Blocking Advertisements

Speaking of spam, I also have a pet peeve against intrusive and obstructive advertisements. Blocking them in your web browser is easy. Firefox has great add-ons for this: Adblock Plus or Adblock, and Filterset.G. For Safari on the Mac, I find Safari Adblock to be simple and effective. It's a lot easier to focus on the content when you don't have all the dancing baloney on the page. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, "that's a strange web page design!"; then I remember that the block of white space must have contained an advertisement that I really don't need.

For blocking advertisements on the television, it's nice to have a digital video recorder (DVR) with a 30-second skip button. Even better is MythTV with a facility for recognizing advertisements and not recording them in the first place. On that note, the LinuxMCE distribution can make it easy to get a Myth system up and running. If you like old television shows, nothing beats watching five years of shows in series on DVD. I'm currently enjoying Northern Exposure via Netflix.