(Mon Apr 29 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Mothers Day is coming up and therefore the Merchants of Gifts are out in force trying to get us to spend money on gushy thingies for our Mothers. And yes, our Mothers sure put up with a lot to get us to where we are, and deserve all our thanks. However this advertisement that popped up in my Facebook news stream is more than intrusive, and it demonstrates the lengths to which some advertisers will go to sell things.
(Sun Apr 14 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Last week I saw an ominous drop in traffic on one of my sites that was related to Google starting to enforce mobile-friendly web design on the site. Google has long warned it would start looking at mobile-responsiveness and use it as a ranking factor in search results. My site wasn't too bad in this regard, but some of the pages were outright horrible on mobile devices. Not all pages, only some. I've spent most of the last week working on the issues, and have an intermediate result to show.
(Thu Apr 11 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Hidden inside Intel CPU's is a whole other computer system, the Intel Management Engine, or Intel ME, that watches over the computer. It is running an embedded Minix operating system, and has massive privileges over everything running inside the computers. Some fear this hidden computer is a hidden backdoor inside Intel CPU's. This video claims to show how to disable the Intel ME computer, but the process is absolutely not for the faint of heart.
(Mon Apr 08 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) A trending topic on YouTube currently is videos describing how to make a ton of money on YouTube without even shooting any videos. It's a gimmick in which one finds videos that are Creative Commons, which in theory allows free reuse of the video because that's the purpose of the Creative Commons License. What one is to do is download Creative Commons videos, then either make a compilation video, or simply re-upload the entire video, claiming the videos are Creative Commons and it's all okay. In theory this is sound, but in practice there are problems.
(Fri Apr 05 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) This week the traffic to one of my sites is exhibiting a steep traffic fall-off. For years it has had a solid 1000 visitors per day, or so, and at the beginning of March the traffic started to slowly diminish, then on Wednesday April 3 the traffic fell off steeply. Usually this site has a fall-off on the weekends, so this particular change is ominous. In the Google Webmasters tools is a clue - that at the beginning of March there is suddenly many reports of mobile usability issues. The two are likely connected as Google has long warned of a plan to downgrade sites that are not mobile friendly.
