Standard Mischief

Well, “Shovelglove” seems to be a popular keyword appearing in my search results. I wrote a post about it way back when. It’s a stationary exercise program that uses a useful object (a padded sledge hammer) to do practical movements (chopping wood, shoveling coal, etc). The site that tells you all about it is here: Shovelglove.com.

Anyway, the site used to have some crappy lo-rez quicktime movies, but they have been removed. However there’s now a bunch of good quality videos hosted over at YouTube,

Hmmm, looks like my technique was a little off.

Related Tags: shovelglove

A few days ago I complained about YouTube’s lack of a volume control cookie. I was wrong, they do have a cookie, but it’s a Flash Cookie, more properly called a Flash Shared Object.

To be able to store the data on your PC, the preferences need to be set properly. I already knew about the existence of flash cookies, but being a “knee jerk” privacy advocate, I long ago set my preferences such that no site was allowed to save anything permanently on my hard drive. There’s a lot of potential for abuse here, because websites can store anything here at all, and retrieve it between sessions. This has the same security implications as normal cookies, except they stay persistent even if you, as I recommend, “upchuck” your cookies after each session. I totally forgot about Flash Shared Object a few days ago, I just knew the volume defaulted to full on.

So here’s how to set preferences for flash items. You need to go to the site and then right-click on any flash panel. When you do that, the gray menu thingy will appear:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

At this point you want to chose Settings, and then poke around a bit. It’s not too hard.

I let YouTube have 10 KB, but they are currently using less than 1 KB. Here’s the hexdump of the cookie they have stored on my PC (Note: hex codes I do not understand have been changed to protect the paranoid):

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 51 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Q……|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 00 00 |…mute…|


Note, shown above is the volume level I prefer

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 59 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Y……|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 00 00 |…mute…|


Above is the volume at eleven

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 59 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Y......|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 01 00 |…mute…|


And above is the volume still at eleven, but I have the mute button pressed.

The other interesting tidbit came from an unlikely source. There’s this virtual place called Habbo Hotel that seems to be pretty popular with young teens (and the adults that seek to talk to them.) It?s like a chat room with movable avatars.

There’s a number of people who are amazed that kiddies would want to play in a virtual world and swim in a virtual pool, and instead of live and let live, they have decided to pull pranks. Oddly enough, these peoples who hate other people in a virtual world seem to hang out at places like el-jay. Here’s an Encyclopedia Dramatiuca article on the whole deal.

Getting a whole bunch of avatars with afros to block the pool (because it has aids) or stand around, forming a swastika would be non sequitur, except people end up getting banned, and to circumvent the ban, they uninstall flash and then reinstall it again.

So my question, (and my bleg), is this. Does Macromedia Flash have a unique serial number for each install, or is the delete and reload just a crude way to delete a flash cookie? Anyone know? I’d be happy to link to your webpage or blog post. (Update: if I dare use Encyclopedia Dramatica as a source, they appear to just be deleting a flash cookie.)

Further reading: Here’s a post on Digg.com about flash cookies and some info over at Adobe’s Flash Player website privacy settings panel.

Related Tags: YouTube, flash cookie, Flash Shared Object, Macromedia Flash, Habbo, Habbo Hotel, pool is closed, Nigra, POOL’S CLOSED, Pool is closed due to AIDS, SwastaGET

Via ladyada’s rants,

This thingy is by far the most annoying flash anything I have ever clicked on. Oh, let me count the ways.

1. It has the volume already stuck on eleven. When you click on the “volume control, it puts a little red “X” over the speaker picture, but it doesn’t stop the noise, it just tones it down to 3 or so.

2. it’s got an ad for a CD or something “breathing”, continuously in the upper left corner.

3. it’s got this flashing thingy distracting me in the upper right corner.

4. You cannot possibly sweep your pointer over top of anything without having big bubbles pop-up, phrases in red text tumble out, or photographs expanding out at random moments. Constantly.

5. It emits various jingles at random intervals

6. It’s about electronic circuits or something. I really can’t stand all the distractions to figure it all out.

Holy crap! Excuse the swearing, but wow! I have a battery of tools that I’ve installed on my browser (Firefox) to stop stuff like this from happening, but it all doesn’t work in this case, because the text and the ads are integrated into one humongous flash orgasm of motion, light, and sound, I can’t block just part of it, so the whole site becomes an all or nothing thing.

