ben lowery

Just saw a an article on a technique to take over an open internal router using a CSRF technique. If you’re on something named linksys, beware. VPN’ing home before doing anything else is probably a really really good idea.

Last night, we launched a little toy project, called the Wall of Images. It’s a nearly live look at the images contained in blog posts, brought to you as our crawlers find them. Paul has some more on the particulars if you’re interested.

Be warned, this is an accurate representation of the images contained in feeds that people actually read, so there’s a fair chance you’re going to see some pr0n. This is 99% not safe for the workplace or an educational setting. God forbid you get forty years in jail.

Dear The Internet,

Do you know of a plugin for iTunes on Windows that will show me the currently playing song and allow me to rate it with one click?  Ideally, the window would hold just the song name, artist, and the current rating, but not be the main iTunes interface.  Does such a thing exist?

I’ve never been a huge fan of the frothy milk drinks at the local coffee roaster, not because they’re bad, but because they’re chock full of hot milk and that much hot milk doesn’t do good things to my stomach.

Today though, I found a tasty solution!  In the past, I’d always gone for a medium latte, but today I went smaller with a small cappuccino.  Cappuccinos have less milk compared to a latte and the smaller you go, the more you can taste the coffee.  Plus, smaller is cheaper, which is always nice.

On my return, I decided to see if the internet had any similiar advice. It turns out, at Starbucks, you can order a “short cappuccino“, which is pretty much ideal for me (Also, if you like the econ ideas in the article, be sure to read The Art of Profitability) . I also found a note about Italian cappuccino vs. most American cappuccino that backs up my too-much-milk thought. 

Neat!

Update: It turns out my local roaster, Coffee Labs, offers a “traditional cappuccino”, which is the standard 2oz espresso, 2oz milk, 2oz foam. Perfect.

I used to be a big tweaker of the various sounds the operating system makes, but these days I generally just take the defaults and let it be. Just found an article on the new sounds of Vista… Finally a set of sounds I won’t have to tweak.