Latest Entries
Changes on GeekScribes
08 July '08 by InF, under Geekscribes.
Over the next few days, I’ll be making some changes as to what GeekScribes really is about.
This blog, or I should say co-blog, started as a collaboration between Guru and myself, so that we have a common place to blog all of our articles instead of on our separate blogs. Since we mostly blogged about tech articles, this collaboration works well for us.
Unfortunately, I guess Guru is a bit busy these days and he will probably not be writing very often for now (until I can find him to… persuade him to be less busy! :P).
Anyways, what the hell is this post? It’s just to tell you about the “new” GeekScribes. Of course, you will still find your tech articles here, and probably a good dose of sarcasm from me. So what are these changes about?
Firstly, a new slogan. We found that the old one doesn’t really match us much. You will see the new one up there near the site name.
Second, we’ll be expanding the scope of what GeekScribes covers. Tech and news is fine, but we’d like more. So expect to see more topics on GeekScribes soon. What topics? Articles about anime and manga, movies, music and other similars. The full extent of the scope has not yet been decided, but GeekScribes will no longer be a tech-only blog.
Finally, there will probably be changes in the post categories. Also, though I’m not sure, you might see a change in the tone of my posts.
That should be about it. Before I do changes, I’d like to know what you think. (Thanks for voting! Comment if you want.)
Don't want to lose another post? Here is your chance. Grab our feed to have contents delivered direct to your browser.
1 Comment
Rapidshare loves you: No Captchas now!
08 July '08 by InF, under Tech News.
This is excellent news, coming straight from the link Shah gave me:
No more captchas - higher flexibility for premium-users
July 02, 2008
By eliminating the captchas we simplified the use of RapidShare’s free services significantly. In addition, free-users can now upload and download bigger files (up to 200 megabyte). Anyhow, to protect RapidShare from congestion caused by automated downloading, we limited the maximum download speed for free-users to 500 kilobit per second. To compensate for that, they do not have to wait anymore until starting a succeeding download.
Premium-users now profit from more flexibility regarding the download volume: It used to be limited to 10 gigabyte per day and can be “saved” now to a maximum of 50 Gigabyte. As a consequence, the volume that was not used is transferred to the following day automatically, up to a maximum of 50 gigabyte. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to save another 10 gigabyte the following day.
(Source)
Enjoy yer leeching mateys for now, yer have no lame captchas. (Ok, sorry for my lame attempt at pirate speech).
This really simplifies downloading off Rapidshare, and I wonder how and if download managers can be used now. Previously, there was competition to see who can crack the RS captchas, now that’s a non-issue.
Oh by the way, the download timer is still there, so you will still have to wait. I’m sure somebody, somewhere will figure out a way to beat that.
Regarding the speed limits and the download limit, I doubt it really affects us Mauritians. Firstly, 500Kbps download speed limit doesn’t matter. Most of us have 128Kbps, or 512Kbps. It’s not that bad. 128Kbps folks will probably be enjoying full speed.
The 10GB limit is plain off-limits to us. I doubt anybody can download 10GBs in Mauritius with our available connections (unless you are an godly haxx0r).
Overall, I find that it’s a good move from Rapidshare to promote its services. But with limits like 10GB per day, or cumulative 50GB, isn’t Rapidshare directly condoning piracy? I don’t think your videos, documents and free music that you may share with others will amount to 10GB daily, will it?
Let’s see your views. 
2 Comments
The end of privacy on the Internet?
07 July '08 by InF, under General, Tech News.
A number of recent events occurring over the Internet prompted me to write this article. What were these events about? Well, if you want to know, they are about privacy decreasing over the Internet. Most users think that while they are online, they are nameless and faceless; One among the millions or billions of users and that they can do pretty much what they want.
Guess again buddy! In fact, I’d go as far as to say you are never anonymous over the Internet. Why? There is always your IP address. Hide it via a proxy you say? Your ISP still has your record, and if ever your proxy is not totally reliable, then you could easily be found.
I’ll be talking about the decreasing levels of privacy. “The Internet is an unregulated network with free-flow of Information”, or so the definition says. Is it really true? Not according to me. Do you consider bandwidth regulation schemes, commonly known as “bandwidth capping” to be unregulated flow of information?
