Two Slashes

Nope, I didn’t get crickets for Christmas. That’s probably what anyone who actually bothered to visit my blog in the past few months has thought they were hearing, though.

It’s not for lack of trying to fix that, either.  There are quite a few posts that never made it past the draft stage (I’m a picky writer and even more obnoxious when it comes to actually sharing things, but you probably already knew that).

However, despite the dry spell of posts, I’m happy to announce that my daily traffic actually went up.  That’s right, up.  Apparently I’m still something of an important Google search result when it comes to disabling the “taskbar” on Facebook (is there really a better name for it) or people who want to commit suicide (as a result of this April Fool’s post) or even “preteen porn” (I can smell even more unwanted traffic now for mentioning it, but the picture of my watch from this post seems to be particularly popular as of late).

(Oh, and FireStats reports that there are approximately fifty people still requesting new items from my RSS feed once in a while regularly.  Hello to all of you.)

As usual, I’m not going to make any empty promises, or, considering the date, “resolve” to become a better, more regular blogger.  Whatever happens will happen, and it’s up to my schedule and observations to enable me to come up with something I feel passionate enough to post about.  I’m going to do my best to become active once again, but I’m not going to force my hand.  This site isn’t going anywhere, even if I don’t update it for three months at a time.  (The domain itself is a gold mine, right?)  Maybe the random timing is what made it fun for everyone in the first place…

Even so, I’ve regurgitated a few post ideas into Evernote and I’m starting to piece them back into my usual long-winded explorations of whatever catches my interest.  Like the rest of my draft library, they may never see the light of day…but you can stick around and see if they do.  (And in the meantime, I should look into archiving them somewhere.)

Welcome to 2010.  Have a leftover candy cane (they’re still good), sit back, and let’s hope this new year brings plenty of annoyances to write about.

Out of all of the months of the year, February is the shortest.  This fact alone makes it the ideal month for someone like myself attempt what I’m about to embark on.

After Justin‘s successful first attempt at posting every day for a solid month, he decided that the time was right to try it again, and in what will probably be a fantastic failure, I’ve decided that I’m going to try the same thing.  I have a growing Evernote notebook of post ideas, so this seems like a great way to shrink it down and put some content out at the same time.

In an attempt to keep in with the theme behind everything else here, though, I’m calling this little endeavor the “Comment Block.”  (If you don’t get it, feel free to leave a comment asking for an explanation.  Rest assured that it’s a developer joke, though.)

To make sure that there’s no question about what’s going on, I’m going to lay down (and abide by) the following ground rules:

1. Post queuing is allowed, but not backdating.  This means that while I can write a few posts ahead of time to cover any busy time in my schedule, I cannot change the date on a post to suggest that I was on time with it.  (This also means that I won’t be following in the footsteps of a few bloggers I know who have attempted to pull similar stunts.  If you’re reading this, you know who you are.)
2. Anything I want to discuss or rant about is fair game.  (Not that this rule needed to be said.)
3. The minimum word count for a post is 400 words.  (While I try to follow this rule in my normal posts, with only a few special exceptions, most of them tend to be at least double this length.)  This rule is intended to prevent me from sneaking out of a day’s post by grabbing a random link from StumbleUpon or Digg and trying to come up with something to discuss out of it.

Let the ranting begin.  I’ll see you tomorrow.  I hope.

So, it’s been a long time coming, but I was finally bored to crack open some of the development tools and get back to work on some of the projects I have hosted here, at least insofar as some bug-fixing.  (Which is funny, actually, since I have legitimate work and schoolwork to do…)

One of the first projects to get an upgrade is Rolling Paper, the nearly pointless little wallpaper-cycling utility I wrote eons ago to randomly swap wallpapers in a given time period, almost turning your Windows desktop into a picture frame.  (Hint:  If you’re looking to do that without any of the desktop icons in the way, you might want to check out HideIcons while you’re at it.)

While Rolling Paper hasn’t picked up any new features (I know, I need to fix that little one-folder problem…), it has picked up an important bugfix.  A bug that resulted from my stupidity and a bit of zealous copy-pasting with some of the settings code that made it impossible to use the software more than once or twice without manually rewriting the configuration every time you used it.  If you happen to be using it, you might want the update, available now on the Rolling Paper project page.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many Screen Savers clips on YouTube or I’m too tired to properly add up the consequences of what this might lead to, but I’ve got an idea.  A big one.  But if I’m even going to attempt it, I’m going to need your help.

First, of course, I need to explain the idea.  I’ve looked (albeit not as thoroughly as I probably should), and I don’t think I’ve found any IPTV show or podcast that centers around computer users and their questions.  Sure, shows like my own TechCentric, Hak.5, and even The Screen Savers took the occasional call-ins and e-mails, but ultimately they were airing pre-produced content that they had thought up on their own time.

I’m not as creative or well-funded as either of those latter two enterprises, but at the same time that also gives me the benefit of being able to say whatever I want to say without having to worry about losing sponsors or any of that other business-bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo any corporation or sponsored organization would be subjected to.

