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the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar

I've been doing that for years now. Did Mozilla forget about their own feature, one of the features that keeps me on Firefox, I might add?

UV can be used to make scorpions glow in the dark, e.g. http://johnbokma.com/pet/scorp... It also works with some opiliones (harvestmen) and millipedes.

BTW, don't built the one I made years ago. Nowadays one can buy a better UV source online, e.g. UltraFire WF-502B with UV LED.

Oblig link: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/q... You can use it also for RSS feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/r...

Oblig link: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/q... You can use it also for RSS feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/r...

Oblig link: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/k...

Yup, see: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/200... However, this doesn't work if they check for IP ranges.

You mean colors like this Sceloporus species relaxing in my hand.?

Several years back my blog got quite some traffic and some friends convinced me to give AdSense a try. I did. Just before December. In January Google paid me 1200 USD... The following months I made over 700 USD/month. Over the years this dropped, and I guess it's now around 100 USD or so.

My site is still a hobby, but when I made 700 USD/month with it, I was able to put a lot of extra time in it. And no, I am not going to do my hobby the way you want it; it's my hobby after all. If you're not happy with that, start your own hobby.

I run a simple blog with modest text only AdSense and last time I checked 50+% of the visitors do block ads. There was a time I made 700+ USD/month with it. It's now closer to 100 USD, also because I just can't afford to put much time in it (and hence visitors dropped, a lot).

For me: Six Add-ons for Firefox I love and mostly Tree Style Tab. Last time I checked there was something similar for Chrome, but not the same, alas. I use CopyURL+ a lot as well, but maybe something similar is available for Chrome as well. As soon there is Tree Style Tab for Chrome (and no horizontal tabs at all) I most likely switch. The past month or so Firefox has become quite instable in my experience (random crashes when I click in a side bar, or accidentally press a few keys). And the upgrade before this one on Ubuntu kept crashing; I had to move my profile dir out of the way and reboot the computer and then move stuff back. The crashing stopped but it ate quite some time.

You know the deal where the Mexican policeman pulls you over for made up BS until you slip him some cash?

Heh... I am Dutch, and I have been living in Mexico for close to 9 years now. Maybe the state of Veracruz is different, or maybe a lot of people who talk about slipping someone money just repeat what they've seen in a bad movie or heard from a friend of a friend. So far, I've only twice seen someone having to slip (or "slip") money to a police officer. The first time was in Chiapas, close to the border with Guatamala where the driver of a mini-bus had to pay. He complained that he had to pay extra for me because I was an American. No idea why he had to pay, but it did smell like corruption.

On another occasion a taxi driver (I don't have a license to drive a car, never bothered to get one) was stopped and had to pay a fine. On that case I was quite sure it was a fine, even though the taxi driver made it sound like corruption. Taxis with the right papers can leave Xalapa, the city where I live, and take passengers to nearby (or even faraway) towns but are not allowed to pick passengers up and bring them back to Xalapa on their return trip. Well, as far as I know that's the law. Yet a lot of taxi drivers just take the risk. As was the case here; the taxi was from Xalapa and had picked us up in a town outside of Xalapa. But I have no idea where the money went, so it might have been corruption.

Also at the migration office no sign of corruption. When I went for a FM3 (migration papers) after been illegal in Mexico (not kidding ;-) ), I did have to pay a fine and leave the country. Nobody winked at me and asked for a palm to be greased. Instead I got good advice on how to leave the country and come back without spending too much money: take a bus to Chiapas, enter Guatamala at one border post and leave (the same day) at a different one.

On a few occasions I've bumped into the police and each time the officers where nice and friendly, listened to both sides, and just gave advice on how to settle (if nobody came up with one). No one was put in a Mexican jail. No money was exchanged. Also during hikes we've encountered police officers on several occasions. Once it was a bit scary, see: Police encounters, but mostly because of the stories I had read online and the movies I had seen; all the corruption etc. in Mexico, the Mexican jails, etc. But in this case, and others to follow, the police was either acting on reports received -- we were hiking in an area that was used for illegal activities and I can imagine that a big white guy with a Mexican girl and a baby might be reason for having a look -- or just warning us to be careful.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that there's corruption in Mexico, like in most (every?) countries; a country has to operate and I think that poor countries do so by corruption and the rich countries do so by making up a huge number of laws ;-). But I don't go around with a huge bag of "grease", nor have I ever seen the inside of a Mexican jail (not for lack of trying.... j/k).

Display started to show a bright about after a month. Earlier this month a whole line of pixels died. Support? Yeah, only if you live in the USA. I got the KF as a Christmas present last year. Since I live in Mexico having the thing replaced under warranty costs well over 100 USD. So Bezos, if you want to give me a great Christmas: shove a KF so far up your ass that the light of the backlight shines out of your nostrils. If you do, I will gladly offer mine at no additional cost.

