This is a long one, but it is really a pet peeve of mine and I don’t know how I haven’t written about this before…

I’m sure you all know what this junk is… it’s software that comes installed already on the computer when you buy a pre-built system from companies like Acer, Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc.  The manufacturers often get paid large amounts of money to pre-install this crapware on your shiney new computer, or sometimes it is software direct from the manufacturer that they think will help you or be of some benefit.

Unfortunately this is hardly EVER the case and more often then not the software does more damage then it does good.

The 2 biggest offenders I have ran in to during my countless dealings with all of the major brands have been Lenovo and Acer.  Acer shouldn’t be that big of a surprise as they are generally a shit company.  They put out PC’s with shitty, cheap components which will fail, and even when you’re paying a premium for their gaming machine line, Acer still has to recall them all because they could potentially burn down your house, and their support is absolutely worthless.  I’ll save the Acer rant for another time though.  So really it should be no surprise when Acer installs software that will cause your machine to eventually bluescreen whenever booted normally (not in safe mode, thankfully).

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I’m sure you’re following the situation more closely over at http://blog.boxee.tv/ but I’m glad to see Boxee has made Hulu work on their software again.
I’m glad they just didn’t lay down and say “oh well”.
Content providers need to learn the consumer will enjoy content they way the consumer wants to, despite what restrictions the content providers try to arbitrarily enforce.

Now if Boxee would just release current Windows builds 🙁

Check out the new beautiful iPhone-formatted version of my site just for mobile Safari!

After an hour of messing around with my logo because my dumbass didn’t save the original source file when I originally made it, I got it looking just the way I want it. (And I’ve saved source files this time so if I ever need to play with my logo again it won’t be such a gigantor pain in the ass)

To see the special site you don’t need to do anything special.  Just browse my site from Safari on any iPhone or iPod Touch and you will automatically be served up the pretty version, complete with ajax-style menus 😎

It will even create a pretty icon for your iPhone’s home screen if you choose to add a link to my site to it (I’ll probably be the only person to ever do this, haha)

Screen shots after the break…

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It was a mildly chilly November night when 3 friends and I camped outside a Sam’s Club to get our hand on the first XBox 360’s.  Some of us sold them on Ebay, some of us sold our spot in line, some of us bought and kept the 360.

Last night, the 360 I bought that cold, tired morning in Novemeber 2005 died on me.  She was striken down by the infamous red-ring of death, virtually gauranteed to take down all first run 360’s.  Of course it was my rotten luck that it died barely 3 months out of the extended 3 year warranty Microsoft had enacted.

We had many good times together, countless games played alone, online, and with friends.  Countless DVD’s and HD-DVD’s watched.  She will be missed.

This morning I managed to track down one of the new Jasper 360’s and have got it all set up.  This new model runs cooler, uses less power, is quiter, has HDMI output, a new CPU (from the Falcon 360), and now a new GPU.  This is supposed to once and for all finally fix the 360’s red ring problem caused from excessive heat from the old CPU and GPU’s.

Only time will tell I suppose.

While I knew that my 360’s days were numbered, it is still disappointing that I bought a console that only lasted 3 years.  I have an original Nintendo Entertainment System that is over 20 years old that still [mostly] works to this day.  My SNES, N64, and Game Cube all still work flawlessly as well.   In my opinion Microsoft should have given a life time coverage against the specific red ring issue to all products effected.  Microsoft sold a defective product and they should stand behind their mistakes.  I realize that extending the RROD warranty coverage to 3 years was a huge cost to MS, but IMO it doesn’t make it right.   Look at me… I supported 360 from day 1 and what do I get?  Nothing but being $200 poorer for needing to replace my known defective console.

I leave you with a few memories of one of the last running Launch Day consoles I knew of…

Well, if you haven’t noticed or heard yet, Hulu streaming has been disabled in Boxee.

I’m not going to go over WHY it happened, as it’s pretty well explained by the Boxee and Hulu teams here:

Boxee on the Hulu Situation

Hulu “Doing Hard Things”

What I will do is offer my opinion on it all… after all, that is the point of a blog, isn’t it?

Both Hulu and Boxee are amazing products.  Hulu brings together MANY different content providers in to one place and offers great streaming services for all this content in one nice, clean, easy to use site.  Boxee is a cutting edge Media Center style application that transforms almost any computer in to a very sleek meda-centric device.  While Boxee [on Windows] is still VERY alpha (read: buggy as hell, crashes constantly), there was one thing I found it actually did really well, which was it’s Hulu integration.  You could search and browse all of Hulu’s shows directly from inside Boxee.

It was a very cool feature, and the main reason I didn’t uninstall Boxee after it’s 10th time crashing while trying to scan my media from my network.

But as of today, that feature is disabled.  The decision was not up to Boxee or Hulu, but rather the content providers (NBC, Fox, etc…)

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I have changed the way my blog handles/creates permalinks to my articles.
The new format is much more search engine friendly, and looks better IMO.
My site was having a few issues for an hour or so earlier while I hammered out the precise apache rewrite rules to make it do what I was wanting to.
Everything should be working fine now though.
I also updated the time… apparently it has been an hour off forever.
Carry on.

Seriously… what the hell is up with this shit Google?
I have now noticed this on all 3 machines I use on a regular basis… my desktop, my laptop, and my work computer. They all have at least 1 (if not more) GoogleUpdate.exe running on them, and it is hard to get rid of. Even if you end the process and rename the file, the next time you run a google app, like Google Earth, or Google Chrome, the program will reinsert the file on your system!
This is the kind of shit that really bugs me. Programs that feel the need to run background processes WITH OUT any obvious consent being given to them that are 100% unnecessary for day-to-day tasks.
There is absolutely NO reason why there needs to be a google update serving running in the background of every machine. This is horse shit and I’m done putting up with it. Firefox doesn’t need to do this and it stays up to date just fine.
Because of the GoogleUpdate.exe plague I have seen I will now be uninstalling any google products I have installed on any of my machines.
Good job google. First you change your iGoogle page all around and force me to leave that. Now you infect my machines with your constantly-running update service, and I remove all traces of your programs from my computer.  What next?  Your search results going to turn to shit?  Or have they already?  Maybe I should start trying out other search engines?
Good day Google. I see you’ve thrown your motto of “don’t be evil” right out the damn window, haven’t you?

Starting the first week in January, I started noticing my personal server getting pounded with requests looking for roundcube or mantis installs on my system. After doing a bit of research at the Internet Storm Center I realized it was a new vulneribility in these programs and these script kiddies were just scanning servers for the existance of these specific directories.   In the last couple weeks I have been scanned at least 25 times… so I decided to have a little fun with the script kiddies.  Now instead of getting an error 404 page, they will get… well, here is the code.  I’m sure you’ll see where their scripted scanners will be getting sent to 🙂

Redirect /nonexistenshit http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mail http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bin http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /rc http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /roundcube http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /webmail http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mantisbt http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /tracker http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugtracker http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugtrack http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /support http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bug http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugs http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mantis http://www.fbi.gov/