Crap in Advertising – Part 1

This crap has to stop.

Also, have you noticed how “moms” are discovering all the shocking and weird stuff that’s changing everything? I need to open a lab. Srew the scientists, this lab will be staffed by moms!

Dirpy Replacements [YouTube Downloader]

Dirpy, once a very slick web site which featured tools to download YouTube videos or simply rip the audio from the video, was taken down recently. A suicide message has been left nailed to the door. Was it legal threats? Or did they simply grow weary of playing cat-and-mouse with YouTube? Better question: Does any one care? I’ll venture that most of you don’t; we Netizens are a fickle crowd. We don’t care your blood, sweat, and tears went into something, we just want it to work, we want it to work now, and when it doesn’t work, we’ll just flock somewhere else. Here’s a list of web sites to flock next if you’re looking to rip YouTube videos:

ClipConverter.cc

Clip Converter can take uploaded content as well as content from sites like YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Metacafe, Veoh, and more. Output can be audio or video in a variety of formats. This is probably the service which most like Dirpy.

3outube.com

Three-ou-tube? E-o-tube? Either way you say it, just replace the “y” in YouTube.com with the number 3, and you’ll be taken to the 3outube page with links for downloading the video in your desired format.

YouTube-MP3.org

This site just rips the audio to MP3, but if that’s all you need, YouTube MP3 is dead simple.

————

Don’t bother with downloading a piece of software for conversion, especially when you can do it online with no extra download! Plus, they all suck anyway!

Do you know of another conversion web site? Let me know in the comments!

Free Holiday / Christmas Music

There’s no other time of the year which is so uniquely identified by entire genres of music than the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. Then, come January 1st we’re sick of hearing it piped in over store P.A. systems and radio stations. With the explosion of online radio, and the plethora of options available, there’s little need to keep Holiday MP3s on your computer anymore just so you can listen to it for a couple of months out of the year only to take it out of the rotation on December 26. Below I list just a few of the best in online radio which offer holiday music selections. In no particular order:

——-

• Pandora Radio
  • Head over to Pandora and type in the name of your favorite Holiday song, or artist and Pandora will play more music based on the qualities of that song or artist. When you select an artist, and if the option is available, be sure to select the option which includes the word Holiday. For example, when entering “Tran-Siberian Orchestra,” Pandora will suggest “Trans-Siberian Orchestra (Holiday)”. You’ll want to select that Holiday option to ensure Trans-Siberian’s Beethoven performances aren’t included in your mix. Don’t have any song or artist in mind? That’s okay, Pandora has typical genre selections, too.
• AOL Music
  • I haven’t found anything special about AOL Radio other than its fairly large pre-defined selection of genres. During this time of year you’ll find a bunch of Holiday-themed stations including “Oldies Holiday,” “Top Christmas Songs,” and so on.
• Last.fm Radio
  • Last.fm is known for their social approach to music discovery. They provide plugins for most popular media players to keep track and display your music playing habits and, in turn, will make suggestions for other artists you may be interested in based on your habits. Additionally, you can find your friends on Last.fm and influence each other’s recommendations. However, you can skip past all that socializing,  fire up the Last.fm radio, punch in an artist or genre and start listening!
• Grooveshark
  • Grooveshark boasts an impressive library and music on-demand. Normally, I would recommend Grooveshark, however, for the purposes of quickly playing Holiday-themed music, Grooveshark sinks to the bottom. While you can use it for Holiday tunes, it’s just not as easy to get a nicely packaged station with only Holiday music as some other services.
• Slacker Radio
  • Slacker is a good choice for Holiday-themed music because the service offers both artist or song matching and pre-packaged stations for quick selection of desired genres. Just head over to Slacker Radio, click on the Seasonal category, and select your favorite flavor of Holiday

Have a different place to enjoy Holiday radio? Let us know in the comments!

Fun Flowcharts for Geeks

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Flow chart for Flow Charts

Geek Dating Flowchart

Gadget Buying Flowchart - Should You Get the New...

General Geek Flowchart (not sure what the end result is supposed to be)

Prediction Flowchart for Geek Gifts

Nerd, Dork, Geek, or Boring

Are You a Noob?

Infinite Loop

Domino’s Pizza Tracker

Domino's Pizza Tracker (click for larger view)

Filing under the “learn something new everyday” category, I’ve found that not only can you order Domino’s pizza online, but you can “track it.”

The Pizza Tracker will keep you up to date with the status of your order as it passes through the order, preparation, baking, boxing, and delivery stages. Not only will you know know where the dough is, it’ll also tell you the name of the employee man-handling your order each step of the way, including the “delivery expert.” The application updates without the need to refresh so you can plug your laptop into your big screen LCD TV and give the whole family something utterly unproductive to do while you wait.

