Randomn3ss

Yippee yay, it’s earth day!

Earth day was created in 1970 as a global environmental awareness initiative. It is now observed in 175 countries and supported by progressive action organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Earth Day Network. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

Some great, green + fun websites for earth day and beyond:

1. Buy local foods, support local farms. Visit Local Harvest to find local farms and farmers markets. Go out and pet a goat.
2. Carpool. Check out eRideShare to find local peeps that are looking to share rides. You can even search for someone to carpool across the country with.
3. Remove yourself from junk mail lists. Check out GreenDimes, sign up to be removed from junk mailings and in turn they’ll send you a dollar, plant a tree on your behalf, or send you a free green ‘zine. Everybody wins! (FYI: When you sign up for this they will ask for credit card information to verify your identity. Sort of like what paypal does. It’s been a few months since I signed up and so far no funny business.)
4. Once you go black, you never go back… take a walk on the dark side: Blackle is Google powered and eco-friendly.
5. Recycle your goods and get new ones at freecycle. This site will hook you up with a local group that supports the reuse of anything and everything. Although the site is a little difficult to navigate, once you’re in there seems to be a lot of activity going on in each of the different areas. There’s a slightly loved television stand in York, PA with your name on it.
6. Go zero! The Conservation Fund will help you measure your very own carbon emissions and tell you how many trees you need to plant to offset your consumption. I’ve got 16 trees to plant this year to outweigh my emission consumptions. Damn. I had better get started. You can do it yourself or they allow you to make a donation for whatever the cost comes out to be to plant your trees.
7. Get free stuff (by paying for it) at the Sierra Club. Right now, $15 will get you a membership (usually around $35), and a handy backpack for a thank you gift.
8. Be a green person/dog/baby. I bought my dog these organic treats in the shape of little cupcakes that he refuses to eat from a store I found on Green People. They also have eco friendly and holistic business listings for people too. And their travel section has some really neat stuff.
9. Save on gas. With gas prices expected to hit $4 this summer, be sure to get your daily feul economy tips for some serious advice on saving money at the gas tank and saving the environment.
10. Read up. Eco Chick’s blog is as sassy as it is green. And I don’t use the word *sassy* often. Starre Vartan’s website is funny, smart and earth friendly. And how could a girl named Starre not be cool? Be sure to read her list of what not to do for Earth Day. As she says, because mother earth is a woman. Yeah!

It is true, we all need to be a little greener. Without the earth we won’t be here.

April 22 also happens to be the democratic primary in PA, so get out and vote all you registered Pennsylvanians. Polls are open 7am – 8pm, your local polling place is usually within walking distance to your house. Brody and I will be on our way to our designated voting center bright and early wearing our Obama buttons. See you there.

All over the internet today and even my the front page of the business section of my local paper are articles about Starbucks ditching long-time internet supplier T-Mobile and joining with AT&T to offer free Wi-Fi.

Non-cardholding customers can pay $3.99 for two hours — which, of course, will incent customers to get the debit card. Monthly membership will cost $19.99 per month, and will enable access to AT&T’s 70,000 hot spots in 89 countries.

That quote came from an article titled, Starbucks announces free Wi-Fi. I’m sorry, maybe I’m missing something here, but $19.99 per month for two hours of internet allowance a day or $3.99 for two hours for those of us not in the cool club is not free. As a consumer, I feel that I was misled.

I really wish writers would stick to the facts. There is not a whole lot of difference to the wallet of those who sit in Starbucks and want access to the internet. The only thing changing is who provides it.

I’ve really started to dislike how most drinks from Starbucks taste, but I do like their atmosphere and on occasion have sat there with my laptop and written articles for Randomn3ss or edited photos. I’m lucky though, the Starbucks a few miles from my house is in small strip mall, two doors down is a Panera Bread that offers free Wi-Fi to all customers, just agree to their TOS and deal with them blocking a few sites.

A note to Starbucks:

I, your customers agree to order coffee in those stupid names you give cups instead of small, medium and large. I also agree to pay three and four times the amount for your brown, burned tasting water that you call espresso. I will not agree to pay your bloated price to gain access to the internet when your competition less than 50 feet from you gives it away. Take notes.

