Apparently pigs are happy to fly (ok, jump and dive) on their own. Chinese pigs, that is.

The pigs actually look more graceful than those acrobatic high divers...

I really like sharing knowledge with others, and that's what this website is mostly about (with the exception of a rant here and there, when I need to vent some...).

So, whenever I manage to create something that doesn't just fulfil my needs but also works for somebody else, I gain a fair bit of happiness (quite important for an otherwise extremely unsocial introvert like me).

Here's an example: I created my Sun to PS/2 keyboard converter because I needed something like it, and since posting my solution here I've heard from a few others who have built my contraption successfully. The most recent of those who reported back, Edward Robbins, has a subtly different model Sun keyboard and it took us a few email exchanges and experiments to determine how the one (undocumented) extra key on his keyboard could be made to work - but we got there.

Without the net he and I would never have gotten in touch, let alone ended up benefiting mutually from each other's efforts.

For three+ years I've been content with my Hanlin V3 but as it has become more and more unreliable and its flaws more annoying, a week ago I bit the bullet and replaced it with a Nook Simple Touch (for a measly $90). This post is about reducing the porky Nook to its useful Nookleus, so to speak.

click here for the rest of the story...

But dog-shaming.com is pretty hilarious.

Snow causes havoc across eastern OZ :-)

A few days ago SBS showed a weird but really cool Hungarian movie named Kontroll. It's about ticket inspectors in the Budapest subway, of all things. Very nice, very weird, very much recommended. It hasn't surpassed Hukkle on my list of Hungarian favourites, and it isn't quite as weird as Taxidermia but weird enough.

One of the more memorable scenes: some paramedics scrape the bits of a (non-)suicide from underneath a subway carriage while discussing the finer points of cooking a gulyas :-)

My Voice-over-IP to analog gate is fully visible on the net, because I like it if people with working SIP phones can directly call me without going through any commercial provider at all.

That's all fine and well, except when folks start hammering my systems with sipvicious/friendly-scanner: the damn thing doesn't wait and listen for responses but rather blasts out gazillions of (doomed) REGISTER or OPTIONS messages.

Here's my fix for this annoyance: if an inbound SIP message looks like REGISTER or OPTIONS, drop it. I don't run any VOIP server, so nobody is supposed to register with me, ever.

That's actually pretty straightforward to achieve with iptables: iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 ! -f -m u32 --u32 "0>>22&0x3C@8=0x52454749,0x4f505449" -j DROP

The u32 match module is low-level but really efficient and precise, and this cryptic instance will simply look for REGI or OPTI at the beginning of the UDP packet payload. The iptables string match isn't as flexible, and could quite easily wrongly match the words in the body of the request (and SIP responses are pretty verbose and full of echoes...).

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.
click here for the rest of the story...

Yesterday I had yet another punctured car tyre, this time two for the price of one: one nail (not through) and one fat screw (all the way through). Luckily it was a slow puncture and I found it in time, repressurized the tyre and put in a quick trip to the local repair shop ($15).

This must be at least the tenth puncture in eleven years in country, which is gazillions more than I've had in Austria: looks like punctures are a part of the Australian way of life, too :-)

Weird. We drive slower here and the roads aren't that bad so why the all damn holes? I think it's because the buildings here in Southeast QLD are mostly constructed of wood, and most tradesmen drive utes without canopies over the cargo bin and are pretty messy with their gear: all the punctures I've had so far were caused by spiral-shank nails or by drywall, roofing or other wood screws.

You may very well call me a boring old fart, but I very much prefer fountain pens over (almost all) ballpoint pens. Maybe that's because we weren't allowed ballpoint pens in primary school and had to use fountain pens?

Regardless of the Real Root Cause of my pen preference, I've been a relatively happy user of a Waterman Kultur Demonstrator for the last some years - with one exception: the cap isn't tight enough and the pen dries out very quickly.

Recently, however, I've discovered a nicer and cheaper pen: the Platinum Preppy costs about $3(!) a piece incl. cartridge, comes in two nib widths (0.3 and 0.5mm), is refillable - and can be converted into a cartridge-less eyedropper pen with just an o-ring. The (proprietary) cartridges have a very big opening, so it should be pretty trivial to refill them with a small syringe. The nib is great and very consistent, and glides better than my Waterman. In addition to that it's got a spring-loaded inner cap which I think will keep it from drying out too quickly.

