Tonight SBS will run Silentium, as usual in the original language (Austrian) with English subtitles. The above is a quote from the Tv guide.

[ published on Mon 17.09.2007 20:54 | filed in interests/au | ]

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...

[ published on Fri 14.09.2007 00:26 | filed in interests/comp | ]

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."

[ published on Thu 13.09.2007 23:24 | filed in interests/anti | ]

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...

[ published on Wed 12.09.2007 14:19 | filed in interests/comp | ]

...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).

[ published on Tue 11.09.2007 11:12 | filed in interests/comp | ]

My daughter complained last week about the lack of updates on my website; she's checking it every so often but there's nothing new. So, do more, daddy! Ok, I'll try, but much of it will be rambling, unhappy blah.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Tue 11.09.2007 00:46 | filed in still-not-king | ]
 2007_08_28-conny-leiberlkleid.jpg


click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Fri 07.09.2007 10:29 | filed in brainfarts | ]

(And gargoyles are great.)
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Tue 14.08.2007 12:18 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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?

[ published on Mon 30.07.2007 12:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

...since 1972!
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Thu 19.07.2007 22:01 | filed in brainfarts | ]

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.

[ published on Mon 16.07.2007 14:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

...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...

[ published on Wed 11.07.2007 22:53 | filed in interests/anti | ]

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...

[ published on Mon 09.07.2007 21:15 | filed in interests/tinkering | ]

I'm with Rat on this topic.

PearlsBeforeSwine-2007.04.15

However, my favourite underdo^Wunderpig has a point there, too.

PearlsBeforeSwine-2007.07.04

(credits, as always to Stephan Pastis with a big thanks for the dark & nasty & great strip!)

[ published on Mon 09.07.2007 01:27 | filed in brainfarts | ]

...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...

[ published on Sat 07.07.2007 00:55 | filed in interests/tinkering | ]

"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...

[ published on Wed 04.07.2007 01:20 | filed in interests/tinkering | ]

Somehow I don't think I'll run out of caps anytime soon.

 2007_06_30-component-sorting.jpg

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.

[ published on Sat 30.06.2007 20:40 | filed in interests/tinkering | ]

1.1.13 is available here (and via apt-get install kuvert in debian and ubuntu).

Changes: the pgp-signature part is now tagged a bit more extensively with a content-description and the "canonical" filename; while the filename tag was there in an earlier version (and got removed for reasons lost in time), the content description might help the more...suboptimal mail clients out there.

The prod to do this came from Andreas Labres.

[ published on Sat 23.06.2007 14:25 | filed in mystuff/kuvert | ]

Kuvert is a tool that automatically signs and/or encrypts outgoing email using the PGP/MIME standard (RFC3156), based on the availability of the recipient's key in your keyring.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 28.11.2005 11:40 | filed in mystuff/kuvert | ]
rtail_rwbbrtail_rwbb2rtail_rwbb3

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)

[ published on Thu 21.06.2007 21:50 | filed in interests/flying | ]

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.

[ published on Sat 09.06.2007 01:06 | filed in interests/au | ]

Mine started even worse than the last one ended.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Tue 29.05.2007 15:35 | filed in still-not-king | ]


click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 21.05.2007 18:26 | filed in brainfarts | ]

Tony Nelson pointed out a bug in glibc's gethostbyname() which causes pam_recent failures in mixed ipv4-v6 situations. The problem is worked around and the docs have been improved.

Version 1.3 can be downloaded here.

[ published on Mon 21.05.2007 18:07 | filed in mystuff | ]

...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. fakefake

[ published on Wed 16.05.2007 17:32 | filed in interests/comp | ]

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.)

[ published on Sun 13.05.2007 16:40 | filed in interests/comp | ]

Spam is good for something, after all. Two things in my case: First it gives me a nice flow of test mails so that I can verify that my servers do work as intended. The second use is that every morning when I get my first cup of coffee, skimming the spam&trash mailbox reminds me of recording my weight, which I check every morning before showering. Usually I have forgotten to write it down by the time I've finished doing my teeth, inserting my eyes, getting the coffee etc.

[ published on Thu 10.05.2007 12:02 | filed in brainfarts | ]

Ten minutes ago \rho-bert and Anitta left Oz for the last time. "Back to Europe" for them, "back to work" for me. We'll see how soon I cease speaking German because of lack of exercise.

[ published on Fri 04.05.2007 15:02 | filed in brainfarts | ]

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.

[ published on Thu 03.05.2007 13:49 | filed in interests/anti | ]

Yesterday my car decided to celebrate the coming of the merry month of May.

While driving home in the evening, the horn started hooting uncontrollably, on and off and more on and more on and maybe off... Very annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that the horn is not coupled to the ignition, so it kept on randomly hooting after I switched off the engine.

It took me about five frantic minutes to determine that no, I won't find the correct fuse (if there even is one for the horn) anytime soon, yes, hitting the horn pad on the steering wheel has a 50% chance of shutting the sucker up for a few seconds, and finally...blissful silence, when I disconnected the horn. Fortunately on this Fart Falcon the horn is easily accessible once you open the bonnet and even has a convenient quick-disconnect plug close by.

Looks like the foam in the switch pad has rotten away. sigh. Well, at least it didn't fail when I wasn't around; my neighbours would have been real happy with a randomly braying horn during the night...until the battery would have died.

[ published on Tue 01.05.2007 14:44 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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