See also: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2012/03/04/kindle-fire-outside-usa-beware.html

In short: don't send a Kindle Fire overseas. Amazon can't ship the KF after repairs so it will be very expensive

"endless pages that are designed only to echo content to gain page rank for some pointless website"

That's actually what slashdot is (and always has been). One could argue if it's pointless or not, but one's pointless is another's treasure, of course.

As for PageRank: I think that one got mostly pointless several years back. It's a system that's way too easy to game, hence Google uses a lot of other ways to come up with the actual rank (position) on a search results page (SERP).

And aggregating happens because it's cheap and easy. Look at sites like LifeHacker: most of their content is just a short summary and a link to the original (or "original"). It's not done for PageRank as far as I know, just to become a major aggregating site. A lot of people are OK with consuming a short summary and don't care much about the original.

I blog here and some of the stuff took me 8+ hours to write. And some people are just happy with a 10 lines summary on an aggregation site and a link to what I wrote (or now and then via via via). Case in point, Slashdot; most people don't RTFA: the summary, no matter how wrong or badly written is enough. Moreover, most people just click "post" and off they go. Traffic, traffic, traffic.

And Google just had to get along: those copy pasta sites are important to people, hence they score well (and hence PageRank became more and more meaningless. (My blog had, and maybe still has, a PR of 7)

Kindle Fire outside the USA: fun while it lasts

It's a nice device, don't get me wrong, but even if I could have warranty outside of the USA I am not interested anymore. I live in Xalapa, and there's an Apple shop "around the corner" from where I live. Beats shipping and waiting weeks if not months for repairs.

I managed to get a Vostro without MS Windows and with FreeDOS: Dell Vostro 200 Windows Tax Free in Mexico. It took some effort, but I had a very good point: Dell advertised that the Vostro was sold with any software the customer wanted ;-).

In Mexico it's as far as I know the only brand one can buy that doesn't have piss poor support (HP/Compaq, Acer), have the option of an USA keyboard, etc. Built your own? You must be kidding... parts are here both antique and overpriced (sometimes 2x as much as they used to cost in the USA). And if you want to order them, don't be surprised if you have to pay at least 50% in advance. And warranty? Good luck with that. Last time it took me 50 minutes of talking to get my 2 month (!) old router (well under warranty) exchanged in OfficeMax and only because I stated that if I didn't have a new one within 5 minutes we would call the police. When I left I had to promise that if the new one got the same problems that I would work things out with Cisco and not come back....

Anyway, I am happy with my Dell Vostro 200 ST, especially I paid as much for it as I would have paid for it in the USA. And while it took some effort, I could buy my Dell Vostro 200 Windows Tax Free in Mexico. Shortly after Dell even offered a similar machine without Windows (but didn't call it the Vostro Bokma, alas) ;-)

Great machine; shame it's running Ubuntu. Which is the reason why my next machine is going to be an Apple made one; I don't care for a hackingtosh, and am sick of the Ubuntu "dance". Yes, I am aware of Linux mint, but I am afraid that I will end up with too much tinkering that option as well.

Anyway, thanks Dell! And I am happy to read that they keep their Linux support going.

Ah, yes, and I have 28,000 daily visitors on my blog.

Easier: turn on the Quick Launch toolbar: A better start menu with Quick Launch toolbar. No need for a folder on the Desktop (hate that clutter) or another task bar. Quick Launch is already there, just turn it on ;-).

When on XP I used this the most A better start menu with Quick Launch.

Besides Windows key + R.

But yeah, MS must be lying through their teeth because you use the start button about once every 5 minutes... Can't even imagine why people would do such a thing unless they get paid for doing so.

Kindle Fire is mostly here a device to watch YouTube (and some downloaded movies). I think in families with (young) children a Kindle Fire is used more for watching YouTube than reading eBooks (also, we have two Kindle Touch for just that). I like it for that, my wife and I both love cooking, and somehow sitting on a couch together and watching a cooking video on YouTube is way nicer than watching the same movie on a laptop or desktop computer. Also, when cooking, one can keep the Kindle Fire close at hand, and follow the instructions.

I have a Kindle Fire, got it as a Christmas present. I think it's a fantastic device. The only downside is that I am not in the USA. When after a month a small defect showed up in the LCD Amazon cared a lot but was not able to help me out other than suggesting that I would pay ~ 140 USD to have my Christmas present fixed, see Kindle Fire outside the USA: fun while it lasts.

So, be warned if you're outside the USA and decide to import one yourself. You might end up paying for what adds up to an iPad. While I hope that Amazon will start selling the Kindle Fire outside of the USA, and hopefully within my 1 year of warranty, I somehow doubt this is going to happen. At least not with the current Kindle Fire. And with rumours of a smaller iPad I wonder if a Kindle Fire 2 is going to be an option for Amazon.

