Could be useful when trying to find that “perfect font” for your new website. Oh and the new font selector website is pretty cool.

I have only one word to explain it… “AWESOME”.

It reminds me of the handheld gadgets they use in shows like CSI where they take a photo of something (fingerprint, shoe print etc) and then click a button and the phone magically does some recognition and comes back with the info. It’s not perfect… and doesn’t recognise all the logos I had in the office but it does a pretty good job none the less.

And now with Google Images supporting reverse searches (search for an image using an image) it could only get better.

I must say that it does look nicer than the old Firefox, unfortunately a little out of place on my Windows XP desktop but not too bad. Unfortunately it feels very sluggish, switching between tabs is rather slow and so is scrolling in pages. The worst though is that any longish textarea like the comment boxes in Facebook and the WordPress “Add New Post” page is very slow. On some pages I’m able to type about 10x faster than its able to put the characters on the screen.

I’m still not sure if loading of pages is faster and if there is a speed up in the Javascript engine I haven’t noticed it yet.

For the moment I’m going to give Firefox 4 a good chance to redeem its self and use it for a few more days… If I don’t grow to love up I’m switching back to Firefox 3 or moving over to Google Chrome.

Architecture of Wikileaks

Basically these guys offer access to a cluster that has been specifically fine tuned for cracking WPA encryption keys for wireless networks and at the cheapest price it’ll cost $17. I’ve seen people online build machines with multiple graphics cards and then run the code on them as well as the CPU as the graphics cards (Nvidia is the example I read) are faster at doing the math the desktop CPU’s.

Should we all panic? Well if you read the FAQ on the site you’ll see that WPA encryption is still a little hard to crack, changing the SSID of the access point to something unique makes it harder and so does choosing a non-dictionary password for the WPA key.

Sorry guys I should’ve realised that this is not Iron Man but rather War Machine, but still its impressive.

For those of you who don’t know about this there is a conspiracy theory (which I actually think may be true) about how printer companies make their printers print mysterious yellow dots in certain places in order to allow law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the printout.

In the days of things like type writers it was actually possible to match a particular type writer to a particular page by the printing as each type writer had a slightly different wear pattern on the letters, it was even possible in the days of dot matrix printers to still do this although I’m not entirely sure how reliable this is. Of course its much harder to do this with modern printers as there is no “wear pattern” or anything that acts as a fingerprint.

I love these kinds of conspiracy theories… Like the governments have nothing better to do than track down who printed what… obviously the way to prevent them tracking you down is don’t print anything or use someone else’s printer.

This has been a rather common occurrence lately with email accounts hosted in the US. Our normal method of fixing this is log in via the ISP’s webmail front end, go through the mail and delete any messages that are “junk”. Unfortunately that did not work, the minute the Inbox was opened the page would sit trying to download and then finally timeout.

It was time to use some knowledge that I acquired in my “younger days” when I hung around the darker parts of the web… you can access a POP email account using Telnet, the big advantage of using telnet is that you never download the message, in fact you don’t even have to see the message to be able to delete it. The downside is that telnet is not the easiest tool to use to read your email, you basically have to stick in all the raw POP commands from the specification in order to login and access your email account and manipulate the emails.

I don’t remember all the commands for POP servers but the basics on this page were enough for me to delete the offending emails and fix the problem.

While fun and not particularly dangerous, this is not something for your typical “user” as it involves command lines, typing often blindly at prompts and careful typing to ensure you make no mistakes as back space often doesn’t work.

Unfortunately Web Africa (my favourite ISP) doesn’t offer anything like this in the same price range.

I’ve only just signed up for it, so I can’t really give an accurate review of it… but the wife and I will give it a good test over the coming weeks and I’ll report back here and let you know how well it works.