you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Today, I made a healthy choice by selecting a can of corn with no added salt. I like to put corn in my ramen. Late night munchies attacked and my can of corn was all I could think of.

….man! oh man, salt-free corn sucks! I had forgotten since the last time I bought no-salt corn how much it sucked. This is the last time I choose healthy corn! (..or until my next memory lapse). The choices were: 1% USRDA of sodium per serving (healthy corn) vs. about 15% per serving. There’s 3.5 servings per 15 oz can, so I put the salted one back on the shelf. The salt-added corn, ironically, was cheaper by a few cents.

The salt accentuates the sweetness of the corn, and I think it enhances the texture too. The salt-free one just tastes bland and not very good eats. Adding salt now doesn’t improve the taste since the corn is cooked in a broth of its own juices. Putting corn in ramen is something I learned in Japan. Hokkaido, the northern island, grows a lot of corn and their Hokkaido-style ramen includes regional specialties like corn and butter. I remember not liking butter ramen, but I might need to try that again. Mmm… sodium AND saturated fat? How can you go wrong?

I’m seriously eying the smoked pork knuckles sitting in the fridge. I bought them for soup stock, but they look like they could use a friend right about now.

15 cents per message. That’s how much Cingular charges me to send or receive a text message. Or “The New AT&T”. Whatever they want to call themselves these days. They spent millions of dollars spinning off Cingular into its own company and now have spent millions re-educating/rebranding themselves.

15 cents! WTF?! That’s insanely expensive. It used to be 10 cents when it was still Cingular. In Japan, it’s 1 cent. How many text msgs do I send a month in the US? ZERO.

Cingular could’ve spent some of that money wasted on their branding and rebranding back to AT&T on providing better service at lower cost.

I was poking around YesAsia and this was just so hilariously bad, I had to write about it before I forgot. At first, I didn’t even notice the name: Pensonic. I can’t believe YesAsia is selling this completely obvious fugazi product. When you actually go to their site, the font is the exact same as NEC.

no copyright infringement here, sir

Their copyright date ends at 2005. When you do enter their site, whatever bullshit script they’re throwing you hangs Firefox for several seconds until FF gives you a warning to either stop the script or continue. The site just looks like crap and takes forever to load, with all the ugly dirty-looking JPEGs.

Apparently, they’re based out of Malaysia, and Pensonic is meant to be “Penang” + “sonic”. I’m all for region free DVD players, especially ones with DivX support and USB port and SD reader. The options here are endless for a hacker like me, but come on guys! Pensonic? Couldn’t you have picked a less fake name? I would buy the Penang + sonic story if your font didn’t look like NEC’s. It also doesn’t help that the founder’s name sounds like “Chew Wang Cock”.

For $50, I’d gladly buy it and give it a try. For $100, not so much. I’m talking about the player… not Chew Wang Cock.

“A teenage schoolboy was pulled around his classroom on a lead and spanked by a stripper after a birthday surprise blunder.”

Awesome!

In a previous entry, I had incorrectly written that you can’t turn off icon preview. I just found out how.

Finder > View > Show View Options

then uncheck the box that says Show icon preview.

There’s still no direct way to turn off the much-reviled transparent file bar though. You have to resort to some hacks or installing a third-party download. Hopefully Apple listens to customers and releases an update to let people turn this off.

Wow! I don’t know how South Park keeps getting away with stuff like this! :) Their ’sodes are already controversial and offensive enough (if you’re the victim of their jokes, that is), but this one goes for broke with potential copyright lawsuits. There are just so many characters in these episodes that I’m amazed they don’t get sued 50x over. Making their appearance are:

Care Bears
Totoro from Hayao Miyazaki’s anime
Ronald McDonald, also in a Saving Private Ryan parody
beasts from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” books
Optimus Prime from the Transformers
Aslan from Chronicles of Narnia
Frankenstein
Flash Gordon
Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street
Jason Vorhees from Friday the Thirteenth
Orko from He-Man, Master of the Universe
the Alien from Aliens
Q-bert from the 80’s video game
Snarf from Thundercats
Headless Horseman from Sleepy Hallow
the Predator from Predator
Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul, Stormtroopers from Star Wars
Pinhead from Hellraiser
Goro from Mortal Kombat
orcs possibly from Warcraft
Sagat and Akuma from Street Fighter
Dr. Fu Manchu (I think)
Mario and Wario (except their hats say E and V)
The Joker from Batman
Strawberry Shortcake
characters from Tron
Green Goblin from Spiderman series
Morpheus from the Matrix
Wonder Woman
Popeye
assorted Greek and Roman mythological creatures and deities, including Zeus, the Minotaur, Medusa, Cyclops
Jesus

There’s just so many in here! It’ll take hours of freeze frame fun to sort them all out. Some are really obscure.

Talking about shoddy workmanship and bad customer service! My “repaired” XBOX lasted a whole 2 weeks before giving up the ghost, so now I have to send it back to Microsoft a second time. Well, at least it didn’t die before the Sox vs the Rockies game.

