Technology

Blogger facing charges

Wayne — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:20:18 -0400

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,528031,00...

HARTFORD, Conn. — A New Jersey blogger is due in a Connecticut courtroom to face a charge of inciting violence against state lawmakers.

Harold "Hal" Turner of North Bergen, N.J., is set to appear in Hartford Superior Court on Monday.

The 47-year-old former radio talk show host, who now broadcasts commentary on his Web site, urged his blog readers earlier this month to "take up arms" against Connecticut lawmakers and suggested government officials should "obey the Constitution or die."

Turner was angry over legislation that would have given lay members of Roman Catholic churches in Connecticut more control over their parishes' finances. The bill, brought by state Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor, was withdrawn in March.

Turner's lawyer says the case is about freedom of speech.

I must admit I tend to agree with him. I find tyranny to be the greatest enemy of this nation, and by definition, the enemy to freedom. I find it consistent to suggest Constitutional violations by lawmakers as treasonous actions, punishable by the death penalty in some cases. I do not believe it's time for such justice to be executed by the people at large. Instead, this justice should be incorporated into our rule-of-law. On the other hand, I believe tyranny is growing at a rate that I can reasonably predict armed rebellion in my lifetime. I can certainly empathize with this blogger's anger.

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Twitter

Wayne — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:41 -0400

I find Twitter to be utterly inane, worse than social networking. However, a growing number of people are relying upon Twitter for site updates. Used this way, it could be considered an ignorant man's RSS. To this end, TuscanyCircle now has a way to interface to your Twitter account. When you create a new post (not comments), your Twitter account can be updated to include your post's title and URL.

Just edit your account settings here on TuscanyCircle, and you'll see the Twitter configuration options. Yes, this means the Twitter interface is user-specific. Your own Twitter account is updated with your blog posts. (~~There is no TuscanyCircle-wide tweeting.~~ See here.)

By the way, the "Share" button below posts already supports Twitter if you like to tweet your favorite posts.

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Live Streaming

Wayne — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:02:27 -0400

I've been investigating live streaming (live video broadcasting over the web). I've found several services that offer this for free for individuals and non-profits. I've tested many of them, too. Bambuser.com seems to be among the easiest with the least latency, yet it seems to offer the few features I'd like (e.g., email notifications, public/private selections, ease of use). Not too many support cell-phone webcasting, but Bambuser is one of three I found that supports WinMo. What do you recommend and why?

I have two purposes in mind presently. First, it would be nice to capture and broadcast—as close to real-time as possible—noteworthy events. Such events may be my own arrest or similar abuse of police power, a hilarious observation, or breaking news. This may be arguably a more important application for webcasting (esp. for gov. accountability), but I anticipate this to be far less frequent than my other purpose.

Second, I'd like to broadcast dance performances live (with the requisite permissions, of course). Opening up performances to an online audience may provide opportunities to those who cannot otherwise attend. The webcasting would be via webcam, not cell-phone. To this end, I'd also like recommendations for a good webcam for the MacBook. Yes, it has the built-in iSight, but it's facing the wrong way for shooting dances, and it has no pan and zoom controls. I'd like a USB-connected webcam that works well on the Mac and can be mounted on a tripod, thereby providing panning. Variable-speed, optical zooming with on-board controls (i.e., not via host computer) is preferred, but some kind of zooming capability is pretty much required. Am I asking too much? Or does this put me in a ridiculous price range (e.g., camcorder rather than webcam)? As for audio, I'll take it directly from the board; I have the RCA-to-TRS cable to do it, though I might want an extension for some flexibility in locating my setup.

Thanks for any helpful suggestions you can offer.

UPDATE: Anti-shake would be nice, too, since I'll need to zoom quite a bit (more than 3x, maybe even up to 10x).

