Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

The podcast normally comes out Saturday Morning (that would be today,) however, I am traveling, and will be podcasting later this evening instead. Hang in there! You’ll get your “fix” in just a little late… and we have some great stuff lined up, so be watching for it!

Cookies are fairly benign insofar as web sites go… IF they are used only by the web site that you have gone to, in order to help the site itself know that you have moved from point “A” to point “B” within the same site. However, if a third party site, say one that has an advertisement, or banner ad, on that web site sets a cookie on your browser, THEN that cookie could be used to track you to other sites that they also advertise on, thus tracking your movements! Evil alert! Evil alert!

How can you prevent this? Set your Firefox Browser to accept ONLY cookies from the current website, NOT from third parties! Go into “Tools”, then select “Options”, then click on “Privacy”, now check the box shown in the image below:

See? The box marked “For the originating site web only.” This option is not turned on by default. You HAVE to set it yourself. There you go! You are now harder to track, and therefore, safer on the web!

And, if you MUST use Microsoft Internet Explorer, then do this: Go to “Tools”, “Internet Options”, “Privacy”, “Advanced”, then check on “Override automatic cookie handling”, and select “Accept” for First-party cookies, and “Block” for Third-party cookies.

You Star Trek “red shirt” wannabes can rejoice! You can now have your very own shoot-through-metal lazer gun!

Lazer Gun

And this is a good idea… why? Oh well, you do have to sign a hazardous warning release before you buy it! (Yeah, that’ll help!)

For us Linux geeks, we know there is one game to rule them all… one super addictive game that you can use to while away hours and hours of time! That game is, of course, Frozen Bubble! Now, you can play Frozen Bubble anywhere you have a web browser and a Java environment installed!

Frozen Bubble using Java

Enjoy! And, remember, I TOLD you it was addictive!

Whoa! This will make you think. Check this out:

Solar System Shown to Scale

Then, to see how far we are from each of the planets (and the sun) check this out:

Solar System Positions

One pixel in these photos equals about 1000 km. Wild!

It makes you consider your relative size with respect to God’s Creation!

OK, so spammers have “bots” that scan web sites for e-mail addresses and add them to their lists that they then sell to other spammers for high fees and them use these lists to send out tons of spam! “What if,” someone said, “What if… we provide the bots a link that will generate tons of useless e-mail addresses (on their OWN spamming domains) that will ‘pollute’ their lists, making them huge, unmanagable, and unusable?” Well, that is the idea behind “SpamPoison”… you set it up as a link on your web site, or blog, and enjoy the fact that spammers will be harvesting bogus addresses and causing them trouble. It does have a certain poetic symmetry doesn’t it?

SpamPoison

On PodcastAlley, at this very moment in time, the “Dr. Bill: The Computer Curmudgeon” podcast is rated number 12 in the “Technology” area! Dewd! (I know that it is early in the month, and I know that it may be a bit of a fluke, but I am going to enjoy it while I can!)

Go to this link, search for “Dr. Bill” and vote for me! (Please! I need the ego stroking!)

PodcastAlley

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Other rankings at the same moment in history in Technology: Number 6: Diggnation, Number 8: This Week in Tech, Number 11: CommandN