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around the traps

around the traps

jam donut

fresh cooked jam donuts

Turns out that fresh cooked jam donuts are amazing, in much the same way as fresh cooked cinnamon donuts. OK sure, all that sugar and fat probably took a month off my life... but I did not care ;)

Taken at the Aroma Festival, Sydney, 2009.

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around the traps

  • Ghost in the Machine: The Clash on Flickr
  • Swearing mitigates pain - Boing Boing: Some experimental evidence to suggest that swearing makes pain less traumatic, though the mechanism ... is unclear

  • A couple of topics discussed over breakfast with some smart people a while back... Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

    The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which '...people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it'. They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence.

    Fascinating, yet highly unsettling. Because if you are one of the people who fall into this effect, you don't know! Also explains a bit why some seriously smart people think they're not very smart - they know all too well how much they don't know, and also (mistakenly) think everyone knows what they do know. At the far end of that scale you find Impostor syndrome, where people cannot accept their own success. Amazing the way the human psyche can completely mess itself up.

  • Wacky Races in Real Life! - very well done.

blocking Snapshots popups

I hate Snapshots™ popups. Snapshots™ seem very proud of their creation, however I have never seen any possible reason you'd want these intrusive fucking things on your website:

Anatomy of a Snapshots(tm) intrusion. 1. Bastard icon heralding annoyance. 2. Laughably out-of-date screenshot. 3. Huge window that adds no value.

All they do is get in the bloody way. Now, you might think why get angry? just click the handy-dandy little "disable" button! Then you realise the bloody thing doesn't work. The moment you clear cookies, sneeze or look away for five seconds the sods are back.

If you have ad blocking software you might be able to get rid of them that way; but I prefer to get medieval on Snapshots™ arse. I don't want to see them again just because I installed a new browser or something (I do that a bit, I'm a web developer and have at minimum five browsers installed at any one time).

blocking Snapshots™ using the hosts file

Let's block these suckers at the hosts file level. First, find and edit %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts ... Commonly the directory is C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and hosts is a text file. You may need to edit the properties to turn off "read only" (you can switch it back to read only when you're done).

Once you're in the hosts file, add these lines (of course you can edit the comment to taste):

# fuck off snapshots
127.0.0.1 shots.snap.com
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
127.0.0.1 snap.com
127.0.0.1 ixnp.com
127.0.0.1 direct.shots.snap.com

Save the file, happy days. As far as I know this works in Windows XP, Vista, 2000... probably all versions of Windows. The Mac equivalent has to be done on the command line, because apparently Apple thinks inside every GUI-loving Machead there's a UNIX geek trying to get out.

So anyway, get on in to your hosts file and consign Snapshots™ to the oblivion it so richly deserves.

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around the traps