I'm happy she's turned out to be a good person :-)

I haven't got a clue, but I can tell you what I did.
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A few days ago an appeals court in the US has substantially reduced the amount of patentable non-things: business-method patents were flushed down the drain. To-be-patented thingies are to be scrutinised a lot more before a patent can be granted. Software gets harder to patent.

More on this quite interesting issue at groklaw.

(Somewhat) apropos yesterday's article on tinkering: I wanted a simple setup to mount my Treo phone/pda in the car. None of the kludges for sale impressed me favourably, all being expensive/clunky/both or worse.

Being the Dismantler and Recycler Of Crap that I am, I have a few dead hard disks sitting around. Dead hard disk = two large and strong magnets, iff you manage to get them off their backing without breaking the brittle material. Sometimes I do manage, sometimes I don't.

So here's my ghetto mount: a fat magnet in heatshrink tubing, embedded in the back of a slab of coreflute which is stickytaped to the car dash. The Treo-side consists of a bit of thin sheet metal (was once part of a floppy drive housing) taped to the back of the treo with super-thin packing tape.

The hard disk magnet is easily strong enough to work through one layer of heatshrink, coreflute, the silicon glove and the packing tape. With the packing tape no irreversible mods to the Treo are necessary.

Simple, neat and zero-cost. I like that.

It's Conny's laptop and I'll paint if she wants that.

Actually, she does, and not surprisingly, I did. She wanted a skull and crossbones design and who am I to object to that Sound Sensible Choice :-)

I found a tiny image on the web and used that as an inspiration to come up with this design. Then I reused an old conference presentation slide and cut that for a mask, and went shopping for paint: fluoro pink. The mask I fixed to the lapdog lid with spray glue (sprayed onto the mask, of course), and then I rattlecan-sprayed four layers: plastic primer, a thin coat of silver as a lightening base and two layers of pink. Removed the mask, cleaned the glue residue off and neatened some of the spots where I had been too generous with the paint (raised edges). The stupid pink paint decided not to be very fluorescent (even with the silver base), but pink it is. Another coat of gloss enamel for the whole lid is forthcoming, but Conny is pleased with the result - and so am I.

I just saw a really interesting article, titled reflections on tinkering. Recommended.

My newish Treo 680 has blue teeth, which is better than a kick in selfsame (but not very much as shoddily as it was implemented by Palm). Being only a moderate gadgeteer (and far from rich) I've been lusting after a good/cheap/simple (yeah, I know RFC1925) navigation setup for the car - and cable-less as much as possible.

So I got a cheap Bluetooth GPS receiver which is branded "HP iPAQ Bluetooth GPS BTG-10H". Interestingly that model seems to have been orphaned by HP and is now sold under the name Siraya. $20 for a new 12-channel receiver with data logging, some other goodies and a car charger; not bad I think.

A bit of digging determined that it uses an iTrax03 GPS chip made by Fastrax, a Finnish company.

Now I don't know about Finnish attitudes towards the Dutch in general, but this Finnish piece of electronic wizardry absolutely killed the Dutch fount of navigational wisdom. (Apropos nothing in particular: the Dutch have a reputation as lousy drivers all across the mountainous parts of Europe.)

Tomtom Navigator 6 works quite well - when it works at all. Specifically Treos and Bluetooth receivers are well known sources of horrible interoperability problems. Same here: my receiver gets a fix moderately quickly and the TomTom shows the way, but after no more than 10 minutes the TomTom locks up my Treo completely - until the GPS is switched off or the BT connection is lost.

This obviously sucks, and is a tale of woe oft repeated elsewhere on the intertubes.

I am, however, really stubborn about fixing problems. So I started digging through all the horror stories, tried all kinds of suggested things, learned a bit about NMEA, to no avail - until the really simple, really stupid cause dawned on me: During a session with a serial terminal reading the NMEA data from the iTrax I realized that the volume of stuff it sends is quite..substantial.

The FasTrax docs about NMEA and their chips are quite good. NMEA has a bunch of required and optional messages, and I learned that for barebones navigation one only needs RMC messages as often as possible; if one also wants to know things like satellite positions and fix quality, one needs GSA and GSV.

