Windows 7 Ultimate N, to be precise. And I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with it so far.

First thing I did was revel in the fact that I no longer have to deal with Microsoft’s dickishness about DirectX and WinXP – so I fired up the Just Cause 2 demo. That’s a great game – I’d buy it if I had the $$.

Then after that, I found the sticky notes thing. I thought it was cool, but when I was Googlin’ for something else, I found the formatting controls for the sticky notes.

The result.

I’m still finding cool shit with this thing. AH LURV EET.

At first the iPhone 4 came out, and with it, iOS 4. Both had some cool shit (iPhone 4 has a lower-firepowered camera on the front for video calling, iOS 4 came with folders and multitasking). Everyone nommed all over the idea. Then came one little tiny problem – it couldn’t hold a call.

It soon traced to horrible antenna placement. First Steve Jobs went through denial – “Just don’t hold the phone that way.” Then he went through kludgery – “Here’s a bumper to put on your phone.” Then finally, shame – “Looks like the formula was wrong, those bars didn’t actually exist [lie].” And boom – iOS 4.0.1 hides two bars or so.

I’m glad I’m not an iPhone user. I have an iPod Touch, yes, but not an iPhone. I have this baby, a Palm Treo 680. I can just laugh at the iPhone users right now.

Oh, you’ve only got a couple bars? Here, use my phone, AT&T’s giving me all four up here…OH WAIT! You have four bars too, Apple just hid them because your phone’s antenna is in a horrible position! You can’t use them! ha! Here, I’ll call you when I get home OH WAIT, it’d just drop.

Yes, I am an ass.

I will only like things I agree with on Facebook, I’m not completing a single damn survey, there aren’t any goats, alive or dead, around here, and the cheerleaders around here are actually pretty nice.

So let’s work around every restriction, shall we? The extensions I link to are for Google Chrome, but I’m sure they have Firefox equivalents.

1: Be a snark about it!
The first step in combatting these pages is to give a bad attitude towards them. For that, I use the fbosf extension (Facebook on s’en fout, where “on s’en fout” means “We don’t care” in French). It’s basically the “I DON’T CARE” button. It will fill your comment box with an automatic “I DON’T CARE! (link to fbosf)” as well, and I do send that out to further have an impact.

Works pretty good too.

Bieber's Cell? Whoop de crap.

2: Fear No <div> Hiding!
I’ve gotten used to being able to use the Chrome extension fbpageshow to just click a button and show whatever hidden content the page wants me to not be able to see until I click “Like”.

But if that fails, Chrome also has a way to edit page properties temporarily. Change the color of a button, or (in this case) set a <div> tag to not be invisible. Easy. It’s more complicated, but it works.

3: SURVEY EL BANISHO
I got information from a site owned by a dmmcintyre3 about how to get around CPALead/CPALock, which handle the surveys. It basically boils down to this: Open C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts with a reasonable plain-text editor (such as GVIM or Notepad++ – Windows Notepad is probably NOT going to work) and paste this at the end:

98.142.209.5 cpalead.com
98.142.209.5 cpalock.com
98.142.209.5 www.cpalead.com
98.142.209.5 www.cpalock.com
98.142.209.5 adscendmedia.com
98.142.209.5 www.adscendmedia.com

(Note: The site I got this from says you can put all the .coms on one line with the one IP, but I’m skeptical, knowing MicroShaft)

You’ll know it’s doing it’s work when you see a bar (similar to the Internet Explorer Information Bar) saying “CPALead or CPALock was here but it has been blocked.” It even lets you scroll down!

And viola, you can see whatever damn content the page is about, nearly hassle-free! You’re welcome.

In a combo of pro-gay-people and “let’s fix our ratings!”, Idol put Ellen DeGeneres (feel free to nicely correct me if I spelled that wrong) in as a judge. Then some uninformed Christian news site saw the Ellen + Ratings Drop, and linked them together.

Are You Fucking Serious?

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR STUPID. The religious überfanatics are at it again, going “HOLY SHIT GAY PEOPLE EWW GROSS GOD HATES YOU” and saying that’s why Idol’s losing steam. Saying parents are banning it in the house because they think that it’s promoting gayness to everyone.

