Category: English

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RSS Explained

I mentioned before that I use RSS. These days I use RSS for almost everything I read on the Internet. I use Google Reader, which is very popular and works well, and I almost never go to websites.

Using RSS is easy. It can help you consume a lot of content and keep you updated without having to browse to all your favorite websites. Without RSS it would have been information overload for me a long time ago. Here’s a short video explaining RSS and how to use it. I strongly recommend it to anyone who feels coping with all the information on the Internet is a heavy task.

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Don’t call anyone when the daylight-savings time changeover is close

Why, you ask? Why shouldn’t I make phone calls very close to when the clock leaps one hour forward (or backward)? Ah, well, you’ll have to ask innocent student Cody Webb, who naively called his school at that time, very close to the time a bomb threat call was made to the same school. Since the school failed to adjust their clocks correctly, he got the blame and spent 12 days in jail. Unfortunately, this prevents me from labeling this post as “Funny”.

Anyway, next time the question “what are the chances?” springs to mind remember poor, innocent, non-bomb-threatener Cody Webb. (via Digg)

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Sao Paulo, Brazil: The City Without Advertising

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the advertisers did not adhere to the city’s rules on outdoor advertising. In return, the city banned outdoor advertising entirely. So what does an 11-million citizens city look like without advertising? You can read a little more about it here or go directly to this set of pictures.

We hear about city-advertisers disputes a lot here in Israel, too. I wonder if an Israeli city will ever ban outdoor advertising. Probably when municipal corruption is gone and pigs fly. (via Digg).

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Is Microsoft Dead? Define “dead”

Every time I hear someone claiming that Microsoft is dead I roll my eyes and try to stay calm while listening to a whole lot of nonsense. Recently, Paul Graham (famous hacker and also a partner in venture firm Y Combinator) wrote that Microsoft Is Dead.

While I usually distance myself from such clear cut statements, the article itself lists very good points why Microsoft is not the big fearsome monopoly it used to be, and how the new age of the Internet doesn’t take Microsoft as a threat like software companies did in the past. So while the main point in the article doesn’t seem to be that Microsoft is dead (at least not according to my definition of “dead”), it’s still a very good read. (via Download Squad)

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Microsoft Paint Videos

Microsoft Paint, which comes with every copy of Windows since about the beginning of time, must be the most generic drawing application in the world. So naturally this means that some people have to show their ability to create Photoshop-like pictures by using Paint alone, a task for those with great patience and quite a lot of talent. Here are some sped-up videos that show these abilities:

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How To Install Flash Player 9 On 64 Bit Linux

If you try to install Flash Player 9 for Linux (download link) from Adobe on 64 bit Linux you get this annoying error from the installer:

ERROR: Your architecture, \’x86_64\’, is not supported by the Adobe Flash Player installer.

To overcome this, you can simply run the installer with the following command:

$ linux32 ./flashplayer-installer

The linux32 program makes the installer think that it’s a 32 bit architecture machine and the installation continues. So far I haven’t experienced any problems with the installation.

UPDATE: It seems like I have no sound inside flash any more. It seems to be a known problem with known solutions (solutions search link), but since I don’t have root permissions on my Linux machine (at work) I can’t solve the problem.