If you’ve skipped the previous two paragraphs, here’s the idea in short:  I’d like to start (“experiment with starting” might be a better term) a viewer-oriented vidcast answering a viewer question (or two) per episode.

This is where you come in.  Obviously, I can’t experiment with this without having questions, and in order to have questions I need to let everyone in on what I’m doing (or attempting to do).

Before I go any further, I’m going to try and lay down the following ground rules:

1. I’m not discussing religion. If you don’t get what that means, I’ll boil it down to mean that I’m not comparing X to Y and telling anyone that Y is better than X for reasons theta, beta, and alpha.  In popular usage, this would usually be referring to things like which browser/operating system/Linux distro is the best to use, but considering these are more opinion than technical, I’m not going to even put my toes in the water.
2. Be appropriate. I’m not interested in what porn sites you visited to cause whatever problem you’re having, and I’m sure nobody watching (my prediction is that this doesn’t even reach 3 people) is yearning to hear about what fetishes you have.  Keep it discrete or take it to someone with a privacy policy.
3. I am not your employer’s IT department. If you’re going to ask me questions about your work PC, you probably should be asking the friendly face on the fourth floor, not a kid with a video camera and no free time at school.  Not only will my tips possibly not work for you due to any settings your department has set you up with, but they may not be happy to hear of you tinkering with their carefully-controlled setup.  Which brings me to my next point…
4. Don’t expect episodes (if I decide to continue this experiment) to magically appear every few hours or days. As a college student, I’m already swamped in work, and add to that the content development for TechCentric, my fledgling attempt at a social life, and all the little other odds and ends I have in my daily routine, and you’ll notice that the free time left after all of the above (in which I would need to film, edit, and upload episodes) is actually negative.
5. I am not responsible if my tips result in more harm than good. I’m going to say what works for me (and should, theoretically, work for you).  However, I cannot be responsible for human error or the inevitable stupidity.  (And actually, if you toss me an e-mail full of blame, I might use it to publicly humiliate you.  Alright, maybe I wouldn’t…but you don’t know if I would make an exception… )
6. I have no budget. If your question is about something that requires me to pay $3,000 for product T, you’ll disturb fragile college budget U and cause me to fail to make my insurance payments V.  If the cost is somewhere in the ballpark of $10, I might go out and acquire whatever it is you’re asking about, but that will most likely be only if I get a decent viewer base and people decide that donations would be cool.
7. I reserve the right to filter questions. This one’s more to cover my behind than anything else, but I would rather pick questions that I can answer knowledgeably, that I have the resources to answer (i.e. Mac OS questions might be a little more difficult for me seeing as I don’t have a Mac on  hand) and that I feel might benefit a multitude of people.  If your question’s so detailed that the answer’s only going to apply to you, I’m going to skip it.  If I don’t pick you, I’m sorry.

For now, I have to figure out a distribution medium (either post videos to YouTube/Vimeo/insert-video-sharing-service-here, or go the full and involved way and put up a site with RSS feeds).  The first video or two will probably be posted here, however.  If you’d like to express your opinion or suggest something I’m overlooking on the matter, e-mail me.  I’ll also need a name (sorry, but I won’t be using Two Slashes for it no matter how many votes I get) and some cool graphics (i.e. logo for whatever name I end up with, lower thirds, and the like – I’m looking for at least some professionalism here).

For anyone worried about what’s happening with TechCentric, this is officially unrelated to and detached from TechCentric and I’m not looking to detract at all from the TC base we have going.  In fact, I hold TechCentric at a higher priority than this simply because it’s been the TechCentric crew’s ongoing pet project for the past several years in all of its forms.

Of course, I think that leaves me with one last loose end.  For now, go ahead and e-mail questions to the G-Mail account listed on the Contact page, but there’s a special requirement:  subject lines must start with “[question]” (exactly as written, but without the quotes).  This is more so I can set up a filter to set them aside in their own special pile, but it also means that the person asking the question isn’t as brain-dead as some of the people I’ve talked to in my life.  (Yes, I’d prefer if you had a head.)

I think that just about sums it up.  Let’s break the bottle and see where this goes.

And a special thanks to Calais for suggesting that the ideal tag for this post was “insurance payment.”  I kept it simply out of humor.

Last weekend, Justin decided to award me with one of the “Kickass Blogger” awards that seem to be making their rounds like a particularly bland chain letter.  (I would have posted sooner, but I’ve been getting ready for school and it’s been hard to get some free time while I’m still unpacking.)

Not to demean the award or anything, but I’m of two minds about the concept (neither probably what the people who came up with the award are looking for, sadly), and I might as well get everyone else’s opinion.

As you might have guessed, I can see similarities between this award making its rounds and the chain letters my mother ever-so-happily forwards (directly into my Spam folder, mind you ) or the tripe you might find on MySpace, sans the “death penalty” for not forwarding it to anyone.  (I hope Justin doesn’t have to stab me with a spork under a blue moon in the middle of November for not passing this on.)

I also think it’s a little ridiculous to single out just a few people when there are probably a ton who deserve recognition.  (Of course, the exact number is up to the post authors, but all the same it seems like people are going for two or three at a time.  Interestingly, though, the original site requests that you suggest five blogs.)  Favorites games never work out well, though, so why should people be asked to put them into the spotlight?

