DeeLoaf

Ok this is how _I_ got the damn samsung r351 link sch-r351 whatever phone to talk to my pc on windows 7. I tried a bunch of stuff and searched around for a long time and got some leads. I ended up downloading and installing the New PC Studio (note the New in the name, this is something Newer than regular PC Studio I guess lol.). Anyway the install did a bunch of stuff then kind of blew up and failed but the files it left in the Program Files directory there was a folder called USB Drivers. I went into device manager and found the yellow busted driver icon for the phone and clicked update driver on it, then i pointed it to the USB driver folder from the failed New PC Studio isntall. Well bam it actually worked and installed a driver. But then there were 2 more yellow icons that appeared. No problem. do update driver on each of them and point to the same directory. So you end up with 3 devices. But after doing this BitPim BLOODY FOUND THE GODDAMNED PHONE!!! WHEEE LOL. Then I was finally able to follow the instructions on the link below

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1648597-Samsung-Link-r351-%28Virgin%29

to punch the "Allow this time" blah blah network access requests on apps in the face. And hopefully more coolness is also possible :) Anyway I just tested google maps and it hasnt said a peep since I told it to never ask me again :D :D XDXDXD!!!!

Cheers i'm gonna play with mobile street view and apps from that m.getjar.com site

I got the Freecycle bit working now on my Victoria Free Stuff site. Freecycle has a posting subject line protocol where when you offer something you are supposed to prefix the subject with OFFER. And then if someone takes the item you are supposed to post another message with the same subject but prefixed TAKEN instead. If everyone did this, and all did it the same way, it would be perfect :) But humans being the creative, deviant and/or lazy creatures that they are, tend not to always adhere to the rules perfectly. By and large, MOST people do post correctly, but often with variations on the theme. Below are part of my regexp I use to pick out whether it is an offered or a taken posting.

if ($link_text =~ s/^(offered|reoffer|offer|re(\-|\s)offer|on\s+offer|free|repost)\:?//) { $type = 'offer'; }
if ($link_text =~ s/^(taken|on hold|onhold|spoken for)\:?//) { $type = 'taken'; }

See what I have to deal with?? Lol. And that's after I've got things already cleaned up a bit ;)

I discard everything that I cannot classify as an offer or a taken post, so WANTED posts and general conversation on the freecycle board get dumped by my system.

The system will group the posts by author and then attempt to match up TAKEN posts with their original OFFER posts. It has about an 80% success rate on finding the OFFER with the last 3 months of messages on Victoria Freecycle. It tries to match by exact subject, and at present for the ones it is able to match up I think it matches about 2/3 of all the TAKENs to OFFERs by perfect subject match, and then it will attempt to do a token based matchup and if it matches 85% of the words in the TAKEN post subject with words from an OFFER it will accept that as a match up as well. This provides the other third of successful TAKEN matchups. And of course once the system believes an item is TAKEN it will de-list it from the combined results :).

Its not perfect, but its as good as I can make a computer deal with the imperfection with what limited resources I have right now. To do better I think I would have to dedicate some serious time and effort into finding a way to do a contextual analysis of the contents of the messages, etc. Stuff that I would need a patron to finance! LOL :) So I'll stick with this simple thing that works pretty well for now.

Of course this would all be MOOT if Freecycle would switch to a more modern way of doing things, something like a craigslist site but with a forum attached. FreeMesa.org is I think doing something like this. I encourage the switch. If Victoria people start using FreeMesa I'll scrape that site too. Its so much easier with the scraped sites (Usedvictoria.com, Craigslist.org, Kijiji.ca) to deal with de-listing items because quite simply when the item disappears from the scrape results we know we should de-list it in our own system.

Now that the freecycle aspect is working, and that I've tweaked the scraper script to my reasonable liking I can call this project complete. Like the chan thread post/bump lulz project. Like the craigslist and gmail account creation projects. Like the proxy-list scrape project. Like the captcha bypass sales/data entry (captchaquest.com/chws.ca combo) project. Its all done. Well rather if I had patronage to make captchaquest more of a fun game I have ideas for it but not time or money.

So I did my thing. I wrote a lot of code, and I had a lot of fun. But now I need to make some money. I had hoped this stuff could become made of money but it did not pan out or I would have to do immoral things that I'm not ok with in order to make it pan out. I still have some ideas on something lolgasmic to get CL PVAs but I'll discuss that another time.

Ta ta for now, time to work on Resume and spam that shit around via bots (lol, be annoying till you hire me? haha. it might work. probably not. might be funny. might get myself blacklisted. but then i wouldnt want to work for _those_ people anyway. lol)

I made a site for free stuff in Victoria (BC). I havent got the freecycle bit working yet. dunno if i will bother. LOTS of posts from other places. Gathering from Usedvictoria, Craigslist and Kijiji right now. The list might be a little stale until I get things finalized and the cron job set up to run.

Check it out here http://victoria-free-stuff.chws.ca

Around the beginning of October I started a project for a captcha bypass system. It was based on this old idea I'd had that you could literally just pay people in 3rd world countries (india, china, etc) to enter captchas on the cheap and then send as much spam posts as you want. It was a neat idea. Too bad it was like 3 years ago and I never did anything about it. Meantime several businesses also thought of this and made money with it. So I had this thing that I made and its a kind of a game where the idea is that I would get people to play it for fun, meanwhile they are really entering captchas that customers of the captcha solving business would have paid to be able to submit to the site.

Anyway I didnt know how to find poeple to pay me to solve captchas. So I thought I need a way to jump start that, so I figured I'll write a gmail signup bot that uses the game system to solve the captcha. That was cool and all right up until I hit the phone verification (never knew about that before lol). Anyway long story short, there are several different ways of getting a PSTN routable phone number for free online and collect voicemails with codes or receive SIP VoiP calls and receive code from it that way, or of course the original way I'd imagined -- use the captcha solving game to also ask people to receive a phone call and enter a code. I did that, and it totally works its just that the numbers can only be used a couple times first, so I needed these other sources of phone numbers. Anyway thats a solved problem now, I can make gmail accounts at the push of a button any time.

Next challenge. I was thinking Reddit but its a big fish to fry, so I put my thoughts towards the chan. 4chan specifically. I thought about a bot that would create and bump a thread. Then I made this bot. Then I tested it. 60 posts in a single megathread later I had a boatload of lulz and decided it was time to write about all this sillyness. (should mention the image that it posted is a self generated AWESOME troll image that changes every time it posts)

Anyway its been a lot of fun. Trying to monetize it. Using linkbucks links in the 4chan posts to link back to the game. "Earned" 24 cents so far that way today. LOL. What a joke I know right? Well thats just from me trying to keep a frontpage post on the chan with 8 to 12 threads running and relaying captchas and 0 to 1 other "players" in the game besides lonely old me.

So yeah once again, money. I'm having a lot of fun writing this lulzcode. I need to make it make money because I sooooo do not want to work for someone else again.