You are not allowed to use some services at some times of the day, by some ISPs. That’s a lot of some’s, but it’s there. P2P throttling is becoming increasingly common among ISPs who are seeing their bandwidth being swamped with P2P traffic. This violates the basic philosophy of a free-flow of information, right?
But let’s see what the Japanese have to say when it comes to how they use the Internet.
We know that the Japanese are very good when it comes to high-speed Internet, with something like 100Mbps available at around $45 per month. We also know that Fair-Usage Policies were introduced by Orange in Mauritius, giving you a download-capping of around 10GB a month, or so we guessed. Guess what the Japan ISP, NTT did. They implemented an upload-capping of (!!) 30GB per day! Downloads, of course, are still unlimited. Ok… *shocked* Read more here.
Now for the decreasing privacy topic. Starting with the most recent now, let’s see flagrant cases of what I’d call “invasion of privacy” but which authorities seem to consider “normal”. You be the judge.
3 Comments
45% increase in students at UoM next year!
25 June '08 by InF, under Mauritius, UoM.
This is the astounding news that the L’Express Newspaper reports today to us, starting with those lines as the article header.
L’UoM se propose d’accueillir 4 467 nouveaux étudiants, soit 1388 de plus que l’année dernière. Elle offrira par la même occasion davantage de formations : 23 licences supplémentaires et sept maîtrises de plus.
I’ve been at UoM for a year now, and my year 1 class had around 110 students. The labs were nearly packed full. The cafetaria could barely contain the crowd during peak hours. Common room was often so full that there were no chairs or tables, so students had to find somewhere else to hang out. Same goes for Raised Plaza.
Now, I see this article about a 45% increase in the number of students at UoM and I tell this to myself: “Are our decision-makers insane?”
(Click here to read the rest…)
5 Comments
New Rapidshare.com Captcha: No pets in
25 June '08 by InF, under Tech News.
I was downloading a file off Rapidshare.com today, and guess what I see?
They finally acquired some common-sense! The infamous Cat Captcha system is DEAD!
The new captcha looks like this, which is very much easier to read:
The new captchas look like the letters were modelled off a flat surface, like a terrain. The letters look like mountains off the ground.
This is a most welcomed change, since the Cat Captchas were sometimes very tough to decipher, and a general pain in the rear. This will surely make leeching off pirated files off Rapidshare easier for us netizens! The new captchas sometimes are not clear, but still easier than differentiating cats from dogs, specially the tiny things Rapidshare used! (Is that end letter a D or an 0?)
Thank you Rapidshare, after soooo long, you are seeing the light!
2 Comments
Why we are all liable to receive a DMCA notice?
22 June '08 by Guru, under Torrents.
Bittorrent is one of the most famous way to share data among users. The files ranges from legal to illegal. This method of transmission is very much vulnerable to many exploits. Given its popularity, one ca imagine the number of illegal files like music, movies, tv shows and the likes are alive in the community. The immediate benefiters of these media are going berserk of what is happening. They are getting lesser than ideally they should be. Here come into scene, the monitoring agencies to track down those infringing copyrights. (Click here to read the rest…)
No Comments
France: Taking anti-piracy to the next level
21 June '08 by InF, under Tech News.
France wants to step up the pace of war against piracy, by adopting a new law that will make it possible to ban users from using broadband Internet for up to a period of one year.
The new law would make use of a 3-chances policy, and after you are caught downloading illegally for 3 times, you are barred form using the Internet. As simple as that. Quite a radical measure you might say, considering that till now, people were only threatened or advised not to download illegal material off the Internet.
Now, as I said, the French authorities want to literally keep you away from the content you so much want to download, whether you like it or not. And apprently, this new law seems to receive support from the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy.
Why am I blogging about this? Just take a look at who is our main ISP is. Orange. Any bells ringing yet? No? French ISP then?
Yep! Orange is a French ISP, and if this law is actually accepted in France, and if all French ISPs are to sign it, I believe this would include Orange.
Now, I’m not really sure how this would work, but is there a risk that Mauritian Internet users will be affected too?
I don’t know. I’m no law student. But if anybody can bring any clarity to this matter, your comments are most welcome.