I invited a few friends over to watch the game and was worried I’d be Boxless that evening. Only one of us really cared about baseball. The rest of us just wanted to hang out, drink some beer, and have some pizza. Just a few days earlier, I booted the thing up and got a scary black screen with an E67 error. In typical unhelpful Microsoft fashion, no other information is displayed about what caused it. After some cursing and looking on Microsoft’s site to see what E67 was (hard drive failure), I reset it and the error never came back. Strangely, the BOX was running completely fine the night of the game, and we got in a few rounds of Halo 3 after we decided not to watch the rest of the game. Boston was winning.

The next morning, I powered on the XBOX and got all kinds of badness. The spinning X orb animation froze, the sliding panels of the dashboard froze, putting in a game froze. Every time I reset it, the system froze within a minute of powering up. The console refused to acknowledge the controllers, and I got the 3 red rings intermittently. So, I got fed up with it, cursed Microsoft some more, and waited until Monday morning for customer service to open.

My prepaid box came 5 days later, and now it’s on its way back to TX for repairs. The tech support guy said he flagged my ticket high priority, whatever that means. Hopefully, that means “stop screwing this guy over with dead XBOXes and give him one of the re-engineered units with better heat sinks.” My brother got a new one from Microsoft, with a manufacture date of September 2007, so I’m crossing my fingers.

In the never-ending war against banner ads, pop-ups, and other annoying marketing garbage, you have a very powerful ally: your router! This tutorial will explain how to block ads at the hardware level, your first line of defense.

You may have tried popup blockers and plugins for Firefox or IE, but none of these are very effective. I’ve tried all kinds of popup killers over the years, but many ads still found their way to my screen. Eventually, these plugins all became useless as sneaky advertisers and spammers find new ways to thwart the blocking mechanisms. Worse yet, are the countless fake popup blockers out there that trick people into installing them. They themselves are malware and open the user’s PC to a flood of attacks.

The problem with ad blocking software (the legitimate ones) is that they block ads through software, at the PC level. You’ve already let the ads through your front door. All these ads, in addition to just being downright annoying, steal bandwidth from you because they take time to download. They also take up space on your hard drive as part of your browser cache. The other problem with software-based blocking is that you need to repeat the procedure on all your computers. To solve these problems, what you need is to stop the ads from even coming in through your door, with your router/firewall, by defining some simple blocking rules and a blacklist.

By configuring your router to blocking domains or keywords, you’re stopping the junk right at your front door, and preventing it from ever entering your network. These ads never reach your PC. As a side benefit, you’ll get a slight boost in page download speed because you’re not downloading ads anymore.

Most, if not all, routers let you block sites by keywords or URL. I have yet to see a router that doesn’t. Given the differences in manufacturers, I can’t tell you exactly where the configuration screen is, but the procedure should be the same for all brands.

1. Use your browser to login to your router. The IP address is usually 192.168.1.1 or something similar. The first 2 sets of numbers will always be 192.168. The last 2 sets will vary by manufacturer. To find out, look in your manual or doubleclick the network icon in your system tray. (It looks like a computer.)
   

2. Then click the Support tab. Default Gateway is what you’re looking for. Type this into your browser.
   
3. Once you’ve logged in, look for where you can block sites or keywords. On a Netgear, it’s called “Block Sites”. Fancy, eh?
   
4. Enter in all the offending sites and keywords here. You can use wildcards to define blocked words or sites, or partial word matches. eg:
   • *.doubleclick.* - will block all subdomains and subnets of DoubleClick. anything with doubleclick in the name will get blocked, like adserver1.doubleclick.net, or www.doubleclick.com
   • ads*.* - will block all servers with starting with the word ads, like adserver.net, adsyndicate.com
5. Save and apply changes and you should be all done. Fewer ads!

New ad servers are always popping up, or being obscurely named, and techniques of evading blockage are always being developed by unscrupulous advertisers, so you’ll need to update your blacklist often. Some of the keywords on my banlist are:

*.2mdn.net
*.zedo.*
adrevolver
addynamix
akamai.net
bannerfarm
bannerid
casalemedia
clickshield.net
clickTag
google_ad
kontera.*
yieldmanager

I’ve also added some keywords for specific sites I visit often, and you can too. I’ve blocked a few Javascript files that populate pages with ads.

Adding google_ad and kontera.* will stop those pages that display double-underlined links with annoying popup context ads when you mouse over them (called in-text advertising, context ads, or ContentLink). Their ploy is to blend in with normal links, making it harder to distinguish from real links, so you click them unknowingly and get served an ad instead of what you really want. Advertisers like IntelliTXT and Kontera have pissed me off for a very very long time with this, so everyone should be blocking these guys. Death to their business model! I also hate sites with Flash overlays that interrupt what you’re reading and force you to look for the X button to close them. I hate intrusion and any kind of push advertising (anything you didn’t “pull” - e.g. unsolicited ads or ads you didn’t initiate).