Unfortunately neither pen, pencil, rapidograph or ballpoint fix my lousy handwriting - but I do enjoy making my inconsistent squiggles more if it's by pen :-)

I really like this lovely small gem of common sense, uncommon in this century of propaganda and threat exaggeration:

Fan-TAS-tic!

Apparently your life history is reflected in the types of germs in your belly button. This is, of course, highly exciting for every human on the planet.

Have a look at these examples of street art, or this cool mural or this one, all by the Etam crew.

Pretty amazing stuff!

I've been using Palm PDAs since 98, and I liked PalmOS a lot. Still, after Palm gave up on it I've been thinking about replacing my phone+pda with something slightly more modern: not necessarily because my Centro wasn't sufficient, but because I looked for better networking capabilities. Some months ago I finally did switch to an Android phone. Which I like, too, with one major exception: the automatic assumption that you'll entrust all your personal info to Google and the lack of other options (at least in the basic load-out). I categorically refuse to do that, and am willing to devote pretty much any amount of effort to degoogle my infrastructure - without losing overly much in the way of essential services. This post describes how I got my Android phone pretty much google-free.
click here for the rest of the story...

My nice-but-cumbersome lapdog decided some time ago that being asked to suspend is insulting or something, and now goes catatonic instead: the suspend works fine, but absolutelly nothing, ever, wakes it up again.

"Roses are red and my SO-DIMMs still hot,
you asked me to sleep but I'll let you rot."

A lot of debugging (and swearing) later, I now know that the culprit (at least for kernel 2.6.35.14) is the module lpc_sch, which isn't needed for normal operations anyway. blam! Bye-bye, module.

Wikipedia is lovely. Today I learned that Kurt Gödel (a pretty well-known mathematical genius) also was a paranoiac and starved to death while his wife was hospitalized because he refused to eat anything not prepared by her.

I thoroughly detest udev: large, ugly, inflexible, disgusting, recently started to insist on DEVTMPFS and /usr being on / (or having an initramdisk, neither of which I accept) and so on.

For the few situations where there are dynamic changes on my boxes (e.g. usb sticks, radio killswitch and so on) I've made do with hotplug until now, but that set of shell scripts has simply grown too annoying to maintain. But recently I found out about mdev, a small component of busybox, and I took to it instantly.

Mdev was designed to be a micro-udev for all kinds of embedded systems where busybox is playing the vital role of providing most (if not all) classic unix tools. To me mdev is the embodiment of the unix mindset: do one thing, and do it well.

And that's what it does: if given the -s switch, it trawls /sys for things that look like devices and creates them in /dev. When run without args as hotplug helper, it creates the device the kernel tells it about, or loads firmware if that's asked for, or removes a device if the kernel says it is going away. These operations are adjustable via a straightforward, simple configuration file which also lets you tell it to run commands of your choice (and load modules), and that's all there is to it. mdev consists of about 650 lines of C, and it works very well.

What it is/was lacking, is support for kernel uevents with action=change, which some subsystems use (e.g. the rfkill subsystem signals changes to any radio kill switches that way). So I wrote this tiny patch to add that capability (I hope upstream includes it in the next version of busybox), and mdev now runs *-tagged commands on add, remove and change.

The other lacking thing is documentation - in the debian packages, that is. mdev is decently explained in docs/mdev.txt and examples/mdev*.conf in the source tarball, but the debian maintainer chose not to ship any of that. I'd recommend getting and reading those documents first if you ponder playing with mdev.

So, to help others along a bit, here is my own setup as an example:

• my commented mdev config file,
• my auto mounter for removable devices,
• and a small renaming helper that puts usb devices into a hierarchy in /dev/bus/usb/NNN/MMM.

I do have a few extra bits and pieces (e.g. startup scripts, small rfkill and bluetooth agents), but they're somewhat idiosyncratic and likely not very useful to others (but just ask if you do want them).

Socialism:

You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbour.

Communism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and sells you some milk.

Nazism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and shoots you.

Bureaucratism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk away.

Traditional Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiples and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

American Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

Enron Venture Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell 3 of them to your publicly listed company using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

Accenture Model Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You shred them.

French Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You go on strike, organise a riot and block the roads because you want 3 cows.

Japanese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You redesign them so they are 1/10 the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called "Cowkimon" and market it worldwide.

German Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves.

Italian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

Russian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You count them and learn that you have 5 cows. You count again and learn you have 42 cows. You count again and learn you have 2 cows. You open another bottle of vodka.

Swiss Capitalism:

You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

Chinese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have a full employment and and high bovine productivity. You arrest the journalist who reports otherwise.

Indian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You worship them.

British Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Both are mad.

Iraqi Capitalism:

Everyone thinks you have many cows. You tell them you have none but they don't believe you and bomb the shit out of your farm. You still have no cows, but at least you are part of a democracy.

New Zealand Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. The one on the left is looking pretty sexy...

Australian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Business seems good. You close the office and go for a few celebratory beers.

And here we go again: behind closed doors They are negotiating the rules of TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership=next-generation ACTA.

Then there is, of course, the new CISPA bill (=SOPA/PIPA regurgitated and made worse).

And there is Austri^WAbsurdistan's VDS (= preemptive wholesale surveillance of the whole population).

Repeat ad nauseam.

Looks like humanity needs more Tor relays (and bridges), more services like Tor Mail, DDG (with its Tor hidden service), and ideas like the Telex Project - oh, and would somebody please cook up some gene-engineered plague that takes out politicians? Those pests are really annoying...

possibly educated but precisely zero practical relevance.

i'm serious - which of the above would you consider to be practically useful bits of knowledge and which not? ('impact the course of history'?!?....bwuahahaa)

source: pleated-jeans

There are people who pull off pretty amazing stunts, like getting lost for three days/four nights in a fairly small national park just inland from the Gold Coast.

Somehow I can see only one explanation: she must have been wearing her bikini over her eyes :-)

that's the way i read this company name: 'your health and safety is unintentional and purely accidental, as you wouldn't need to buy our services if you were safe and healthy.'

(pic snarfed from the demotivator company)

Researchers have found that going to meetings makes people stupid. (The whole paper can be found here - a candidate for an IG Nobel Price?)

If only the apparatchiks in my place of ork knew that - or even better, read this Harvard Business review article...

One of the nasty coercive laws of the last few years has just taken a beating:

A Yank federal appeals court has ruled that being forced to decrypt your stuff is unconstitutional. Good for the J. Doe in question, who relied on TrueCrypt which is a pretty nice tool (open-source - but badly licenced, multi-platform, and it does plausible deniability).

The actual text of the ruling is also pretty interesting in its argumentation.

Now if only the powers that be in this place would scrap the Cybercrime Act 2001 No. 161, items 12 and 28...

Last week Aldi OZ had an especially odd item on special: blood stain removers, 8 units per pack.

Just how did I survive for 39 years without such highly crucial, essential stuff that you need every single day?

(Maybe it's because I have a spade. Then, maybe not.)

Nope - I'm in the wrong movie...or more likely: I work for the wrong gang.

Maybe they 'award' us these things so as to properly weigh us down here in the trenches, to make sure that no dreams or hopes escape and fly away.

Well then, back to work in my usual 'first week of the semester' work clothing...

The current wanking draft for HTML5, section 8.2.2.2 translates into the W3C saying 'standards are a good thing, but we are clairvoyant and know better than all of you, so fuck them standards and all the people actually relying on standards compliance!'

Dear W3C, when I label material as being encoded in iso-8859-1 then I MEAN ISO-8859-1 and not smart-shite-infested windows-1252, thank you very much.

Your oh-so-helpful labelling of this mess a 'willful violation, motivated by a desire for compatibility' motivates me to shoot you all on sight.

I've got these Ikea spice racks in my kitchen, and the way I installed them they needed to be fastened to the wall for stability. I didn't want to drill the tiles, however.

Once again my answer is "recycling": I habitually salvage the magnets from dead hard drives. The spice rack is coated steel, the magnets are pretty strong and so I simply glued a bunch of them onto the tiles. Silicone sealant makes a decent glue for operations like that, and it's removable if need be. Problem solved.

...doesn't have to be high tech. I've got a new toy that I really like:

It's a Aristo 868 slide rule, and I find it pretty amazing how much you can do with it. Best of all: no batteries :-)

I'm obviously not against high tech, for example:

That's my trusty HP 28S, which I got in 1988 - RPN forever! But still there is a certain minimalistic appeal to the simple magic of sliding log scales...