cshen.ca

I had submitted this comic to The Peak a week ago, but John Morrison III decided that a cat with a giant penis was funnier, and Graham Templeton found the idea of “everybody draw Mohammed day” hypocritical. He wrote a scathing critique of the event on the basis that the western world is only now – after the fire and brimstone riots have passed – deciding to support free speech, whereas they should have stood together and republished the Danish cartoons when this freedom was the most fragile and in need of support. I agree that the western media displayed extreme cowardice in leaving the Danish cartoonists alone to face the violence of Muslims with hurt feelings, but I won’t condemn a stand for free speech whatever the circumstance.

Similar to the previous post, this is another compilation of my experimentation. Earlier today, I received an Acer laptop to setup for someone. Unsurprisingly, the system recovery disc was laced with irremovable crapware, and support refused to supply a clean Windows image. Fortunately, it’s still possible to do a clean install, if you have the original media lying around.

The easiest way to install Windows without the crapware would be to use a proper installation disc with its corresponding licence key. Some business class products provide the original install media, which makes this process easy. There’s also the option of using another copy, but that would mean the OEM licence – which accounts for about $50 of the laptop price – would go to waste. The last option is to obtain an original install media and make it accept the OEM licence key. This is the most difficult, but the most feasible, and the one I was stuck with this time. Google didn’t reveal much, so I asked Neowin members for ideas.

Gmail has offered the ability to specify different emails that you own as the “From:” address for a long time. This makes consolidating emails easy. When combined with forwarders, one account could handle the emailing of multiple addresses. However, some recipients see a very ugly “From:” address when using this method.

This is because since Gmail is now sending the email instead of the original mail server, it must include the actual Gmail address in the mail headers.

• Delivered-To: recipient@domain.com
• Return-Path: <real@gmail.com>
• MIME-Version: 1.0
• Sender: real@gmail.com
• Subject: email
• From: Chen Shen<new@cshen.ca>
• To: recipient@domain.com

A while ago Google introduced a new function that solves this by routing emails through the actual server of the alternate address. I’ve only recently set it up with my own account, and found the relevant information scattered around the web. This is a compilation of my search results.

The government is trying for the nth time to change Canada’s copyright laws in an effort to please US media overlords, who wish to dictate every detail of how and when Canadians consume media and culture. They want to do this by criminalizing every day activities and imposing hugely disproportionate penalties for these “crimes”.

It is evident, from past bills the government had tried – and failed – to pass, that the goal of this copyright “reform” is to mimic the DMCA of the United States. It is also evident, from numerous examples under the DMCA, that this kind of legislation is a bad idea. One does not have to support file sharing to realize that fines of $1.92 million for allegedly sharing 24 songs, or even $675,000 for 30 songs, can in no way, shape, or form be just, or even sane.