Edward Andrew Robinson

<rant>Yesterday Bell, my super fast ISP, started to redirect unfound urls to their own website (www.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>

I am a huge fan of the google docs, In fact I am pretty much a fan of all of googles services. I love having all my information with me wherever I go and I am willing to “sacrifice” my privacy in exchange for that service. Anything really important and I will keep it on my own server but I am yet to have anything that I really worry about. That said some people might not want to use google to host there expenses, I do.

The great thing about using google docs to host my expenses is that I can add an expense from anywhere using the google docs form feature In the example I provided (Fake Expenses), I use the forum feature to add expenses on the road as well as getting real time updates about the amount of money I spend per day, week, etc.

If you would like to use my expense tracker you can view it here (Be sure to check all the sheets (Form, Overview, Worker, and Totals)), or download it here. Then simply upload it to your google docs and set up a form. Also feel free to play around and add fake expenses to the doc.

How do you track your expenses?

Update 01: Click here to get your own copy of the doc in your google docs. Thanks JR.
Update 02: Any idea why when I edit my posts they are being republished?

I love planets, both the ones in the sky’s, and the ones on the web. But this post is about the latter. One of the things about the web is that you have profiles everywhere, and while openID partly solves this problem allowing me to use one user name to authenticate everywhere it does not solve the problem that people have to visit a bunch of different sites to find out about me. They need to visit my facebook profile to find out what I’m up to, last.FM to see what music I’m into, Digg to see what I’m digging (but I can never decide if I like Digg or not), and the list goes on. I guess if something really important happens, like the launch of Ubuntu brainstorm, I can always blog about it or Digg it but I’m not about to go blogging or digging everything I see. There are a few facebook apps that allow me to display my google reader info on my facebook page and thats kinda cool but I want it all in one place.

My solution planet earobinson, this lets me put any content I have with a rss feed onto my own personal planet its kinda what I’m up to everywhere and until I find a better way to link all my content into one place I’m sticking with it. Google’s open social has some promise but as of right now i’m only linked to my last.FM profile.

So how do you keep all your content in one place?

Using gmails spam filters I normally don’t have a problem with spam. However my one email that does receive a lot of spam is my Ubuntu email address. Interestingly enough a few open source members have droped there open source email addresses due to this exact problem. Jeff Bailey has disabled his @gnu.org email address, and talked about doing the same to his Ubuntu address. Daniel Robitaille has also posted on the problem. Now I like my Ubuntu email address so I’m not about going to delete it but I did receive three rather “great” bits of “email” to it today (Ill only include screen shots of two).

What I thought was “great” about these messages was that they where “sent” to Colin Watson and Corey Burger. Yes they got the emails wrong but I recognized the name instantly. I did find it funny that I had “antecedently” received personal emails to the both. It would be great if we where to use google apps, to run the Ubuntu emails that way we could take advantage of google great spam filters but I know that wont happen. I guess for now I’m stuck reading emails about the sexual prowess of Colin Watson and Corey Burger.