Not for me. For him, apparently.
And of course, here's the Obxkcd:
You should have a look at the title attribute (mouseover usually shows it) that Randall has come up with.
Daylight is fine, but darkness isn't to be frowned at.
If you have LEDs, that is.
click here for the rest of the story...
Rob gave me a 1GB clonepod. Its Chinese designers made a number of...questionable design
decisions, and as a result the player was somewhat broken when I got it.
click here for the rest of the story...
A few months ago, I made a simple PIC-based POV toy for my daughter.
Here are some building notes, photos and code of course.
click here for the rest of the story...
When I was a kid, radio control gear cost lots, even toy-grade stuff; the one time I got a toy rc car was therefore quite a letdown: it was a horrible piece of junk.
Now I've got such a tinkertoy again, a big rc car. But this
time it's far from toy-grade, and I'm already in the process of modifying
it. This is so much fun! giggle
click here for the rest of the story...
Geeks are suckers, perfectionists like me even more so. But even I learn: I've had enough of doing the web and registration backend work and hosting for the Canungra Cup, they can look for another idiot who does the work for nothing. Come the 31.10. and I will flush the site down the drain, and GOOD RIDDANCE! Well, SEP.
In other club-related news, they've decided to ban RC planes at Beechmont, for "safety reasons". Damn but this sucks!
The Ten Step program for a Happy Bright Future (the American way).
There's no chance in hell that I will be visiting these parts of the world anytime soon.
The Worst Journey In The World by Cherry-Garard,
about Scott's Antarctic trips, courtesy of Project Gutenberg
Antarctic Conquest by Finn Ronne (and L. Sprague de Camp)
The South Pole by Amundsen
...lots of stuff by G. Dargaud about the French/Italian Concordia Station, and by
Bill Spindler about the American Pole Station
plus Stanley-Robinson's Antarctica; which is (science)fiction but nevertheless very nice.
Silastic RTV sealant is very useful, even if a third of the tube has
already vulcanized...
click here for the rest of the story...
It's amazing what they managed to squeeze out of that poor 6502...
Consider this: you have a nine or ten year old, originally fairly cheap
vacuum cleaner, which has a busted floor head, a broken handle piece
and a dud cable retract. Apart from those problems, it sucks, a
lot :-)
Aldi/Hofer has a new vacuum on sale for $39. What do you do?
click here for the rest of the story...
Tonight SBS will run Silentium, as usual in the original language (Austrian) with English subtitles. The above is a quote from the Tv guide.
today i got my new (well, less than a decade old) sun to replace
my last dead ultra2: a netra 120 (aka sun fire v120).
but what a noisy bugger!
click here for the rest of the story...
FvG is going to jail! finally.
for those who have no idea what i'm happy about: the fellow in question is the most obnoxious litigating landshark in germany. he's been flailing around his cease and desist letters and lawsuits for pretty much anything and then some, usually remotely related to IT matters.
now he's ripped off the taz, a newspaper, and got 6 months without probation. yes!
but best was this quote of the judge: "Die Allgemeinheit muss vor Ihnen geschützt werden."
should you be so unlucky to have to use a box with onboard Intel "Graphics",
specifically a 965Q chipset, and also one of those fat Dell screens which
suck at all resolutions but 1680x1050, and maybe even want to run debian
Etch (without testing or experimental or somesuch),
then you'll hate all
the involved hardware manufacturers. (Likely you do that anyway, for unrelated
crimes against syadmins but regardless: THIS time i did find a way to coerce
them to function.)
click here for the rest of the story...
...but rather with them. Nevertheless, here's a pretty cool game I've started playing recently: Terminus, a space FPS/RPG thingie which rocks: a solid Newtonian physics model, good graphics, both linux and win supported natively (on the retail cds) and so on.
What's even better is that the Underdogs have the game downloadable in its full glory (abandonware; released in 2000).
As a matter of fact, I detest the damn pests wholeheartedly.
Especially the dumb ones: have a look at this innocent, boring, unoffending page (as it has been for the last four years). Then imagine some legal muppets and their threat letters and then look at the same page as of now.
Need I say anything more?
What a "crime". M. Haneef gives his phone's sim card to a cousin before leaving the UK for Oz, the cousin seemingly has connections to some goofball wannabe-bombers, and guess what happens? Oz decides to ruin the bystander, Haneef. Because having given away the sim card is a crime. Haneef hasn't done anything wrong, but his relative may have tried to. And suddently crime is transitive. Sippenhaft, you know. I'm sure the Nazis would feel quite at home in this century.
How Sweet and Just and all that! I feel a lot better now that poor Haneef has his future fucked up for nothing and no good reason. He'll certainly bear no grudge whatsoever against this completely fucked up joke of a legal system and the society behind assholes like Howard & co. Surely not.
This is so sickeningly stupid. I hope our descendants finally wise up and have all politicans be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Because they are most certainly mindless jerks, and with crime now being transitive, the polly bastards' close associations with the real criminals should be treated at least as harshly as the luckless doctor with the dud relatives.
...wieder einmal setzt man sich in der Piefke-Regierung fest
die Scheuklappen auf, und negiert die Realität.
click here for the rest of the story...
Having a 4 channel oscilloscope
makes tinkering so much easier. Now I can look at four
incomprehensible and unexplainable voltages at the same time!
click here for the rest of the story...
