Facebook is scary

When I logged into my Facebook account earlier I found a friend of mine in the “people you might know” box in the right upper corner. I clicked myself through to her profile, noticed that it was indeed this one friend I had with that particular name and sent a friendship request.
So far nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I realized that the both of us didn’t actually have anything in common. At least nothing which Facebook should know.

At least nothing I could put my finger on.

She is living in a completely different part of the country now, never went to school or university with me, we didn’t even meet until we both workedtogether for a NGO a few years back. The closest that we actually got in our profiles was that her high school was about 40km away from mine.
Neither me nor her actually put the occasion where we met online.
So how come she appeared as the top suggestion all of a sudden? A place which for the last few days was held by a girl from my Uni that shares two  of my friends with me.

Now, I know that one or two years back, when I started to use Facebook a bit more extensively, I did a search on her name in Facebook. I didn’t find her back then and actually didn’t think about that too much anymore. Does Facebook really save all those searches I did for people I knew over the last few years? And do I really want them to remember all that stuff for such a long time? Keeps me thinking what else they have on me…

Resources IV

A Greasemonkey script for your Facebook pleasure: removing all those damn Quiz updates.

North Korean Anti-U.S. propaganda posters: They are offensive towards the U.S. of course, but they also show that North Korea seems to be stuck in the 1960s even in terms of propaganda. Of course when you have the highest percentage of the population in the army AND the bomb you might not actually care about that. Although lately what they seem to do is pissing against the legs of everybody they can.

A collection of links to Medieval Cookbooks: I really have to go through that at one point. Still, I suppose there are far more than just those linked somewhere.

And: a Lifehacker guide on how to build a computer from scratch for people who never have done that before. Something I might try as soon as I have some spare money to get the parts. I always wanted to have a computer I built myself. I’m such a geek. Even though being a history student.

Connecting odd ends with Pidgin

Pidgin is actually one of the most comfortable and feature-rich Instant Messengers around. Still, there are some things missing. I think there always would be something lacking, as trying to get to please all possible people with just one program is close to the plight of Sisyphos. Still, the open architecture of the orgram llows for people to create own replacements for things they believe to need. Still, there are some amazing toys around because of that. And while there still is no support for Audio/Video-features like there is in other clients (that would be my favourite), they are working on it. (At least it looks like that).

There are a few interesting plugins for the application around, but concerning the usability I find these the best of the lot:

1. The Skype plugin

Skype lately has become one of the most important instant messenger as well as the VoIP Client. Unfortunately it has had some problems in all his incarnations until now. Connections are regularily lost, or off really bad quality, even when both parties have a perfect connection, the interface is unintuitive,  and, what counts even more when using multi-client messenger like Pidgin, it doesn’t work inside any other client than it’s own. Which leaves me running it as the only other client next to Pidgin, a waste of precious memory and difficult to navigate when taking to different people at the same time. The Plugin by Eion Robb doesn’t get rid of that either, Skype still must be running in the background for it to work, but at least you can switch between chat-windows now without having to first call up another program from the taskbar.