Top posts for 2010

As with many blogs summing up their top viewed or commented pages, here are the top 5 most viewed posts this year:
#1 how to lock down internet explorer 8 with GPO registry
#2 Hide IE8 address bar
#3 The corporation
#4 How to set up a wireless(shared) printer
#5 Lock down windows xp clients with server 2003

Wikileaks and Simpsons

After all the buzz around wikileaks I have been following the stories and got reminded of a very funny episode of the Simpsons that resembled this situation.

The Simpsons season 12 episode 06 called "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" (2000) when Homer got a computer and made a webpage, to get content on it he wrote a rumor about the mayor using money for street paving to build his private pool! (fox published this webpage with all the articles here: www.mrxswebpage.com).

Mr X. is like wikileaks and Homer Simpson is like Julian Assange! great to watch the old episode again, check it out here: www.icefilms.info/ip.php?v=46979.

Enjoy and tell me what you think!

How to watch streaming video on icefilms.info

1. Install and open Chrome (or Firefox with greasemonkey)
2. Install the older version of divx web player (also linked from icefilms)
3. Install the quick stream script for icefilms (also linked from icefilms)

You should now be ready to go!

Note: set the "ask to update" preferences of divx player to "once per month" instead of "once per session" because you don't need the new version (always cancel if it asks to update).

Let me know how it goes.

How to delete scan to destination email

HP LaserJet M1522

1. Open the scan software from start>all programs>HP>HP laserjet M1522>Scan

2. Click Setup > Delete existing destination > Next

3. Choose the one to delete click next, confirm and your done!

DivX Streaming website evolution

We came a long way from relativly slow bittorrent downloads which cannot be streamed (because the pieces are not downloaded in-order) and I thought this history is worth mentioning somewhere so here is my version of how it came to be with high quality divx/xvid/avi video streaming websites, also a good way to conclude the end of this year 2010.

1st generation:

It all started when DivX, Inc. created what appeared to be an answer to youtube, a competing video host/streaming site called stage6.
An ambitious idea indeed, actually I thought it was great and hopped it would take off and really be something great. I actually think they could have evolved it further the way youtube started working with copyright holders, record label companies and movie production companies/film studios. Anyway as the webpage says "Stage6 Is No More", they opened up the market for other hosting companies to arise on February 28, 2008 [1] and initially they recommended veoh which did mostly flash based video but with their own spyware software would allow downloading divx, that died in popularity with the HQ lovers like me.

2nd generation:

As it happens stage6 search engine sucked and when it came to copyrighted files (be it music videos, movies or shows) they got deleted often when names were obvious so the tech-savvy users renamed them and posted to private community type sites. One of these sites which I liked a lot was joox (still active). When stage6 announced it goes down, or when it actually went down the search for another host has begun and megaupload (also still active, still the best file host) had the biggest file size limits at the time. This was used with joox for some time until it had some issues and was offline for a long time which brings us to 3ed gen...

3ed generation:

A new search has started and there were (and still are) many websites coming up, going down all the time but this focuses on what I liked the most but in this case it was so widely liked that ninjavideo(no longer active) became a household name like MTV or something. They still used megaupload as the host but they had a very special virtual software that was run on java (not to be confused with javascript), once accepted the warning by opening the "ninjavideo helper" normally followed by a version # which means it was activly being developed, this allowed you to stream divx/xvid avi videos in blazing fast speeds. This special embedding was so good that the only way I found out it uses megaupload is by sniffing the packets and looking up the IP addresses, in other words users would never know where they are hosted.
This was honky dory until the domain name was seized by the united states government on grounds of copyright infringing.

4th generation:
This brings us today to icefilms, yet again using megaupload (notice a common denominator?) and being very useful with searching (google's custom search) and organizing which goes by movies, shows, genre, popularity, real release date and by added to the site date they are all very convenient. There are also great features that I enjoy which is page scraping from imdb, linking to imdb and to youtube for trailers (searches youtube!). All this and even great speed at adding videos from forum posting (unlike ninjavideo's judgment ridden forums). Great speed at new releases and also a great decision is to avoid CAM movies which I hated on ninjavdeo.... just cause it's out there doesn't mean I want this low quality video!
This is all possible with a special "ICE Quick Stream" greasemonkey add-on script which takes the megaupload pages and turns them into embedded divx web player type pages. But I still enjoy using the manual streaming with VLC when installing the plugin script isn't a good option.

Overall this forth generation is the best right now, it does worry me a little that it's using a common denominator (megaupload) but we should change our copyright law's anyway and this will not be a huge concern.