Other GPSs seem to have configurable separate output rates for these messages; most tips I found mentioned setting RMC to 1/sec and GSA/GSV to once every 5 secs - which makes a lot of sense, because there will be multiple GSV messages depending on the number of satellites in view.

Not so with the iTrax: you can configure the output rate very precisely (up to 5Hz) but only one rate for all messages - and by default it spews its (nonstandard) figure-of-merit message as well as a full set of GSVs every second. At least on the Treo this overwhelms TomTom after a few minutes (which sounds like very shoddy programming to me) and everything locks up hard.

The fix? Get rid of the GSV messages: you do lose the per-satellite signal quality and azimuth/elevation info, but that's all. The satellite status screen simply shows blank bars with the satellite number and the GGA and GSA messages still tell the TomTom enough to know how many and which satellites are in use and how good the nav fix is, so all is well.

FasTrax has made configuring the iTrax very simple: you send it ascii (nonstandard-but-NMEA-formatted) commands over the serial/BT connection and it stores them persistently in flash, done. I used BT Serial on the Treo, which works very well.

The online docs have all the necessary configuration info and the only thing you'll actually have to do is send it this one message, once:

$PFST,CONF,22,$A002

22 is the SYS_NMEA_MASK parameter, controlling which messages you want, and A002 means "send only RMC, GGA and GSA". (The default mask is A023, which includes the above plus FOM and GSV. Sending $PFST,CONF,22 shows you the current value of that parameter.)

Wasn't that easy?

So you have a nice, nifty RC car which is shiny and very fast (and therefore cool) or dirty and really slow (and therefore cool) and yet you are unhappy with its turning radius?

You might consider rigging it for four-wheel steering, which is very nice for tight turns but not so much fun or stable for high-speed runs. Which do you choose, stability and 2WS or tight turns and 4WS? Can't one have both?

Indeed you can. Faced with this very challenge for my Wheely-King-based rock crawler, I've built a four-wheel steering controller (4WSC) which gives you that choice and lots more, provided that you have a radio with one free channel: with that channel you can switch between proportional four-wheel steering, two-wheel steering front or rear and crabbing, on the go and without stopping. Your one steering wheel controls both servos appropriately, based on your chosen mode of operation. The 4WSC also includes a servo reversing cabability for your year servo and is configured/programmed using your rc transmitter.

You might have a look at the manual to see what other goodies I managed to program in.

Here is what the 4WSC looks like: tiny (that's a 1cm grid) but quite capable and cool.

As always with my stuff, it's open source software: the commented source code is available right here for your perusal/modifications/other weird applications. Share and Enjoy. You might almost call the 4WSC an example of "open source hardware": I'm also providing a printable circuit board design, ready for making your own pcb's with the toner transfer method.

The hardware side of the 4WSC is really simple: it is microcontroller-based, uses a PIC12F635 or 12F683 or similar, and because PICs are great devices it does not need any external components (except for plugs/leads and a buzzer). All you need to build your own is such a microcontroller, a PIC programmer interface for programming it, soldering gear and either some protoboard or minimal PCB-making skills.

If that sounds too tedious/complicated, you can simply pay me a little money and get one finished and ready: I made a few of the controllers and am sufficiently happy with the outcome to sell them. Contact me here and we can discuss the details; I might also do custom firmware for your specific requirements (for a fee, mind you).

For the do-it-yourself afficionados (like me) here are the goodies:

• The manual for the 4WSC
• The latest version of the source code
• The circuit board design (600dpi png)

Enjoy!

Haider ist tot. Sehr fein. Ich verspüre haufenweise Schadenfreude (und keinerlei Gewissensbisse: die braunen Ärsche dürfen ruhig aussterben).

Leider ham die Österreicher aber genügend wählende Deppen daß die nächsten braunen Arschlöcher ganz bestimmt bald wieder an der Macht/in der Regierung landen. *seufz*

You know that you live in a Banana...well, non-Republic if the exchange rates between your lifeblood and real money looks like this: Source: Werner Antweiler's Exchange Rate stats

Last Thursday Conny, Rob and I went for a day trip to Nth Stradbroke island, with a bit of fun (of all kinds) in the preceding afternoon.

