admin – Page 16 – Everything is Broken

Attack of the mutant lamppost.

October 3, 2009 by admin

So I was working from home the other day, around mid-morning, when I heard a mighty crunch from outside. I looked out my window and was confronted with the scene to the left. I snapped a picture, and watched as a crowd started to gather, and then after about 5 minutes, the driver emerged from … Read more

Dropbox for offsite backup

April 5, 2022June 8, 2009 by admin

I've recently been using Dropbox. Its a free offsite backup service, which works with Windows, Linux and Mac and gives you 2Gb of space for free. You can pay for more if you need it. Here's what I like about it: It just works. Drop your files into a folder and forget about it. You … Read more

PLDT SMTP server.

December 27, 2019June 2, 2009 by admin

Man this is the best kept secret in the entire telecoms industry … I've been trying to send email through PLDT's SMTP servers as I'm a broadband customer of theirs, and my normal SMTP server wasn't working. I needed to get an email out, and I was getting a little desperate. So apparently the published … Read more

Printing Web pages the way you want 'em

October 3, 2009May 4, 2009 by admin

Just came across this awesome tool which will let you format webpages in real time, and then output them to a printer. Here's the URL http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/ And here's a link to this very page opened up in the site, so you can try it out. Brilliant. Why didn't I think of that …. Oh, and … Read more

Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query

April 23, 2009 by admin

Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this:

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.