Presented here in no particular order are my top eleven favorite Android apps. These aren’t necessarily the ones I use most often, but they are definitely the ones that add the most coolness to my overall Droid experience — the ones I’ll fire up whenever conversation turns to “what our phones will do” (is it odd that, in almost every meatspace social situation in which I find myself, the conversation at some point will always turn to that subject?  just wondering). Anyway, here’s the list, complete with scannable bar codes (I wish I could give you a bar code to download the bar code scanner app, but, well, you know…  Just search for “bar code” in the Android market, k? k.) OK then, here we go:

And that’s it!

talk about an ear-worm. stupid commercial gets in my *dreams*, man.

anyway, don’t believe the ugly rumors that i’m “redesigning” (whatever that means) my “blog” (whatever!) without even the common decency to develop in an offline manner & then publish a finished product. how tacky to have ones CSS battles right out in public! who will think of the children! or the cows! they’re the size of schnauzers, seriously!

For months now I’ve been avidly coveting the Canon EOS Rebel T1i 15.1, oh, yes, I have desired to feel its heft cupped in my little hands, to buy it adequate glass & always treasure its awesomeness. To learn to be the photographer I wannabe behind its rotating viewfinder, yes.

And then I saw this:

The Olympus PEN E-P1. I know it’s the looks of this one that got me, I’m trying to say it’s the features & the size & the lens possibilities & the Live MOS sensors & a Micro Four-Thirds format for cryin’ out loud, but, let’s face it, love at first sight is way shallower than that.

I want to go everywhere & whip this thing out. I want people to see me whipping it out, and they will see, because the would notice, because it is so not one of those you-have-to-read-the-numbers-to-tell-which-it-is ones. No, no it is not. And oh, oh, I want.

If you have an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE , you probably want to install Windows 7. You may not even realize it, but trust me, you do. It’s easy, it’s safe, and it’s beautiful.

For starters, I’m going to recommend you upgrade to 2GB of RAM, Crucial Technology DDR2 PC2-6400 Memory is what you’ll want for that. You could probably make do with the original 1GB, but you won’t be doing a lot of multitasking.

Have I mentioned how easy it is? Because it is, totally. There are a lot of instructions out there on the internets that talk about installing it from an SD card, but I tried that, and it sucked, so I found a way better way. What are you waiting for? The EEE’s roomy 160GB hard drive is already partitioned for your dual booting pleasure – for that is what I am recommending, dual booting. You’ll get the choice of which OS every time you start up.

Step 1: Get Windows 7. You’ll also need to get a license code, make sure you write that down (won’t do too much good saved on your hard drive while you’re in the middle of an install). Save the ISO file to your downloads folder (or anywhere on your C drive you can navigate to easily).

Good news everyone! Amazon is selling the three license family pack of Windows 7 Home Premium for $149!

Step 2: Get MagicDisc. Install this on your C drive as well. When you’re ready (and there is nothing on your D drive that you want to keep), click the MagicISO icon in your notification area, go to Mount ISO, and navigate to where you saved the downloaded Windows.

Step 3: You will immediately get an installation window, offering to upgrade or ‘custom’ install. There’s no upgrade path from XP (note: you DO qualify for upgrade pricing, you just can’t install Win 7 as an upgrade in place of XP), so just click ‘custom’. It will say something about you’re going to lose all your stuff, don’t worry, it’s only for that D drive you already cleared off, right? NOTE: if for some reason you are not connected to the internet wirelessly, you’ll want to download the LAN drivers before you start, as of this writing the Win7 install will disable your plug-in internet. Oh, and you’ll want to tell it not to download updates while installing.

So, you start the install, and you’ll get to a screen showing you options on where to install, pick drive D, and let ‘er rip. It’ll reboot a couple of times, no need for any intervention on your part until it gets to the ‘set up your copy of windows’ bit.

Step 4: after you have done your Windows setting-up, everything will basically be running, but there will still be a few things wonky. You will want to get the following from EEE’s downloads page:

Under ATK, get Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Driver

Under Touchpad, get the Touchpad Drivers (currently Touchpad Driver Version 7.0.4.3), this is your Elantech software.