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Abuse

Wayne — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:58:43 -0400

TuscanyCircle endures its share of would-be spammers, mostly automated. Hundreds and even thousands are stopped daily by layers of security I have in place. The real problem isn't the spambots, but the moronic crack-pots who have some imaginary bone to pick. These are real people—barely, intellectually speaking—and not bots. Many are stopped because they don't provide a valid email address (required, but not shown, even for anonymous comments). Others simply have their comments deleted. A few I will let through once, as their idiocy speaks for itself. When such idiocy becomes a pattern, though, it becomes abuse and will not be tolerated one iota here.

I'm sure you saw the latest moron to have his comments deleted, because he chose to abuse TuscanyCircle rather than further a discussion, search for truth, or appeal to reason. His email address has also been banned, along with his entire ISP (the latter may be freed in time). I also have several other tools at my disposal to deal with abusers of TuscanyCircle (e.g., various levels of locking down the site). Would-be abusers should take note of just how much information can be gleaned from an IP address, an email address, and server logs. You are revealing more about yourself than you'd like to, if you're going to be an abuser. I am all too happy to defend this site and those who post here legitimately against the likes of you. If abuse gets out of hand, I have no problem defending my property rights face to face. Would-be abusers, consider yourself warned.

As for the rest of you, the legitimate participants, I hope my efforts to keep TuscanyCircle free of noise makes it a more valuable site to you. One of the tools you have at your disposal is the ability to flag content that qualifies as abusive. I'm not big into censoring, per se, so don't bother flagging stuff you find merely offensive (get over it). I've loosely defined abuse above, and if you believe posts are abusive, feel free to flag 'em. I'll review flagged content and take the necessary actions. On the other hand, if you'd like the chance to rail against stupid abusers (pardon the redundancy), let me know, and you can join in the fun of tearing them to shreds.

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Bad Bots

Wayne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:44:54 -0400

I added a trap on TuscanyCircle for bots (e.g., spambots) that don't respect robots.txt. Yahoo's Slurp (a webcrawler used by the Yahoo search engine) hit the trap within five minutes! Apparently, Yahoo is very abusive to websites. They have numerous bots, under many user agent names, crawling the same sites redundantly, eating up valuable bandwidth. Yahoo servers should be sharing the once-crawled info among themselves, but they don't.

Many webmasters have allowed their automated traps, such as the one I just installed, to go ahead and block Yahoo. Why? Yahoo's bots hit the webmasters' sites up to 4 times more often than Google's bots, yet the traffic directed from Yahoo is about a tenth that of Google's. That makes Google about 40 times more effective/efficient than Yahoo.

I am also taking this tact. If Yahoo's abusive bots don't respect robots.txt, then they will be automatically blocked. My own logs indicate only a tiny amount of traffic sent from Yahoo—far too little to justify wasting any of my valuable effort. I won't miss them. Of course, if this means their site-search becomes less valuable, too, I'll just remove them from the list of engines (right-hand menu, just below the local site search).

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Web disk space

Wayne — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:23:35 -0500

Do you know where I can find a whole bunch of disk space online, preferably for free? Google's anticipated GDrive is just around the corner, or so the theory goes, but I'm not even sure if this will meet my needs. I have a hosted website with 500MB of disk space; I need many, many gigabytes (mostly for video files). I found http://hostflv.com, and they seem to be rather inexpensive, but I'm still searching for better.

This space will be used for PIM's training videos. There are lots of them, but access is limited to PIMers. I want them to be linked from PIM's website, but they can be served from anywhere, of course. PIM doesn't have much money, though, so keeping costs down is a big deal.

Any ideas?

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TV Online

Wayne — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:07:54 -0500

Internet Television and Movie Sites

Mobile
------
http://channelchooser.com/mobile
http://chooseandwatch.com/mobile.php
http://www.myeasytv.com/m

Desktop
-------
http://abc.go.com/player
http://www.americafree.tv
http://www.buddytv.com
http://channelchooser.com
http://chooseandwatch.com/
http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
http://filmhill.com/
http://www.flickpeek.com/
http://www.fox.com/fod/
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.ireel.com/
http://www.joost.com/
http://www.mefeedia.com/
http://www.moviesboss.com/
http://moviereleased.com/
http://www.myeasytv.com/
http://mymovees.com/
http://www.onlinefilmshow.com/
http://sharetv.org/watch
http://www.sidereel.com
http://television.aol.com/video
http://www.tv.com/video/full-episodes.html
http://www.tvland.com/fullepisodes/
http://www.tvtube360.com/
http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com
http://www.yidio.com

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Scratch on LCD screen

Charla — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:24:23 -0500

Help needed. Any advice appreciated.