I add blogs (and other sites) to my blogroll if I think they’re worth your attention, not because I need a “finalists” list for games like this.  Also, I realize that my blogroll is a little on the longer side, but rest assured that just about everything on that list finds its way into my browsing a few times a day.  (And people say they have problems…)

People shouldn’t need to write up posts suggesting where their readers should check up next; that’s the role of the blogroll (or whatever they happen to call their links section, if they have one), and I think that’s a start as far as recognition is concerned.  (Response posts would be another form of recognition, but that’s a different animal for a different day.)

So, given that little rant, instead of me rolling the dice and having to choose from that expansive published list in my sidebar, how about you try visiting a few of the glorious links in my blogroll of your own accord.  They’re all winners in my book, and they may very well be in yours as well.

(On the other hand, though, there are some great opportunities for a “Six Degrees” game here.  I’m just not motivated enough to follow through with it, though.)

I don’t mean to sound rabid with this post, so I apologize if you’re offended or otherwise put off by what I’ve said, but I’m standing by it.

This is more a small news update than anything, but as I noticed last night, LogMeIn has decided to revise their revenue model, offering most of the features formerly found in their Premium tier service (including the ability to run at the Windows service-level) for free to all non-commercial users.

Because this means that the built-in functionality for several formerly-Premium features is now enabled, the workaround I published a few months ago is no longer my recommended solution.  (My workaround will still work, however, should you decide you don’t want Hamachi to set itself up.)

…you figure out a way to parse apart an old database backup and perform a near-perfect recovery of your site.

Most of my content has now been put back up, though you might need to update your links if you’ve tried hotlinking to them in the past few days, and there’s a gap since this backup was from early February, but most things people would want to read are now back online.  Also, I think the categories might be a bit mixed up.  Not much I can do about that without a lot of manual labor.

However, there is one bigger caveat…there are no downloads available for anything besides the Hamachi hack.  I know this is an issue, and I will go through at some point and correct them.  In the meantime, if you come across a download I haven’t posted, please e-mail me and if I can, I’ll send you the file you’re looking for.

Woohoo!

Ladies and gents, your attention please.  (And yes, I realize a non-computer-related post is well overdue…but…)

In the boredom that has ensued over the past week, I’ve managed to implement a number of new features into SkipTo, including the beginnings of a more configurable interface.  Pretty soon, you’ll be able to swap out a lot more than just the icons for shortcuts.   You’ll notice the hard work I’ve put in in the build count too; this is build 34.

In summary, the new features:

• Tab-key autocomplete/cycling through shortcuts.  This also fixes a bug in the previous release where SkipTo died when you pressed Tab.  (My fault, I should have checked that before I released it.  Ah well, the update’s here.)
• Slightly modified preferences pane with some new options, including controlling the tab key and the shortcut count.  (Note that these require a restart, as SkipTo only checks these settings at startup.  This may be changed, but it’s far safer to save and restart.  At least, I think so.)  You’ll also notice some preliminary options added regarding the keyboard…these are disabled as I’m still working on implementing them…but soon you can use more or less than just Alt+Spacebar.  I hope.
• The shortcut count reminds you of special shortcuts when it is set to ‘Always on’.  (No, the reminder doesn’t appear in either of the other two modes because you can’t Tab to them…they’re built-in, and with the exception of the About box, I feel that you should type the complete word as additional confirmation of your action.)

What are you waiting for? Download it!  (The source code for this build has not been uploaded, and remains from the previous version.)

SkipTo‘s undergone a small update to 0.1.0.19. New with this minor update are a bugfix or two, and a new feature in the means to temporarily disable SkipTo without closing the application. Simply use the shortcut “DISABLE” or the system tray icon to disable SkipTo, and re-enable it with the same system tray icon. Bah, you’ll get it. And if you don’t, I’m here to help.

The source code for this release has also been updated to current (finally!), so if you want to look at that, have at it.

Remember, you can e-mail any changes back to me (see the Contact page for my information) and I’ll include them in the next update!   I know I have the slowest of release schedules, but I guarantee it’ll make it in.

Click here to go to the SkipTo download page.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a f**king script kiddy.  Not only because they’re annoying, but because they think it’s funny to trash stuff.

On the other hand, there is an upside to this.  I spent the better part of yesterday trailing how they got in and did what they did, and writing scripts to counter it.  As far as this attack goes, if it happens again, I literally only have to visit a web page to recover it.

Thanks to everyone for being patient while I repost the majority of my content – I should have an old backup of something around here somewhere.  If you remember anything that I miss (especially the links…) please let me know by e-mailing me – nicktabick@gmail.com.  And my compliments go out to the dude who did it (thanks for the e-mailed “confession”, buddy, and all those replies – you did a great job of helping me figure out where you live, it’s just a shame I can’t subpoena your backside).  (“Great” skills; next time try taking over the box instead of deleting content.  The true cracker doesn’t make his presence known unless it needs to be or serves a means to aid.)

And yes, I did just use the politically correct term.