Under Utilities, get Asus InstantKey and Super Hybrid Engine. do NOT get the EEE storage utility, as of this writing, it will cause Windows Explorer to crash.

Unzip and install – there will be a ‘setup.exe’ in most folders, don’t use that, look for an install file with a more descriptive sort of name. You may or may not have compatibility issues (I forget) but if you do, right click and use the compatibility wizard.

After all this, you’ll do some rebooting, it’s very likely you’ll start getting the weird little errors about igfxext.exe not running on startup described here. I solved this using the ‘install the older driver in compatibility mode’ fix, and it’s working fine, but YMMV. It should be noted this is a harmless annoyance if you were to decide not to hassle with it.

At this point, you will have a near-perfect installation of Windows 7, and the option to boot up either way when you start. But once you’ve experienced the shiny, sexy glory that is 7, it’ll be damn hard to go back to that old-timey clunky XP. I would go off on a tangent about the wonders of 7, but honestly, I’ve been typing this long enough, back to playing with my new OS

P.S. If you have the pretty blue EEE like me, you’ll very likely want the gorgeous, sexy, awesome Logitech V470 Bluetooth Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks (Blue) too. Coolest damn mouse I ever fondled. Just sayin’.

my first social media addiction was digg.com. i started out slow, for the first year or so, digg was just an RSS feed in my google home page, one that was always populated with interesting stories. slowly, i began to get more involved, started to get social, made friends. i discovered that by connecting with people who were actively submitting good content, that i could create a kind of human news filter, that by following their submissions i could learn, be informed, and be entertained.

at the height of my digging, i would digg hundreds of stories each day – not all because i had read the whole article, because i also believed in supporting my friends, making sure they were rewarded for submitting quality content, because i knew that the numbers mattered. social media success is in many ways a contest, and i wanted my friends to win. supporting them was an instinctive thing on my part, because (having run a social website or two in my time), i understood the importance of encouraging the best contributors.

in an ideal social media, or any type of social site, status matters. go to any forum, any group site of any kind, and you will find they have top users, people who have committed a good deal of time and effort to build a good reputation. these users have more credibility, and many times expanded privileges, by virtue of their contributions, their dedication — it’s about quality, and it’s about trust. a social website’s best asset is its user base. this isn’t rocket science – it’s a complete and utter no-brainer. if you have dedicated, hard-working, talented contributors who make the effort to  submit quality content, you have a great website. if you have a random assortment of losers, spammers, and trolls making up most of the activity of your site, you have 4chan.

it was the people on digg that made it worthwhile for me to participate. people like Queenmoweeny, whose excellent post on Social News Central sums up  the stupidity of digg’s actions quite eloquently. when the bannings started and i saw the list, a virtual who’s-who of the best of digg, i was shocked, but not surprised. this is simply the culmination of a pattern that started early this year, when digg cranked down its algorithm to penalize successful, popular contributors in favor of newbies with no friends, no history, no reputation to uphold, and no stake in the site. “diversity”, they called it. it meant that if you had spent years building up trust, respect, and a loyal following, you had to work much, much harder to hit the front page. adding insult to injury, digg also allowed blatantly abusive behavior (as long as it was directed against its top users). and in spite of numerous calls for accountability, digg staff steadfastly insisted on allowing complete anonymity for down-votes (buries), and for the always-denied but completely obvious ‘auto-bury’, in which certain sites were blacklisted — submissions not refused, votes recorded, but at some point they would disappear from the upcoming stories and no amount of votes would cause them to reach front page. they granted more power over their content to the anonymous negatives than to the people who participated in a positive way.

