Category Archives: On The Internet

The Audio Speakeasy

New to our family of sites is The Audio Speakeasy, a forum dedicated to music and audio/video hardware.  If you are interested in discussing some of the newest releases and their sound quality, or want to improve your listening experience, we’re the new, up and coming place to do it at!  We aim to provide an upbeat, informative discussion forum where you can speak your honest opinion.  Register today at the site!  Visit the main page, and follow the links to the forum to do so.  You never know who you may run into at the Speakeasy…

Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck

facebook-small-logo-thumb-360x360-75537-thumb-300x300-78195[1]So here I was, about a month ago, ready to write an article about how to make your Facebook account air tight and secure.  In the past week or so, the stakes have changed and Facebook now has new privacy settings.  New, but not improved.  How would you like all of your information available on Google and Yahoo?  If you’re not careful, and don’t act immediately, you may find your life not to be as private as you want it to be…

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Essential Firefox Plugins

20070520-firefox_logo[1]As much as I’ve been using Google Chrome lately (which still has a blazing fast Javascript engine), Firefox is still my primary browser. The reason I don’t switch is that Firefox has a plugin system. I have a lot of plugins I use that I now consider essential. Here is a short list of plugins I’m currently using, which I recommend.  I may have covered some of these in past articles, but others have been uninstalled or fallen out of favor due to lack of author support, or instability.  The following are the plugins currently installed and running on Firefox.

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Craigslist Becoming Useless: Keyword Spamming

craigslistI haven’t used Craigslist all that much in the past year or two.  I still have to be very careful of every ad I view since it is, after all, a free service.  In the past six months or so, I’ve had good luck getting rid of some of my old electronics gear and tools to some happy end owners.  (I even had one drive over an hour to pick up an old Sony reel-to-reel deck!)

While searching for another Zune player (to give as a gift), I came across an annoying problem: keyword spamming.  For each Zune listing, there were ten others that were completely unrelated. Only after I opened a couple of ads did I realize the problem: the bottoms of the ads all contained dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords that had no relation to the item for sale.

All I can offer is this: flag all keyword abuse as “spam/overpost”.  Recruit some friends to help you out.  Since the folks behind Craigslist don’t do anything about it (other than make the rules which do, by the way, prohibit using keywords), it’s up to the community–us–to clean it up.  As it stands, keyword spamming just annoys regular users, and it is making Craigslist even more useless.

One final recommendation, to the folks at Craigslist: give us an option to search on the listing title only.  If someone lists a Zune in the title, then that’s what I want to see.  This would easily weed out the pathetic folks who post dozens of keywords into their ads, trying to deceive us into clicking on them.  Something needs to be done.  I’m using Craigslist a lot less now thanks to these spammers.