Wayne D's Blog

I took my ISP, Rogers to task back in August for hijacking DNS lookup errors and replacing them with a sponsored search page. Image my displeasure this morning when I fired up my Rogers Yahoo web based email and found a large garish ad on the right side of the page. After we had two computers in the house it became more convenient to use webmail so I could access my email from any computer. That was a few years ago and it has worked out well until now. When I got the EEEPC using the Rogers Yahoo webmail client was a bit difficult because of the smaller screen size but it was still usable. With ads it's totally hosed.

I have had a Gmail account for a while but never really used it. Today I decided to change that and drink the Google Koolaid. Gmail is very EEEPC friendly and their ads are much less obtrusive thsn Yaahoo's garish Flash based monstrosities. I have included a couple of EEEPC screenshots below to show the contrast.

I really should thank Roger's Yahoo for making me upset enough to overcome my inertia. I do wonder why Rogers didn't let us know that this change was coming in advance, I bet they didn't think people would be happy about it. If you are also a disgruntled Rogers Yahoo email user Gmail provides a very nice Mailfetcher utility that will suck all your old Yahoo mail in for you.

(updated Nov. 17th) Things became a bit clearer today when I found this Paidcontent.org story on Forbes.com. Turns out Rogers and Yahoo agreed to shift from a fee based deal to a revenue sharing model. Yahoo and Rogers will split revenue that Yahoo can get for advertising to Rogers customers. This probably means that we can expect to see more ads popping up on Rogers Yahoo cobranded properties. My guess, the Flickr Pro accounts we have been enjoying are next. updated May 15th 2009 As predicted our free Flickr pro accounts will soon be history, see the post for a handy tool for downloading your pictures from Flickr.

I was pretty hard on twine.com last time I wrote about them. My views have moderated somewhat since then. Those of you who know me well know that I have a short attention span, a website has about 5 minutes to convince me that it's useful before I move on. Twine has filled a gap for me that has tormented me, sharing bookmarks. Up until I started using Twine.com I would end up emailing bookmarks to colleagues when I wanted to share a website. A couple of times I have bookmarked something at home and wanted to access it at work. I tried to use delicious but then I have to remember to make my bookmarks private so the whole world can't see them. Delicious also doesn't make it as easy to separate bookmarks into categories. A twine is a collection of things, websites, notes comments. Twines can be set to private or public when created. Twine.com provides a helpful bookmark applet you can drag onto your button bar that is far less intrusive than the Delicious.com bookmark too. The best part is that the bookmarklet applet lets you chose which twine you want to add an item to. I suspect I could do the same thing with the delicious.com tool bar but the five minute rule holds, if I have to spend more than five minutes trying to figure out how to do something I am likely to move on.

Though I have found Twine useful I also find it infuriating. The user interface is nonintuitive, it can be slow to respond. I think Twine.com has potential so that's why I'm sticking it out and seeing if it improves. I've documented my concerns on the twine user feedback thread. If you want to sample one of my Twine's you can check out Wikipedia exposed. I had another one I wanted to share but it was originally a private twine. When I changed it to a public twine all of the items I created in it retained their private property and I haven't figured out how to change it yet. If I didn't think Twine.com had potential I'd throw up my hands in frustration and run away but I'm prepared to give them a chance.

The media has me a bit peeved because they seem to be quite happy that the economy is in the toilet. They can't wait to tell us how terrible things are today and the negative feedback this obsession with how bad things are can only result in lower consumer confidence and a deepening of the financial doom and gloom.The U.S. governments bailout of the financial institutions that helped cause the mess in the first place seems completely misguided. It may have added liquidity to the system but it hasn't done anything to reduce the excess inventory of housing that will continue to be a drain on the U.S. economy for years. The problem with the mortgage backed securities that prompted the collapse of the financial house of cards is that there risk level either weren't well understood by those buying them or misrepresented by those selling them. The compulsion to deregulate that occurred resulted in greed winning out over good judgment. The U.S. government abdicated it's responsibility to mind the financial store and now it's adversely affected the whole world. Now they need to start knocking down some of those houses they will end up owning when the mortgages are defaulted on to help salvage the rest of the portfolio and return some of the value to the houses of the people who still are paying their mortgages. Yikes what a mess.

I have decided to put together a chart showing what flash based video capture websites I have successfully used with my EEEPC 701 webcam. Please feel free to add comments with your experiences. I'd especially like to hear from some EEEPC 900 owners.

Notes:
NR - works with Flash 10 so not tested, should work OK with flashcam too
1 - sometimes requires you to use the command echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera in a terminal window to enable the camera before it will be detected
TBD - data not available

Here are some links to articles I have written on setting up Flash 10 on the EEEPC and installing Flashcam on the EEEPC. Flashcam is a utility that converts the V4L2 camera interface on the EEEPC to the dumber V4L interface that some flash based websites work better with.