so with this longstanding pattern of treating its best people like dirt, it should have been no surprise to see the list of banned diggers, yet it was. i just didn’t ever expect that people like Zaibatsu, or Queenmoweeny, or Cosmicdebris, would be banned from Digg, not really. the reasons given for all these bannings were by no means based in truth – and in the tradition of absolutely no transparency, completely arbitrary.  in the words of Graham (Cosmicdebris), who was banned for script usage but never used scripts, “I just want to speak with someone, face to face, in real time. Nowhere to hide baby! Please explain why you believe I’ve been using a script. Where is the proof? Is there any proof? Can I see the proof? Your word isn’t good enough. In court my legal team would be privy to anything you had. It’s a false accusation. I’ve always adhered to the TOU, never spammed, never been abusive to other diggers, reported spam and abuse. So why give me the boot trumping up the card of script usage. Two years on digg, 3708 submitted, 418 popular, 11.27% popular ratio. Well respected by the digg community for the quality my of submissions. What gives?”. he was given no answers, so he plans to travel to the UK digg meet-up to ask those very questions. i hope he gets an answer, but somehow, i doubt he will.

and that’s a damn shame, because let me tell you, the quality of his submissions was above reproach – as were most if not all of those digg members in the ban list. they are good people, and their efforts added great value to digg, and to those of us who befriended them there.

digg is addictive – and the power of a digg front page cannot be denied. i think Graham explained it quite well, echoing my feelings about this long history of bad management: “I left digg at the beginning of 2008 because I’d become very disillusioned with the whole digg experience, the algorithm changes, the trolls, the abusive front page community. I returned after 2 weeks absence,  I was weak and my “digg it”  implant got itchy. I left again for a period of 2 months starting at the end of July, for the same reasons. I returned once again because of my bored “digg it” finger roughly 10 days before I got banned.”

sometimes i too get an itchy digger finger, but i resist. i’d love to support the friends i have who are still active there, but in doing so i feel like i’d be enabling a *bad* habit – encouraging them to throw away their efforts in a venue where they are not appreciated or given the respect they deserve, and where they may be banned at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all.

soshable.com has graciously offered itself as a platform for disillusioned diggers to express themselves without fear of reprisals from digg, because people are still afraid of digg. as for myself, i am not banned (yet), but i have stopped using the site, so i am not afraid. they can’t take anything away from me that i do not want.

yesterday, i looked at that digg RSS feed in my google homepage, and my mouse cursor hovered over the little ‘x’. i didn’t click it, but i’m about to go do just that.

i’ll be adding links to other posts on this ‘digg blog day’ here:
Nethackz to host guest posts for Digg Blog Day
Diggstapo . . . The Term for Social Media’s Gestapo Called www.Digg.com
The Decline and Fall of Digg

thanks to next2friends.com, i discovered that the blackberry curve *does* in fact have the capability of taking video, it just needed a major OS upgrade that my carrier did not think i needed. i don’t know why they thought this. so, in honor of this, i’m going to test out some streaming on my way to work. i post this boring-ass post only to illustrate <- that over there, which will be me live in a few minutes, off and on the next half hour or so.

the situation: four bizarre bounced emails received on a T-Mobile phone, at the phone’s @tmomail.net email address, as SMS messages because they of course don’t fit as text. two from SpamArrest, one from Yahoo, and one from “Midwest Computer” which seems to use the same “whitelist” approach as SpamAssassin.

all received within hours of each other.

indicating an unpleasant trend. i hate it when bad people soil the good email addresses of good people.

listed below, along with links (to plain text files which will
open in a new window or tab) contain all the headers. the approach
suggests a very similar attack (using random @tmomail.net address as
return-path) being used in a surprising variety of ways considering how
quickly these all came in this evening.

any help in figuring
out exactly what the fuck is going on here (and how to stop it and/or the people doing it) would be much appreciated.
there’s no terrible urgency as all our tmo phones have unlimited txt,
so it’s not like we’ll go broke from this. however it might be entirely
inconvenient for us and for all @tmomail.net customers in general, if
our phones’ email addresses became horribly blacklisted everywhere.

