I started using OpenDNS yesterday. What is DNS?
DNS, the Domain Name System, translates the human addresses of websites and servers (like wikipedia.org) to the numerical address used by computers (207.142.131.203).
What does OpenDNS do?
OpenDNS is a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.
Before switching to open DNS, when I would occasionally mistype a domain name it would sometimes resolve to a strange Chinese search page instead of just giving an error like “that page can’t be found.” Phishing is also a particular worry in China.
OpenDNS can identify and stop sites trying to phish (steal) your personal information or money. The OpenDNS phishing protection works with all operating systems and browsers, and complements any other security measures already in use, such as a firewall and anti-virus software.
Besides giving some piece of mind (I trust OpenDNS more than I trust my internet provider China Telecom) it also seems to be a little faster at resolving addresses. This is just based on surfing over the past day and I can’t say that it is amazingly faster or anything like that. Just feels faster and is certainly not any slower. It doesn’t help with the great Chinese firewall (which has once again been blocking access to blogs on Blogger.com on and off), but still I would recommend readers in China to at least give it a try.
I gave my mother a digital camera about a year and a half ago. I set up a Flickr account for her back in October of last year. She finally got around to uploading some pics today. This one is of her two cats.
Congratulations mother!!
Amber Mac’s site has a link to a new site called Justin.tv.
I knew I should have picked up that domain when I was fooling around and picking up justin-blog.com and jamesjustin.com. I guess I missed my chance to pick up a million dollars selling them their domain name. Yeah right! I suppose if it hadn’t been justin.tv they would have gone for emmett.tv or michael.tv or kyle.tv – the other guys involved in this project.
Here’s a look at the site.
As the site itself says, “Waste your life watching other people waste their lives.” What fun!
Of course Justin.tv has no affiliation to me except that we share the same name. Right now I think that is a good thing.
If you haven’t heard of Twitter then you certainly are not keeping up with the latest fad on the Internet. Twitter is really popular with the geeky in-crowd driving web 2.0 and social networking. If you are not familiar with “web 2.0″ and “social networking” on the Internet… well, you’re obviously not “wired” enough. (Which might be a good thing considering that their really isn’t much point that I can see to things like Twitter.)
A site related to Twitter has just come to my attention called TwitterVision. What is TwitterVision? Well, it links messages posted on Twitter (usually about what people are doing or thinking at that moment in time) with a Google Map so you can see where these people are…and if you watch long enough you see what people are doing all over the world. Which is actually quite amazing if you are someone who grew up in the pre-Internet era.
So far this year my homepage has been visited by roughly 694 unique visitors generating 20,732 hits (excluding 5,311 hits by robots, worms, etc.) from the following countries:
China, U.S.A, Japan, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Philippines, Great Britain, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil, Israel, Morocco, Turkey, Finland, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Germany, Slovak Republic, Russian Federation, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, Antigua and Barbuda, Czech Republic, Iran, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Burkina Faso (where is this??), Italy, Poland, South Africa, U.A.E., Venezuela and The Netherlands.
How many actually took the time to read anything, much less find it interesting, is of course hard to say. But I can guess it is actually a pretty small figure.