I ran arcoss these in Wired this month:
Smartpox lets you generate and print small stickable barcodes that, when coupled with bar-code-reading cel phone software will redirect your phone’s web browser to a given url.
Semapedia lets you do the same thing, but for Wikipedia articles.
You could build a pretty cool underground advertising campaign, run some geeky scavenger hunts and pub crawls, or living here in Jackson, set up a self-guided tour of historic landmarks.
I get my internet connection through Bresnan. The internet is pretty good—probably the best we can get in Jackson.
I’ve been using Bresnan’s DNS servers. When they can’t resolve they serve me a page of ads. It’s really, really, really annoying. I wish I could have recorded the phone call I had with a Bresnan tech (Dave) this morning – him assuring me that Bresnan would never mess with me like that—me assuring him that in fact, they were – and the subsequent call and apology Dave made after he checked with the “Network Operations Guys”.
I’ve been seeing the Bresnan/My-way page often lately… It’s supposed to happen if the Bresnan DNS servers can’t do anything with your request
Which… i guess is ok.
But, turns out it happens for sites that actually exist fairly frequently… Gmail and Google most annoyingly.
I’m going to see how OpenDNS treats me. OpenDNS is free, fast, and easy to use. OpenDNS still shows ads if you completely mistype a domain (bummer). But, one nice thing is that they fix common spelling mistakes for you.
google.cmo resolves to google.com—that’s pretty nice.
There are also a few other features that seem interesting—you can set up personal shortcuts for instance.
I’m going to switch my local DNS settings as well as the DNS setting on my router to use OpenDNS and see how it treats me & the other people using the internet at my house. Hopefully it’ll be less annoying.
