Tangled up in Purple » email

Linkeracy 12 October 2008

nix — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:20:50 +0000

Test the strength of your email security – CNET check out how easy it is for someone else to recover YOUR password.

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Lifehacker’s hivemind give you the best five media converters but …

UPDATE: MPEG StreamClip from Squared Five is an amazingly excellent tool to

to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices.

This is the best tool we have ever found for converting DVD files into a format that can be used in WIndows Movie Maker.

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Have a look at Adeona to install opensource laptop tracking software. This free tool, developed by the University of Washington, will periodically send off an IP address update. If you are on a Mac laptop with an iSight camera there is an option for you as well.

According to the site

Adeona has three main properties:

Private: Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device.
Reliable: Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring retrievability of recent location updates.
Open source and free: Adeona’s software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations are secret, the tracking system’s design is not.

There are some really interesting philosophical discussions about what is tracked with this software.

Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Worth a look I think.

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My own instructions for uploading and embedding video files using WordPress 2.5, 2.6

(N)ettiquette

nix — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:11:42 +0000

According to the Wikipedia the RFCs (Request for Comments) “are a series of memoranda encompassing new research, innovations, and methodologies applicable to Internet technologies”. Many of them are now obselete but there are a few which still have something to offer.

One that is still important, despite not being updated since 1995, is RFC 1855. This is one with a whole lot of guidelines about electronic communications. It’s a sort of Miss Manners guide to (n)ettiquette.

From the section on email,

Unless you have your own Internet access through an Internet provider, be sure to check with your employer about ownership of electronic mail. Laws about the ownership of electronic mail vary from place to place.
Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.
Respect the copyright on material that you reproduce. Almost every country has copyright laws.
If you are forwarding or re-posting a message you’ve received, do not change the wording. If the message was a personal message to you and you are re-posting to a group, you should ask permission first. You may shorten the message and quote only relevant parts, but be sure you give proper attribution.
Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one.
A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

Are these guidelines of any use? I think that they are and I think we can adopt them into our blogging philosophies as well. The interweb is not a free for all for educators.

Why I Won’t Join Plaxo, et al

nix — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:35:06 +0000

From Boing Boing:

In the popup that appeared, the NoScript extension was blocking some JavaScript. Clicking on the button to enable the code revealed that the JavaScript was hosted at — gasp — Plaxo (no linkee for them), the company that enlists its users to send spamalicious address book related emails. So from the looks of it, when you share a YouTube video with your friends, you may be unwittingly adding your friends’ email addresses to Plaxo’s databases. Slick. Or, should I say, slimy. At least it appears so. There is no confirmation that this is what is happening, but it certainly does look suspicious.

I have always been suspicious of the companies that wish to ‘backup’ your contact details. The very fact that they ask you to spam your friends to invite them to join up worries me.

Airset may be a better, safer option.

UPDATE: BoingBoing has a rebuttal from Plaxo.

Your Inbox

nix — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 06:51:17 +0000

Your inbox is a metaphor for your life.

I read the article and was immediately consumed with guilt and depression.

Clean Up Your Inbox

Clean Up Your Inbox

nix — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:48:52 +0000

From 43 Folders.

For those of us who occasionally get a bit slack in the Inbox department.