Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

I love my iPod as I have mentioned before. I now listen to it almost exclusively and whenever I am out and about with just my own thoughts with a podful of podcasts.

The thing that I have been quietly nervous about is that the amount that i have been using it exceeds the number of daily hours reccomended to get the most out of the iPod battery life. Before the podcasts I really had no expectation of listenign to more than a couple of hours a day of music. Now however i need to listent to that much just to keep up with all of hte feeds that I listen to.

As a result I have been seeing the battery time get gradually shorter and shorter, with the battery indicator sometimes displaying half full before suddenly crapping out at the most undesireable times. This is particularly annoying when I am out for a run, 20 minutes into a 60 minute course when suddenly my head is assulted with the silence of empty speakers.

These shortened times between re-fueling are now becoming a more noticeable issue. I listen to about 2 and a half hours of podcasting now before the battery winks out. At the end of the week I will be traveling overseas (more on that later) which would be a great opportunity to blast through some backed up podcasts while I am on the plane but if the battery craps out before we taxi out I will be very dissapointed , to say the least.

I wanted to talk a bit about spyware. This is not a new topic in itself. Spyware has been around for some years now. Really ever since web browsers allowed the use of cookies that allowed someone else to watch where you have been surfing I there has been a threat to our online privacy.

But although privacy is important that is not the real threat. There is a real danger that spyware has already found its way onto your computer. Over the last three years there has been a very dangerous convergence between organized crime and the writers and creators of these online nasties. (more…)

Well I don’t know what caused to problem in the first place, but the ‘puter is back online. These days loading up WinXP on to a cleanly formatted hard drive is just the very beginning of the process and was the easy part. The next step is locking down the system from external nasties, before I connect to the net.

This is really important, since the out of the box WinXP installation is full of well exploited security exploits. The Internet Storm Center tracks the average time before an unpatched system is exploited by the white noise of port scanning and exploit hunting viruses. It is currently tracking at about 23 minutes.
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For a while now I have been planning on giving the home desktop PC a re-bore. There is a lot of crud that has built up over time with tried and rejected software dregs, neglected games, layers of system build-up and so on.

Well last night it decided to lend me a hand in my decision making. After being prompted for the 5th time to upgrade the antivirus software that I had been using, I decided to load up a newer version that I was no longer using from a different PC. (more…)

Ok here is a cool idea, although it will take a bit longer to work out how it might integrate fully into the Website If I decide to use it. It is a geographic locator for a blog and I would like to see how it fits into the idlemind website.

Look for the Blogmap in the sidebar. Let me know it you think it is cool in the comments.

Edit: I kinda like the idea of this tool so I have moved it across from this post to the sidebar.