I wonder what would happen if somebody happened to be leeching off their neighbour’s wireless connection and downloading illegal content, and the connection owner gets caught. Who goes down? The owner or the leecher?
I personally think these “repressive” ways will not end piracy. Waging war on your own customers is never great. In my opinion, offering better content, more content at affordable prices would really tempt customers away from illegal downloading. If only “download all you can” for a reasonable price ($10/month?) existed, it would be real bliss.
Cheap prices, availability of extra content and services and total freedom. I believe this would be what an average customer like me would ask for. Not much huh?
Your views?
7 Comments
Firefox 3 hits 8 million+ downloads!
19 June '08 by InF, under Firefox, Software.
Well, considering that I was supporting the Firefox 3 Download Day to help with the world record initiative, I thought I might update a bit about the number of downloads Mozilla Firefox 3 Final got in the first 24 hours.
Well folks, be amazed, for it is a whooping 8 million downloads in 24 hours, crushing the 2 million downloads in 24 hours set by Firefox 2. Mozilla has gone beyond their expected 5 million downloads. All this came at a price: The Mozilla servers were brought down to their knees (if ever they had knees), and a lot of users got timeouts or “page cannot be displayed errors”.
For the record, Firefox 3 got 1 million downloads in 4 hours, following its release.
The number of downloads is still going up, even after the 24 hours period. If you want live updates on the number of Firefox 3 downloads, check the page that Mozilla has setup here.
Also, from here, it can be seen that Mauritius registered 1055 downloads, 205 for Reunion Is., 286 for Madagascar, 4 for Comoros. So, we are the leading small island in the Indian Ocean? Sri Lanka got 2214 though!
At the time of writing, there are more than 9.3 million downloads registered, with around 2600 downloads per minute. The US folks is leading the race with 2 million+ downloads. Simply amazing!
Big congrats to the Firefox team in any case!
Ps. In case you are wondering, that incredibly cute fox above is called Foxkeh, and is the mascot of Mozilla Japan. More info available here.
Other Firefox 3 articles:
No Comments
Randomly fill your audio player using RandomFill
19 June '08 by InF, under Reviews.
EDIT: I’ve found a better application to randomly fill my audio player. Click here to jump to the review of Mr. Random.
So, there is another freeware review today on the menu. This time, I’m looking for way to randomly fill up my mobile phone with tracks from my music collection found on my PC. Why? Because I’m just too lazy to randomly select tracks myself. Because I’ve got no idea about what I want to listen to. Because I love using Google to find freewares and share them with you. Voila! Now you know, and on with the review.
For this job, we will be making use of a creatively named software named… RandomFill.
Mind you though. RandomFill will work with classic “drop-and-play” audio players and mobile phones, and not iPod-like players with advanced library features, requiring specialized software to upload tracks to them. Anyways, you can download RandomFill and give it a try with your favourite player and see if it works.
Using RandomFill is a 4-step process, as shown below.
The steps are as follows:
- Add folders or playlists from which the tracks will be chosen. Usually, this will be your MP3 directory. Optionally, if you have used RandomFill before and saved your settings, you can load these in this step.
- Here, you are going to select where to send your random tracks. This can either be a location (your player?) or a playlist which will contain a list of random tracks. You can choose to delete everything at the storage location before the random tracks are moved there. I chose to send the tracks to Drive E, which is my mobile’s memory card.
- This step is quite interesting. You can choose to bias the selection process to include more tracks from a particular folder which you add. For example, you can bias the search to include more tracks from your favorite album. Just add the folder, and you will be prompted to add a weight. Weight should be greater than 0. (positive real numbers!).
- If you add a folder and set the weight as 0.1 or 0.2, tracks will probably not be selected from it, and if you add a folder with a weight of say, 20, there will be more tracks from it in the “random” selection”. Add your favorite albums, and bias the weights as you wish.
- This is the final step. Now, you select the total size of the selection in Megabytes, or how many hours of music you want. Useful if you want to only fill up your player or mobile up to only a certain limit, and not completely. You can also choose to fill up by hours if you want, but remember that more hours = bigger file size, so don’t go overboard, keeping your player’s maximum memory size in mind. Save your settings if you want, so that you don’t have to repeat the same steps completely every time. After that, just click Finish and let RandomFill do its job.
