I’m still trying to work it out, ultimately I guess yes, but I’m finding some of the bugs a little bit annoying. Or rather I am annoyed that Apple have once again decided to beta test their products on their customers!

For instance – my Lacie hard drive no longer spins down when it is not in use – why? No idea, but it means the drive gets unnecessary hot and have to manually eject it when not in use.

Another example – iDisk seems to screw-up every time I turn on its Syncing. Not just a weird screw-up, but a “I’m going to use up all your free space” screw-up. Again I can’t seem to find a reason why?

I’m sure things will be fixed and everything will work eventually. I just hate the unnecessary fiddling we seem to have to do these days to get things working, when all we really want to do is just use it to do some work…

…what, dare I ask, happened to the notion that Computers would make our lives easier?

I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.

Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this – a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).

Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.

If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.

Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times – but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!