2002 June

My Humping Dog is getting soar.

We've put GnomeTome PDFs up on Amazon.com – and they're available for $3 apiece. If you wanna make money off of them, just link to them with your Amazon affiliate account (if you have one). Cool, huh? For some reason, our descriptions didn't take – but the titles pretty much say it all. My goal is to 0wn Amazon's top ten eBooks listing. We'll see what happens.

Read more on Cheaper GnomeTomes…

Just click this link. Don't argue.

Jake's Jive has a live one today: One of my responsibilities at Lockergnome is defending our good name against accusations of spamming. Unfortunately, because it's very easy to spoof an e-mail address or associate another company's name with an unsolicited message, defending our integrity is an on going battle. I've been put through the paces by several ISP's in the past because our newsletters are labeled as Bulk Mailings (which they correctly should be), but after a detailed explanation or two, the sysadmins generally come around and realize that we are one of the good guys. So, when I'm forced to be ready to defend our company against accusations of spam, due to other companies outright stupidity, it really PISSES ME OFF! Today, Chris forwarded me a message from a subscriber, who received the following mailing from ActiveWords…

Read more on Activewords Spam?…

Monsters of mud /
Covered in mud /
(Made of mud) /
Monsters of mud /
(Made of mud, made of mud) /
Monsters of mud, covered in mud (they're made of mud) /
Monsters of mud, covered in mud (made of mud, they're made of mud)

Read more on Monsters of Mud…

Tonight, Gretchen and I will be experimenting with Pygmy cuisine. We'll be heading over to the East Bay to hit Minijapa – which is pygmese for “Elephant Toes.” This must be their specialty? We've heard nothing but good things about this place. Will we survive this evening? Only the humping dog knows.

Read more on Elephant Toes…

Read more on RSS Feed Fun…

This is a test of the emergency blogcast system. In the event of a real emergency, you would have been directed to related Google links at the bottom of the post. Please stand by.

Read more on Hacking…

Read this and then read this.

Need to learn Linux? Get
one of Tony's new eBooks! Need proof that his knowledge can turn
your life around? Okay, check out what
Mike Chandler just sent me:
“Your pal Tony on Penguin Shell is 'da man!' Several months ago,
the only thing I knew about Linux was how to rack a server and
watch it quickly get hacked. That's the sad truth. In the back
of my mind, I realized that Linux schooling was necessary at some
point, but who has the time? Since reading [your Linux
newsletter], I've learned how to use my firewall, how to monitor
against malicious port scans and finally how to use a sweet script
to back-up crucial data – and that's the short list! What a
resource, dude! Not that you need convincing, but KEEP HIM! Oh
yeah, and make sure he's at Gnomedex, too.” No problem. Oh, by the way,
Tony's tomes will double in price next week – get 'em while they're
at a special introductory price. Support the community that supports you!

Read more on Sincerely Mike Chandler…

I don't buy it. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. These new Apple commercials with people too stupid for their own good are driving me up the wall. Some of them are claiming that it's less difficult to navigate in OS X than it is in Windows. Pardon me, but they're PRETTY MUCH THE SAME in this respect! Unless they're talking about Windows 3.1, I have to conclude that these folks are on acid. I've been using the new iMac daily for the past couple of months. Yes, there are some things that it does well – but confusing the user less than any other GUI on the planet? No way. It's just not true. I'm far from a cross-platform guru, but I believe that they should be selling the finer points of the new OS if they intend on winning over the masses. Windows bashing from users who didn't know how to USE it in the first place doesn't do anything for me. I'm Chris Pirillo, and I'm a television show host.

Read more on I'm A Dumbass…

The Geek Disc
is much more than just a CD ROM. It's the first New Media TV show from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, 12 year veterans of the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit. It contains much more content than a typical half-hour network tv show, and (hopefully) is a hell of a lot funnier. “The Geek Disc” movie files are WAY bigger and WAY higher resolution than the videos on the Trolls web site. These are NEW RE-COMPRESSIONS of the source “Broadcast Quality” DV-Tape originals, using the finest Sorenson 3 compression codec (and crappy old windows media format too just to be safe). The videos look DAMN GOOD on a crappy old PC, and SUPER DAMN GOOD on a half decent (600 mhz +) box. Each file is around 70 Megs, and it would take at least a solid week to download them all on a dial-up connection. “The Geek Disc” is proof that artists CAN create, perform, shoot, edit, produce, broadcast, and sell and their own works without the meddling censorship or greedy fingers of THE MAN.

Read more on Laughy Long Time…

Have I already said that software roundups are starting to get lame? I'm speaking directly
to this month's issue of PC Magazine. Specifically, portions of
its 10th Annual Utility Guide. For the most part, they listed the
“top” contenders in each category. I have no real argument against
their recommendations on the whole. My true beef? None of them
were all that new. I used to love picking up a magazine to learn
about something I hadn't heard about before. Partition Magic wins.
Again? Norton AntiVirus wins. Again? Why were only the two most
popular disk partitioning tools reviewed? Why were only the two
most popular disk imaging tools reviewed? Why did they feature
FTPx (a free client which hasn't been updated for years) instead
of SmartFTP (a free client that was updated at the beginning of
this month)? The System Tools and Tweaks section was (by far) the
most interesting, although it was far from comprehensive. If only
my hard drives were big enough. Then again, USB 2.0 / FireWire
data storage devices are just now starting to come out in full
force.

Read more on Cool Tools III…

Chris:
Hot on the heels of my last e-mail about e-mail security, I was wondering if you have come across an add-on or plug–inf for Outlook that helps to keep it organized.
I've tried Glance for Outlook, and am using Nelson Email Organizer, but they still don't fill the bill.
Glance lets you access Outlook folders directly from your systray, and offers a Backup wizard too, which is something I really need because no matter how hard I try, when I have to do a Windows reinstall, there are problems. Either Outlook won't let me use my backups, or the file gets corrupted somehow, or… as in this last time… it lost four or five weeks of mail directly out of the backup file… I have no idea how.
But I am really getting tired of programs that reside in the systray…. there are just too many of them, between Creative's Audigy accessor, the USB “Safely Remove Hardware” icons, the Pocket PC icons like MobiPocket…. the list goes on.
Nelson (NEO) is a fantastic e-mail organizer, and opens with Outlook, but it leaves the Contacts and the backups to the original Outlook program. So the user is still double-stepping all over the place.
What I think a lot of us could use is ONE program that automates the organization process for mail AND for contacts, and Tasks, Appointments, etc.
Any ideas?

Read more on Sincerely Mike Riley…

There's trouble in tweakville; X-Setup's official site is down for
the count. Their Web host (Yahoo!) is apparently being non-responsive?
From CptSiskoX: “Yahoo! has some ridiculous policies
in place. A while ago they had a Terms of Service agreement which
claimed everything hosted on a Yahoo! site (GeoCities division
especially) was property of Yahoo! and all creative works were
relinquished to their ownership, etc. Public outrage surged
against them and they backed down eventually. As I recall, it took
them a few different tries to get the wording acceptable to the
public. Yahoo! took serious public relations damage from that
incident and several others, such as automatically signing all
members up for spam and junk e-mail (unsolicited commercial bulk
as we all know) and the user had the 'responsibility' to get off
the spam lists by changing the preferences (again) even if they
had previously said they did not want to receive the spam. Yahoo!
has continued a pattern of blunders and has a real bone-headed
approach to appeasing their users. It's exactly these type of
idiotic, oppressive and offensive acts that cause people to leave
companies for competitors.” Some are going as far as to
Boycott Yahoo!
now. Yikes.

Read more on Boycotting Yahoo!…