Let me know your thoughts!

YouTube slow on Rogers Internet throttling

So for some time these has not happend but recently made me quite angry so had presed the print screen button and now reporting back on the internet inequality of Rogers, also known as throttling of bandwidth (or something).

First screen shot shows how slow youtube loads this video Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg Interview

Notice the network utilization is very slow to load this youtube video, to prove that it's isolated to youtube we can use the speed test.

Point A is the first attempt, point B is the second, it's between 6 and 10 percent network utilization compared to barely 1 percent with youtube!

[update: it's getting a little faster at times, at least fast enough to keep up with the video...]

Us Now film review and thoughts

Us Now is a documentary film that asks "Can we all govern? Us Now looks at how 'user' participation could transform the way that countries are governed." [vo.do]. I highly recommend seeing it soon as you have a spare hour (and maybe a few minutes to ponder afterwards). [Watch it on watch.usnowfilm.com or youtube/usnowfilm or download using p2p & bittorrent from vo.do/usnow]

While I always knew about collaborating, helping and sharing ideas and work are great in projects such as Wikipedia, Linux and open source software, rideshare and more, I actually never heard of coutchshare, momnet, management of a soccer team (in England) and even amazingly funds and investments through individuals, helping bands get gigs and even albums made by commenting on good tracks and even contributing some money for them to get studio or air time. These examples only scratch the surface of what can, will and IS being done by collaborating, helping and sharing ideas, work and decisions.

These collaboration tools are really amazing when it comes to those individual things described but this can be much more powerful when applied to bigger impact things such as Government spending, policies and so on. There can be many, many useful places to think about collaboration of thoughts, ideas and even work as we see with many, many projects already happening everyday and probably since the dawn of time!

I think this will play a large role in the future of not only our society but dare I say our humanity and civilization as a whole. Sharing our ideas, knowledge and experiences not only makes our life great but it also benefits everyone. The right and qualified people on particular subject matter are always needed but I also think that any average person can have enough experience and knowledge to contribute to those kinds and more of the conversations, topics and help in decision making or simply question things from their perspective. Having devil advocates always proved a good thing in small groups, imagine having the entire world to help in whatever you can imagine! 

This is an amazing time to be alive, our human population is large and growing thanks to our technological,  medical, chemical, biological and, well, all the topics in the world (and the universe) that we have made serious advances in. This is only possible by our collaboration, sharing our knowledge and learning, experimentation and further observation and advancing our science, engineering and so much more!

The only thing that seems a little lacking is the field of our governing ourselves (and religion but I will not get into that). Most of those ideas are from ancient history and even those things that have been adopted are still very lacking. It's very clear that there will be a new way for us to manage ourselves in the future. True democracy will come when we can accept decisions that a majority agrees on, transparent systems using web technologies that are open and standardized. But I'm sure these will be finally tuned as we grow in the new society.

I think it makes a lot of sense to combine some of the ideas from Future by Design which I reviewed much earlier this year. Although it sounded more like a pipe dream at first, after seeing 'Us Now' it makes much more sense when thinking about resources based economy, together with these sharing technologies that really wire us all together, and help decide collectively as opposed to 'mechanically' as they said in Future by Design or how it is done now and for the past 100s of years, decisions are made by few elitists at the top that, for what ever reason, got there...

When we put our minds together we can accomplish anything, think about how the internet, the truly global network connecting all of humanity together can really take this civilization further and into the future into a much better place for all of us. I think many already agree that so many things are wrong in our civilization (money and government being the top problems), so we really all need this type of system and I think it's not a matter of IF it will be implemented but rather, when and how it will happen.

We all know the saying that two heads are better than one, will in this case we have the entire population (that can access the internet - for now 1 or 2 billion).

Let me know your thoughts!

how to do a lease take over

Couldn't find the simple step-by-step details so here is what I have so far:

1. Get the credit check application from your leasing company (this is a financial company or manufacturer, ask your dealer if you don't know)
2. Fill the application and send to the company (fax or mail is probably acceptable) = $25 (charged from your usual lease payment method
3. As this happens or before this happens (bear with me as I find out, I will update this step) you need to get your car proof from the provincial ministry (or state organization if in US I assume) to prove the car was not in accidents. = $not sure yet
5. Upon approval I assume the transfer can be done (didn't get this far yet, will update once I do.) = $500 (sent by check from my understanding)

And this is as far as I got so far, if you have any tips or different steps, comments, etc leave them below or privately to my email.
Thanks for visiting!