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WaFiTz! » Entries tagged with "Google"

This Year I Have Mostly Been Setting Up Forwarders…

January 7th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Yeah, I can’t believe I haven’t done this before, either but now I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve elected to start off the new year by cleaning up my inbox – that means unsubscribing from services that I don’t use or read and also switching current services to a temporary email address through this domain. The beauty is by using custom email addresses e.g. custom(at)wafitz.net I can later check and see who is selling my data to spammers. I also have an effective way of removing myself from mailing lists where unsubcribing is discouraged by stealth. The very worst offender I have found appears to be http://www.advfn.com/.  I signed up to this website a long time ago to some financial info and it automatically added me to a dozen or so email subscriptions. … Read entire article »

Filed under: Complaints, Social Media, Takeback

Blog Your Geocaching Found Logs with Blogger

July 25th, 2010 | 1 Comment

You may or may not be aware that Google have recently released a command line tool called Google CL which allows limited updating of some of it’s primary services from the command line – including Blogger. I have been working on a script and looking for a utility to parse the “My Finds” pocket query for uploading to a blog for a while now so on hearing this news I set to work to see if I could create an automated script. You can see the results on my old blogger account, which I have now renamed _TeamFitz_ and repurposed for publishing our Geocaching adventures. It’s a little bit clunky and could be improved, but the script is now complete and ready for ‘beta’. I’m publishing it here and releasing it under … Read entire article »

Filed under: Blogs, Geocaching, Linux, WaFiTz!

Why I Still Use Facebook Despite The Issues

May 11th, 2010 | 1 Comment

Over the past year I’ve agonised over keeping my Facebook account, but everytime I’ve considered deleting it I’ve come to the same conclusion – the benefits of having one far outweigh the benefits of not having a Facebook account. Big Brother is Poking You Let’s start with the negative shall we? First is privacy – Facebook is infamous for dicking around with users profiles and privacy settings. It should be on the tip of every Facebook users mind that what they post in private today could be on the front page of The Sun tomorrow. It’s something I’m concerned about and it’s likely if Facebook did not give me some measure of control over my privacy settings then I’d definitely look for an alternative. Farmbook Second, Farmville (and it’s ilk). Seriously I don’t mind … Read entire article »

Filed under: Social Media

The Biggest Pirates of All: Stealing from the Public Domain

March 26th, 2010 | Add a Comment

I was reading a topic on Slashdot the other day about the public disclosure of Google’s internal emails in its court battle with Viacom, that seem to take the shine off Google’s “Do No Evil” image. I’m not particularly invested in this news itself, but what cause me to stop and think was this comment from user drDugan (emphasis mine): What’s more evil? You know what’s evil? Copyright term of “70 years + life of the author”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_term [wikipedia.org] Almost every single thing creative that someone creates today will *never* enter the public domain within our lifetime. Nothing. The owner of the copyright must explicitly grant it to the public domain, or license it for other’s use, distribution, sharing, mashing, basically anything more than fair use… Copyright is no longer about promotion of creativity, its … Read entire article »

Filed under: Books, Distractions

Egosurfing

January 6th, 2010 | Add a Comment

Happy New Year! Hey I got a new domain: www.wafitz.net. I haven’t done anything with it yet but I intend to start moving ‘operations’ over there. This blog, maybe a static webcam, geocaching related stuff. And I’m working on a weekly(?) podcast with my brother in law – we’re just ironing out the technicalities. Speaking of domains and online activity. Ever since I did my first egosurf (way back when we were all surfing web 1.0 with 56k dialup, Google was a sound a baby would make, email was the fastest way to communicate and AOL was a formidable giant of the web) this website is what drew in the top results. The image of the little girl has been “picture of the week” for the last 300 weeks. The whole website … Read entire article »

Filed under: Definitely Not Me, WaFiTz!