I found this image on Reddit. It shows the space needed to transport a certain number of people by car, bus or bicycle. If you look closely though, you’ll see that different zoom levels are used in different photos. This is my attempt to rectify that with a bit of cropping. The photos still show the significant problems with cars.

I got really sick of the comment spam on this site and realised that it was my responsibility as a web master to prevent it and thus ensure that only deserving sites had their sites boosted by links from this site. Akismet was, and remains, installed - but it wasn’t really cutting it. Although it has stopped an extraordinary 105,428 comments and trackbacks since installation. I’ve now implemented reCAPTCHA which means you have to type a couple of blurred words to make a comment. While this requires effort on the part of the user, which is a great shame, the good news is that your efforts do not go to waste. ReCAPTCHA uses one of the words you input to check you are human, the other helps to make electronic copies of scanned in books, a la Project Gutenberg.

Apologies for the inconvenience, blame the spammers!

Unless you live in a different Internet to me, you can’t have failed to notice the abundance of annoying flash-based ads which make irritating noises.

Perhaps the best example of this is the horrific buzzing mosquito you can only shut up by attempting to win a laptop, it starts buzzing without any activity from you at all. If you haven’t seen a copy yet I’ve hosted it here. But there’s also the talking smilie faces, the voices whispering about you, etc. If you use a tabbed browser and have as many tabs open as I do, you have to search through them all to find the culprit.

And it’s not only the loud flash ads that are problematic, ads on newspapers cover the text you want to read and have confusing, hard to find ‘X’ buttons.

The solution
This whole situation seems very reminiscent of another form of advertising, the popup. Popups used to be everywhere, they were really irritating. Then browsers and toolbars came in that blocked them. Now, even if you use a legacy browser without a popup blocker, you’ll be hard pressed to find many popup ads.

Why? Because there’s no point in them. It’s a waste of bandwidth to send the javascript to make a window popup if 90% of your users won’t see it. So many websites have moved to advertisements which their users appreciate more, like contextual advertising (Google Adwords, etc.) which displays things people might actually be interested in if they’re on your page.

Some however have embraced the almost equally irritating flash ads. But we can make them stop, as we made popups stop. If a significant proportion of the internet installs flash ad blockers it will become economically unviable to fill space on a website with an irritating flash ad, when it could be filled with text-ads visible to all.

Firefox users

There is a firefox extension called AdBlock which will block all advertisements. I’m against this (as a publisher who makes money from text-ads) because it removed the only revenue stream from a lot of websites and would force a lot of sites to close. We should block unreasonable ads rather than all ads. We consider popups unreasonable and I think we should consider most flash ads unreasonable too. Inobstrusive text ads are not, in my opinion.

So instead use FlashBlock, it replaces all Flash animations with a little play button you can click to make them appear. It’s really unobtrusive, using Flash based websites isn’t hard. You can add sites like youtube to a whitelist to avoid too many play buttons.

Internet Explorer users

Well my first advice would be get Firefox, it’s so much better, but I know you’ve heard that a thousand times before.
So if you really must continue using IE I suggest you try FlashSwitch which lets you toggle flash in the system tray.

If as many people as possible take these measures it will soon become pointless to display annoying flash ads.

… I apologise. I’ve suddenly noticed a vast amount of emails being bounced to my catch-all address. This means that an evil spammer is sending emails which are forged so that they appear to be from VariousRandomAddresses@splasho.com. If you’ve received such a message please be assured that it has nothing to do with this blog. If there was anything I could do to stop it I would, but it’s totally unconnected to me. I can strongly recommend the excellent SpamBayes for spam detection if you’re not on GMail or similar.

I also apologise for the apparent death of this blog, I still hope to post on it occasionally I just apparently haven’t had anything interesting to say for many months.

For most of this year, this blog has had a post every day. THe vast majority of these were simply links to sites that interested/entertained me a bit. Given that there are so many other sources of these links out there I’ve decided to mostly stop that. I recommend Reddit, Digg, MetaFilter, Waxy and Kottke.

I will now be posting less often but my posts will hopefully of a higher quality, there will be:

• Original articles on things, usually techy
• My opininion, which I find interesting but you may not.
• Links to the wonderful things I’ve created
• Links to random things which REALLY entertained me, but not every day

I feel guilty for laughing so much at this page because of the poor innocents at whose expense I was laughing, but laugh I did.
[Via boingboing]

Hilarious recording of (update: fake) telemarketer talking to a loop, if enough people did this companies might give up trying to sell things to us over the phone.

Many people on the Internet (including me from time to time) seem to have too much time on their hands. This page analyses a song in which Kate Bush sings the digits of Pi and finds out that she is actually referring to a ring of trees.

This discovery of the ring of trees at the precise location that I decoded from the song completes the quick verification that there is indeed hidden information in the song, and that I am not chasing illusions.

[Via b3ta]

In addition to Plasma Pong, there’s also Paddle Power. It’s a single player game that adds a new dimension to Pong.

[Via b3ta]

Improv everywhere has done some very funny things: sending 80 people into Best Buy dressed like the staff, suddenly moving in slow motion while shopping and creating a time loop.

Venice from above and San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

[Via reddit]

TrackMeNot is a browser extension that protects web-searchers against surveillance and data-profiling. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s trail), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view.

I thought this Firefox extension was a great idea. The only problem was that it had a pretty limited word lists and it’s searches weren’t very human. What it really needed was a database of real search engine queries. Where could you find such data? Oh yes, AOL. So I’ve made a new version which uses about 40,000 AOL queries (you need to uninstall any previous TrackMeNot first).

It also uses the sequence which AOL searchers used, which looks realistic (eg “john smiht” and then “john smith”). I have also changed it to only target Google rather than MSN, Yahoo and AOL.

Note that it may search for anything an AOL user searched for, including many things you do not wish to be associated with, and the search will come from your computer! It is also incomplete and not very tested so use it entirely at your own risk.