No More HD TV OTA Toronto Channel List

Two buildings went up blocking my view of the CN Tower, so now I ONLY get US HDTV stations, and a couple of analog Canadian stations. So I won't be able to post updated channel lists for a while. I tried a better indoor antenna but it didn't help. I may go get a big outdoor antenna and see if it works, but the view is pretty bad, even the analog Canadian stations that are coming in are terrible. (Any suggestions would be very welcome.) The only major US change I noticed after their HD switchover on June 12th is that 2-2 is sports and 2-3 is Retro TV (RTV) now. For a channel list, this site has a great list that they update regularily: Remote Central Buffalo and Toronto Channel Listing

Avoid Tucows or Hover for Domain Registration

I had domains registered at IYD, both personal and at work. They got bought by another registrar. They left us users on the "old" system for a while then flipped us to a new backend for managing our stuff.

The first time I went to renew a domain on the new site, Hover.com, I was stunned. I had logged in with the intent to give it a try, and maybe transfer it elsewhere if I had to, say if the price had tripled or something like that.

The new site's interface is one of the worst I have ever used. Finding things is difficult and there appears to be no way to do more than one domain at once. It looks like someone got an AJAX hard-on but didn't test it on actual users before launching. To make it even worse their ticket response time appears to be 1-2 weeks. After a few one-at-a-time transfers I got so upset I said darn-diddly-arn it and decided to give up and transfer all my work and personal domains away from them en-masse. Godaddy was nice enough to give a big volume discount on the transfer :)

Related story: Hover.com is the anti-Go-daddy

Email Myths

Do you think email is secure? I am getting the impression there's a big fallacy regarding the privacy of email. Some apparently lesser known email facts:

1. Internet email generally has no encryption, either of the mail itself or the communication between servers.

2. Email usually hops across a few dozen servers (routers and switches usually, devices people can log into and control) and a few mail servers to get to where it's going.

3. Email is usually stored in plain text on servers, allowing staff and crackers easy access.

There is some good news though. On many servers, you can at least encrypt your own communications between you and your server. And there is an end-to-end method of encrypting email using extremely hard to crack encryption. GNU Privacy Guard is a free program that allows you to send mail using conventionally uncrackable encryption algorithms. It's not impossible to defeat but it requires computer power few people have access to. I would say it is the only way available to securely send Internet email.

There are several servers that will let you automatically fetch people's keys, mine is here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x0E6834E3

The search page on that one is here: http://pgp.mit.edu/

There is a nice add-on for Thunderbird that adds good support for this, called Enigmail.

Sorry State of The Linux Desktop

After a holiday of installing/reinstalling, GNOME and KDE versions, trying so hard to get a working 64 bit Linux desktop with a proprietary 3d driver ; all I can say is don't install Linux if you plan on using an NVIDIA or ATI card right now. X and the drivers are a nightmare. Then to top it off KDE4 is quite a shock. After a few weeks I'm finding I like it more than KDE3. But there are some stunners. Some apps just aren't ready , they are still KDE3 apps and don't work properly. Like Digikam it can't delete files, even if you chmod 777 the file...

Kubuntu hides so much config of KDE it's intolerable. But then on Fedora even though they left in more , I can't find half the settings I want from KDE3. Like making a corner of the screen do something like popup the panel. And theres silly stuff half done, like if you have slideshow wallpaper you can't change the aspect ratio or scaling. But you can on static wallpaper WTF?

Thats not to say there aren't bright spots. Network manager on all of them works amazing now, pulse audio actually works. The desktop is slick , I can easily say the best looking of Crapple, WinDOS and unix is KDE 4. The latest GNOME isn't that much of a jump compared to KDE 4.

The current state of the ATI and NVIDIA drivers with this new X.org version really blows on 64-bit. It had been getting so stable. I hope they fix it in time to finally offer a decent replacement for MS' POS. They've probably got until XPs EOL.

I've ended up on Fedora 9 having to manually move around GL related 64 and 32 bit files depending on what application I need to run. It sucks but isn't too big of a headache, at least I don't have to use Windows or MacOS ;)