Posts Tagged ‘internet’
The procrastinator’s nature
I just started using LeechBlock yesterday, and already I know why “How can I block Google’s cached versions of sites as well?” is in the FAQ.
LeechBlock is wonderful. (Install)
There are no results on Google for “LeechBlock saved my life”, but there are testimonials like “Leech block has changed my life”, “Leechblock just saved my life”, and “This application is saving my thesis, and improving my social life”.
If LeechBlock isn’t working for you, you can try more extreme solutions like (on Mac) Freedom and SelfControl. (Found via this post.) But for me, right now, with my current level of work and self-awareness and other devices being employed, LeechBlock seems to be just about sufficient. (Although I do wish Safari were an even worse browser than it is.)
Semi-unrelatedly, also worth reading is Aaron Swartz’s experiment involving one month offline: Before/After.
One of the amazing miracles of the internet
From Stevey’s blog rants:
Heck, some don’t even read at all. It’s one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They can’t read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them commenting all the time in my blogs: “I didn’t actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same…” Lovely.
Very true. Also, makes me wonder: Am I one of the read-only people?
Yahoo Answers
There’s an article on Slate about Yahoo Answers. It hits Slashdot, and soon people dig up SomethingAwful’s three–part series, sample questions, and remarks about the model and the name (as well as random stuff).
Slashdot rots your brain.
Yahoo Answers will kill you.
The Cure for Information Overload
This post sums up my situation perfectly.
It’s probably even more appropriate now than it was a year-and-a-half ago.
Net neutrality
An issue important enough for Google to have a page about it.
Read that page.
Watch this 10-minute video:
Read the rest of this entry »
Probably the most interesting blog I’ve seen
I’m afraid to look at it, because I expect I’ll get tempted into spending hours and hours reading all the old posts: Strange Maps
Restarting Airport from the command line
Something is wrong with the network in my dorm; DHCP negotiation sometimes fails (or takes a long time). So the usual thing to do is to turn Airport off and on, and hope it works this time.
To do this from the commandline, here’s a simple trick I found:
Go to System Preferences → Network, then in Location choose a New Location and create one called “Airport-Off” (or anything you like). In the Show menu choose Network Port Configurations and turn off Airport.
After this, you can do scselect Airport-Off to turn it off, and scselect 0 (for Automatic — or choose whatever other location you want) to turn it on.
Edit [2011-10-03]: You can also do this:
sudo networksetup -setairportpower "Airport" off sudo networksetup -setairportpower "Airport" on
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”
The popular phrase, and an article about it. The image can be found easily, here for example.
Online LaTeX
Someone has collected a useful bunch of links: Using LaTeX in WordPress » Online LaTeX
(Pasted from somewhere, to be cleaned up –)
For typesetting mathematics, there is LaTeX, of course. But what does one do next with the LaTeX file, if you intend the document to be viewable online? Using PDF files for online viewing is frowned upon. There is simply nothing better than HTML, and so one might consider using latex2html. This, however, usually uses images for almost everything leading to huge files and slow-loading pages. Much better in this regard TtH, which tries to make the mathematics display in plain HTML by hook or by crook, but this ends up looking ugly and defeats what was probably one of the major goals in using LaTeX in the first place. One could use MathML — writing a MathML document by hand is absurdly painful, but there is TtM which can convert LaTeX to MathML. But MathML creates XML (not HTML) files, and thus doesn’t plug into general text easily; it also requires the user to have some specific fonts installed, etc., and if a browser (like IE6) fails to display it correctly, the result is a mess. I just discovered that there is ASCIIMathML, which seems to handle everything very well. LaTeX-style formulas work (one can also use their simpler language, it appears). It still needs the fonts to be installed and everything, but when it fails (if JavaScript is disabled, for example), the user will simply see the “source code” of the mathematical text, which can still be readable.
Lauri Apple calls it “Twittarded”, and says
After using Twitter, I want to make a Website that consists of a plain white screen. The site does not allow you to do or communicate anything — all you can do is just look at it and develop an overwhelming feeling of boredom that will hopefully inspire you to get up and express yourself in the three-dimensional world.
She also links to this dull blog. That blog is incredible. The number of comments on each post even more so.
ssh-keygen as another user
To set up an ssh-key usually, type
ssh-keygen -t rsa, hit [Enter] a few times, type
cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, and add entries from other places where you might have created a key, to the same authorized_keys.
To set it up so you can log in as another user (called, say, user2)
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Enter a different file to save (id_for_user2, say), and blank passphrase.
Now add the contents of the file id_for_user2.pub to user2‘s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.
Oh, and when you want to login as that user, you will have to specify that you want to use that file, like
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_for_user2 user2@hostname. For long commands like this, it’s best to make an alias (put alias sshasuser2='ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_for_user2 user2@localhost' in your ~/.bashrc if all you want is a password-less replacement for su - user2). You can also give the id_for_user2 file to others, and they can also login as user2 without a password simply by typing the command above.
Got it from this linux.debian.user newsgroup post.
The Lumber Room 