Web

Google AdSense

Well after hearing a few people adding Google AdSense to web sites to pay for hosting fees, or even make some extra cash I decided to add it here to try it out. I’m also working on another website, http://lifeinnorthernmichigan.com to see if I can actually make some money with it. A co-workers neighbor that doesn’t really have a lot of web knowledge is making 1K/mo from three pretty aweful websites (but I can see how they generate clicks). Well it is an experiment.

Interesting blog on the topic.

Great PDA/Phone

Well I finally gave up on my Treo. 1) It was dying a terrible battery death 2) The hinge broke AGAIN 3) I work for AT&T and people look at me funny with my Sprint Treo. I switched to Cingular and got the new 8125 phone (a.k.a. HTC Wizard). It’s really awesome. I’m creating an article with all my Cingular 8125 notes with my software finds, and migration from Palm.

More on Internet Filters

The story gets better on internet filters. Of course only after I write a 20 page HOW-TO guide on the SurfPass filter from cogilab do they yank it from the free-for-home-use market. Turns out everyone was downloading the free version and they weren’t making money.

The good news is an easier more powerful filtering software has come out called K9. Much better at false hits, easy to install, use, etc. Step on over to http://www.k9webprotection.com and try it out.

Good Internet Filter

If you are looking for a free, effective, internet filter that can do both blacklists (banned site lists) and content filtering (looking for text in packets) I think I’ve found one that works well. You can even whitelist/blacklist your own. For example I whitelist slashdot.org (sometimes the comment pages are raw, but I don’t care). I blacklist images.google.com. Free blacklist updates, free for home use. Unlike ContentProtect (what I was using) it doesn’t hog any machine resources. Works “behind the scenes” quite well.

http://www.cogilab.com/us/homeedition/index.htm

I’ll try to put an install HOW-TO up soon.

A few things I don’t like about it are:

1) It kills the browser process after a violation. There are reasons to do this, you can change this behavior.
2) No override. You can go whitelist a site but there is no way to put in an override password when a violation is found
3) No ability to email the logs, etc. I think you can administer remotely though.
4) I think I had to login as admin and change the unlimited profile to include content filtering (blacklists was default)

Yahoo Music DOUBLES the price

Well everyone in the industry said they couldn’t keep that price of $4.99 with portable support. I just got an email from Yahoo saying (after I just BOUGHT a compatible portable player) that the $4.99 no longer includes portable support for music. That is another $5! What a rip off. I was able to lock in the current price for one year. If someone else has a cheaper price after that I’ll switch.

Yahoo Music Engine

Wow… Over 1 million tunes for $60/year. I’d say $5/mo (like the Yahoo ad does) but that would be a lie. If you want to pay by the month it is $6.99. Still a deal. Less than half of what the cost of a similar offering from Rhapsody (Rhapsody to-go is 14.99/mo). Downside is of course they are DRM enabled Windows Media files. You can use them from 3 computers however, and unforunately I don’t have a lack of windoze computers around the house. You are “renting” a music collection and you know what? I’m fine with that. The albums I love I’ll probably still buy. Today I buy quite a few albums that I don’t care for except a song or two. I can buy just those songs on Yahoo for 79 cents now (If I still like them after hearing them 20 times). You can also take the music to a DRM enabled MP3 player.

For $5/mo it is worth it to listen to just about any music you want. The WMA files can be downloaded to your hard drive for offline use but they will expire I guess if you don’t connect or cancel the subscription. The software is pretty buggy. It logs me off periodically and then after I log in it doesn’t let me stream music – restarting the program fixes it. It is very web centric and is pretty slow right now. How would you like to size that application deployment?

Ok, so when can I do this with movie and TV shows Yahoo?

Prepackaged Goods

Wow, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and other useful stuff all prepackaged and configured for multiple platforms. I love open source.
http://www.apachefriends.org/xampp-en.html was easy to install on XP. I ran an install script and started the server. I installed OSCommerce in 5 minutes! server, database, and shopping cart platform all installed in under 10 minutes. Wow. And with PHP I can take the site back and forth b/w Linux (where my web hosting is) to my machine. And it’s not even written in Java!