This post is mostly for the benefit of my fellow MIT alumni. Remember Jonathan Monsarrat? If so, then you may have gotten the same impression of him back at the ‘tute that I did, to wit, that he gave off creep vibes. Judging from what has been written about him online since then, he’s done… Read More »
Recently, I wrote about why my comics aggregator stopped supporting comic strips distributed by the King Features Syndicate. In a nutshell, King Features changed how their comics are distributed in a way that (a) makes it much harder for my aggregator to scrape them, and (b) makes it 100% clear that they don’t want people… Read More »
The folks at the King Features Syndicate have always made their comics harder to aggregate than those of any of the other syndicates. I had implemented a convoluted workaround involving redirecting requests for images of their comics through the comics aggregator itself, where various special headers were inserted into the request to convince the King… Read More »
Perhaps I just don’t grok the zen of Hacker News, but I just don’t get why the site doesn’t provide RSS feeds of comments on postings. I also don’t get why nobody has written something to provide this. Or, at least, if it has been written, I couldn’t find it (perhaps my Google mojo just isn’t… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-01-20]: The scripts weren’t reading the username and password from the config file properly. In fact, I had accidentally hard-coded my own Vonage username and password in this script. D’oh! Needless to say, I’ve changed my password, and the updated scripts below are fixed. Also, I updated the cron script to allow the usage… Read More »
I’ve added xkcd.com the comics aggregator. And there was much rejoicing. Alas, because of the architecture of the aggregator, I can’t easily serve up the alt text that Randall attaches to the strips. :-/ As always, feel free to show your appreciation. 🙂
I have just been informed by a member of Massachusetts Senator Will Brownsberger’s staff that he “will be co-sponsoring a piece of legislation that will, among other things, prevent employers from asking job applicants for their social networking passwords.” This issue has been raised in previous sessions of the Massachusetts legislature, but it has not… Read More »
By popular demand, I’ve added Mallard Fillmore, Prickly City, Broom Hilda, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey, and The Born Loser to the comics aggregator. As always, feel free to show your appreciation. 🙂
For a while now, the web browser vendors and major purveyors of targeted internet advertising have been working on a proposal for allowing users to prevent web sites from tracking their online activity and using it to “customize their web browsing experience,” a.k.a., displaying targeted advertisements which are, theoretically, tailored to the person viewing them.… Read More »
UPDATE: The Consumerist has posted a template you can use for your opt-out letter. Furthermore, the Consumerist article says that eBay just did the same thing as PayPal, and you need to send a letter to opt out of that one as well. There’s a link in the article to a template for the eBay… Read More »