With more people doing hardware blocking, the net will become a better place for user. Spread the word. Power to the people!

I’m always wary of new product releases. Often, they are buggy and early adopters get to be unofficial beta-testers by virtue of being the first people to use the product in real life. With Leopard, it’s no different and there are already plenty of reports of bugs and security issues. But breaking my “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule, I pre-ordered the family pack from Fry’s when it went on sale 2 weeks ago and eagerly waited for the box to arrive. I also ordered two overpriced Lexar stainless steel USB drives (what can I say? I’m a fashion whore) and 4 HD DVDs to make me feel less guilty about Fry’s $6+ base shipping fee.

When the box arrived, I thought Fry’s sent me an incomplete order. For the number of items I ordered, I expected a box twice the size (or maybe I’ve gotten use to wasteful shipping from other retailers). Where was the rest of it? I thought Fry’s had shipped OS X separately because software boxes I’m used to seeing in stores take up quite a bit of room. I was surprised to find that the OS X box is only slightly thicker than a CD case. It’s same size as the disc bundles box that comes with new Macs.

I have to praise Apple for their eco-friendlier approach to packaging design. The box is made entirely of paperboard. The dustcover has some nice reflective coating and looks like the milky way, to go with Apple’s new aurora borealis look… which looks suspiciously like Vista’s aurora borealis. The manual is printed in full color, with lots of pictures, unlike the dull computer manuals we’re all used to seeing. It might actually be fun to read, if you’re into reading manuals before you use products. It’s also printed in the USA, which is a nice touch especially these days when almost nothing is. The DVD is pressed in the US and Canada. Maybe this is a subtle political move by Apple to impress the idea of quality upon people, considering how highly anticipated Leopard is… or maybe it’s not so subtle, given the spate of problems with Made in China goods in the last year (tainted dog food and animal feed, lead paint on toys), or the minor Chinese iPod factory scandal last year.

The manuals that came with my iMac and both MacBooks are printed in China. They’re on thinner, coarser paper, and the printing (in B&W) looks really lousy. I immediately got the feeling that Apple dropped a few notches from their long-held attention to quality. When I bought my G4 years ago, everything felt so impeccably designed and packed. The paper quality was nice back then. For my MacBook Pro, the plastic slip bag that the DVD comes in had one corner folded over. This is a small detail, but it shows a little of the decline of quality as Apple tries to shave costs by moving their manufacturing to China. (Previous Macs were made in Mexico or Singapore). Given my long history of Mac ownership, it’s disappointing to see Apple trade off quality for cost savings.

So on with the show. Here are my impressions of Leopard, from the few hours that I’ve had it running.

One immediate thing I noticed is the longer load time (it also replaced my Ansel Adams landscape wallpaper without asking, which I didn’t appreciate). The login screen takes several seconds longer to show up, and the desktop takes much longer to display. I even get the dreaded spinning beachball every time I login! (Though it probably doesn’t help that I have 50 items on the desktop.) Leopard does something new that Tiger didn’t. It shows ALL your media files in preview mode. If you have a picture, a movie, PDF, etc, it will show a thumbnail of it. I don’t like this at all. Not only because it is a drain on resources, but I use the standard icons to quickly identify files by media type. I looked for a way to turn this off, but didn’t find it through the System Preferences. Speaking of which, I don’t like the new icon for it either. It a bunch of clockworks. I liked the old “light switch” icon, used in OS X since 10.1.

I’m sad to say that Leopard is looking more like XP/Vista/Office in major ways, starting with this goofy, half-assed alpha blending thing that Microsoft likes to use in Vista. For people not family with graphics geek terminology, transparency is called “alpha”. The File menu bar is where you’ll notice this first. In Tiger and before, this bar was completely opaque. Now it’s an unattractive partially transparent bar that makes text harder to read and I want to turn it off. System dialogs and menus now all do this partial transparency and blurring effect, which is not only useless, it’s detrimental. This, I can definitively say, Apple did purely for ornamental reasons and it detracts from the usability and performance of the OS. The foreground window is milky and the window behind it is partially visible, with some Gaussian blur effect done to it that makes things look out of focus. This is really unnecessary and just a waste of processor cycles, not to mention being very distracting. Another thing I wish I could turn off.

Gone also is the brushed steel texture, replaced by gradient fills. It’s really looking a lot like Microsoft Word 2005 (or whatever version it is that does this). There’s a lot more of the washed-out blue/grey color and the new folder icons are also a major step backwards, in my opinion. They look less colorful and less tight than Tiger. Not only have they been desaturated, they’ve been uglified, and remind me of X-Windows icons from my college days. Instead of looking bold and striking, the icons now are low contrast milquetoast pussies.

One improvement however, is the label of programs in the dock. There’s a speech bubble around it which increases contrast and makes it easier to read. There are no doubt plenty of improvements and nice new features to be discovered, but my first impressions of OS X is that these two major things I talked about really take away from my enjoyment of the new OS.