Archive for the ‘resources’ Category

Dan schools us on eviction in 15 steps…

Friday, May 28th, 2010

My buddy Dan sent this commentary regarding an earlier post.  I yakked about the sadness inherent in seeing a household’s contents turned out onto the berm (hence the image).  Click past the jump to read a landlord’s fifteen-step guide to getting rid of your tenants.  Also, keep in mind that Dan isn’t known for his landlordly compassion.  Case in point, Step 13:

13)  Hound them.  Make phone calls, do skip traces, internet searches, whatever it takes.  Get that judgment satisfied and make them cry.

~~~~~~~~~~

Professor Dan is ERIWA’s consultant on property maintenance and law, as well as chemistry and online golf.  His hobbies include facial hair experiments and taunting people on the Yahoo Answers forum.  Casual observers sometimes mistake us for siblings.

~~~~~~~~~~

Prof. Dan: Time to go, deadbeats.

Prof. Dan: "Time to go, deadbeats."

Dan Sez:

While eviction is never pleasant, it should be noted that both parties in the matter are equally inconvenienced.  The landlord doesn’t have his rent money and the debtors/tenants have to move.  Ultimately, the process comes down to 15 steps:

1)  The tenant refuses or otherwise shirks to pay the rent.

2)  A period of time passes as the landlord endeavors to give the tenant the “benefit of the doubt,” assuming that promises made will result in cash in hand.  During this time, shared utilities (should this situation exist) are still being used and bills are accruing for the landlord with no offsetting remuneration.

3)  The landlord gets fed up and sues the tenant/s in civil court, paying the 100 dollar filing fee and 20 dollar service fee in order to remove the non-paying resident/s.

4)  Time passes, bills accrue.

(more…)

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Testing the new comment-spam plugin…

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

First, a little bait:

You know, there are few things I enjoy more than eating a handful of knockoff Zoloft and Viagra, then doing a little online gambling.  Now that I think of it, I AM interested in meeting women in my area.  Or, maybe, I’ll take my online casino winnings and buy a wife from China or Russia.

Discuss.

UPDATE — this came in literally two minutes after the post went live:

I like all of those things, so I’m going to let you in on a sweet deal. I have 30,000 USD in a bank account and I need someone to withdraw and send to me the money, then I will compensate you handsomely for help.
Gud Bl;es
Col. Prince Akbar

Cory’s a funny, funny guy.  Go show him some love at Keep St. Joe Weird.

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Homebrew wifi repeaters in Afghanistan

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Although the organization behind this looks a little, well, mercenary, their project is pretty cool.  Free Range International is training Afghans to build their own wifi repeaters out of pretty much whatever they have on hand.  It reminds me of the chicken wire satellite dishes mentioned in William Gibson’s Count Zero, and pretty much all of the improvised infrastructure in his Bridge Trilogy.

Via Boing Boing.

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Hal Grades Your Bike Locking (a classic)

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Here’s Hal Ruzal, career bike mechanic for Bicycle Habitat in New York, doling out grades for different bike locking methods.  This is a 2003 video, but there have been two sequels made in the interim.  Hal mentions that people actually recognize him from the videos, yet somehow seem to have learned little from his advice.  Part one is embedded here as a YouTube video, but the higher-quality original and the sequels are available here, here, and here.

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Don’t just shorten your URL — make it shady

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Their tagline is “Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening“.

When I ran everythingrightiswrongagain.com through it I got this:

http://5z8.info/-OPEN-WEBCAM—START-RECORD–_l3l1v_trojan

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An actual killer app for the iPhone

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

This is a wonderful thing, but for a product I don’t want to ever own.  Square, Inc. has developed a credit card reader that plugs into an iPhone’s audio jack, as well as the back-end service necessary to process credit card transactions.  Swipe the card, get a virtual signature, and send a receipt to the buyer’s email.  Now potentially anyone (who can stomach the iPhone) can process credit card transactions.

And it’s for the iPhone, dammit.  Hopefully this will be ported to Android devices sooner than later.  I also hope it’s as secure as it purports to be.  I found this story  on Core 77 and they mistakenly said that it didn’t bother with receipts, but the Square video demonstrates otherwise.

