The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Month: November 2010

  • Refurb HP w2408h Monitor Factory Menu

    A year or so ago I picked up a refurbished HP w2408h monitor that’s been entirely satisfactory, although the backlight now seems to flicker occasionally. In the course of enabling the backlight sensor to see if that changes anything, I came across this useful bit of information about enabling the Factory Mode menu (lightly edited for clarity):

    1. Make sure you have video on your current input.
    2. Then turn off monitor.
    3. Hold down the “Menu”  and  ” +” keys while turning OFF/ON REAR Power switch. If monitor does not have rear power switch (ex. w2408) then just do with front power switch.
    4. Bring up OSD and scroll up/down to “F” letter at one corner of the OSD window.
    5. Press Menu/select button to enter Factory menu.
    6. Scroll down and turn off BurnIn.
    7. Scroll back up to “Exit” menu.
    8. Cycle power with front power button.

    The menu isn’t particularly useful to mere mortals, although it does show total power-on hours (3700, IIRC) and some other settings. It seems the refurb shop shipped some of the monitors with Burn-In mode enabled, much to the confusion of purchasers.

    Makes you wonder what other Easter Eggs lie in wait, doesn’t it?

  • Conversation With a Scraper

    Several trackbacks along the lines of “Click for the original post” recently arrived in the comment queue; I have moderation turned on for well and good reason. Their common URL resolved to a blog containing half a dozen posts ripped in their entirety from here.

    Huh. How about that…

    The IP address resolved to [mumble].com, a dedicated server provider, and the blog actually had a contact page with what looked like a non-bogus email address. Here’s the exchange, with me doggedly CC-ing abuse@[mumble].com:

    Me

    Much of the content at [scraper URL].info has been ripped directly from my blog at softsolder.com, in direct violation of the Creative Commons copyright given in the About page.

    Remove all of the content taken from my blog and notify me when you have done so.

    You may post links to my blog, but you may not re-use the text or pictures without following the applicable Creative Commons copyright rules.

    Thank you.

    Scraper

    Thanks for your email.  This was generated by a sofware program and has been removed as requested. Regards,  David

    Me

    OK, I’m puzzled: you imply that your site uses content that a program automatically rips from other blogs.

    What’s the point of that?

    Scraper

    FYI there are alot of different software programs out there that create autoblogs in much the same manner. These are being actively promoted to internet marketers.  All that is required is subscribing to your rss feed and the software does the rest. It populates the blog, and publishes the content.  I’m sure that you will run into this some more as these type programs become used by more and more marketers.  David

    Me

    Ah, now it makes sense: the lure of money for nothin’!

    I suppose I should be flattered that you considered my blog worth stealing.

    Frankly, I doubt you’ll get very far with second-hand content, at least based on the readership I’ve built up over the past two years by creating an original post every single day.

    I’ve always wondered at the financial reward from a scraper blog. Let me know how that business model works out for you in, say, late January of next year.

    OK?

    Thanks…

    Something tells me I’m not going to get a reply.

    There are many “bloggers” like David who think there’s money to be made by pretending they’re competent. Many of the comments you never see lead to spam and malware blogs that link back here, evidently to boost their clickiness.

    My RSS post feed has teaser excerpts, not the entire blog post, which seems to discourage scrapers: copy-and-pasting a URL Is so much more difficult than just clicking an RSS button. I suppose that makes David one of the more enterprising “internet marketers” in his field of non-expertise…