Paradigm shift-lock

As a citizen of the kingdom of Sweden, I'm finding myself in the very peculiar situation of living in a country that's supposedly among the best democracies in the world, in theory, while it's in practice among the worst of western Europe. Read a bit 'bout it here.

While whining and ranting is good things, leading to progress and all that, it's also important to do something. So, as a first step I made sure to make my mails a bit safer. Here is what I did, along with a file to make it easier for you, dear Reader. First things first:

What you will get
You will end up with a USB-stick (nah, you'll have to buy that one) with all your mails on it, along with a mail program (Mozilla Thunderbird) and an encryption/signing system (GPG). Moreover, every file on the USB-stick will be encrypted (using TrueCrypt) to make certain that no one will be able to read them by stealing your USB-stick; the only files not encrypted are the files you need for the decryption...

Read on the linked wikipedia page about the encryption system, if you're not familiar with GPG or PGP. What it does in essence is to allow you to send and retrieve encrypted mails and files and/or to sign your mails so the recipients will be able to verify that you are the actual sender and that the contents hasn't been tampered with.

And on a final note, one of the funny things is that your mail program will in fact be faster using this encryption than if you just installed it on the USB-stick unencrypted.

Ok, this is how you do it

Read more

Pretty please with sugar on top, don't use autoplaying of movies/songs/burning churches/whatever other media-contents your site might have.

But ... since everybody does, use this plugin instead: Stop Autoplay. It's a plugin for Mozilla Firefox that allows stopping all stupid annoying irritating bloody autoplaying media on websites! You choose yourself how far you want to go in getting rid of the mess.

I for one am going for the "remove completely and nuke the server" option!

Kanske intressanta bloggar om: autoplay, play, media, movie, music, sound, video, youtube, firefox, plugin.

I stumbled upon a rather cool idea a couple of days ago, that I have to share with You all even though it's an old one: reCAPTCHA. It's something developed by people at Carnegie Mellon University, and is free to use for anyone (and a bunch of people have put different libraries for it online, so it's almost too easy to get started with it).

The general idea is that websites use CAPATCHA; those images with some blurred characters that You enter into a form that You're 'bout to submit, that bots aren't supposed to be able to udnerstand. Now, there's also a lot of old books that have been scanned, but contain words that OCR-software can't handle. Now, what these guys do is, they combine the two. Using reCAPATCHA, websites make their users participate in identifying these words that the computers can't interpret.

Now, since I'm a lazy bast^H^H^H^Hprogrammer, I havn't implemented reCAPATCHA here. And I won't. But if You read this, please feel free to make a plugin for b2evolution, and do tell me 'bout it.

“Oh no, not another bloody blog” is of course the proper reaction, before leaving this page for something much better. So, who cares? This is my new blog, and it's made for me. Grock it?

There's two reasons for this blog. 1: I'm sooo tired of stupid people thinking they've got programming skills, asking stupid questions without even looking for the obvious (and stupid) answers. 2: I'm just sooo bloody tired of them.

And there's two purposes with this blog. 1: Ranting. As with everything on blog.gnallspik.net. It's what it's all about, basically. Ranting. I'm gonna go on complaining about things that matter and (mostly) things that don't. And I'm gonna have bloody fun reading stupid comments that I can complain 'bout. 2: Giving some tips'n'tricks. Yeah, that's right, once in a while I'm actually able to create something, despite all bloody stupid people bashing away on my nerves, breaking my concentration and slowly grinding down what's left of my mentality. Oh yes, so once in a while I just might share, or maybe answer a question, or some other curiosity.

For now, 'til I've got something better to write, cheers.