As for Amazon's after sale support.... be glad you didn't import a Kindle Touch yourself: Kindle Fire outside the USA: fun while it lasts

You're lucky. I got mine as a Christmas present. After a month it showed a issue with the back light. And since I am living in Mexico, it's not worth to return it, even with Amazon paying for the shipping to the USA, see also: Kindle Fire outside the USA: fun while it lasts

Benzodiazepines (see article) are also prescribed for anxiety and taken over the day, not specifically as "sleeping pills". At least in the Netherlands seresta (oxazepam) is handed out like candy. Or at least that was the case in 2003. I suffered for months withdrawal effects, see also Quitting Oxazepam (Serax) - personal experience with withdrawal.

Acer refunded me 70 MXN (a little over 5 USD!) for the Vista starter edition, and Dell was able to sell me a Vostro 200 ST without Windows "tax". I live in Mexico.

Acer refunded me 70 MXN (a little over 5 USD!) for the Vista starter edition, and Dell was able to sell me a Vostro 200 ST without Windows "tax". I live in Mexico.

Just back from the migration office, renewing my FM2. I am Dutch, living in Mexico. I guess Mexico is developed? If you have some income (I am a freelance "overseas" Perl programmer) getting an FM3 or FM2 is a piece of cake. It's just filling in some papers and the fees are far, far from 2K USD. Also it takes weeks, not months. Oh, and I was an illegal immigrant for 2 years in Mexico. No, I didn't end up in prison, didn't get tortured, and no, I didn't have to bribe corrupt officials. I just went to the migration office (Xalapa) where I was told that I had to leave the country and come back in. They even explained how to do this: go to Guatemala, cross the border, get to a different border post, so you can come back in the same day. Been there, done that. It's a long bus trip to Guatemala from Xalapa, but it's easy peasy, see: A very short visit to Guatemala

Have also been living in NZ for a while. They use a points system that at one time was strongly biased to get UK bred material in the easiest. With a good degree (MSc) the right age, and some persistence one can get in without much trouble. Fee was around 2K USD. Took around 5 or 6 months, can't recall. Since one can stay for 9 months (back then) on a visitor visa it's possible to get the papers done by then.

Based on my experience: a) do the paperwork yourself, it's not that hard (were possible) b) DO NOT use an "immigration service" in your own company. If I had used those in the Netherlands, were I was living until 2000, I would have paid well over 5K USD for their "services" which basically consist of filling in papers and sending them to NZ.

In both cases I just went to each country, and filed for immigrant status in the country itself.

I asked Dell to sell me a Vostro 200 ST with FreeDos instead of Windows and avoided paying for an OS I wasn't going to use.

Mexican Immigrant here. I arrived in Mexico in 2003 and I have been illegal in Mexico for a quite a while (~ 2 years). When I went to the migration service (Xalapa) the people were *extremely* friendly. I had to pay a small fine and leave the country and come back in. I even got advice on how to do this the easiest way: go to Guatemala, cross at one border post, travel to the next one and come back into Mexico the same day. Trip to Tapachula (Chiapas) by bus was ~12 hrs, hopping over the border, and taking a minibus to the next border post and back to Tapachula took an hour or two, and we took the next bus back to Xalapa. All in all it was done over the weekend ( A very short visit to Guatamala ).

As for the immigration laws, as long as you can prove that you can make a small income you can start your paperwork, which is extremely easy to do. The immigration people are extremely helpful and very patient and give solid advice, in my experience.

I have also lived in New Zealand for a little over 2 years, and the whole NZ immigration circus is extremely elitist, expensive if you're not careful, and there is a strong hate against Asian people and a very strong preference for people purebred in the UK.

Have you tried this trick? Making Copy URL+ work on recent Fx or Six Add-ons for Fx I love in the Section "CopyURL+"

Have you tried this trick? Making Copy URL+ work on recent Fx or Six Add-ons for Fx I love in the Section "CopyURL+"

Don't blow yourself up

While not a laptop, I paid *less* for my Dell Vostro 200 ST *without* a MS OS. It took some time but I managed to convince Dell to sell it to me with a copy of FreeDOS: Dell Vostro 200 Windows Tax Free in Mexico for less.

Another "fine" example is their Adsense "support". If, for example, checks don't arrive you can hang out in a forum and beg someone to please help you... Google still owns me like 2000 USD after I cancelled [1] my account (I don't do business with companies that don't bother to help me out), and I am afraid I have a long road ahead of me in order to get what I am owed.

[1] Goodbye Adsense and Good Riddance

Google is already a dangerous hacker tool.

are called scorpions, see: Mating scorpions from Molcaxac, Puebla

"That is, if online dating works at all, which is doubtful."

