663 is the number of the EU Parliamentary Porkers that voted against the ACTA mess yesterday. 13 little piggies toed the Content Cartel's line.

663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".

Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.

Ever since I stopped using a Sun SparcStation as desktop (around 94 or so) I wanted a decent Type 4 or 5 on my pc - alas, the Type 4/5 are serial keyboards and hence not directly supported by normal pcs. Getting the Type 5 to work under Linux wouldn't have been too hard (it's serial after all), but that isn't good enough: I wanted a decent solution that also work for BIOS interaction and in Windows (and even the Linux-only solution would have required soldering up a TTL inverter).

So why not build a converter?
(more...)

No electronics project of mine ever ends without me rerouting and resoldering at least two connections.

Why?
(more...)

...of having extremely few friends, no girlfriend (and no hope of finding one), absolutely zero social life and of having an apparently abrasive personality?
(more...)

Of course I don't work (for|with) incompetents like these.

And 2 + 2 = 5, FSVO 5.

...first, I'd get a muzzle for the damn howler monkey neighbours' dog. Not because of the barking, but because of the dog being one of the root causes for the everlasting bloody aggravation: see, he's got some Doberman in the mix, and his owners are total assholes, so he's decent-sized, frisky and badly educated. That makes him pinch the damn kids when they yell and scream too much, eliciting more screaming and howling, which generates more pinching and screaming and tantrums...Oh Joy.

Next, I'd cut all the howler monkeys' vocal cords, and thus earn the everlasting gratitude from the other neighbours around - who are all fairly quiet denizens.

And finally, I'd shoot all the monkey neighbours for good measure - 'it's the only way to be sure'.

No, I'm not angry, not at all. Why do you think so?

From the bottom of my heart I wish the plague and a quick, quiet death on these neighbours.

This human universe is a mess, what with the authoritarian assholes always lusting after (& usually getting) control, and I for one am quite sick of it.

Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.

So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)

The first day of the trimester at work, and I've got an 0800 lecture... for the one (inherited) subject I dislike teaching the most. Bah. And the projector in the room is squirrely. Aaaaaargh! And the room is generallylousy. Double-bah. And my brain is fogged up enough so that I'm quite sure I'm making more of a hash of the subject material than necessary. Sorry dear students! My best efforts at 0800 today weren't really quite good enough.

What a lovely way to begin the week!

Yesterday Eric Rohmer died. A pity, I liked his films a lot (especially the contes des quatre saisons and the comedies et proverbes sets).

However, György Palfi is Not Dead - and I heartily endorse his film Hukkle to anybody who likes subtle films. It's really, really nice. His second film, Taxidermia, is pretty cool as well but quite a bit further into the odd realms of the universe.

Samizdata makes my day.

If you are using spamassassin without sa-update you will not like to hear that as of 5 days ago spamassassin has pretty much declared open season on all your mails:

Due to an incredibly gross and dirty bit of rule all properly dated mails get an extra 3.6 added to their score. *kablam*!

Botch/Fix: edit /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf, and change the regexp for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX to something that doesn't fire in the near future (like 20[2-9][0-9]). Don't forget to sa-compile if you use compiled spamassassin rules.