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"Culinary".

For some unfathomable reason I found this gem in the pikiwedia entry on ducks highly hilarious.

A classic example of this problem....

(I know it, she knows I know it but still it can be said publicly ;-)
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The Linux in-kernel secret store (aka "key retention service") is a cool thing and not just useful to the AFS and Kerberos implementers. Actually, it works perfectly well as a general-purpose passphrase store, but the userland tools are somewhat idiosyncratic. Here are some extra bits and tricks that I use to make this more convenient.
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...of blue bread here in Oz, it seems:

"AGB International...has recalled 13 brands of garlic bread after learning that the bread turns blue when heated."

Come on! Finally you've got at least some fun bread in this dreary place (dreary where Real Bread is concerned) and you do what, recall it?!? Spoilsports.

I've got a new toy,
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I hate udev. It does not work in settings very crucial and important to me (ldap-nss) and it's a huge step back from hotplug in terms of useful functionality. Stupid complicated config environment, bloated *and* it does not load modules on demand. Dear udev authors: you can keep that crap and i'll stick to what works, is small and almost semi-elegant: hotplug.
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The object of my repair efforts this time: a Coleman Instant Hot Water system for camping. The product is nice, the company is lousy and unwilling to sell any spare parts; but that kind of plot does not work with me.
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damn this conroy idiot. not only will the stupid "cleanfeed" mandatory censored internet idea not work technically, it also makes no sense.

oh how i despise and hate these bastards! couldn't somebody pretty please invent a good tailored plague that kills off politicians and all the other power-lovers?

One thing I really dislike about Subaru is that they've changed the distance between the roof rails almost every model year - and that the precise distance is not stated anywhere publicly accessible. (The factory service handbook lists all kinds of measuring points but the roof rails aren't among those.)

Together with the fact that the cheap bastards sell the rail-equipped cars without crossbars by default, you get aftermarket hell: subtly different gear to be sold for every model year.

I resent that. A lot. And I'm certainly not willing to pay $270+ for a set of factory crossbars (or similar money for a non-sooby rack).

So looking for secondhand gear for your soobyroo is more annoying then necessary as you'll have to match the model year - or buy bars that are longer and cut the alloy part down a bit. For those who might consider this and want to know what you'd get with MY99-03 Outback/Liberty crossbars, here's the info: The front bar is longer, the alloy profile is 75.5cm long. The plastic/resin endpieces (screwed in) add up to a distance outside rail-outside rail of 90cm (inside-inside 84.5cm). The rear bar is 1.5cm shorter.

We now conclude this publice service information announcement.

What a pity, it could have conveniently lost the Christian Chief Tosser out that nice, big hole. Instead they had to make do with losing some luggage, when the aging 747 lost a fair bit of its fuselage structure in a Earth Shattering Kaboom.

keine ahnung ob diese Rosa Riedl auch ein schutzgespenst ist; den nervigen hausmeister-posten und gschau und gwand teilen sie ja eh schon - nur die strassenbahn zum drunterfallen fehlt uns hier...

If you got a spam with the above subject, which contains only the following lonely line

this is the proof, watch: http://someshitesite/video1.exe

would you visit that site? Yes? Really? Now that is what I'd call a self-fulfilling prophecy: you must be a total moron indeed to trust a spamster feeding you an executable. A slightly circular proof, but still QED; no pity from me and you deserve all the mess you'll get into.

The annoying bit is that there are sufficiently many morons out there to make this kind of crap work for the spamsters...

The human gene pool really needs a lot more chlorine.

