Sick of these ads? Of course you are… Well what if you could avoid them altogether?

Here’s a simple tip that heps you do just that,- stopping images and pages from a long list of notorious web sites from being displayed on your browser. These particular ones are hosted on the domain “content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net” and link to a url at “ad.adperium.com” – literally just a couple of sites among many which are purely for shoving advertising and spam down the viewers throat.

One easy way to stop such ads appearing is to use customise your HOSTS file. This is basically like a local version of a DNS server (those servers that translate domain names into numbers so your browser can find web sites). In the HOSTS file, you’d have a list of all the sites you want blocked and have them correspond to 127.0.0.1 (also known as “localhost”) – so that your browser would try to load the images and pages from your own PC instead of the actual web site.

Handily, someone’s already written a customised HOSTS file for you to use and it’s pretty simple to install. First things first though, – better safe than sorry.. back up the file you’ve got.

One for the U2 fans… as the promo says, “in the history of U2, Dave Fanning has always had the first play of their new single anywhere in the world. That will continue this Monday morning on the Colm & Jim-Jim Breakfast Show…”

Watch:

So there you go… you’ll hear it there first.

Weird ad on facebook that I saw just now…:

WTF is that supposed to mean???

This (among other things) almost puts me off the site…

Then there’s this!

A friend of mine and a newspaper journalist (two separate people) recently emailed me – one to announce her housewarming party, the other to apologise in case she’d spammed me. Nothing unusual there, no – until I looked at the “To:” lines of the emails. The first person had emailed me along with about sixty other people, the second one had about twenty other recipients – all of them in the “To:” line – so all of them now know all the email addresses of all the others.

I’ve replied to both of them, pointing them at the BCC Please web site. Whether they’ll pay attention or not, I dunno. It’s not a case of email etiquette as such (well, okay, it kinda IS really) but it’s always seemed like common sense to me. If you’re sending something out to many people, don’t do it in such a way that all the email addresses are visible to everyone receiving the message. That’s just silly. I mean – I certainly don’t want my personal email address publicised to all your friends and aquaintances and I’m sure most of them will feel the same.

Anyway… rant over…

Here’s Bill doing his “Yo yo yo, homeys!” pose. Anyone out there with Photoshop “skillz” want to paste a basketball shirt onto him? I would, but I’m rushing out the door to work… Maybe I’ll get on it later :p

Anyway,- Bill Gates (the man who, 4 years ago, said that spam would be eradicated within 2 years) has stepped down from his position at Microsoft and will now concentrate on his charitable efforts. BBC News have a good breakdown of the good and bad, the hits and misses of Bill Gates here. It kinda paints Microsoft in a bad enough light, making out that they eat other companies for breakfast, are slow on the uptake, quite litigious, and still enormously successful – all of which, of course, is true.

I wonder what Bill would make of this…

(a van I saw in Swords today)