(See also: Hinterholz 8.)

Well, there is progress in my bath, not stellar but not to be sneezed at either.
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Oh how I hate the cheap bastards who built this place! The QLD building codes seem lax enough already and still these folks didn't leave many building sins uncommitted.

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should you ever have any excess baggage to ship overseas, use anybody but worldbaggage.com.au: they're bumbling fools and waste time left and right.

after one primary mistake on my side (not realizing that the qantas freight office is n/a on a saturday, when conny left a month ago) i was in need of getting her second suitcase to vienna, somehow.

qantas would have wanted $1300 for sending it with her as excess baggage (that's for 18kg...as her ticket cost $1500 i conclude that the humans themselves are treated as worthless encumbrances while their baggage is worth gold...to qantas). pack and send quoted a ridiculous $550, and qantas themselves would have charged $350 airport-airport (as the unaccompanied baggage discount is only available when you submit your unaccompanied stuff before you leave yourself) - and you'd have to pick the stuff up at the vienna airport, home of truly obnoxious customs bureaucrats.

worldsnails looked fine, at $305 or so for airport to door and so i booked the suitcase with them, hoping for speedy delivery for my good money.

that was on the 19.1. as an aside, they shafted me nicely with insurance fees (their online calc doesn't reflect what they really charge and the fine print was suitably badly worded to trick me out of a nice extra $150...my own mistake).

on the 21.1. i learned they had lost the paperwork, so i resubmitted that. on the 22.1. i finally got the rotten bill.

and then...nothing, for a very long time.

on the 9.2. the first signs of life reappeared, as in "the suitcase is somewhere around amsterdam". after the customary wrangling with the fucking austrian customs the suitcase was finally delivered on the 13.2.2009.

19.1. to 13.2. - even carrier pigeons would have been faster! not even australia post needs four weeks for airmail from oz to at.

...I vote for Sergey Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" cycle (Night, Day, Twilight and Last Watch). I'll also mumble the word "bookchan" if need be.

And for the more visually oriented, I definitely recommend the "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" movies - but enjoy them in the original Russian with subs, the American/"International" cuts of both films are crap.

Even more interesting: I found the movies no letdown when compared to the books.

cheddar rubber: from $7.5/kg
the absolutely cheapest camembert: $21/kg
blade or rump steak: about $8.5/kg
whole rump: about $7/kg

As you can see QLD is a good place for carnivores and a bad place for cheesivores (or at least not for people on a reasonable budget). Fortunately I like meat, and so does Conny - if it comes in the right form. This is about one such form: dried meat goodness.
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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.

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

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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"Culinary".

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

A classic example of this problem....

...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 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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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 :-)