I just logged into MySpace today to, well to check MySpace out and saw something kind of unusual an Amber Alert. Back in January I told you that MySpace was going to add Amber Alerts, Right above where it says Hello, Mike Panic (once you are logged in, above your default photo on the left) was a link that said,

ATTENTION: There is an Amber Alert in your area.
Please CLICK HERE to find out more information.

Now I’m very aware that MySpace is far from secure and peoples accounts get hacked or taken over on a daily basis, usually due to password phishing, but I know I didn’t login anywhere unusual. Intrigued, I clicked the link and the screenshot to the right came into view. Please note that the screenshot I took is real, those kids are missing, it is not false information.

This is a great thing for MySpace to offer to utilize this system, there are millions of people online daily and hopefully this will bring more attention to child kidnappings. It is sad to see it actually in effect now though.
Offical Amber Alert website: http://www.amberalert.gov/

As of about 10:50am EST, Google’s web based email Gmail is dead is not responding. What makes it worse is that Google Groups are giving a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to view them. It took more than 10 minutes to get my email to load properly, trying to send a message has resulted in this cryptic message.

Searching Google for this term has proved all but useless, since the first 10 pages of results are links to Google Groups pages, which are dead as well. If someone kicked the plug out of the wall that runs the Gmail & Groups servers, please plug it back in.

AIM, also known as AOL Instant messenger, is still my instant message software of choice; I’ve been using it for what seems like forever and have several hundred contacts in it. Google’s Gmail has a chat feature built in, no need to download software, so this works in a pinch, but only if the person you are talking to has Gmail and is logged into their email account and / or has a chat client that supports Google Talk. But what if you want to talk to someone on AIM but don’t have the client software installed on the computer you are sitting at, say at work, because your network nazi has prevented you from installing time wasting software.

Don’t fear! Google has integrated AIM into their Chat program, allowing you to login to your Gmail account and contact people on your AIM buddy list. No software to download, it just works. They do suggest you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 installed in order to get all the features and functions to work properly, skip IE and go for Firefox.

Radiohead, one of the world’s most popular and critically acclaimed groups, finished their contract with EMI with their 6th release, “Hail to the Thief”, in 2003. The band has just announced that their 7th recording “In rainbows” will be available for download only from their website inrainbows.com on October 10th, for any price you choose, really. The band has refused all offers from record labels and has chosen to release the album on their own with the help of their PR company Nasty Little Men. Live performances of several of the new songs are available on YouTube and can be accessed through this TimesOnline article, which also provides interesting commentary on Radiohead’s “honesty box” album sales. This is yet another blow to the music and recording industry who have been steadily loosing profits to the filesharing programs Limewire , Kazaa (the most downloaded program file on the web… ever), Bearshare or the newer and more complex Bittorrent and it’s affiliated Pirate sites. Warner Music Group reported a record 74% loss in profits last year, while EMI (Radiohead’s old label) managed a 13% increase by harnessing digital download sales of such bands as Coldplay, Gorillaz and Robbie Williams. The future of music is online, but with bands as massive as Radiohead taking on the world of digital downloading without the help of a record company, one wonders if these record companies, as we have known them, have any future at all.

Oh, and go get the album, it sounds amazing.

In my daily job of network administration and IT hell, I have to report a lot of errors to outside vendors for web-based products. Usually this will include a screenshot of some sort to visually show them what I am talking about. Up until a few weeks ago, this usually meant hitting the Print Screen keyboard button (on Windows) and then opening up some sort of image editing program, usually Photoshop. This method works fine, however launching Photoshop can be somewhat slow on my work computer and I needed to crop out my computer’s taskbar and any other information I didn’t want to send to the vendor. Using the Print Screen function also limited to what was seen on the screen alone, even though I’m running 1280×1024, often times I need to capture an entire web page that might be two or three pages worth of scrolling, Print Screen won’t work here.