Now, if they could only stream video of the whole process taking place, it’d be just like being there! It’s a nice toy, but I’m okay with ordering pizza without the need to stalk it.

What do you think? Is this just a neat toy or the best thing to happen to world since sliced…. pizza….?

Blizzard Axes LAN Support for Starcraft II [Plus an old SC typo]

Its official: Blizzard has made the decision to completely axe LAN support for Starcraft 2.

We got quite different answers about local area networking (LAN), where both Dustin or Sigaty said they were still discussing it, however, Pardo knew immediately: “we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net. – StarCraft II Developers Talk

Behind the reasons to forgo a geek’s birthright to enjoy LAN parties include limiting piracy and the claim the new Battle.net will be an experience so mind-boggling,  heart-pounding, and tear-jerking,  you’ll forget all about LAN parties and lock yourselves away in your dark room, playing SC for ours on end with your “friends” over a WAN.

I’ m sure Battle.net will have it’s features, but there are limitations to massive gaming over a typical WAN connection (expecially if one isn’t available), so I’m a little apprehensive about how this will change the dynamics of traditional LAN parties or even quick games between a couple of friends. I’ve played SC on numerous occasions when my WAN connection was down, or I was somewhere where there was no Internet connection. Then again, SC2 won’t be laptop friendly, so mobile SC will become decidedly more difficult.

In other news, I came across this a couple years ago. It’s a printed tech tree for Starcraft, pre-Broodwar I believe. Forgive me, I have no scanner:

I bet you didn't know Siege Tanks came with disguises (click for full size)

If You Post it, they will SPAM it

Most people don't care for spam, in all forms.

I hope that my Internet savvy readers will know that you should never, ever, post a personal email address online in public view. In personal emails, in password-protected forums, sure, post away, but otherwise, posting an email address in plain-text is a one-way ticket to SPAM-ville.

So, if you already know this stuff, why am I writing about it? Because, obviously, not everyone does. Over the past year, I’ve been responsible for the design and upkeep of a local church web site. Of course, one of the best (nerdy) perks is being able to analyze all the unique stats that roll in. One very helpful metric, the “search engine terms” metric, as its commonly referred to, shows you what people terms or phrases that a visitor bounced off a search engine in order to find your site. An interesting trend began to appear after awhile;  one that I hadn’t seen before. It seems that someone, or something, had come to the site after searching for something such as “church in california @hotmail.com.” At first, I only saw a couple of these, but after awhile, these hits began to occurring weekly with different phrases, “pastors in california @hotmail.com,” “email contacts of pearsons @hotmail.com,” “prayer 2009 @gmail.co.th,” and so on. After digging into the stats more, I was able to pull the IP address of the machines that had landed on the site after those searches. The IP address? 74.125.77.132. I’ll wait a second for the nerds to run a trace.

Weird, huh? That address points squarely at Google. Not all the searches had that address attached to them. For example, one search traced back to Togo Telecom, an ISP in France.

No doubt some of you already know what this is all about, but just in case, I’ll dispense with the details of my theory. The hits are coming from bots which are programmed to harvest email addresses for specific campaigns. Yes, even church pastors and staff get spammed from “religious” organizations with special “services” to sell. The method of querying a couple of keywords, then a popular email provider is actually pretty smart in a, let-someone-else-do-the-heavy-lifting kind of way. The hits from Google are most likely a result of the bot choosing to visit the cached link — a snapshot of the web page as it was indexed — provided by Google for each search result so the coveted email address it seeks will still be available on the page, just waiting to be added to a list of email addresses for sale. A search engine bascially hands a list of pages to a bot with email addresses on them, making it even faster to crawl pages than to randomly bounce from site to site hoping to find them.

For example, if I wanted to spam people who are involved with Relay for Life I would search for “relay for life @yahoo.com,” or if I had a fraudulent operation running on fake Scantron forms, I could search “school teacher @hotmail.com.”

So, in review: Don’t post any email address online in plain-text, unless, of course, you enjoy the extra reading material. Currently, the safest way to allow web site visitors to contact you is to use a temporary “throw-away” address, or a form with CAPTCHA verification. Another method I consider safe enough is generating an image that shows the email address without actual text on the page (don’t use the mailto link either!). Any of these email image generators will do. Though your email address appears on the page, it isn’t easily read by a bot harvesting email addresses from text. Though the technology is there, as far as I know, very few spammers bother with OCR (optical character recognition) technology since there are still so many good addresses readily available in plain text.

I wonder what would happen if I Googled “looking for unheard of foreign entity to transfer large sums of cash with no assurance of legitimacy @citibank.com.”