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YouTubeArchive for the "Techy Stuff" category
Suppose I should say this in the first sentence: I use AdBlock. I like using AdBlock since it blocks and removes the annoying flash ads, animated ads, music playing or other noise-making ads, most video pre-roll ads etc.
This is especially true for websites which add a huge leaderboard ad to the very top of the website before their head content, thus pushing their entire website down by about 100 pixels. Or those that have an annoying ad placed right in the middle of their site’s main content, like halfway through a news post, breaking up the flow of the article.
The main unfortunate side-effect of this mass-blocking is that non-intrusive advertising gets blacked out also. Now I’m not a complete Nazi towards online advertising, I don’t mind the banner ads, small boxes etc. that sit off to the side or the bottom of the site, especially when the site owner puts them there knowing full well that they are most likely to only get revenue from impressions as opposed to clicks.
Nor do I mind advertising that isn’t completely corporate driven, this particular example being Project Wonderful. They are one ad network I’ve expressly allowed to show in my filters, along with a bunch of other sites I either don’t mind supporting, that I know don’t have intrusive advertising, or (unfortunately) that don’t work when you turn off the ads – several site video players are notorious for that.
I know several site owners who do expressly ask – and always in an off-the-cuff sort of passing mention, never specifically pushing people to do so – to whitelist their site in AdBlock for the revenue, and in most cases I’m cool with that particularly if I’m an avid reader and like what they’re doing. Sites/comics like Real Life Comics, Nerd Junkies, Manly Guys Doing Manly Things I keep AdBlock off as I both enjoy their content and they don’t run intrusive advertising.
One aspect that I really hate though, is when people specifically ask for ad clicks. Especially when it’s always against the ToS of whatever ad network you’re in to game the system in any way or to ask people to submit invalid clicks.
Alright, I know that this new functionality has only just been released, but it already has a bit of an impact when it comes to me and my usage of Facebook.
As you probably know, I interact on Facebook through two primary methods: my own personal profile, and my Page. I initially made my page after a few… instances where people who were following me for all of my gaming and YouTube related stuff started getting a little too keen on my profile on Facebook. This then spurred me to create a second Twitter account and a Facebook page to handle the people who only knew me from my dealings on the Internet.
At that point, it was the best course of action since I didn’t want to start opening up my personal profile and everything I might say, to people I didn’t really fully know or trust enough. Of course, that’s not to say that everything I post is completely private, in fact most of the time I will post the same thing to my main Twitter and my Facebook profile simultaneously with TweetDeck, but it helps to have that individual post privacy selector on Facebook to keep things only to people who I know.
However, not long after that I started to realise that gaming and YouTube related stuff actually constituted quite an amount of my overall activities, and as such my personal Twitter has a lot less going on now than it used to. It kinda shows in my gaming Twitter as I’ve made over 1500 Tweets from that account since I started it in December last year while my main account has dropped from around 300 Tweets a month to just 100 a month.
So, this new subscribe functionality on Facebook is making me think about whether I should delete my secondary accounts and use just the one once again. Everyone could continue to follow me on Twitter, and those who I don’t fully know could just subscribe to my Facebook rather than having to add me as a friend. This would then enable a fair bit more functionality that I’ve had to stop using recently, or find a workaround for, since some Facebook tools don’t work with Pages, including YouTube Autoshare, Raptr’s connections, and others.
The main benefactors from this change that I know would be higher-profile YouTubers who are well-known for who they are, rather than their online persona. Two who immediately come to my mind would be Jory Caron and Jonny Paula from the old “Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?” YouTube show, but it could also be of use to some other smaller people like MegaGWolf, and to some extent (and I can’t believe I’m actually saying her name) ssskinner.
Right now I’m still debating what to do. The main things I have against merging them would be the fact that my second accounts are already too well-established to really just pull the plug on them, and they are helping me to keep my two “audiences” separate.
I suppose it’s something that would have to be thought of over the next while, I’d say it would all depend on the uptake of the new subscription functionality.
So I’ve been playing around with Dxtory recently, testing it to see if it’s a good alternative for PC recording compared to what I currently use – FRAPS. Both programs do the job, but both of them also appear to have different wants and costs associated with them, as well as having a different end result.
So, I went off to the MyMeteor website to send a web text in reply to a text I just received on my mobile. Generally when I’m at home, or otherwise near an available computer, I send a web text to save myself the 12c that I may otherwise need at some point, and it also helps to extend the length of time before I have to top up again – generally a single €20 top up will last me at least a few months.
Upon the page loading, I noticed that it had been given a little facelift, with a nice fresher-looking login screen.