Toddler scratched an LCD screen. I'd like to repair it, but all I'm finding on the net is to either rub petroleum jelly into the scratch, or take it in for repair. I don't want to do either. Do you have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance.

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Cybertyranny

Wayne — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:05:42 -0500

Some tyrants are again pushing to end freedom on the Internet, perhaps the last place any semblance of freedom exists. Along with "hate crimes" legislation criminalizing free speech, patrolling the Internet will spell an end to free speech online.

Here's my favorite part of the tyrants' argument:

This [cybersecurity] is a strategic issue on par with weapons of mass destruction and global jihad.

Folks like me who can properly name our global enemy, Koranic Islam, and our domestic ones, socialists, are "on par with weapons of mass destruction and global jihad," because on our blogs we oppose the government's fantasies. Sweet! I'm a weapon of mass destruction! If only that were true, I'd be a lot more effective in the war for freedom, truth, and holiness.

The tyrants continue:

Civil libertarians may worry that, in a world consumed with terrorism, the protection for civil liberties may take a back seat to national security and public safety.

There's no back seat about it. Civil liberties will be (already have been?) expelled, never to return without another armed revolution.

And then:

But in a world where the Internet citizen is about to embrace cloud computing (or, put another way, in a world where a citizen's most sensitive data may routinely be globally accessible and in the possession of third parties), we have a unique opportunity to proactively decide what the right rules should be.

I have far less concern about third parties being in possession of my most sensitive data--as long as I can still defend my family with lawful force--than I do about the government being in possession of the same information.

Here, they demonstrate their immense wisdom:

We believe that cyberspace cannot be secured without regulation.

Yes, regulation has worked so well in ending crime in the physical world. Our 20,000 gun-related regulations have really done their job to prevent violent crime (as opposed to the abundant evidence proving freedom [for gun-owners], not regulation, reduces crime). I'm sure we can expect the same bang-up job in cyberspace.

They conclude with this wonderful example of doublethink:

Our discussions made it clear that government programs must provide security while also protecting privacy and civil liberties. Greater security must reinforce citizens' rights, not come at their expense.

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Ads on TuscanyCircle

Wayne — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:12:30 -0500

I'd like to hear your feedback on the idea of putting ads on TuscanyCircle. I ran a test yesterday with Google's AdSense, putting an ad block on the right (below the Shout Box). It was easy enough to set up once I created an AdSense account. I rather doubt it would generate any serious income; I'd count myself lucky if it ever paid for my website costs.

I know most of my regular readers/users have Firefox and likely AdBlock. I use it myself and had to disable it to see TC's ads. I certainly have no problem with this. While I don't have any problem with advertising, philosophically speaking, ads tend to be mere annoyances to me, so I'm happy to tune them out, skip them, or hide them whenever possible. I wouldn't begrudge others the same freedom.

I've seen lots of articles on the ethics of using AdSense on Christian sites. Most seem fairly neutral about it, but a rare few reject AdSense specifically (because of Google's left-leaning). I've not found any Christian version of AdSense, though, but that would certainly be nicer as far as the content presented in any ads. Advertising itself, though, does not seem to be rejected by Christian ethicists generally.

What do you think about:
- Advertising in general, philosophically speaking?
- Advertising on websites/blogs?
- Google's AdSense?
- Ads on TuscanyCircle?
And by all means, point me to any AdSense alternative with a Biblical bent. Even if I end up not advertising on TC, it would be good info to have.

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