How to fix an IPOD that won’t play songs
Posted on August 12, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My IPOD died for some mysterious reason over the weekend, and it wouldn’t play music or pictures. I would guess that videos would also be broken, but I didn’t have one to test it out with. The keyboard was still active, but when I pressed the Play button, it would just freeze up.
The fix? Do a hard reboot of the little piece of crap. In this order: Press the Menu button and while still holding it down, press the middle button. Hold for 10 seconds. You should see the Apple logo appear and after a brief period it’ll restart and begin working again. Using the ITunes Reset function doesn’t seem to fix it.
The downside to running a website
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Over the years, the one biggest downside to running a webblog I’ve found are the people who find you by mistake. Let me explain.
I used to run a weblog of Religious News. I’d get news postings from all over the world and collect them on my site. These stories were varied and contained a ton of different subjects. Now, when search engines like Google and Yahoo scan my site, they index all the words on the page. My front page was made up of 20 different stories, but would appear (I think) to them as one single page with a lot of weird words. This means when someone searches for something odd, there is a slim chance my site would be returned as a hit by accident.
An example. This is a story about a young girl who was raped by her tribe, as a form of revenge/punishment. It’s a terrible read, but it includes the words: “18 year old girl”. When someone now hits google for their dose of teenage porn and search for “18 year old girl”, guess who’s site turns up? Yep, mine. Over the years I’ve gotten 1000’s of hits on that story alone from people looking for 18 yr old porn.
It gets worse. I sometimes find searches like this one, hitting that same article:
72.24.221.13 - - [25/Jun/2008:06:58:16 +0800] “GET /rno/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=184 HTTP/1.1″ 200 7137 “http://www.google.com/se
arch?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=girls+boob14+years+old&spell=1″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;
Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
This is some pervert searching for pictures of 14 year old girl’s boobs. How ungood. Why did my site get returned? Well, the story included the words “year old girl”, and a timestamp on the page from a comment included the number 14. The word boob doesn’t appear, so I can’t explain that one, but there it is… This isn’t google’s fault of course. Their software is just word matching what was searched for.
Gotta love the internet.
Binge Drinking
Posted on June 16, 2008
Filed Under Rant | Leave a Comment
So apparently, four drinks is now a binge. That means every person in every pub and restaurant in Australia is a binge drinker. What absolute bollocks. Way to surf the media frenzy on the subject and implement a plan that has absolutely no hope of doing anything useful to help solve the issue of problem drinking. What’s next - a whopper AND chips is binge eating?