http://www.flickr.com/photos/thayerschool/3267515306/

No doubt you’ve seen the storm crossing the net these last few days (and weeks, months, years) concerning the possibility that Chinese hackers have planted code in our power facilities giving them the ability to remotely shut down our grid at their whim. Well, this isn’t my obligatory pseudo-opinion, instead I’ll just share a little bit about the area I live in. We are one of the windiest areas in the entire US, and the concentration of wind farms in our are is a testament to that fact.

Despite the seemingly endless supply of renewable energy around here, the power goes out quite frequently. Sometimes it makes me think about how it must have been to live in the early days of the electrical age when just the slightest breeze might knock out the power for days. It gets pretty crazy around here this time of year with winds peaking at 80mph on a near daily basis. Not only does the wind have a habit of kicking off the power, it also tends to kick up a lot of dust. On days like today, the visibility drops and going outside is almost equivalent to being willingly sandblasted…

Now here’s where the FUD comes in… I read a bunch of these news articles concerning the threat posed by malware at our power stations, and I also know from years of experience that the wind gets strong here and knocks out the power…. but can you guess what first came to mind when the power went out the other day? Howling winds and all, part of me still couldn’t help but remember the articles and that cast doubt in my mind about the cause of the outage. Now, I consider myself to be a very free-thinking adult with half a brain, and at least half an education, but think about every one else for a second. Ok, stop.

You just put more effort in to it than most. Congrats, now ignore the FUD and go back to your American Gladiators.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morgacito/44179636/

Wow, I haven’t had a Bill Hicks moment in a while. Feels good bro.

Also, here’s a great comment from a user named tehowe on digg:

The fair and balanced media has rediscovered botnets and hackers. What next, EMP? Surely this technology is well within reach of the turrists and foreign agencies. All computers henceforth must be stored in a secret cloud-top Colorado mountain complex with ninja assassin guards.

Great insight from a 10 year old. Better grammar and spelling than most digg commenters too! :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ondersetgonas/

Dropping on new Entrecarders can have many benefits, though EC’s use of Javascript in their category browser makes it hard to drop on multiple users without hours of tedious clicking. In this post, I’ll show you how you can create an easy to use link list of the newest members.
1. Install some Firefox extensions
Linky will allow you to highlight and open up to 99 links in new tabs.
DOM inspector will allow you to see the actual page source generated by Entrecard’s Javascript.

2. Get a decent text editor
Notepad++ is an excellent FOSS text editor with many additional capabilities.
OR
EmEditor (30-day trial) is possibly the best non-FOSS editor around.

3. Grep for Win32

Once you have your extensions, editor, and grep installed, go to your EC Category viewer sorted by newest members:

http://entrecard.com/category/browser?order_by=newest

Set the EC browser to view 24 rows and wait until it’s fully loaded.
catnew
Fire up your DOM inspector by clicking Tools > DOM Inspector in your Firefox menu. Once in, click this green button to activate the node inspector:
dom1
Now click on an card on the EC Category viewer and you’ll see a red box appear around it. Switch back to the DOM inspector and you’ll notice that the tree has expanded and highlighted an entry below the cat_results id. Click the arrow to expand cat_results and you should see the following:

dom2

dom3

Right click on the cat_results DIV and click “Copy XML”. Paste it into your text editor of choice. You should see one very long bit of code. Browse to the next page of Category viewer results and repeat the last few steps until you have 3 or 4 lines.

edit1

Save your text file to your desktop and launch your command prompt by clicking Start > Run > cmd > OK
In your command prompt window, type the following to change directories to your desktop where your file is saved:
cd Desktop

Now using grep, you can filter out all the url’s hidden away in the text file.
grep -Po "\/t\/oc\/\d+" DOM.txt >> newec.txt

You may need to run grep with the full path if that didn’t work:
"C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\grep.exe" -Po "\/t\/oc\/\d+" DOM.txt >> newec.txt

edit2
Now open your new text file in your editor and do a search and replace.
Find:
/t/oc/
Replace with:
<a href="http://entrecard.com/t/oc/

Now add the last bit of that html using your editors macro function.
Click to position your cursor at the end of the first line.
Start recording your macro
Paste the following at the end of the first line:
">.</a>

Now hit the down arrow and then the End key on your keyboard to move to the next line and position the cursor at the end of the line.
Stop recording and run the macro with options. Set it to run one less than the total number of lines in your file, or until the end.
Optionally, you may wish to insert <br /> between every 99 links since Linky can only open 99 at a time.

edit3
Save your file as newec.html and open in Firefox.

Once your page is up in Firefox, you’ll see a ton of “…..” links. Highlight a few of them and right click to open selected links in tabs with Linky. You’ll want to uncheck “Select already visited links” to keep from reopening sites you’ve already dropped on.

linky

Voila! You’ll likely notice more than a few sites don’t have widgets, usually due to newb bloggers spending hours trying to figure out how to add the script to their sites…
Enjoy :)

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