REDELIJKHEID
Amazon patented the practice of photographing objects against a white background... Huh? What the F*ck?
Well, that's exactly what Stephen Colbert thought;
I guess that I'm not the only one violating that patent.
Dandelion seed against a white background
and not that I wanted it.
This weekend all the REDELIJKHEID.COM services went down. This included;
There are lots of (portfolio) websites available for the enthousiast / pro photographers. Some are free, and some cost a couple of dollars/euros a year. The most popular are (in no particular order, but since I store my photos @ SmugMug....);
In general, Flickr is portrayed as a photobucket where people dump their photos and comment on others with the weirdest badges, just to get some attention.This was also the reason I stopped paying for my Flickr account.
Both SmugMug and 500px offer less 'noisy' features and lots of customization options, but the thing they all have in common; they offer an app (at least one) the give the users an excellent experience on their mobile devices (Android and iOS).
Also, each of these services allow (up to some degree) nude photos, and as long as it's artistic you shouldn't have a problem publishing your photos on these platforms. Especially when you mark them as nude/possibly offensive, etc.
This week, Apple pulled the 500px app from the Apple App Store, because it was too easy to find nude photos [1, 2], and this violates their terms of service. The funny thing is that most of these apps allow the user to find nude content, and Apple's mobile browser (Safari) being one of the worst.
Just today a got a new follower on Twitter with a username that didn't leave much to the imagination. I just followed the users website link (which opened in Safari) and 'stumbled' upon a Tumblr account with tons of nude photos. All it took was 1 click.
Talking about Tumblr.... They have their own app where you can 'subscribe' to these micro-blogs. So I guess that Apple needs to revise their App Store terms, because this is ridiculous.
While browsing the news sites, I stumbled upon this Nicotine Vaccine video on Reuters. Nicotine (smoking)... Vaccine? Since when is smoking caused by a virus?
A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism, and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.
What's next? A vaccine for Kleptomania? Bad driving? Being obnoxious? This is (in my opinion) nothing more than an effort of Big Pharma to have us take more and more drugs. They have to do something to keep their investors happy since more and more drug patents are expiring.
It's been three weeks exactly (well, almost), and my new iMac i7 27" went to the repair shop.. (*sniff*).
The iMac booted normally this morning, but after a couple of minutes, the fans started kicking in. A new sensation for me. I have never heard a fan in this, or my other (i)Macs. At first I thought that my external drive (Drobo) started making the noise, but the Drobo was silent.
Turned out the fans in my iMac started blowing (hard), and the airflow was relatively warm. Too warm for a Mac which has been switched on for about 10 minutes with no real CPU intensive tasks running.
First I checked the Activity Monitor and 'Top' in the Terminal app to see if there was some program that consumed too many CPU cycles. Nothing there. On average, the CPU was 3% busy.
Next thing to do was resetting the PRAM/NVRAM by holding the Option-Command-R-P combination during a power-on of the iMac. This also made no difference (booting went a bit faster though).
It's a fact. As of this Tuesday, the Dutch ISP's are required (by Dutch law) to log all Internet activity of their customers and store the data for 12 months (at the moment). Gitmo Nation has expanded a bit further to the east, according to the No Agenda podcast host Adam Curry (which is a great podcast by the way).
Anyway, the logging is no longer limited to the basic IP connection data, the new law requires the ISP's to log the following information:
General Internet Access:
E-mail:
Internet VoIP:
The 'fun' part is that the Dutch government won't (or can't) give a real reason why this information is required..... Why can't they give the proper reasons for creating and passing this law. Theoretically we still live in a democracy.
My thought is that it's probably based on some vague report by some high-profile consulting company that scared the shit out of the politicians (accountability??). Especially the terms 'child pornography' and 'terrorism' are most likely THE keywords on which the decision is based. And no one wants be publicly not against those two.... And so the privacy of the Dutch citizens crumbles, and crumbles.
Time to start using more and more encryption in all of your communications if you ask me, and start running your own services on a server in your attic .
/me is removing the dust from his PGP keyrings....
I ran into the most annoying (understatement) thing about certain Microsoft automatic updates (on Windows XP Pro). It seems that last Tuesday was yet another 'patch-Tuesday'. Nothing unexpected about that, but this update (or at least one of them) required a reboot of the PC (yet, still nothing wrong with that).
Normally, the automatic update process bugs you about rebooting, but somehow this reboot interface had a timer. A timer of 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes the PC will reboot.
Totally ignorant to open (modified) documents. The shutdown process kills all open programs / documents and reboots. Without waiting for user input on e.g. saving files.
I tested this with opening a notepad document, altering it and leaving it open. After 7 minutes, the PC had rebooted, and all changes to the document were lost.
Yet another 'Thank You, Microsoft'
A couple of days ago I upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After the upgrade I opened the blog, and added a new post. Both of those actions worked properly.
After the upgrade I noticed a major decrease in comment and trackback spam. But today I discovered the real reason why comments AND page views were close to zero.
There's a bug in Wordpress 2.6 where the permalinks are not working correctly. If you're using permalinks with the date, name, etc. (e.g. /index.php/switched-to-mac/) you get a 'Not Found' error. A definite WTF moment.
When you change the permalinks setup in the wordpress admin pages to default the pages/posts are accessible again. It seems that the issue is known and will be fixed in Wordpress 2.6.1. Untill then, most of the Google search results which end up on my website will result in a 'Not Found' error.
I would go back to an earlier version if I could. After the upgrade (which I thought that worked correctly) I removed the 2.5 installment... Yet another lesson for the future.
UPDATE: the pageviews are returning to normal :)