Confessions of a cat

1. Use firefox (preferred)
   Install adblock and flashblock. configure adblock to suit your needs. use google and your common sense. also use the source (of the web page)
2. Use the opera browser. It has an option panel where you can block certain urls…
3. Redirect adservers and the like to your local host (127.0.0.1). in unix systems learn about the /etc/hosts file. in windows have a look at windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts. they have the same purpose. learn about it.

Also I am not against ads (mostly) just against those ads that think they need to have all your attention - especially when several of those flash ads compete on one page for you. flash also tends to suck lots of cpu power from you… well that’s when you gonna love flashblock’s default block all setting. you decide which flash parts you wanna see. period. google adsense in its current text only way is fine. sometimes even I myself click on interesting ads. Simple picture banners or with a nondisturing animation are also fine.

If you use a computer sometimes it’s fun to give her a name. My latest baby is the above mentioned laptop. Why her? Because a Macbook can only be a woman. Just take a close look at the soft curvy lines, the slim case, and the caring attitude the operating system shows toward You.

Since you are the most important person for her she takes good care of you by auto-adjusting the brightness of the screen (less bright at night, more in daylight) and automagically switching on a keyboard backlight at night. The magsafe connector, the built in charge level meter on the battery, and the small white pulsating “eye” while the system is in sleep are small nuances - yet these features make you fall even more for her…

Not to mention the really quick startup and simplistic yet powerful approach to the overall usage of the system. Simplistic as in the way the graphical interface works yet powerful which you will figure as soon as you start digging into the unix underpinnings of her.

Just like women: usually it’s their beauty that catches us first - yet in the long run justpure beauty is not enough. There must be something more on top of it.

In short if I’d be capable of falling in love with a computer that would be her. And rest assured folks, even computers have a soul (as people planned their circuits and built them). So you should take good care of them. Especially as more and more pieces of our “very important” digital life gets stored on their hard drives.

Well, just open Terminal.app (apple+space brings up spotlight, start typing terminal, then cursor down + enter on it - there you go) and type:

drutil burn path/to/image.iso

OR

drutil burn path/to/folder

Even the command line is simple. Also erasing a rewritable? Yes, you guessed it right, drutil erase.

Cool!