FROM: Jennifer Nolan TO: Kim SUBJECT: herrera (SpamArrest)
kim.txt

TO: dhemberger (Midwest Computer)
dhemberger.txt

spam: it’s the new mystery meat

FROM: Marion Huddleston TO: davechristianson SUBJECT: davechristianson (yahoo)
crussell.txt

FROM: Gale Abel TO: crussell (SpamAssassin)
dave.txt

dear sun,

i do enjoy your Java platform and i appreciate the things (Star Office) that you would give to me for free if i wanted them, but with all due respect, y’all are deeply fucked up for sneaking that Yahoo toolbar in your installation like that. seriously, i would love to come to your offices and go on a slapping spree. not kidding. not even a little bit.

now, i knew it was there, or i suspected at least. i even (briefly) poked around in the options looking for it, but when i didn’t see an obviously checked box to uncheck, i thought hey! maybe they saw the light and stopped inflicting that obnoxious piece of shit toolbar with its aggressive ‘i want to change your homepage and your default search provider’ nonsense. so you can imagine my rage when it finished up and said ‘thank you for installing Java with Yahoo™ Toolbar”. or maybe you can’t. trust me, i was pissed.

well i uninstalled that unwelcome, un-asked for, annoying, ugly, worthless, wretched excuse for a toolbar, and now i’m going to spend the next several hours periodically cursing your name under my breath. oh, and i’m going to join many others on the internet, blogging about what a fucked up thing it is you do. maybe you’ll get the message, maybe you won’t, but whatever.

bite me,

lizard

this evening my son said to me “antivirus says i have a virus!” and i knew we were in for a long night. i’ve battled infections of Antivirus 2008 and i know it to be a very insidious enemy. well, Antivirus 2009 is new and improved with extra insidiousness!

Antivirus2008 / Antivirus2009 attacks when you visit infected websites, and has a very aggressive installer, once it’s popped up it is virtually impossible to click or do anything that doesn’t grant the installer permission. It uses a logo/icon with the shape of the Windows Security icon, and the Windows logo colors; it is very carefully designed to look like a legitimate piece of software. once installed it pops up a bogus virus scan window with a list of viruses, none of which are on the computer. i will repeat: it does not find viruses! there may indeed be infections somewhere on the computer, but this software does not find them. it is a scam. it then tells you to buy a license in order to remove the non-existent threats. it will continue to pop up dire virus warnings every few minutes or so, and it can’t be shut down. it is not possible to uninstall this software through the normal methods – either its own “uninstaller” or through Windows Program Manager.

the difference between 2008 and 2009 versions, is that the 2009 version is capable of disabling existing anti-virus software – in my case, AVG free. after AVG dies (and this is the seriously insidious part), Windows Security Center then pops up and informs you you have no virus protection because Antivirus 2009 is not activated, and offers you a button to purchase a license from Antivirus 2009.  further, the Windows Security Center alert logo appears in the taskbar, with a message that Antivirus 2009 is not activated, and says to click this balloon to fix the problem. they have managed to exploit the way Windows Security Center monitors the computer’s protective software, in order to compel the user to purchase a license, and the user can initiate this process by clicking a button within the Windows operating system itself. 

seriously, get a Mac.

haha, just kidding. i have Macs and PCs and i like them both, you’re not going to get any of that OS-bashing here.

a friend recommended Simply Super Trojan Remover, but i installed Windows Live OneCare first to see if that would do it. i’ve used AVG, Avast, ClamWin, Norton, and Macafee, but i’m most happy with Live OneCare, it is effective and (unlike most of the freeware anti-virus programs listed) it is not a system resource hog.

before Live OneCare was even finished with setup, it had found and dealt with Antivirus 2009. i’d expected to do a lot more work to get rid of the insidious pest, but it was actually quite an easy fix.i am very impressed (and surprised) by OneCare’s ability to deal with a very nasty infection. 

i guess it’s not going to be such a long night after all.

note: according to Miguel Campos, it might require more effort, but for now, i’m going to relax and be happy that the computer is suffering no further symptoms.

i’m sitting on the porch, typing this, because 802.11b wireless? they’re giving the shit away. i mean literally. well almost literally, but pretty much, literally.

the internet’s getting easier to face each & every day.