Edward Andrew Robinson » android http://www.earobinson.org “Brilliant people simplify things, and mediocre people complicate things.” — Unknown Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:12:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Voting with your dollar http://www.earobinson.org/2010/10/03/voting-with-your-dollar/ http://www.earobinson.org/2010/10/03/voting-with-your-dollar/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:12:05 +0000 Edward Andrew Robinson http://www.earobinson.org/?p=376 <rant>There are many ways you can support open source projects. You can write code, you can help out other users, submit bug reports. Ubuntu has a great wiki page as to how you can contribute and many other open source projects do as well. And really the best way you can contribute is to get involved in the community, spread the word. That said, when I see a cool open source project, like the OLPC project I cant help but support it with my money. The Google Android OS is another one of those projects. I got my Nexus One about six months ago and I love everything about it. I love that it runs Linux, and supporting a business model based off open source is perfect for me. Two apps that I really love are Call Track (records all your calls onto your Google calendar) and SMS Backup (records all your sms messages to your email).</rant>

So now I am looking at getting a tablet, I am thinking of getting the Archos 101 internet tablet, any other ideas lazy web?

]]> http://www.earobinson.org/2010/10/03/voting-with-your-dollar/feed/ 5 Using Firefox + NoRedirect Extension to Avoid DNS Hijacking http://www.earobinson.org/2009/08/01/using-firefox-noredirect-extension-to-avoid-dns-hijacking/ http://www.earobinson.org/2009/08/01/using-firefox-noredirect-extension-to-avoid-dns-hijacking/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:00:19 +0000 Edward Andrew Robinson http://www.earobinson.org/?p=255 <rant>Yesterday Bell, my super fast ISP, started to redirect unfound urls to their own website (evil_lg_bell.pngwww.domainnotfound.ca). I have been very happy with Bell for the last few years and have been thinking of moving my cellphone subscription to them as soon as they support the android.

To Bell‘s credit they do offer a way for you to opt out of the service however when you opt out instead of returning a DNS error they you get a blank page, not very useful for me. I have a habit of typing anything I am looking for into the address bar and then letting google take over. This works very well for me if I want to visit reddit I type reddit and google seems to figure out that I want to visit reddit. If instead I type “reddit bell dns hijacking” google still seems to figure out that they do not know what I am looking for and so they take me to a search results page. This is how I brows the Internet, I do everything from the Awesome Bar (the bar in Firefox that you type your url into). And yesterday Bell broke that.

NoRedirect (Firefox Extension Link) to the rescue!

NoRedirect lets the user take control of HTTP redirects. It can be used to interdict an ISP’s DNS search redirection hijacks, preview/screen “shortened” URLs (e.g., TinyURL), stop the annoying redirection of “smart” error pages, etc. — Source

This lets me set any url mattching the following regular expression http://www\.domainnotfound\.ca/* to be interpreted by Firefox as a DNS error giving me back my Awesome Bar and my ability to type anything I want into it and have google do all of the work!

I think this is an exteremly evil move by Bell and I am quite disappointed. at least Firefox + NoRedirect has saved the way I brows my internets. But this is another step by our ISP’s to erode our digital freedoms and net neutrality and another reason to move to TekSavvy. I should not have to resort to a software solution to preserve how I browse the Internet!</rant>

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