Standard Mischief

Is it really this simple? I thought there were endless secret salting and washing rituals to making this stuff turn out correctly.

The radish kimchee (and the young radish stuff they sell too) is way better than the Chinese cabbage kimchee, but I’ve never seen a recipe before for anything but the cabbage type. I’ve also utterly failed every cabbage kimchee attempt in the past, and have always been perplexed on why it was so hard to make what is essentially spicy stinky cabbage. So I have to give this one a try.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.9 . There is also a minor update for those who are on the 2.1 branch. There’s apparently a minor XSS (cross site scripting) vulnerability that these versions patch.

Having both shell and ftp access makes upgrades so easy. I just mirrored my entire blog in another directory and then used ftp to overwrite just the files that were in the list of those that were changed.

Everything seems to be working fine, but let me know if something is amiss.

…still, the response and “DDoS” attack has been amazing. If we could channel that into a beam, the Brady Bunch wouldn’t have a chance. -Standard Mischief ¹

Well, Jim Zumbo the gun writer is down for the count, but I can tell, you’ve still got some of that fire in your eyes. Don’t you?

Well there’s no need to keep that frustration all pent up. The NRA, on request of its members, has for a long time kept a list of organizations, companies, and media personalities that have publicly supported those who would wish to end gun ownership by ordinary citizens.

So go ahead and tell Stoneyfield Farms Yogurt that you enjoy the three live active cultures in their yogurt, but until they stop their hatin’ on our gun culture, you are gonna have to make due with the store brand.

Feel free to let the Southland Corporation know that you don’t need to go to 7-11 to get your caffeine, high fructose corn syrup, and yellow dye number five. You could tell them that you would much rather support Kwik-E-Mart or Circle-J instead because of Southland’s stance on freedom.

Let Bonnie Raitt know that while you love her slide guitar, your legally owned Evil Black Rifle kills fascists, and while Bonnie is publicly against that you don’t see how you could possibly support her.

The NRA blacklist is plenty long. Please, go take a look.

¹Yep, I’m quoting myself from comments I’ve left on other blogs. I can get away with that because this is the new media.

Xavier says that Jim Zumbo’s blog is down, but there’s a statement up. I was trying to graph the number of posts per day, but alas. There were thousands of comments and thousands of page requests. I’d love to see the bandwidth bill.

Countertop informs me that besides Jim-bo, Outdoor life has been hobnobbing with the “astroturf” sham group American Hunters and Shooters Association. Update: Check Countertop’s site for an update to this.

Countertop also points me to the best damn parody of Jim Zumbo’s blog.

There’s suppose to be a photoshop thread over at AR15.com, but I haven’t seen it yet. Post a link please.

Tam explains exactly why Jim’s apology didn’t go far enough. Well stated.

Specifically this is against Snap.com’s cookie, but broadly I could subtitle this as Manipulating Brower Cookies in Firefox - 101 or something.

One of the more annoying things on teh tubes of ‘net nowadays is called Snap Preview. When you are on certain websites with this crap enabled, when you roll a mouse over a off-site link, a javascript program runs and pops up a pretty useless preview of the off-site website. The pop-up is too small to be useful, yet too large to be ignored.

I thought the world knew by now that any window that pops up, without me specifically clicking on anything to activate it, instantly gets classified as annoying, whether or not said window is actual spam. Tiny little helpful “tool tips” are the one exception.

There are several different ways to kill this annoyance, some better than others. You could disable javascript, but it’s useful for all kinds of things (like Google Maps). Here I’m going to give you Snap.com’s preferred method, with a twist.

Step one: Go to this page, scroll down until you see the yellow area.
Step two: click on the “Click here” link (underlined in red below).

This should set a cookie that gets sent back to Snap.com’s servers, informing them to not send me a pop-up. It seems, however, that the cookie they send only lasts one session, meaning I’d need to keep setting that cookie each time I started up Firefox. To keep it around a bit longer I need to use a Firefox extension called Add ‘n Edit Cookies That means that from here on out, you need to be using Firefox.

Note: While testing this procedure, I once got a cookie from Snap.com that did not expire at the end of my session. I have no idea why that happened, but I thought I’d let you know. If I could reliably reproduce that result, I could skip the Add ‘n Edit Cookies extension part. That would save a bit of work. Most of the cookies Snap.com sends me are session cookies.

Go follow the above link, and install Add ‘n Edit Cookies. While you are at it, you want to install CookieCuller too. We’ll need it later. Got it? Good, you will now need to exit and then reload Firefox, and after that, you’ll likely need to fetch that damn cookie again too.

Step three: Activate Add ‘n Edit Cookies by clicking on Tools::Cookie Editor. Click on the one cookie from Snap.com that’s called “spa”. Go ahead and ignore the other ones.

press the edit button that’s in the lower center

In the new window just opened, we need to now click on the “new expiration date” radio button and add some time to the life of that cookie. I added 20 years. Press save to dismiss the top window, and then close to dismiss the one below that.

We could stop right here, but if you have your browser set to “upchuck” cookies after every session (highly recommended) you will lose your magic cookie, no matter how much time you added. So I’m going to use another extension (called CookieCuller) to protect just the cookies I want to keep, and discard every other unprotected cookie.

Step four: Using CookieCuller, Tools::CookieCuller again we select the “spa” cookie.

Step five: Then we press Protect Cookie to protect only the “spa” cookie, and any other cookie we wish to keep around. I only keep cookies where I know what the purpose of the cookie is, and I feel the benefits outweigh any privacy disadvantages.

Under Tools::Extensions, right-click on the CookieCuller bar, and select preferences

Make sure that “delete cookies on startup” is checked.

Last step: Click on Edit::Preferences or Tools::Preferences (Win XP), select the Privacy icon at the top, and click on the Cookies tab, and make sure your setting are as shown below.

You are done! Please note that if you want to test your new no-snap cookie, you will need to mouse over a site other than Snap.com. It seems that even with the cookie, the pop-ups do pop-up on any Snap.com page.

Now for the disadvantages. Please to be donning teh tin-foil hat. Every time you go visit a site that uses Snap.com, a line appears in Snap.com’s referrer log. That’s not so terribly bad, because you never really gave Snap.com your mothers maiden name or your Social Security number, but they do know when and how often you visit a Snap.com enhanced crippled site, how often you upchuck the other cookies Snap.com sends you, your browser type and other data like that. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Snap.com’s Terms of Service will read in such a way that they presume to own all that data, and may do with it as they wish.

The other disadvantage is that beyond step two, you need to use Firefox and a few extensions. There may be other cookie manipulating tools on other browsers like Opera or Safari, but I don’t know anything about them.

If you liked this post, you may like another blog post where I show you how and why to zero out Google’s cookie.

This is not the way I block Snap.com’s crap, but it should hold you over for a day or so until I get the other methods up. I’ll also try to clarify anything if you leave me a comment.