Standard Mischief

The picture on the right shows a few found objects from a seven mile road walk yesterday. It’s clickable, if you want a better look. I saw four wheel-weights, which will end up going into my strategic lead reserve. That’s not really notable because I always seem to find wheel-weights. Of perhaps a bit more interest was the velcro-mount visor CD caddy. Inside I found the traces of six CDs. Three of them were commercially pressed, and all three of them were cracked and useless. There were also three home burned CDs, and every single one of them survived the impact and play fine. Odd.

Once we get the bonfire going pretty good, I’ve been a participant in a strange ritual where we toss empty spray cans into an outdoor fire, then duck behind a woodpile until the aerosol can cooks off. Fun but silly.

I’ve never even thought to cook off live ammo, but now I know what it should look like thanks to this You-Tube video. A 7mm Remington Magnum is on the higher end of the scale, as cartridges go, and it makes a pretty satisfying bang. Please note that all the safety warnings on this video are at the end. The creator took pains to make sure that no one else was around and he also shielded himself with a tree.

Below the video on the You-Tube page, in the comments, you’ll see a few alarmist a-holes whine about safety. Typical. I think things were presented here in a safe, sane manner, but there will always be a few killjoys out there. Maybe they would feel better if it was subtitled “Trained Professional — Do not Attempt!”?

Let’s just hope he sifted those ashes and packed out that trash in the end.

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.