or just shit monitor and a half-assed video card like in Microsuck land. Hey and don’t say oh just get good stuff put in it
, I’m a fucking designer. I just want to get a good machine that I enjoy using, I’m not a geek who wants to spend every spare second of my time needing to beef up inadequate design machines.
Rant over.
So just what happens when two hardcore gamers break up? All goes smoothly until the custody of saved Xbox games throws a spanner in the works:
Justin is a man of action. He promptly called customer support. “I have two Xboxes,” he said breathlessly. “A memory card that’s too small and an ethernet cable. Lets try to figure this out…”
“So you’re telling me it’s not possible for my ex-girlfriend to take with her her own saved games? I can’t believe that! You make it sound like hacking my Xbox is a good idea!”
Federal Democrat spokesperson for IT, Senator Brian Greig, has accused the federal government of using its proposed anti-spam legislation to favour groups with conservative agendas, allowing religious and political organisations to flood e-mail in-boxes with spam and deny other groups the right to respond
Microsoft experiments with an international news search service in competition with Google’s, upping the ante in the hotly contested Web search market
Wacky CSS driven tangrams from Mark Schenk; basic tangram set, tangram toolbox and the running man
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