Spammers Defeat Gmail CAPTCHA, Recording Off an HD Tuner, A Flickr Pic

Another Google Trick

Another small Google trick (again, you can find lots of sites with these or figure them out using the Advanced search options in Google itself). Find all pages with a certain URL in the search. Example: inurl:view/index.shtml - searches only for pages with "view/index.shtml" in them.

Spammers Defeat Gmail CAPTCHA

It was bound to happen. After all, there's some pretty advanced OCR software out there, so it was about time someone created something that could recognize text through any background. I think you'll see this showing up to crack other CAPTHCHA registrations. Damn spammers.

Recording Off an HD Tuner

Surprisingly what they say is true - even if you record an HD program off an HD tuner onto a regular old-school analog VCR the picture is better. Of course, it's not HD but it is better then off an analog tuner. Quite a bit in fact.

We haven't quite decided what to do about recording things. But for now, probably until the Big Diital Switchover (cue the fanfare); we'll probably stay with a VCR. We don't want to pay every month for TIVO or the similar brand, or go through the trouble of setting up a computer with an HD tuner just to record HD. Why doesn't someone make a standalone HD-capable digital recorder? Oh, yea, the whole digital copyright thing. Yea.

A Flickr Pic

The Internet is great, isn't it? Especially blogs. If you don't like what I'm saying you don't have to read it. Or maybe you're so fascinated or disgusted you can't look away no matter what. Anyway, blogs are great, I can give you my totally amateur thoughts on a picture like the below.

Anyway...I still love Flickr.com, even though I don't have a full account there now. But I can still upload lots of pics and look at other's. In fact, I have two accounts - one for general pics and one to correspond to my OABONNY site. You can see my OABONNY pages here at Flickr. Also, if you do, check out my favs there.

Some great stuff on Flickr, some talented people have shared their photos.

Here's one of my new favs (among many at both Flickr accounts). Have to share this, click it to see it larger:

You And I Fly A Ship Seeking The Warm Unending Sky
Originally uploaded by Eric Rolph

Firstly, the title caught me. At first I wasn't sure if it completely fits the photo but I now believe that it does.

The second thing that caught my mind's eye was something that made me think of that commercial, you've probably seen it but not thought anything of it. I'm not sure what it's advertising - maybe an allergy medicine or something like that. Hiking girl, top of a hill, looking out over the distance, the perspective turning 360 as your view swings around. Somehow, even though the are somewhat different, it reminds me of this shot.

Lastly, I think it's an inspiring shot. Potential spread out before you, but with the occasional hardships along the way seen on the horizon.

You could even call it post-apocalyptic if you wanted to interpret it that way, no civilization as far as the eye can see.

Or maybe I'm just getting anxious for the summer.

Footbridge in Watertown #2, trail down to Black River, Kittens, Pool Table in an Aztek

Footbridge in Watertown, trail down to Black River, second post

Earlier this week I took my father to the doctor's for a routine procedure, so afterwards we made another pass by the footbridge off from Eastern Boulevard. This time the gate was open (last weekend was the whitewater kayaking event, I believe).

The bridge itself has a fine sheen of discoloring (rust?) all over it. The "island" it leads to has a fenced in area where you can look over the Black River, the plant on the other side along with the old walls and base of the original Eastern Boulevard Bridge.

There's also a (somewhat) steep walkway down to the rocks along the Black River. Here's some pics, a few more at my Flickr set.



Panorama from the stones. Taken with my Motorola Razr V3xx. A surprisingly good photo pano, taken with my cameraphone (forgot my Canon on this trip!).


The old bridge foundations.

The trail leading back up. Concreted stones. Nicely done, though maybe too steep for some people, probably slippery during wet times. More photos - my Flickr set.

Kittens are getting larger.

They're wandering around, playing with every other animal and thing they can find, and are developing their own little personalities.

Pool Table in the Aztek

We've fit pretty much everything into our 20005 Pontiac Aztek Rally Edition. The seats come out which makes for a large space, it seems none of the newer SUV's have seats that actually physically come out; just fold down.

Anyway, I didn't think this would fit but it did - a full size pool table.

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Tucker; in mid-jump, Flickr, Wayback Machine, Commodores and Modern ASCII Art

Another picture and playing around with the camera some more, Flickr

Another nice action shot taken with the Canon A570 IS. Continually impressed with the 570's features, quality, and quality of the pics.

Lots of interesting little things with the camer along with the bigger features - I discovered yesterday that when you're looking at previews if you tilt the camera is automatically rotates the images on the screen to keep it horizontal, kinda like the Iphone.

This pic is hosted on Flickr, and was posted to this blog using the integrated blogger poster. Works nicely. I've been a member of Flickr for quite sometime but never got around to using it much - there's so many photo hosting sites and places to set up photo albums...

Anyway, I recently got back into using it. Very nice; nice choice of uploaders, the ability to organize your photos via a JAVA drag and drop applet, and the EXIF info from your pics are read by the site and posted (if you want it to be). And you can make photos private if you wish, important sometimes. Also, lots of photos from the Jefferson County area by others.

Will our websites be archived for eternity?

I've often wondered and pondered if the stuff we write in blogs, the websites we make, and other things on the Internet are REALLY going to be archived forever, or such? Not just for a few years, or five or ten years, but a long time.

Sure, there's a lot of things that you maybe don't want being available "forever" or even for a long period of time (and sometimes for no period of time).


But what about that genealogy website you joined and painstakingly added your entire family to - will it be available to distant relatives a hundred years down the line? Will your artwork you posted on your website? Or your photos? Or a posting on a forum website for dog ownership that is what you consider to be the best philosophical statement you've ever made, something so deep you'll never be able to do better?

I think in the far future (if the human race is still around and still civilized) much information will still be available from our time period, though probably very patchy. Sites like the Wayback Machine are massive archives of websites, websites of many descriptions and various types. And not just the newest stuff but ranging over long time periods (at least "long" in the computer world). Google and other sites too (and if you listen to some people even your Google searches and the e-mail you deleted from Gmail are saved somewhere).

I think some data will be lost, some will never be archived in the first place, others will be archived but those archives will not themselves be stored permanently.

Commodores, ASCII Art

Maybe an occasional reader to this blog will remember the "good ol' days" of the Commodore and the burgeoning of the home computer, back in the 80's. I started out with the Commodore Vic-20, 5 whole KB of RAM! Wow. I had a tape drive, an 8k memory expansion (I even learned to do "high res" graphics), and some other accessories. I graduated to the Commodore 64, wore one out and bought another, then the Commodore 128 and wore at least one of those out too. I even started setting up businesses with Commodores and writing my own programs for myself and businesses. In fact, some people were still using databases and software I set up well into the mid-90's (hard to believe).

Hey, they were the thing at that time, along with TI-99's, Atari's, etc. But Commodore was the most popular, I believe.

At one time, even though bit-mapped graphics were readily available on these machines, ASCII art got kinda popular. Making pictures from the text on your keyboard. BBS's used it for their opening screens, etc (you don't remember BBS's? No, they were the things we used before the Internet started being used by individuals. I even wrote my own software and ran one for a bit - didn't everyone at that time?)

Here's a website that kinda brings that all back (though people never stopped using ASCII art on their computers) - Photo2text. Upload a pic and their computer automatically creates an ASCII text picture.

Here's an example - My photo. Kinda nice, you can also do it all in 1's and 0's, shaded text, etc.

The difference between the Days of Commodore and now is that the computer does it itself, back in the day you had to painstakingly create your ASCII art by hand.