I've just completed testing the next generation of my kuvert tool: Version 2.0.0 is out here and has just been uploaded to debian Sid. It's full of Nice New Things that make kuvert more useful, the most notable ones being:

• inbound SMTP support
  You can tell kuvert to listen on localhost on a port of your choice for inbound messages. (This absolutely requires ESMTP authentication as pointed out in the manpage.) Benefit: any garden-variety mail user agent can send via SMTP, which means it can interoperate with kuvert. You don't have to bother with the submission wrapper anymore (but it is still available of course).
• outbound SMTP support
  Kuvert now can speak SMTP to any server of your choice. No more need for a local MTA installation (unless you prefer one, in which case kuvert will work like before).
• support for gpg-agent

There are also quite a few other goodies, but I haven't cooked up a good changes document yet; You'll have to read the manpage.

I really hate working with visionaries, most specifically The One Whose Stuff Always Changes. To be more precise, I hate having to base production environments on TOWSAC's ever-morphing APIs and semi-complete implementations of things.
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I dislike throwing away repairable things. Like this old, very cheap but quite good knife (originally from Ikea): after more than a decade of daily use and the associated dunkings, the wooden handle had finally rotted away and split.

So I made a new grip: reused some wood reclaimed from a door frame, shaped it with my router, glued-and-screwed the grip halves on, sanded and lacquered the thing multiple times.

Why? Because I can, because it is fun to (re)make things and because a well-made thing gives me satisfaction.

Rob gave me some promising (i.e. ring of fire) chili seeds a while ago, for planting behind my house. I successfully got them to sprout (I have anti-green thumbs and can kill off most types of plants, without meaning to but still easily), and a few days ago I planted them in 14 or so small batches. This is how they looked like before I planted them. I'll keep you updated on how this planting experiment fares.

Ebaypal are not allowed to go forward with their paypal-only scheme, says the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission aka the consumer watchdog. Schadenfreude is what I feel right now; in my opinion ebaypal deserve all the flak they get.

This pending ruling is welcome news, because (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) the extra mandatory fees make ebay vastly more unattractive to sell one-offs like I do occasionally. (What also sucks is ebay's sugary political correctness bullshit but that's a separate story.)

In the meantime I've gotten me an account at Oztion, the biggest(?) local alternative. As they only charge fees on successful sale (so far) and offer auto-relisting that's a vastly nicer environment for people like me who sell only odds and ends occasionally.

My Wheely King RC toy was a tad fast for crawling over obstacles and also lacked torque and endurance with the stock motor and batteries. Simple fix: I cooked up a cheap brushless motor setup.

Ingredients:

• one cheap Chinese 2830 outrunner (850KV, 58g, 3.17mm shaft): $20 with shipping
• one fairly cheap Chinese/German ESC (speed controller) for brushless motors, $35 plus $15 shipping
• smaller pinion gears, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17 teeth: $20 plus $10 postage
• some time for filing down the motor mount: dusty but free

Install the 14 tooth pinion. Mix and stir well. Season with absolutely incomprehensible Chinglish instructions for the ESC. Simmer on "Medium Angry" for a week. Find the German partner company who's responsible for the design of the ESC, and who has a manual in Real English. Turn off the heat, install, enjoy the slooooow speed at full blast. Up the pinion teeth, to 16. Reinstall, enjoy both the torque and fast-walking speed on full throttle. Mounting the brushless dwarf was interesting, because it doesn't have the same screw pattern as the big 540-size original motor. It comes with a converter plate but using that the shaft is too short. So I made do with the smaller screw spacing. I simply filed away a fair bit of the motor mounting plate and then used a drilled steel washer as counter-piece for fastening the motor.

Getting the ESC to stop beeping and start working was almost as horrible as having to learn vi without a clue and a manual (ie. it beeps a lot but doesn't work, no matter what you do). Extremely frustrating. The thing being a very no-name non-brand, I even cut off the heatshrink to have a peek at the circuit board looking for manufacturer clues, but to no avail. Eventually and only because of a few really odd, happy circumstances I finally found out that it's one of these and got a working manual. Wohee, this actually works! I glued on an old heatsink block to the ESC's metal back plate and then closed it up again with transparent heatshrink tube. Looks neater than the original.

Overall the result is very pleasant. Torque is way up, this ESC has a proper brake (which the original didn't have) and with the tiny brushless motor (a powerhouse despite weighing only a measly 58g) I get very nice long run times even with the old original nicad battery. The reduced weight up top helps too.

