Fuck Flash, Fuck Ads, Fuck Flash Ads

I hate ads. On the Internet, in the Paris Metro, on TV. I hate Flash. I link to an occasional YouTube video, and yes, I even use Flash for my numerous music players, but it’s slow, it hogs ressources, especially so on the Mac. Which is why I surf mostly ad-free, using Safari and SafariBlock,…

Ce Insanity, continued (squared)

Epilogue. Following the calls from the customer service lady, and then from Davina, the online sales department lady, I got the third call, as promised, from Kaoutar, the regular sales department lady. She told me that they would exchange the defective LG set by an identically priced Toshiba set, which had the same specs. We…

CE Insanity, continued, continued

Chapter 3. So the repairman came to check out the slightly defective new TV set last wednesday. He said he couldn’t fix it (big surprise) and that they would get back to me. Which they did, today, saying we had to go into a store to get an exchange. So far, so good. Except that:…

CE Insanity, continued

So, how does the new HDTV stack up you may wonder, if you somehow made it through this recent post? Well, it’s pretty great, even though I’m still mourning the loss of my 16+ year-old Sony 20″ CRT TV… I still haven’t connected anything via HDMI to the new set, but standard (wide-screen) TV, PPV,…

CE Insanity

I bought a TV about 16 years ago. A mono Sony set, with a 20 inch screen. In color mind you. I got cable about 8 years ago. I got a combo VHS+DVD player a few years ago. I got TV (some of it HD) via ADSL for free, without asking for it, as part…

Spam, spam, spam, spam…

Read what frogblog had to say today on spam (the meat (by)product). Truly amazing. It turns out that our ISP, Free.fr, is tightening things up. They offer free hosting, with a lot of nice features, but have suddenly blocked outgoing port 80 calls from their servers (due to some kind of abuse related to people…

Another Microsoft Music Video

You may remember Microsoft’s surrealist Vista Rocks video. Well, following the Vista fiasco, Microsoft tries to move on, with a Boys Band singing the virtues of the upcoming Windows 7. Appalling. (Via Daring Fireball).

iPhone Tips

I’m enjoying version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, which ushered in the era of third party apps. I spoke about a few early favorites in a previous post, to which I would add the following: VisuaRadio & Liveradio, great Internet radio apps Shazam & Midomi, magical apps that identify music that’s playing around you or…

20,419

Following-up on last Friday’s 20,000 post, here’s a nice, digestible article, Report: cyber-hacktivism, botnet effectiveness on the rise from Ars Technica, which sums up Secure Computing’s latest findings about the state of spam and malware on the Internet. I won’t try to summarize the summary here, except to say that these numbers and trends are…

20,000

I’ve spoken about blog comment spam before. It’s disheartening to start your day erasing spam caught by the Akismet WordPress plug-in. And this morning, I’m sad to report that I passed the 20,000 mark on the Geeks. That’s twenty thousand spam comments in 18 months. And you know what? That’s nothing. Small potatoes. The Geeks…