Pop-Up Killers, Strange CD-R noises
 

Hello folks,

I have been happily cruising on Mandrake 10.0 for a few days now. This is after over a dozen installations of four different distros and a living nightmare through each. (90% of this was my own fault, however. Fly blind and forwards, that's my motto... <sigh>)

Anyhow, that's half the purpose of my post is to just share my "I DID IT!!!" with the rest of you. I'm so excited.

The other purpose of my post is I need some ideas. On Win2k I used Meaya Pop-Up Ad Filter, and absolutely loved it. I had tried several others and this one worked beautifully for me. However, now that I've migrated to Linux, I'm afraid I'm left at the mercy again of all those damned "Click here and win a million dollars and a free copy of the Paris Hilton video!" popups. Any ideas, suggestions?

The second thing is, under Mandrake my CD-ROM has been acting strange. I will put CDs in, ones that I've burned under Windows, and it's a roulette as to whether it will read it. I tried some regular audio CDs, and it began making strange grinding noises. I ejected/inserted the CD several times, and it finally picked up under KsCD. This morning, when I logged in and KDE started up, the weird grinding noises came back.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help. It feels so good to be free of Big Brother Gates. I just wish I'd done this years ago.

Hi, I usually browse with Firefox or Opera and both have an option where you can block pop-ups. With Firefox it is Tools -> Options -> Web features and with Opera it is File -> Quick Preferences.

Hth.

Joe

IMO, Firefox blows Opera and any other browser out of the water (with the right extensions installed of course). :)
I suggest you get Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox) with the adblock extension (and others of course).
I'd also suggest Tabbrowser Extensions and All-in-one mouse gestures.
Once you have adblock you can set up filters to remove ads from pages, like http://ad.* http://ads.* http://*/ads/* etc., etc.

Or simply construct a good working /etc/hosts file that blocks ads and banners.

It is no harder than adding say:

127.0.0.1 */pagead/
127.0.0.1 */ads/
127.0.0.1 */banner/
127.0.0.1 */banners/
127.0.0.1 */smartbanner/

as you find new banners and ads, add new entries to your hosts file.

As to the cd, it sounds like the drive is on its way to failing, or maybe u have to much dust build up in side of it.

Trust me, adblock is better than that.
Bypassing the hosts file is trivial.

I noticed you can import filter lists. So, since I'm both not that knowledgeable at regular expressions and just plain old lazy I'd like to find a nice premade list of filters. Hopefully one that is updated regularly too. Do any exist? And if so, which ones are your favorites?

Thanks,

Brian