Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I think I’ve been hit by the latest lame Facebook virus-like application! It’s called suspicious activity log, and it’s designed to trick people into approving it by sending an official-looking message to as many friends as it can indicating that their “profiles have been reported as terms of service (tos) violations.” Here’s a screenie of the notification it posted to me:

I went to the application page, and this is what I got:

The Facebook “friend” who was stupid enough to install this piece of crap malware is no longer my Facebook “friend.” Fortunately, I’ve never met him in real life, so the pain to my heart is minimal!

For a look at the new Kindle2 unboxed, a review of the awesome device itself, or a list of pros and cons, you’ll have to look elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I just got my Kindle2, and I think it’s better than actual books.

One often overlooked feature is Amazon’s Kindle PDF/Microsoft Word .doc to AWZ (kindle format) conversion service. For just $.10 an attachment, they will convert files for you into Kindle format, and transmit them wirelessly to your device! A question you might ask is how does the converted file look, and is it readable?

First, the new file is transmitted and named exactly as the attachment is named. The “author” field is your email address, so you can quickly distinguish the converted pdf from your purchases on the Amazon Kindle store.

The conversion doesn’t know about tables of contents, footnotes, copyright statements, prefaces, or any other book convention. It simply reads in the file you gave it, and spits it out onto your Kindle in the same format. So, the indentation may be screwy, and there may not be any chapters or other marks–it will read as a single continuous chunk of text. That said, it is legible and works, although the experience is somewhat degraded from what you’d buy in the Kindle store.

You can also get text (as above) which came from a page marking randomly inserted into the paragraph flow. Converting PDFs is definitely not glitch free, but at least it only costs you $.10 a try!

I was looking through my computer for culprits of high-disk usage when I noticed two suspicious folders using 548mb + 155mb = 703mb of space:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple Computer\Installer Cache
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple\Installer Cache

If you needed another reason to hate the Apple installer, after they tried to push their crapware Safari browser to all windows users, now you have one–it’s bloated and wastes valuable hard disk space by keeping copies of every version of every Apple update you ever download.

Update: I found another 900mb of iPhone software updates being cached here:

C:\Documents and Settings\Elliott Back\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates