Phisilophical tidbit of the day I

Question: How much would you do to get something free?

Ok, so first of all, let’s start this post off with a promotional link.

This link has been inserted here because if I am one of the first 250 bloggers to talk about it, I will get a free $5 DairyQueen gift card. Am I one of the first 250? probably not. Because once the first blogger posts about it, a few other bloggers will read the post and quickly  dash to their websites to post, and from there, it all goes down faster than a forkbomb on a self-reproducing machine. I might add that I also have  two free ‘wine.woot.com’ car decals and a baby blanket/plush toy set on their way to my house because I filled out an assortment of free online surveys.

I have no idea what I will do with either them once they show up on my front porch. ( But hey, they were free! )

Despite the word ‘free,’ everything comes at the expense of someone, be that the manufacturer or the distributor or the guy who’s dog peed on your rug the other day. But big businesses aren’t just going to start giving away their products free for the taking; people have to make a living somehow. So why does it seem like they are doing just that? They aren’t!

How can they do this and use it to their advantage, then?

Some of the time, they ask you to fill out some kind of product survey. Product surveys use your information to make their product more sellable.( Imagine that! :p )

The internet seems like the perfect place to do this, as  there are so many easily accessible people who want easily accissible (albeit useless ) free stuff. Of course, there are a few problems with this. People who fill out these surveys are usually ‘just here for the beer’ ( ‘just there for the bear’? ) so they could easily fill out a mass random/flamey/flattering or otherwise useless information without giving the company anything they really wanted.

Other times, a company might just give you a product (usually software, I guess?) for your consumption so that maybe t he company will gain mindshare with you and you will buy their products in the future.  This, of course, is useful to them because in a best-case scenario you end up donating to them and buying thier stuff.

Either that or they just go open source and pwn all other competition.

Another case is as linked to in the beginning of the article. By submitting, you gain a small ( To the company, that is ) prize and they get free advertising. (ROFL, I just realised that.  DQ is getting sneaky. )

I suppose a derivative of this is some black hat having you fill out all of your personal data in return for nothing, so that he can sell all of it to some huge annoying advertising company.

All this brings us down to another question: How would a cost-benifit analysis come out w/ this? Do I really need a 100% organic  ‘cute teddy’ plushie with a 1/6 size baby blankie tied to it? What about a decal I would have to peel off of my car every time I hung out with someone decent? ( much less TWO. )

The answer:

Yes, if you’re really really really bored. And fortunately I am.

Data storage options

A buddy asked me to do something on data backup a few weeks back. ( Sorry for getting this up so late, by the way :embarrassed:  )

Here’s a brief overview of it all:

-= Brief Pros/Cons overview-list-thing=-
Ok so first off you have drives. ( Microdrives, External Hard disks, etc. )
Their write speed is very fast, they wear slowly, and as of now they have the smallest ‘gb per dollar’ ratio on the market. You can get a lot of memory in a small amount of space for very cheap.
Some external hard drives (  ex western digital passports ) are made for portability, but they are mostly embeded into computers.
Of course, with hard drives come hard drive faliure horror stories and mechanical parts (spinning disk, moving head)
If anything gets too close to magnets all of their data is erased and totally unrecoverable. If you can’t protect it from that, this might not be a good choice.

Another option is a Solid State drive ( Flash memory: CompactFlash cards, SD cards, microSD cards, etc. )
They have no physically moving parts and are not affected at all by magnets. Most are also very portable.
You can fiind small amounts of flash memory practically anywhere, but higher capacities are harder to find.
However, write speeds are sometimes slow, and they wear pretty quickly if written and rewritten a lot. They also come in tons of differnet shapes and sizes, so you’ll need the appropriate card reader before you can do anything with it. Build quality is pretty important with flash memory, so be sure to buy a reputable brand. Amazon reviews are usually pretty good with this, but it also seems to be a favorite topic for flame reviewers. :p

Optical discs are yet another (admittedly mediocre) possiblility
Most Optical disks can only be written once, although there is such thing as a rewriteable CD/DVD.  They are disposable, dirt cheap, and they wear out after about 30 years.
CDs are generally not a good choice for long term data backup for this reason.
CD-ROMs usually have ~700-800 mb capacity, while DVDs can hold 4 or 5gb of error protected data.

Aside from your nomal backups, you could also upload to some online storage service (Hint: See post below ) . That way, you can just let them manage the drives for you to use as a last resort. And if it breaks down on you, you can just blame the service for your data loss.

Alternatively you could just buy one of each of the storage types and make several copies of the same file on each device.  It might take a while, but at least it won’t keep you up worrying in the middle of the night.

Use wordpress as an online hard drive [BUG]

Picture this in an infocomercial:

<ping> Do you have an abandoned wordpress blog? Are you too ashamed to start it up again, after that huge, huge post gap??  Are you considering deleting that abandoned shameful wordpress blog??? Stay clear of that idea! Instead, recycle! And use it as a half-baked semi-functional online storage space! And if you call now, we’ll double the offer, half the price, and throw in a totally unrelated item for a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y FREE!!!<ping>

Sarcasm aside,

WordPress has (as of this post, at least) this ‘bug’ that lets you upload an alien filetype to space normally restricted to a few different kinds of image types. So here’s the mojo:

-Rename ‘unethicalbugexploit.offlimitsfiletype’ (aka ‘yourfile.file’ ) to ‘yourfile.file.jpg’ or ‘yourfile.file.png’ . It really doesn’t matter, unless it ends in ‘.jpg’ or some WordPress-uploadable image file. The file icon might change to some generic image thumbnail. That is good.

-Now just go onto WordPress and upload it as you would any normal image file. Embed that file in a page or a post if you wish to make it appear publicly. ( Even if you don’t embed it, it will still be publicly accessible, just not as evident.) If it gives you options to edit the thumbnail size, leave it alone. Just give it a title and captions if you want to.

-Also, note the image URL by clicking on the ‘image url’ button. If you can change the url, go wild.

-Ok. After the post is up, right click on the link, (there shouldn’t be a thumbnail)  and ’save it as.’

-Just give the file it’s original name and that’s it!

If you create a password protected blog with just one page, and edit a link into that page every time you upload a file, you can use it for some simple friend to friend file sharing.

The same bug also appears in Palm Desktop synching software. Rather than buying a card reader for your computer, rename a file to ‘.jpg’ and use Quick Install to burn the file  to a card in your Palm’s SD slot. Afterwards use a PalmOS file manager (like uniCMD or something) to rename the file on-device.

Note: There are plenty of *real* free file sharing services out there, and card readers are still dirt cheap. ( Much cheaper than a Palm with an SD slot. ) Only use these little hacks when you don’t have anything better at hand. Temporary bug exploits should not be considered ‘xzomg 4nzsw3rxz0rz 2 real life problems.’