As mentioned a few days ago I've just escaped the clutches of our telco monopolist - successfully I should say. Here are my experiences with the Telstra Elimination Project.
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We're back, connected once again: some techie must have been in the neighbourhood saturday night, because Saturday 2138 line-sync suddenly reappeared, and today I finished setting up the remaining bits (e.g. inbound POTS-to-VOIP etc.) and verified that Internode didn't make a mess of their part of the service conversion.

Looks all mostly good, except line attenuation has jumped up 10dB (without the previously required inline filter), which makes little sense, and sits now at 50dB downstream. This sucks as it severly limits the achievable sync speeds and makes things a tad more brittle. Ticket open, we'll see.

Actually it's not just low on blood but stone-dead, but it'll come back -- eventually (like in the film Reanimator...).
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When Conny went to brush her teeth tonight before bedtime, I suddenly got a fairly urgent/distressed Request for Assistance: she stood mesmerized at the bathroom door, and a meter from her sat an (equally mesmerized) huntsman spider of less that minimal size (maybe 10x10cm with the legs). She strongly dislikes spiders.

And so do I. Usually, smaller specimens I don't bother; they eat bugs and thus are not exactly welcome but tolerated household members (if they stay hidden and out of the geckos' way). But this one was too large for my liking, so it got the bucket-on-top-and-then-poison-inside treatment (huntsmen are very fast). Sorry fella!

Conny asked for this note to any future spider visitors to be posted on the web (maybe spiders use google? dunno): Small and tiny spiders tolerated, large ones very unwelcome. May be dealt with harshly!

The object of contention is Halva, which I recently found at Coles (one of the big supermarkets here) and simply had to buy. Looks like Conny likes it :-)

...I would rate this Brand-New and Shiny Aluminium door sign. However, as I'm just one of those no-good overeducated academics with a profound distrust of manglement and the consequential cynical attitude, I have to make do with a heavy dose of Dilberts and some homemade jokes. (The white felty things are the velcro where they took off our previous not-shiny-but-sufficient door signs. I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to be improved.)

Remember: Toilets are any company's most valuable asset.

(or, translated for the en-natives: we'd far rather blue bread than blue blood!) Here's our proof:
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The complex I live in has been slightly beautified over the last year or so (think property values etc.), and finally, this week, the guys doing the work on the common areas got around to redoing the flower beds in front of my place.
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...my rule is: you don't throw away good computer books, period.

Most folks at my palace de ork are...odd, to put it nicely: today I strolled over to the "Dispose Me!" desk in the hallway which is often stacked with orphaned books (today: loads of Flash, Dreamweaver and other less interesting stuff) and there I picked up this Absolute Gem: the 1977 hardcover edition of Donald Alcock's Illustrating Basic. (I very much recommend checking out the PDF excerpt. 134 pages of hand-lettered and -drawn illustrated goodness.)

Picture this: the person who dumped it, has had it since 1978 and nevertheless decided to toss out this classic.

These are people who'd throw out a full Knuth to make space for "Vista for Dummies"!

On similar occasions in the past I did inherit/adopt/reverently provide a new home to: Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, Sterling+Shapiro's The Art of Prolog, one of the compiler bibles, The TCL/TK book and sundry Lesser Goodies. But enough of that; their (unfelt?) pain, my gain.

One of the cool things about the Basic book is that it's well written, and actually had enough appeal for Conny to spontaneously start learning how to program today. She did her first few experimental programs (with bwbasic and emacs on my/her Debian laptop) just this evening and so far is pretty much thrilled by what one can do. Pretty cool, and I hope she gets something of lasting value out of it.

Go Conny! :-)

Five-and-a-half months after buying it, I actually still like my Subaroo - except for the lousy excuse for a high beam (which is the nr. 2 complaint about the older Outbacks, trumped only by Hal).
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...if you like stereotypes, that is. Here goes:
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A few days ago the rearview mirror in my car parted company with the windscreen glass. Looks like it had been re-(super?)glued before.