I am married (just over one year) to the girl I dated online, using MSN messenger, and we have a daughter (see: Introducing... baby Alice ). I hope that answers your question.

I report comment spammers and for some reason the daily average stays well below 20 which gives me the impression that someone is taking notes. My site has over 14,000 daily visitors ( john bokma ) so I think 20 spams is very low compared to what I hear from other sites.

Before I reported spam, I was flooded with 100+ spams a day.

CAPTCHAs is just another "plan for spam" bound to fail in the long run, just like filtering. It's ignoring the issue itself.

I've done that, it several chats and emails, but I managed to get a vostro with FreeDOS and pay less: Dell Vostro 200 Windows Tax Free in Mexico

Ditto for Firefox, see: Keymarks explained

Firefox wins in stability and ease of use in OWA. I've had to many many times tell users to use firefox instead of IE due to one reason or another. MS is ALWAYS going out of their way to screw the other guys. I've seen it when i worked at a place that used Novell Netware, and I've seen it many times since. OWA is just another area (anybody saying otherwise is probably working on MS's counter-blog/misinformation team). However, some users need the fancy features to pick multiple recipients under the TO: button. Switching the user agent seems to totally allow this feature for firefox (using 2.0.0.11). Weird to follow (poor wording?) on how to get the user agent switching option started: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/24/changinguseragent.html http://www.user-agents.org/index.shtml gives the string of "contype" to emulate IE 4.x and 5. I don't see one for 6.x or 7 though. Anybody know one for 6.x?

If only the automatic update was not so crippled on Windows...
http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2007/11/08/software-update-failed-firefox-thunderbird.html

A quick search found this: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/24/changinguser agent.html

It has really nice font smoothing. Superior to firefox+windows in that respect. The address bar as progress bar is neat also.

That said, I'm probably among the 100 people in the world that actually use the keyword feature of firefox. Meaning I type 'wiki term' in my address bar and it searches wikipedia for that term, with similar keywords for other common searches. This page gives you an idea of what you can do with the firefox keywords. I prefer not to display the search bar.

Safari won't let you set up keywords for searching different sites from you address bar, and that's a deal-breaker for me.

@2 - people who use web based email don't notice a single issue. People who are not technical savvy will notice a problem, blame it on some random company, and notice that it works again the next day.

In short, I am afraid that it doesn't work.

Better: scan for known botnet activities and disconnect user immediately. Waiting for a random period might result in several infected computers sending out a lot of spam.

Furthermore, spam is migrating to blogs and guest books at an alarming rate IMO. Recently a lot of edu domains suddenly hosted viagra spam and the pages got spamvertized ( http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2007/04/27/edu-domains- host-spam.html ).

As someone who reports this (comment spam) garbage daily I can write a book on how hard it is to do anything about spam and spammers. I guess most seem to pay their hosting bills on time and the rest of the world filters them out. Or something like that.

My blog ( http://johnbokma.com/ ) has over 16,000 daily visitors and makes some nice money. So there go 2 out of 3 wrong. You might be right with 2 because English is not my native language. On the other hand a lot of people seem to be very happy with my Apache on XP tutorial.

Don't assume that your personal opinion reflects reality. And if that hurts, join Digg.

Old news, see: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/13/

Have been reporting this to Google for over a year. Only recently long lists (thousands) of blogs got /finally/ accepted by the abuse desk. If I can find thousands of blogs with some Perl, why can't Google fix this before those blogs get spammed on thousands and thousands of open guestbooks, blogs, etc.

Furthermore, the problem is not limited to Google. LayeredTech, ThePlanet, and several other hosting providers have no problem at all with making it a pain in the ass to report abuse and just host too much garbage for too long.

And all the while non-solutions like Akismet are applied by the masses. It's time some people create a draft on how comments should be stored in blogging software (hint: including remote ip, proxy related environment variables, etc) and we get a online reporting tool like spamcop. Filtering? Look at your inbox. It's not going to happen. And CAPTCHA? By the time bots have problems with it, most people can't solve them.

It's not meta, it's JavaScript, see: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/13/
They often redirect to sites that pay for click traffic.

My best guess is that there are about 50.000 blog spot blogs doing this, although Google, after months, seems more serious at cleaning this shit up.

Sorry for the double-post, but here's how to do it and some further examples:

http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.ht ml

It's amazing what two seconds in Google turns up.

Comment spam is a serious problem in my opinion and growing very strong. Your question is like back in 1996: how much of a problem is email spam, I get only 4 such emails a day.

See: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/13/

If you have your own blog, writing down some of the links in the spam, and checking Google for them after a few days might show you 10,000-20,000 blogs/guestbooks with the same links.

http://johnbokma.com/pet/scorpion/detection-using- uv-leds.html

Also because people are impressed when I demonstrate it :-)