My solution is Pearl Crescent Page Saver, a Firefox add-on. This small add-on adds an icon to the Firefox toolbar that is not intrusive and can also be controlled by keyboard shortcuts that are 100% user defined. The two main options for screen shots are

• Save image of viewable portion as…
• Save image of entire page as…

These two options will fit just about any need you have for grabbing web-based content. It does not capture your browser, desktop, Windows taskbar, etc., and will save the output in nearly any format you choose, I prefer .png. This eliminates the need for launching Photoshop or other image editor, thus saving you time and making you more productive.

Currently there are two ways to install the add-on, the basic version, which I use, and a paid Pro version that adds the ability to live crop what you need from the web page. I have not yet found a need for this feature and belive that the free version will work for nearly everyone.

Keep in mind that this add-on will only capture what is in your Firefox browser, if you need screen captures of other items, like your desktop or programs running, this won’t help.

Time for some feedback from everyone, what websites do you read on a daily basis? I’ve got about 40-50 websites in my iGoogle (formally Google homepage), most of them I read at least once every few days based on what content is shown. In no real order, my partial list of most commonly read sites:

• Randomn3ss.com
• http://www.iphotoforum.com/forum/
• http://www.consumerist.com/
• http://www.uncrate.com/
• http://forum.thegiant.org//
• http://www.gizmodo.com/
• http://www.lifehacker.com/
• http://www.boingboing.net/
• http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog
• http://www.myspace.com (Sad, I know)
• http://www.wired.com/
• http://digg.com/
• http://popurls.com/ (Previously mentioned here)
• http://www.engadget.com/
• http://www.ohgizmo.com/
• http://www.johnchow.com/
• http://www.doshdosh.com/
• http://www.dailyblogtips.com/
• http://www.problogger.net/ (A must read if you are serious about blogging)
• http://digital-photography-school.com/blog
• http://omgposters.com/
• http://www.gmail.com/ (If that really counts)

The only ones not listed are for site stats for this site and a few of my other sites. There are about 20 more feeds in iGoogle however I only read those articles with headlines that really grab me and don’t have a need to go on a daily basis.

Depending on what kind of mood I’m in, I usually check eBay several times a week for various things as well.

So what sites do you visit on a regular basis?

As any blogger knows, keywords are everything. Popular search terms will increase the chances of a blog garnering attention. But what about Websites that don’t just use keywords, but domain names to increase Web traffic?

A pathetic attempt at attaining Web traffic at the very expense of the thing they wish to eliminate from American culture is NoPornNorthhampton. According to this site:

NoPornNorthampton aims to increase awareness about the impact of porn on people and communities. We support the reasonable regulation of sexually oriented businesses in Northampton, Massachusetts. We call on landlords to exercise sound judgment about whom they rent to.

First of all, never end a sentence with a preposition. Secondly, did they really need to have the word “porn” in the URL? By using the terms “no” and “porn,” they could achieve a Google hit for someone searching for something totally juxtaposed to their goal: “Porn, no lesbians;” “Porn, no animals;” or even worse “Porn, no Peter North.”

There is no reason the site couldn’t have a name like “NorthhamptonforDecency.” Now I’m certainly not against the site using search terms to help increase traffic, but if their goal is to eliminate porn then the name of their site is inexcusable.

On March 2, 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which oversees sound recording royalties paid by Internet radio services, increased Internet radio’s royalty burden between 300 and 1200 percent and thereby jeopardized the industry’s future. At the request of the Recording Industry Association of America, the CRB ignored the fact that Internet radio royalties were already double what satellite radio pays, and multiplied the royalties even further. Artists, listeners, and Webcasters, have formed a coalition to help save Internet radio. The coalition believes strongly in compensating artists, but Internet radio as we know it will not survive under the new royalties.

We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in back-fees alone. The fees are FAR beyond what “traditional” stations are required to pay. Starting May 15th many free internet stations will shut down simply because they can no longer afford to stay on the air.

Recently, there was a by-partisan bill introduced in the House of Representatives that would save countless stations from being forced off of the air. Contact your Representative and tell them to co-sponsor and support this legislation!

May 15th is the day that the new royalties take effect….so act now!

Learn more & make your voice heard: SaveNetRadio.org

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