So I read up on a number of (un)suggested glues:
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I'm just about finishing Peter Watts' book "Blindsight", which is excellent but really, really really heavy stuff. Charlie Stross described that book aptly:

"Imagine a neurobiology-obsessed version of Greg Egan writing a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie posthuman crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire, with not dying as the boobie prize."

I'd change that to read "...version of Greg Egan, but with McNihil's B&W mods, writing...", otherwise I fully concur.

It's a bit like Linda Nagata's excellent "Vast", but loads darker and with an Egan-like hard science disposition.

I'm also inclined to say nice things about Watts' Rifters books, which I just started - but likely more interesting to you out there is this factoid: Watts has published all his books under a Creative Commies licence online on his website (and in various convenient formats). Kudos to him, and I'll certainly consider buying his books when I see them in dead tree format.

After chatting with friends who always bake their own bread (plus cakes and other market goods) I decided that having a breadmaker Would Be Nice, as I don't like white soggy sandwich bread.
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As mentioned earlier and before I have a Wheely King rc toy. Me being me, that WK is nowhere near stock and I often delight in tinkering with it to make it work better or more fun or whatever.
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Emacs and exmh go together very well, but of course there's spots where things rub across. Today I scratched such an itch successfully: I now have access to exmh's address database from emacs (and so can you).
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Yes, That Orkplace again. Names and other identifying bits removed to protect the terminally cluele^W^Winnocent.

This email gem arrived a few minutes ago:

The SMG Workshop agreed that academic staff should wear their scholarly gowns for key events, such as the Faculty Award Night and graduation ceremonies, as from the second semester of 2008. ...

The reasoning behind this proposal supports the view it will help provide students with an overall sense of academic custom and professional admiration.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Somebody sufficiently annoyed by this fool idea replied (to all, in all caps which I fixed as being bad for your eyes):

we already wear gowns to graduation. wearing gowns anywhere else, such as awards night, would only provide students with an overall sense of hilarity at our expense. no one will attend awards nights if this unutterably silly requirement is in effect. why is there such a persistent drive to return to the middle ages, when we are supposed to be the university of the 21st century?

>thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
i'm afraid your anticipation of our cooperation is mistaken.

Time to get the popcorn out, sit back, relax, and watch the upcoming exchange of heavy ordnance. "Fire for effect, over!"

"Lucky" must be his middle name -- and "Clumsy" his first: a fellow in Frankfurt fell down an elevator shaft, and landed on a woman who had "been there, done that" 24hrs earlier. He stayed awake, she stayed unconscious; he was not hurt while she is in bad shape.

How exactly one manages to fall into an elevator shaft despite knowing the thing is being repaired, is a tad beyond me.

...but quite nice. I've got my own ideas about how to manage my collection of digital photos and so I wrote my own tiny, idiosyncratic but sufficient photo manager five years ago (says rcs; hmm, those years went quickly!).

Now that Conny has a shiny digital camera of her own (and a bit of associated trigger-happiness) she also needs something to organize her pics with. And while my photomanager is fine for me Old Fart, it's a little bit gnarly. So I looked at more user-friendly (but not idiot-friendly) solutions. And voila, the first apt-cache hit was already what I had been looking for.

Martin Herrmann has written "martin's picture viewer" aka mapivi, which is more than just a viewer (a feature which is fairly irrelevant to me). It's written in Perl plus Tk (important to me), it's a photo manager (ditto) and it keeps pretty much all info where relevant: in the photo files themselves. The last is most important IMHO, because it frees me from sundry databases, proprietary overview formats and the like. mapivi uses EXIF and IPTC metadata to record pretty much anything you can think of in extra segments of your jpegs (and other image formats that allow such metadata storage).

The thing is a bit rough in places but works very well for a 0.x release, and the combo of Perl and Tk is really fun to work with.

I've immediately gone full steam ahead and coded the two plugins I need to emulate the few features my photomanager had over mapivi (complete with balloon popup help texts for Conny); also submitted one patch to the upstream author.