First off, I use the Flashblock extension to stop flash ads in their tracks. Flashblock gives me a button to press when I (rarely) actually want to see the flash object. Most of the time, there are annoying little flash ads on the sidebars that I rarely click on.

Second, I use the Adbock extension combined with Adblock Filterset G Updater to keep it updated automagicly. In the prefs of that last tool, I keep a custom block list designed to target web-bugs, slow counters, and other such annoyances. For instance, I block anything named 1×1.gif.

I use the Customize Google extensions to block them from doing snoopy stuff, and enhance the search experience by putting links directly to other engines on the same page and really cleaning up and improving the image search function, but it does a number of other things like block what really are the least obtrusive ads on the inter-tubes.

If there’s an annoying animated ad that somehow got through all those defenses, Nuke Anything Enhanced allows me to rightclick-kill anything on the spot.

Also, if I’m on a page such as ell-jay, or I’m forced to go to a web forum to harvest some nugget of information, I can either set Firefox by default not to load images or (more likely) Just hit the ESC key when I arrive at the page. The ESC key freezes every animated gif on the page, and that functionality is already built in to Firefox at the factory, no plug-ins needed.

If I’m somehow caught on Myspace, or other extremely poorly formated unreadable page, using the Bookmarklet “Zap Stylesheets” will at least usually make the page readable again.

All theses tricks allow me to speed read, seek and find information faster, and save me bunches of time by not dealing with distractions. If the whole web was a series of awful flash pages, I’d probably go back to a strict hardcopy only policy. Once you start to tune out the web crud, you’ll never go back.

I was doing battle with my accumulitis and I came across my trashpile bike. A friend gave it to me, he had constructed it completely of bicycle road salvage and dumpster finds. I had only purchased new tubes, water bottle holder, and one of those blinky LED thingys. Unfortunately, while truing the rear wheel, I broke a spoke. I had a few spare spokes from a tacoed wheel I found but taking apart the rear wheel was a pain, so the project sat.

I was going to toss it, but decided to at least attempt the repair. I plunked down a whole $5 on a tool to take apart the rear cassette (we use to call them sprockets, but I guess this is a cassette of sprockets or somesuch). Those Bastards at Huffy (yea, I said Huffy, and BTW having ?Huffy? painted on the frame of your bike counts as an anti-theft device), seem to have designed their cassettes a bit differently such that they look exactly like, but are just a hair smaller (tighter) than the Shimano brand standard, probably to obtain themselves one-way interchangeability. I’m sure they’re not afraid of any negative consumer backlash, because Huffy has no brand loyalty whatsoever.

I could destroy the cassette, and put a new one on there, but at that point, I ought to get all new shifters and front chainrings and chain, and that looked too much like spending real money on a trashpile or something.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon this tool.

(click on the image to go to a webpage dedicated to the tool on jimlangley.net, a great bicycle resource site.)

I didn’t actually get the tool, but I got the idea from the tool for the replacement spoke. I just took one of those salvaged spokes from the taco wheel (which ended up being too long anyway) and made it into the ?s? shaped replacement spoke with some pliers. That let me replace the spoke and sorta-true the wheel without taking the damn thing apart.

So far, I’m sticking to at least a 20 minute daily workout (if not an hour), and the workout is a bit more intense than my usual urban walking jaunt, so the trashpile seems to be working out okay. While backpacking, I always get stuck in granny gear going up those damn hills, so this is probably a good exercise, seeing as their isn’t any tall hills around here, and I never haul the backpack out for exercise anyway. I just hope I don’t turn into one of those critical massholes.

Such a handy little tool, and it looks like it was rare to begin with, and now has become pure unobtanium. Looks like an opportunity for some blacksmith or other custom tool maker to clean up.

Just a few days ago I told you about how AOL accidentally released a bunch of user’s Internet search term records, which was exactly why I had suggested way back in January that everyone zero out their Google Cookie.

So there is a new plugin for Firefox called TrackMeNot, and it sounds like a good idea:

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. TrackMeNot integrates into the Firefox ‘Tools’ menu and includes a variety of user-configurable options.

Of course I’ve been trying it out for a few days. Here’s a selection of my true search terms co-mingled with the TrackMeNot ones.

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