1. Stop assuming because someone’s gay they’re going to hock it off to everyone.
2. Do your research before throwing shit around like that.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Christian news site that I am not disclosing, Idol’s been losing steam for a WHILE now. I think it’s because it got old, and people got bored of it.

And Ellen’s not going to inject a bunch of “I love being gay” statements (even if she does throw in some comedy once in a while – because face it, she’s funny) into her role as judge.

Well, I uploaded it. You can’t leech off my webserver because I don’t have the firepower for that, but the script is there for you to use on your own server.

I also fixed the Player Titles, but that was just a capitalization error.

So, what I did was develop a way to get a fortune. As in, the *nix command “fortune”, which I usually find in /usr/games.

First, the Lua end of the spectrum, which is the command in the server to get this fortune. All this does is listen for a ULX command (“f” in chat, or “ulx fortune” in console), get the data from a web page (in this case, a CGI script on my site), strip the headers, and echo it back, one line at a time.

The CGI script on my webserver does the background work (since my GMod server is hosted on a Windows box, which lacks fortune). First I run fortune -s, and get it’s stdout (the fortune). Then I print it onto the webpage. Hardly any work there either. Coded it in ~30 seconds, since I knew exactly how that worked. All that was left to do is flip on a CGI switch and make sure it worked. And one installing of fortune later, it did.

There is probably no security vulnerability here (unless you’re capable of screwing the system and uploading files to either half of the equation), which is why I’m blogging in-depth on it as I am.

In case it wasn’t blindingly obvious, Turkey Day (also known to the government as Thanksgiving) is approaching.

Now, that means half the stores are all Christmas’d (sorry, “in holiday spirit”, fucking whiny asses), and the other half is working on it still. I appreciate that they’re trying to pass on savings to everyone, get everyone to do Christmas shopping early, etc so forth, but it’s all for greed. They eclipse Turkey Day.

I admit, I put my Christmas crap in my playlist already, but I just found out that I didn’t have the files on my computer, so I figure “Might as well add them to the playlist before I forget”. I’m semi-innocent this time. The stores do this EVERY FUCKIN’ YEAR. Hell, the city even has the damn Floating Christmas Tree thingy above a nearby streetlight. IT’S STILL A COUPLE DAYS BEFORE THANKSGIVING.

Thanksgiving has it’s two days. Turkey Day, and National Food Coma day. Christmas happiness shouldn’t be in full swing until AFTER Food Coma day. Well, the actual date it can start is ON Food Coma day, but do you honestly expect to be moving around that day for any reason?

Even if I did, my original impression was “A bunch of people realized ‘Hey! Mayan Calendar ends 2012! WORLD END AHHH!!!1′”. So, naturally, I scoffed.

Then I found this website. Here’s a chunk from the head paragraph if you’re not gonna click the link.

The “2012 doomsday” is a hoax, a fraud, and a con job. It is a cruel and disgusting lie being promoted by scam artists after money; First they scare people to death that something terrible is going to happen, then publish books and videos on “how to survive the apocalypse”.

So, to the scam artists, I have one sentence for you.

Are You Fucking Serious?

WOW. Just…WOW. You’re gonna make money off an apocalyptic theory that doesn’t even have any basis? Well, you’re fucking lucky Americans typically lack sense, because it’s working like a charm. Wait ’til 2012.12.22, they’re gonna sue your asses sixty different ways. Even if they don’t work, that’s what they DO.

I’d stop this bullshit and come clean now, you’re causing some deaths too. Check out more of the bits I’ve gathered from that site:

…[I] am a teacher and my 3rd graders are hearing about this – A small child is talking about how if its ending, and why she shouldn’t just end it now.

I have a 7 year old that happened to see a documentary on the history channel that scared him so bad, that he became depressed and often questioned the meaning of life….This nonsense is scaring our children – it must stop immediatly.

Spelling “immediately” wrong aside, the second person there is right. I don’t know if History Channel is trying to make money off this or they’re just innocent casualties, but they should probably cancel their thingy, and they should definitely tell all the viewers (by using the commercial slots) “Sorry, this [is|was] a hoax.”

Fear not, my old and obsolete Blogger URL will not be deleted (unless Google decides to do so), so there’s still kind of an archive of old posts. As of a little bit after this post, lavacano.tk will be updated to have the new URL.