Just a very quick post on a site I stumbled upon quite by accident, and then I have to go back to grading: Internet Access CAPTCHAs! In the words of the webmasters themselves:

Site administrators use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated scripts from performing certain functions, such as creating an account, sending email to a distribution list, or participating in a discussion thread.

That's fine, as far as it goes. But, frankly, I'd also like to see certain people on the Internet prevented from doing certain things. You know, like: logging onto the Internet.

And so, a modest proposal: Internet Access Captchas, built right into browsers, designed to greatly reduce the overabundance of youtube commenters, MySpacers, and bloggers.

Go try it, it's hella fun! (Of course, my idea of fun and yours might differ greatly!)

This one offers books from the 30 onwards, with some of the books written as late as 2008. It's called Feedbooks, and it has a range of genres, from adventure, crime/mystery, through history, science fiction, to westerns and YA books.

You can view books sorted by Author, Subject, Top download or Recommended, or you can search for a specific book. There is also a "Recently added" section.

All of these are legal, either offered freely by the authors, or books whose copyright has expired.

I'm subscribed to newsletters sent out by several publishing houses and sometimes they include link to free ebooks in the newsletter. Today I received one such email, offering mostly first books in a series. Baen Books has been doing that for years, I believe, and the reasoning is that, if you offer the first book for free, readers might like it enough to buy the other books in a series.

Here's a link for you: Suvudu Free Library. It has a couple of Star Wars books, kayim will probably be interested in those.

It's a very sound reasoning, except when you live where I live. I can't even begin to describe the trouble you go through if you want to buy something online, and you don't have a credit card, or your credit card is not one of the supported ones. If the seller doesn't accept any other form of payment, you're stuck with asking friends with an appropriate credit card to do some shopping for you, and you'll cover the expenses. But that gets old pretty quickly, and you run out of friends to ask. Meh.

[Maybe it's a good thing, I don't know, cause I'd probably spend all my pay on books. :) ]

Joining others in the desktop meme posts, here's my current one:



I usually change it each month, and use one of the calendar wallpapers from Smashing Magazine. They currently have calendar wallpapers for June.

They recently had a post about free fonts for your designs, and another one about 50 free icon sets. Those of you who like Star Trek will be especially pleased about the Star Trek icon pack, but the rest are also gorgeous!

ETA to limit picture size.

I am finally uploading a new wallpaper.

It was something I had planned to do for the hgx texture/fanart contest, but that's been over a year ago. Good Lord, I just checked my tags; according to them, my last wallpaper was the Chaucer one, on 15th-Mar-2008 01:20 pm. Eek! egorstandish was suffering from a writer's block, and I was suffering from the fanartist's one!

Anyway, it's a "Serpents" wallpapers, and I'll be spamming the comms, notifying them of my latest grand achievement (:snort: picture Buck saying "Yeah, right!" to jailed Ezra in ODOW). (^_^)

All joking aside, hope you'll like it!



All the best, Aida

Oh, hey, and happy birthday to Tony!

Oh my God! I just got a notice on my LJ home page that 7men1destiny is a year old today!

I can't believe it's been a whole year. It seems like it was only yesterday that quietcontrary, egorstandish and me got together and decided to start up a rewatch comm for all the new fans that were coming into the fandom, and old ones who wanted to revisit the joy that is Magnificent Seven.

Although the comm has been silent lately, I don't intend to give it up; my workload should decrease soon and I'll be able to devote more time to it. I've recently started painting again, and I would like to try my hand at the boys. I also want to bring back challenges, and graphic posts.

If you have something to contribute to the comm, please do. Let's mark 7men1destiny's first birthday properly.

Are any of you having trouble accessing various comms on LJ using Mozilla based browsers? I can't open 7men1destiny at all in Firefox/Flock, but I can open it using Opera and IE8. The page just keeps loading and loading indefinitelly. It annoys the hell out of me because Flock is my default browser and I have all the blogging addons on it.

Following some links, I stumbled upon a review of one of my favorite shows, The Invisible Man - or I-Man, as it was affectionately called by its fans. It was my very first fandom, and it's still very close to my heart. I urge all of you to read the review, and maybe even to rent the DVD and see some great action, heartbreaking drama, and steadfast friendship mixed with a touch of comedic genius.

Never fish off the Company pier.