After getting in, I noticed a myriad of new links on the left-hand side, and one which piqued my interest long enough to delay me sending my text for a while, was this “My Usage” tab. Inside was basically a breakdown of all my calls and texts, similar to what you would get on a bill. It definitely reaffirmed the fact that I don’t actually use my phone very much!
However, I began to notice the charges in my usage history were not adding up too well with the advertised 29c a minute anytime to any network or landline plan I’m supposedly on.
So, much earlier this morning when I went to just randomly watch a stream over on NGame.tv, I was greeted with a very large and red error message:
NGame, flagged...?
When the bloody fuck did that happen? I had been watching the site without any problems 3 hours before that and got nothing in my way. A quick look on Twitter shows that other had been experiencing the issue too. Since I have faith in Avast, I went ahead anyway and had no issues at all.
I will point out that at this point in time, the Safe Browsing diagnostic page for NGame was completely clean, nothing mentioned.
Fast-forward to about an hour ago, and…
Say wha?
Jesus, where the hell did that come from. But on further reading I notice something else – IT’S CLAIMING MY SITE IS INFECTED NOW TOO?!?!?!
Sure enough, I go to visit my own website, and I’m greeted by the exact same big red error page. And the diagnostic for me:
...for fuck's sake.
Upon checking my Google Webmaster Tools, I was told that the page on my site in which I embed my NGame channel page was what had caused my site to be flagged also – bearing in mind they said nothing about just the physical stream video itself on my homepage – so I went to go file for a malware review after privatisation of that page until this issue blows over…
EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING LINK ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND.
As they claim: “Very rarely, it can take up to a day for malware warnings (and links to the malware review request form) to be visible in Webmaster Tools after your search has been flagged in search results. If you don’t see a warning in Webmaster Tools, but your site is flagged, please check back later.”
Searching around for other instance like this show that this is the complete opposite of “very rare”, rather it’s more of a “happens all the fucking time”.
Moral of the story? Google is shit. Go disable this stuff in Options -> Under the Bonnet -> Privacy -> Uncheck “Enable phishing and malware protection”. And then go download Avast, which has been a hell of a lot more use than this browser “feature” has.
I don’t want very much really…
Can I just have a social media program that has the power of TweetDeck, has user streams, uploads stuff to Twitpic properly – as in with the tweet as a caption, and what adds the image preview on the Facebook status – with Seesmic’s speed, fluidity, plugin feature, and the “Home” column which shows everything…?
Why is it that at the moment I have to pick one over the other as both TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop 2 have a single failing about them that means I’d rather not use them:
- TweetDeck runs on AIR, which is not good for my system and makes it slow and liable to crash. Also it takes a while to initialise and populate the columns. And most importantly it doesn’t have an all-encompassing “Home” column.
- Seesmic doesn’t upload images properly to Twitpic, it has to upload the image first before getting the URL to add to the tweet, and Silverlight isn’t great for my system either. Also, the way Facebook is shown in the client is confusing as well, especially in the account selection, as I have to go into a sub-menu to toggle my personal account and the bear’s account.
I switched back to SD2 a little while back as it was much quicker than TD. But now I’ve just had to switch back again as SD2 was not uploading stuff to Twitpic with the caption the way TweetDeck does. Now though I really want to go back to SD2 because I don’t have a “Home” column featuring everything…
Argh, why cant I have the best of both worlds 
So within the past few hours, after finding out that the transitioning of Google Apps accounts to fully fledged Google Accounts was available for early adopters to opt into, I decided to jump the gun and go ahead with it, seeing as I just wanted to get everything finally together for once in one place.
Now though, I’m maybe thinking it wasn’t such a great idea to choose to do this so soon, mainly because of a few niggling issues I’ve had with the transition, primarily from my point of view that my Google Apps account was created for my sole personal use, and that my conflicting Google account also used the same e-mail addresses as what was in my Google account.
There is one very accurate comic out there which goes on about how what your e-mail address is, tells people about the type of computer user and the computer skills you have.
Found on The Oatmeal.
YouTube recently launched the ability to upload and watch 1080p HD videos on their site, and also previously introduced a new feature where you can right-click on the video and get a context menu option to copy the embed HTML, view the video info or copy any debug info. When I learned of these, I went ahead to test them out on some of my own videos to try and see what would appear. But, to my dismay, nothing happened on either side. However, when I went and tried it on other videos, it worked fine…
So for those of you still don’t yet know how I watch people’s feeds, I utilise IE8 and Windows Live Mail, since I prefer those programs over Mozilla’s offering, and Google’s lack of offline tools to do the same. However, one niggling problem with using those to update my feeds is that sometimes, they just don’t update no matter what the setting for frequency of updating. And even more annoying is that sometimes it’ll just randomly start working again…