Gone is my photomanager, and welcome mapivi. Not Invented Here indeed :-)

Just read the announcement (and news item) which tells us peons that from now on, Ebay Oz is only allowying the inhouse-bank Paypal as payment mechanism, and also that Paypal may keep your cash for up to 21 days (IOW a big "screw you, sellers!" from the greedy bunch).

I'm not certain about how I take these badly disguised price hiking changes: as a buyer, fine, doesn't cost me anything and makes it easier to stuff around with a recalcitrant seller.

But as a non-commercial seller of leftovers every now and then, this set of changes sucks: the ebay/paypal combo is quite expensive. A commercial vendor will factor these in and eat them as side-costs do doing business, but on a $10 garage sale item the fees are not fun: 0.50 listing plus 5.25% of the final, 0.30 paypal plus 2.4% of the final for paypal again.

I just wish there was a reasonable alternative in Oz/the Asia-Pac region.

Just kidding.
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Not entirely unlike a Kaplan turbine, my mini-turbine is used in a high-flow, low-head(room) scenario. Only in reverse, sort-of. Confused? Perfect, mission accomplished :-)
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I've got a netvista thinclient serving as jukebox in my bedroom. Recently I wanted to switch to a faster wireless adapter, which required moving to the 2.6 kernel series. This is especially painful for the netvistas, but nevertheless possible (despite some sources claiming that it won't work). Here's the rundown.
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Recently I experimented with having adsense advertisments on the chgc site, with the rationale being: it costs me money (to run that server) and time (to run the club web, membership stuff and mailinglists) and I don't get anything out of it except a Warm Fuzzy Feeling - which occasionally is very close to the Warm Fuzzy Feeling you get when some(body|thing) has peed on your pants.

Anyway, I thought why not try and see whether ads might work for paying towards the server cost. Hence, Enter Adsense, which claims to provide contextual ads.

...

...

...

A week later they hadn't managed to serve me one single ad (always only offering the community service ads - or none).

So, Exit Adsense: you suck.

A snippet from the classic Owed to a Spell Chequer:

I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea
...

Reminds me a bit of what openoffice's spall choker did to one of conny's homework texts recently...

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No further comment.

What a perfect match, down to the brown garb. The only thing missing is the glowing index finger, but I'm sure we can rig something from a few LEDs...:-)

Yesterday started rainy and windy but got quite nice later on.
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(This title constitutes an obscure in-joke for Austrians. No alkbottles were harmed making this joke.)

In the news today: Australian Senator arrives at Parliament dressed as a beer bottle. My first thought: "When in Rome^WACT..."

ABC has the story complete with pics.

Last Saturday I finally managed to meet up with Ben and Mel (and Thomas) to visit one of the Byron Bay / Northern Rivers PG sites.
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Oi, get your minds out of the gutter!
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Yesterday was lots of fun.
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...the non-geeky middle-aged checkout chick at Aldi starts chatting to you about her now using this Linux Thing, and that being quite cool.

I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.

Conny likes to fall asleep with some light on. I dislike having to wait until she's gone late at night, just to switch off her bedside light. I dislike having an energy-wasting halogene 25W burning all night long even more, not to mention the temperature problems with the transformer base buried in stuffed animals.

The solution: teach her something! So we repurposed an old broken desk lamp carcass, I taught her how to solder, programmed a 12f629 PIC and we combined the above with sufficiently many white LEDs and some recycled laptop Li-Ion cells into an auto-off bed light: Press the button when off, and you get 18 min of light. Press the button when the light is on, and the light goes off. Simple, neat, efficient. As a bonus the lamp body is black, Just Like It Should Be.

The circuit is trivially simple, the diagram follows and the PIC code (also boringly simple) is here (plus the auxiliary delay library).

The diagram is not complete in two particulars: I used a 4.5mm plug with a builtin bypass switch to isolate the battery when charging (don't want to blow the LEDs and/or PIC when my intelligent charger feeds the LiIon), and I repurposed the original lamp switch as an extra "general disconnect". BSTS.

Great care should be taken to avoid shorting or annoying the three 2000+mAh cells in any way - unless you like to play with fire extinguishers.

Conny did all the soldering apart from one or two small fixes and the LED interconnections. Well done.

