By Dave M. on January 26, 2012
Steve offered an alternative to using Google’s search engine, falling into Google’s trap of gathering information about us.
Using an alternative like DuckDuckGo is OK, but lets face it, there really isn’t a “great” alternative to Google. We have all grown used to using the search engine and have our little tips and tricks for getting the results out of it we expect.
I offer an alternative to using a Google alternative…
Modern browsers these days allow you to access the Internet “privately”.
Safari has an option in it’s menus to set “Private Browsing…”:
Resulting in:
Chrome has “New Incognito Window…” in the Wrench menu:
Resulting in:
Firefox has “Start Private Browsing” in it’s Tools menu:
Resulting in:
Opera has “New Private Window” in it’s File menu:
Resulting in:
There are, of course, many other browsers out there. I suspect most have similar abilities to turn on private browsing.
I ran a little test with both Chrome (in normal mode) and Safari (in private mode) doing a search in Google for “Stephen Hargrove”. Sorry Steve, I wanted to make that the browsers were not pulling up any cache data.
This is Chrome’s normal access results:
Here is Safari’s Private access results:
You can see, there are some pretty significant differences in the results. In Chrome’s results, you can see that in Google’s instant search box, there is data from Google+ because Steve is in one of my Circles. It also has a couple of search result hits, one from Google+ and another that Steve might have shared on Google+. Those extra’s don’t show up in Safari’s Private browsing search results.
It’s interesting however, that in both results, Google knew my location. I took a closer look at that value by clicking on “Change Location”, then clicking on “Auto-detected.” The resulting page describes how they get location from an IP Address. There isn’t much you can do about that other than spoof your address or use a Proxy Server.
I may be wrong here and with Steve being the security expert, I wonder if there are any repercussions from just opening a “Private” browsing window separate from what you normally use and search Google with that window instead of a normal browsing window…
Posted in Internet, Tips & Tricks | Tagged chrome, firefox, google, incognito, opera, private data, safari, search |
By Dave M. on January 25, 2012
OK, Steve posted on Spirit of 9 that Google is getting creepy with all it’s data gathering.
My question is what do we have in the way of alternatives to searching the web? Sure there’s Bing, but I have to believe that Microsoft is doing the same thing. Yahoo is also powered by Bing. Is there a decent alternative?
There is DuckDuckGo, but I don’t really know how good it is. Does anyone know of any other alternatives?
Posted in Internet | Tagged alternatives, bing, google, search |
By Dave M. on January 25, 2012
So, you know I’ve been teaching myself Perl using a couple of books:
I feel like I’m really making progress… I downloaded a theme for Bowtie (a free desktop accessory that allows you to see and control either iTunes or Spotify) called Lux by Ryan Christensen. I was really getting off on how it pulls images from Last.FM to fill the background of the theme.
I opened the theme file to see how it was written and saw a relatively simple call to Last.FM’s API. So, now I had to give it a try.
As you know, this isn’t just as easy as calling the method. There is a lot of setup, so I went over to cpan.org and did a search for ‘Last.FM’. Sure enough, I found: Net::LastFM. I downloaded the file, but found it had prerequisites.
So I cracked open the books (virtually, thank heaven for PDF’s and the ability to search them!) and searched for Perl Modules. I found a great little Perl script called ‘cpanm‘ which will painlessly install Perl Modules.
So I installed ‘cpanm’ with a little head scratching since it needed:
--sudo
added to the
perl - --self-upgrade
part of the
curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --self-upgrade
Once I got past that part, I was golden. Net::LastFM was installed and I was ready to test.
I used a sample described in both the Sams book and the documentation of the module and created:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::LastFM;
use Data::Dumper;
my $lastfm = Net::LastFM->new(
api_key => '...',
api_secret => '...',
);
my $data = $lastfm->request_signed(
method => 'artist.getImages',
artist => 'Kate Bush',
limit => '10',
autocorrect => '1',
order => 'popularity',
);
print Dumper $data;
It doesn’t do much more than show the data returned from Last.FM, but that’s a start and I’m pretty excited that I was able to get that far without too many problems.
Now, if only there was a way to take the image I get and save it to disk. 
I know, there is probably a Module that can do that. I’ll have to dig around a little bit more. Still…
Posted in Perl | Tagged cpanm, cpanminus, last.fm, module, net::lastfm, perl |
By Dave M. on January 23, 2012
Walkingshark writes:
“Chris Dodd’s recent statements complaining that congressmen who receive donations from the RIAA and MPAA should toe the line has spawned a firestorm of anger on the internet. Among the bits of fallout: a petition on the White Houses “We the People” site to investigate him, the RIAA, and the MPAA for bribery! This petition gained more than 5000 signatures in 24 hours and is still growing. When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity.”
via: Slashdot
Posted in News | Tagged chris dodd, mpaa, pipa, riaa, sopa |
By Dave M. on January 23, 2012
Steve and I discussed the future of MyAppleAnd.Me and decided that the Podcast thing really wouldn’t work out for either of us. We just felt the discussions were forced and were not really being listened to by anyone.
So we decided that a “discussion” blog would be more interesting for us and possibly the readers. For a long time, we emailed each other with questions, or topics that we discussed at length in emails. Steve realized that those discussions might be interesting to more than just ourselves. As an example, one of our last email volleys was about how Steve was going to use Perl to automate putting his Twitter tweets into Day One. That led to me asking more about Perl and how to script in it. He pointed out some great sites to watch and so on…
This is more of an experiment than anything else. Will any great revelations come out of this site, probably not, but hopefully a spark of an idea might form for someone and that’s all we here can ever ask for.
Posted in Website | Tagged content change, day one, discussions, email, maam, perl, scripting |
By Dave M. on February 25, 2011
I just read a headline that gave me the shivers. “Mac OS X Lion Preview: New features, orphans first-gen Intel machines“
When I first read this, I had a sinking feeling that my two Mac’s (MacBook 1st gen and Mac Pro 1st gen) would not support the new OS X Lion. Fortunately, reading the linked article near the end I was finally relieved to see:
“Meanwhile, the Preview notes show that Lion will require a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better. This orphans the first release of Macs with Intel chips during the first half of 2006, although customers may have purchased these machines throughout the rest of the year.”
I got my parents a MacMini back in 2006 and that machine doesn’t have a Core2 Duo processor in it, so they won’t be able to take advantage of the new OS. I’m not unhappy about this since I haven’t updated their Mac since Leopard came out. It doesn’t even have Snow Leopard on it.
Still, I’m a little concerned. I know that a future OS will drop support for Core2 Duo processors and I’ll be left behind. I suspect that my Mac Pro will finally bite the dust before that happens. Yet, it’s been functioning pretty well for these 4 1/2 years so far.
Posted in Apple, Macintosh | Tagged core2 duo, lion, os, support |
By Dave M. on February 11, 2011
ScreenCastsOnline Markdown screencast is episode #284 and located here.
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download
Posted in Podcast | Tagged app, download, dropbox, gmail, google, ios app store, iPad, iPhone, iwork, littlebigplanet 2, notetote, playstation 3, priority inbox, ps3, remotely, sales, schedule, search controls, verizon |
By hargrove on January 25, 2011
Since moving to the Mac App Store 20 days ago, Pixelmator grossed $1 million.
Posted in Apps, Macintosh | Tagged Apps |
