September 2005 Archives

   Ah, air conditioning. One of the greatest things that make mankind even lazier. Down here in the south it is almost a necessity. Sadly, the one that we have in the apartment I'm in is exceptionally crappy. Its 81 degrees, Fahrenheit, in here and probably only slightly above 90 degrees outside. We even recently had it repaired, but that caused it work even worse..
   I would like to believe that I'm quite tolerant to extreme temperatures. Of course, we all have our limits. It was around 76 degrees when I went to sleep last night. That in itself wasn't really that bad, but it was enough to cause me to be somewhat uncomfortable. I fear it will be the same for tonight.
   Not to worry though. Winter lies just over the horizon. When it finally arrives we'll realize that our central heating is also crap. Ah, the wonders of technology...

   After observing my computer for some time, I decided to start keeping a log of its various faults. Don't get me wrong, my computer is getting a little 'long in the tooth', so to speak. Problems are bound to start occuring. Hell, its almost 6 years old now. Despite this, it proves to be as useable as ever, thanks to the various upgrades and such I have done. But enough of this.
   The whole point of this experiment is to see how many errors, including kernel panics, crop up over a period of a month. I've created a seperate page to hold this 'Problem Log' as well. There you can go to see what's going on.

This is just a update to inform you of a few things.

1.    I have two new wallpapers avaliable in the wallpaper gallery (on the right...). One is a Fullmetal Alchemist that I made. It was a rather quick one; so, its not really up to my usual level. Its been a while since I made a wallpaper. Nevertheless, the second wallpaper avaliable is of a famous work by the artist Katsushika Hokusai titled 'In the well of the great wave of Kanawa'. I believe that is the title of it.

2.   The second, and final, thing I have to tell you is that I'm almost done with my 'fan site' galleries. They are avaliable on the right, underneat the wallpaper gallery menu. They might not be up for another day or so, but they are almost done. The whole point of this is a place for mini-articles on things that I like. I felt that they deserved there own spot on my site. So, there it is.

Just a quick update informing you of a few things, eh?

   Even while I had updated to Mac OS X, I still used iCab as my main browser for some time. The main reason behind this was iCab's unparalleled ability to filter out ads. These ads could even range from the common ad images to even ad Java apps. No other browser could match this feat. Except until Firefox rolled around.

Firefox in itself didn't offer this nice feature, but an extension to it did. This extension was cleverly named AdBlock. For this reason alone, I even prepared to start using Firefox as my main means of viewing the internet. A quick search, though, found that someone else liked this ability to block ads and prefered to use Safari.

This is when I came upon the wonderful piece of hack-work that is SafariBlock. The author of this great creation was inspired by Firefox's AdBlock extension and wished to give Safari the same power.

After installing it and restarting Safari, I was now able block images by their url. In many ways this is quite similar to iCab's ability to block ads; of course, it comes no where near the full abilities of iCab's filter manager. But the usage of the (*) character made the trasition of my settings from iCab very easy. I already had a long list of ad servers ready.

The change was immediatly noticeable. I visited a few sites to check out its effect and there was nothing where ads used to reside. Nothing. Nada. Ha ha. I'm not finished though. These ADs are a wiley bunch. You can never let your guard down. Hell, they've started to find ways through many a browser's anti-pop-up defences.

When you use this, feel no guilt. There will be people who say that poor websites need their ads to make money. Boo hoo. I don't click on 'em and they only hurt my eyes. How are they making money off of that? Do they enjoy hurting me or something? If you are looking for software like this, then the advertisers aren't making money off of you anyway. Go for it. Enjoy a partially more ad free internet then ever before...