Also, please note that the beardy guy is Adam Lisagore from my favorite podcast, You Look Nice Today.  I can’t tell if he’s working for Square or if he’s just their spokesgeek.

Here’s Adam demonstrating the YLNT dance, the Fishstick.  The Fishstick is a dance performed almost entirely in one’s head to “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells.  The origin of the Fishstick is explained in the YLNT episode “Sacks-Minnelli Disease“.

How and where not to do The Fishstick from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

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A Shocking Turn of Events: Phishers Discover Google Buzz

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The Consumerist is reporting that phishers and other scammers are already mining Google Buzz, ultimately targeting the users’ email info.  I apologize for not remembering where I read about Buzz described as “the answer to Facebook no one asked for”, but it’s pretty apt.  An investigation has begun:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently preparing a formal complaint to the FCC regarding Google Buzz, the same group that led a similar campaign against Facebook’s questionable privacies policies.

“Both companies have broken promises to their users about how personal information would be used,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “They did so in ways that were misleading, unfair, and deceptive. These are serious concerns for any user of these services.”

As a Gmail user, the first thing I did when the scam-hole appeared was disable the evil thing.  At least I hope I disabled it.  Here’s an article which explains the steps necessary to keep Google from automatically turning your account inside-out.

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EFF’s Panopticlick and your browser’s fingerprint

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

The EFF has a new research tool and would like your help testing it and building a sample database.  It’s called Panopticlick and it examines your browser configuration, especially installed plugins.  Your browser’s configuration is then compared to its sample database and it rates your “uniqueness”.  Since your browser configuration is available to every web server you contact, it can act as a sort of fingerprint.  The more unique the configuration, the more readily you could be tracked as you surf around the intertubes.

Firefox is my main browser and apparently I stick out pretty well, thanks to my plugins.  For example, I was a beta-tester for Quake Live and that definitely helps boost my uniqueness.  Here are the results:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 134,447 tested so far.

I also use Opera and Explorer, but generally only to test web development in different environments.  I expected Opera to be fairly generic, but it was also unique.  This was unexpected, because I haven’t really customized it at all.  Upon closer inspection I realized that it also has the Quake Live add-ons, which it must have picked up from Firefox during installation.  The results:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 134,632 tested so far.

And finally, Explorer, which ought to be as stock as they come.

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 136,319 tested so far.

Huh.  Explorer ought to look just like many, many others and yet it’s unique.  No plugins were evaluated, but the browser was extremely balky at loading the site and running the test, generating different errors and warnings each time.  I’ll have to look into why this is.

Oh, well.  At least the EFF now has a little more sample data to work with.  For more details on how browser uniqueness enables tracking online click here (math nerdiness ahead, but there’s a helpful glossary).

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Introduction to the TOR router

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Censorship seems to be a theme today.  Wild Bee has posted a pretty good introduction to what the TOR router (the “onion” router) is, how it works, and how it’s used to circumvent censorship regimes.  One of the more interesting aspects of implementing the TOR router — even if you don’t feel you need enhanced internet privacy — is that you can passively enable users who desperately need a way to communicate securely beyond their national borders.

Like all open source projects, TOR is not without its faults and vulnerabilities, but it does an admirable job of staying ahead of the parties who would undermine it.  It’s also a great example of how the internet development community constantly adapts to challenges and, in this case, literally routes traffic around them.  I would go so far as to actually describe TOR as a genuinely, morally virtuous project.

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How to track creepy blog visitors down via Google Analytics and Google Maps

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Spleenal, a British cartoonist who apparently shares his name with his creation, has published a fascinating post on how easy it is to find your blog visitors.  Some anonymous searcher used the following string and ended up on the Spleenal site:

I should probably warn you now that Spleenal is a spectacularly NSFW webcomic, but it certainly shouldn’t be attracting the type of searches depicted above.  You have been forewarned.  The rest of the post details, step by step and screenshot by screenshot, how to get within a city block of the person who used those search terms using Google Analytics and Google Maps.  It’s good information to have.

Spleenal’s a great comic series, but like I said, it’s not for everyone.

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