...with a FREE spelling mistake, but nevertheless excellent. (source:some flicker user via Cryptogram)

Das Inserat hier ist grad eben vorbeigekommen, sehr schräg... Dazu passend die folgende Headline von gestern: Ein Abgeordneter in Mississippi (selber blad) hat einen Gesetzesvorschlag eingebracht, nachdem es Restaurants verboten werden soll, Blade weiter zu füttern. Welch Brilliante Idee.

In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!

Conny has pretty much settled in, but my brain is close to pastel overload already.

I've had to move just about all my stuff from her room so that she can make it into her den. She brought three fat and one slim suitcases full of things, and her room is unrecognizable.

The only remainder of my things are my Tektronix scope, the HP function generator and a bench vise on the desk. Cognitive dissonance: the shelf above the TEK and the HP now contains mainly pink boxes, makeup, dolls and other girly gear (instead of soldering station, multimeters, charger, bench PSU and other tools).

School seems to be fine and fun; she has gotten lost (slightly) between home and there twice so far.

Townsville might be a good place to learn golf quickly - or else. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "water hazard".

Whenever I am optimistic and not expecting trouble, this state of oblivion usually gets cut short, badly, when it rains problems. On the other hand, if I expect bad things and worry, a lot less trouble finds its way to me. This sucks.
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Juhuuuuh! Heute hat die Post endlich mein Weihnachtsgeschenk aus Ö vorbei gebracht: Alle 19 Kottan-Folgen, auf 8 DVDs.

Ah, Nostalgie pur. Böse Wiener Gfrasta. Inspektor gibt's kan. 70er Jahre Schädelweh-Tapeten. Danzer-Gstanzln. Ambros. Wunderbar.

Danke, liebe Frau Mutter!

Next Wednesday my daughter Cornelia is arriving in Oz, to spend a fun and action-packed year 2008 with me. Well, let's hope the action is of the Good Type...either way, there goes my independence.

In other non-news the weather still sucks completely, it's been so wet and humid over the last weeks that some of my leather gear (bike suit and mountain boots; what did YOU think?) started to get mouldy on the surface. This sucks.

Work sucks, too, with disorganized chaos worse than usual, even factoring in that it's the first week of the semester. But numbers are up, I have about 13 for the networking subject and about 7 for the Silly Subject. What I don't have is a correct timetable, exact enrolment figures, and fun. What I also won't have in two weeks' time is a clueful unix-savvy counterpart in the central it services dept, because that fellow is throwing in the towel.

Not that I can fault him at all; the management and marketing hordes have grown like mushrooms in the wet, while we peons are being kept like mushrooms.

Apropos mushrooms, it's been wet enough for quite some mushrooms to grow in my backyard. Some look very similar to small Parasol but I won't try them.

This stuff is pretty cool I think. I found that one the funniest construct.

Should you end up with this cheap DVD recorder you'll note that by default it is region-crippled. The thing has divx support, records to dvd and dvd-rewritables and has vga-out, which is why I bought it for AU$130: my Zensonic Z330 player is badly on the way out.

Region-lockout is at least close to breaching the law in this country and thus region-free gear is actually way more common - and legal.

Should you - like me - be very pissed off by the manual not saying anything about how to make the fellow region-free, don't despair. I voided my warranty by opening the box, found out that it uses a Mediatek MT8105DE chipset - and that on a no-name unidentifyable mainboard. No go so far.

However, looking around further I found out that the sequence Power on, Setup button, 8 1 0 5 gives you its internal system info screen (alas, with the region unchangeable). On a Hungarian board I found the crucial info that Setup, 5 0 1 8 gives you a menu with the region changeable (use 0 for any). Hit setup afterwards, power off and on again and everything works. (apprently the firmware is similar to another noname called chili/yanada dvr-8500x, for which i found the 5018 thing...)

This success helps at least a bit to offset the disappointment of lots of shite weather in the last 8 weeks (and counting). The farmers are happy, the dams fullish, the beaches are gone and the wind howls and/or it rains. Soon I'll have to develop gills and webbed fingers - unless the mould gets me before.