...to hear how my friend rob is spending a lot of time in the gym. My character is already fucked, so why waste time in the gym? It's spent way more productively with soldering iron in one hand and a datasheet printout in the other ;-)
Latest example: I talked to rob earlier this evening (about 3.5hrs ago), and he
asked me how hard it would be to make a Hardcore Gym Timer,
so that he can keep his "8 second blast/12 second slow" training
regime precisely.
click here for the rest of the story...
"Innsbruck, Ich muß Dich lassen"...viel schlimmere Barock-musi
gibts nicht. Ein guter Grund, das Gedudel als Türglocken-Melodei zu
verwurschten. Weil es soll ja nicht gut und wohlig klingen, sondern
laut und nervig damit a) ich aufkreuch und zur Tür gehe und b) die
Wartenden sich möglichst gleich ohne meine Mithilfe dazu entscheiden
daß sie sich schleichen. Weil mei home is mei kastl, da sind nur
wenige besondere Leute willkommen.
In diesem Sinne also eine perfekte Wahl. Wie ich das verbrochen hab, erzähl ich
weiter unten.
click here for the rest of the story...
Somehow I don't think I'll run out of caps anytime soon.
As I've been tinkering a little bit with electronics and microcontrollers recently, some more components were required. I dislike wasting money. And I like bargains.
Somebody sold off his stuff by the kilo, after retiring from an electronics repair career. All bandoleered, also mostly labelled and well mixed: a few strips of transistors and filters/ceramic resonators, resistors, a pile of chokes/inductors, some tantalums, a pile of ceramic caps, a big pile of film caps and a bloody huge pile of electrolytics. I said well mixed: all common values well represented. Ah yes, and more fuse holders than I'll ever need.
4.7kg of gear, for a whopping total of AU$80. I'm pretty pleased. But the sorting is a pain.
It's not an eagle but a hawk, but it serves as Eagle Airlines for some nasty blackbirds.
Photos by Alan Stankevitz, whose webshite sucks (flash-infested eye cancer) but whose photos rock!
(via the OZ report)
Just came back from a trip to Ikea, and I'm pissed: They have discontinued 60cm wide Billys. WAAAAAH! The most essential size for a book shelf and they just dumped it (40 is too narrow, 80 is too wide)...Dimbulbs.
...and it doesn't dig many if not most of my files. Damn dumb beast!
Well, no more. swish-e seems to be better behaved, and actually works! duh
These guys have cooked up a tiny perl CGI frontend (which I've reworked and cut down a lot further), and the search functionality on this site works again.
I've also fixed a long-standing annoyance of blosxom: plugins can't
cleanly set the title of a page from the story title, because the header
plugins run first and the story plugins have no official access to the
output. The fix is Really Dirty, in the best tradition of blosxom which
is Abysmally Dirty Code: a plugin with a sub last {...}
that massages $blosxom::output. If it finds exactly one story in there,
then it changes the <title> to that story's title. Hideous but
it works, and the search interface can display story titles instead of
just the boring story links.
If you want to play with the Abominable Code for this stuff, let me know.
I dislike spam, very much, and repeat offenders deserve all my wrath. Here's another use of the iptables recent module in a very cheap and simple manner, to limit the spam blasters' effects on me and my servers' life.
(I've said nice things about ipt_recent before here and here, both with example applications.)
I've just added these extra rules to the firewall setting on my mail servers:
# smtp access is controlled by previous behaviour: spam me and you lose. iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j smtplimited # smtp: if mimedefang has flagged you as bad, you lose for 12h iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --hitcount 1 \ --seconds $((12*3600)) --rcheck -j TARPIT # clean up the old entries to unclog ipt_recent iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --remove # and let people through if they've been good in the past iptables -A smtplimited -j ACCEPT
My mimedefang filter has been instructed to (do the perl equivalent of)
echo "+$ASSHOLE_IP" > /proc/net/ipt_recent/SMTP
whenever it detects an asshole that tries to:
- send email with a non-existent sender's address
- send email to one of the spamtraps within my domains
- send email to nonexistent addresses within my domains
- send me spam (where the degree of spamminess is beyond any reason for doubt)
- send me viruses
(The decision logic is actually a bit more complicated: I certainly don't blacklist known forwarders and backup MXes.)
The net effect is that when you do something nasty to me (email-wise), all your subsequent connections to my mail servers are tarpitted for the next 12 hours. Works great, easy to tweak if you want to be more lenient (just up the hitcount and adjust the following --revove rule) and reduces the time my systems have to waste on repeating the checks for surefire rejections on the smtp-envelope level. (I usually get about 5000-10000 rejections per server per day.)
Austria has no DMCA, so let's also publish the Magic Number here.
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 (with a heartfelt "Leckt's mi am Arsch!" to the RIAA/MPAA/AACS goons)
Netzpolitik.org has some nice alternative renderings, and of course it makes a weird color bar, too.
After the almost-fiasco of upgrading my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy, I say, so here goes.
click here for the rest of the story...
Damn, how I hate those wobdesigner idiots that make you click on virtual keyboards to enter your passwords. Virginmoney/Westpac has such a thing, and a very crappy one, too, but we have a fix. All this involves EczemaScript, not nice but better than suffering.
Now I've got another set of suckers to deal with, Citibank AU. Their setup is less gnarly but still annoying. This time, I produced a fix myself: Citibank-Demouse is a Greasemonkey script that simply clears the hooks that invoke the virtual keyboard; and hey presto! keyboard-entry of your password works again.
Update (Sun 29.04.2007 18:53):
Federico Schwindt pointed out the appropriate Citibank UK url, and the script has been updated with this information.