Now, there is a small “bug” I’d like you to be aware of. After the copy, if you click Finish again, it will try to re-copy a random selection to your destination, which can cause problems such as full memory. So, after the copy part, you will need to click on Cancel instead. A bit weird, but it’s useful to know. Another potential disadvantage is that the last folder used is not remembered. This will probably be made in future versions. For now, it’s not available.
That’s about it for the RandomFill review. It’s not perfect yet, but I hope you can find some use to it. Give it a try, and drop us some comments.
Ps. iPod users, you might want to check Floola as an alternative to managing your device with iTunes.
Mr. Random: A better Random-filling App
RandomFill did not particularly suit my needs, so I ended up finding a better app called, Mr. Random. It’s Java-based and requires the Java Runtime Environment and this needs to be installed if you don’t have it. Just Google for it.
The Settings window is accessible by going to Options menu. That Settings window will allow you to customize all the aspects of Mr. Random. Here’s a list of the important options there:
- Collections Folder: Where your music is found. Where the selection will be made.
- Device Folder: Where the music will be copied. I’d advise you to put it as a temporary local folder, then manually move the files after the random selection is made. It’s safer that way. Less risk of messing up during transfer.
- Device Type: If you have a Sansa, choose it there. Else leave it on Generic Player like I did.
- Capacity Slider: The total size of your player. I use it to choose what will be the combined size of all the files copied.
- File Types: What files will be copied. Eg. If you want only MP3s, uncheck the rest. There is a box for Custom extensions. Eg. for .flac files if you have those. Put .flac there.
The rest, you can just leave blank. The Advanced button allows you to select which random algorithm to use, or just leave things default.
Now, click on Ok to go back to the main window. To make the random selection, repeatedly click the “Fill List” button until the list stops filling. At the bottom-right corner, you can see the number of files selected, as well as the combined size. I marked that with a red dot.
It’s a bit annoying to repeatedly click the button, and I hope it will be fixed in future versions. I don’t know if it’s just at my place that I have to click many times though.
The Add File / Add Group button are there if you want to include some particular file/folder in the selection, that is if you want to override the random selection for some selected files. Move Up/Down is for re-ordering files. This is because Mr. Random also creates a playlist out of the files.
After that, just click the Copy to Device button and wait. If you have selected a local folder as I recommended, you will need to go there and copy all the files to your device manually.
That’s all. Mr. Random is free, and does not crash as often as RandomFill. I need to mention that Mr. Random seems to have a 20GB limit. To overcome that, I guess you just run it multiple times.
No Comments
Firefox 3 Final: The Review
18 June '08 by InF, under Firefox, Reviews, Software.
Firefox 3.0 Final has just been released today, 17th June 2008 (it’s already 18th in some countries though), and I already downloaded my copy to help establish the Firefox World Record. Now that it is installed and ready to work, I am going to review it. I’ve been using Firefox since the early 1.x versions, and I kind of saw its evolution. If I could resume Firefox 3, it would be “Shiny Search Boxes”, with respect to the glass buttons and the large number of new search boxes scattered everywhere.
Without much delay, on with the review. But first, you might consider getting your own copy here, and help with the World Record initiative (you need to download from the official mirrors of Firefox, else the download does not count!). Beware though. Some of the pages of the Mozilla website have yet to be updated, and are still showing Firefox 2.0 downloads. Also, the page is taking a significant time to load, probably considering that lots of people are currently downloading.
A word of warning. Before installing Firefox 3, make sure all your add-ons are compatible with the new Firefox. A number of my add-ons are not yet compatible with the Firefox 3 Final. Specially Tabmix Plus, which is not yet compatible. Even Unplug is not yet compatible, according to the default install. So, check beforehand, or simply backup your Firefox profile before upgrading, in case you want to revert. As you can see below, some of my extensions are not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Unfortunately, you will have to check manually via the Mozilla Addons site.
To backup your Firefox profile, you could use the FEBE extension (cross-platform) (doesn’t work with Firefox 3 Final yet), or you could use the MozBackup (Windows only) application. More info about manual profile backup is available from Mozilla, here.
