Enter your password securely

I came across a nifty little utility that just might keep you from having your passwords stolen from you by a keylogger or similar devices and programs. Neo Aplin wrote this tiny little app called Neo's SafeKeys which will let you enter your passwords via a little onscreen keyboard. The really nifty part is that not only are you defeating keyboard loggers, but it places the buttons differently and the program window is a different size each time it's run, thereby defeating any program that attempts to log which button was clicked by mouse placement. All-in-all if you use public computers or even are just paranoid about your own and run Windows, this app's for you! If you missed the above link, here it is again.

Gabe Perez

I came across this picture on the net today and I want to know more about it. check it our for starters:



So, where did this come from? Who is this Gabe Perez guy and what possessed him to do this? I think it's hilarious and want to know more. I apologize about the crappy image quality but for some reason Blogger does that to it when I upload it, to see a better version click here. Anyways, I searched and couldn't find anything, could any of my fellow stumblers help?

Baltimore police- HOW THEY REALLY TREAT PEOPLE

Heres an awesome video of how the Baltimore Police really treat kids who are doing nothing more than skateboarding. As far as I can tell, these kids didn't even provoke this cop to act like a pompous ass, and this one in particular needs to be FIRED! He even says his name on the video so have at him!

False LOLs

I came across a website today, NoMoreLOL.com, which advocates replacing the way too damn often misused LOL acronym with LOI (Laughing on the Inside,) which, honestly, is probably more accurate like 98% of the time. I know there's probably been like 2 times ever I've actually laughed out loud while reading something or chatting at work, but dozens of times I typed LOL (even though I don't use it often) and you know, Sai is right. Screw that, LOL doesn't describe what is going on at all most of the time. Anyways, the site made me LOI, so check it out.

Oh, and sorry about the lack of updates if anybody cares, I haven't really been much into it lately, I've got some serious financial issues I'm trying to deal with, and in the middle of all that my rent money got stolen at knifepoint, so.. I dunno, if anyone cares, click some freakin' ads or send me a buck or something :P

PassiveAggressiveNotes

I just joined the community over at PassiveAggressiveNotes, and I probably should have made up a quick post earlier, but welcome to any members checking out my spot here, check back for more cool stuff at random intervals!

My Mini City: Naknek

I started my own little city on MyMiniCity.com, and I want all of you to come visit! This site lets you create your own little city, kinda similar to SimCity, except instead of getting bigger by your actions, your city grows by people visiting it. So why don't you pop by and check out Naknek, and if you want, you can create your own too!

Desktop Environments vs. Window Managers

Many of you who are new to Linux have probably encountered the terms desktop environment and window manager, and might be thinking "what the hell are either and why do I care?" Well, if you're not running a brand new computer, you might have a lot of reason to care. I came across an article today on Download Squad that explains the difference in a newbie-friendly manner. Most Linux installations default to either KDE or GNOME. These are both what's known as desktop environments. This is something akin to what Windows is to a PC or what OSX is to a Mac, a full-featured environment that provides everything you need to access everything on your computer. This might seem like 'well, ok duh,' but there are other options. Back in the early days of Linux, you had to put together all the components of a complete system yourself. This involved a window manager.

A window manager does one main thing, and that is to handle windows. That includes the borders and controls that let you control what is visible and how you interact with it. It also includes the menus and desktop icons (if that is how the particular manager does it.) In addition to it, you also needed to have software running to handle your sound, any panels you wanted, screensaver, and anything else you wanted to run. This seems like it might be tedious and complicated, and sometimes it is, but it allows for a COMPLETELY customized Linux experience. You can control every aspect of your system and have it look, act, and work just how you want. And as a side effect of only running the components you need, window managers are much slimmer, quicker, more efficient, and if they crash, they don't take down anything else with them (like that novel you are working on and haven't saved for 25 pages.) A couple of my favorite window managers are Enlightenment and Window Maker. If you have an older PC that seems real sluggish currently, (or you think you can't even use) give one of these a try, you might find out your 233MHz PII can run as well as your 2GHz P4, and can look good doing it.

Tip: if you really are putting it on a 233 (or something slow) go with Window Maker, it is much slimmer than Enlightenment.

Special thanks to Kristin Shoemaker for her (sorry Kristin!) excellent blog post on the topic, check his article for more information on desktop environments and window managers.

How to post HTML code on your website

OK, so I came across this great tip that lets you see the passwords you have saved in Firefox, so I immediately went to post it on here, and after typing it up, putting the code in, and trying to post it, I found out that it won't show the code on my site because it is interpreting it. So, I had a new problem: how to show the code without it being read as code. It took me a few minutes to find out how to do this, and I had to use a few methods of searching before I found the appropriate answer, so here it is just for you:

Within the HTML example, first replace the "&" character with "&" everywhere it occurs. Then replace the "<" character with "<" and the ">" character with ">" in the same way.

Within the HTML example, first replace the "&" character with "&amp;" everywhere it occurs. Then replace the "<" character with "&lt;" and the ">" character with "&gt;" in the same way.

Interestingly enough, in order to post these instructions, I had to replace "&amp;" with "&quot;&amp;&quot;", "&lt;" with "&quot;$amp;lt;&quot;", and "&gt;" with "&quot;$amp;gt;&quot;" so that they themselves aren't interpreted. To show you what I had to type to get "&quot;&amp;&quot;" to display, view the source, cause it would be really really confusing if I tried to make it viewable, the first level of de-interpretation was bad enough, let alone the second. I better stop before I recurse into infinity showing what has to be input as code to display what the code should be. Enjoy!

TV-Links.co.uk taken down, owner arrested!

This is a sad day for freedom. Just yesterday, the popular website tv-links.co.uk was shut down by a multinational police investigation led by FACT, an anti-copyright infringement group. The part that really sucks is that tv-links never even hosted illegal content, AT ALL. The site merely linked to video on Google and a few other video sites. Everything that could be seen as illegal was on other sites, yet tv-links got shut down and the owner arrested for finding this content and linking to it. This effectively makes the entire internet illegal since linking to something that isn't yours is apparently infringing copyrights, and I don't think that's right. The staff of tv-links has started an online petition to try to do something about this, and I encourage everybody to sign it, just click on the link to sign.