Application has reported a "Not My Fault" in module KRNL.EXE 
in line 0200:103F

For example, the service manual for 7FDL diesels lists all kinds of things that you need a pry bar for on this engine, like speeding up the engine (beyond the governor's limits).

Even cooler, though, are two-stroke diesels. Have a look at this clip of an EMD 645 starting up. A cold start and without the exhaust manifold disconnected, to me this thing sounds very much like a cat purring once warmed up. According to the manual that would be a 2300+ hp, 13 ton cat... Plus, an engine where you need a hoist to lift a single piston must be good.

Should reincarnation really be an option, then I'd like to deposit that I want to come back as a diesel engineer next time round :-)

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.

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.

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...

source: pleated-jeans

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

My solution: cut a finger from a rubber glove and, well, roll it on :-)

And now for some Totally Unimportant Facts: The French wikipedia page on condoms has substantially more instructional pictures than the german or english ones. the german page at least prominently links to usage instructions on wikibooks.

This being perl it's a simple modification; here is the new version of read-growatt which does the submission if you hand it your pvoutput site id and api key. It also displays the readings in a slightly more human-friendly format.

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...

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...

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

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

not too bad, considering my slacker nature...

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.

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.

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

I just hope ebay (who own gumtree via some subsidiary nowadays) don't stuff this service up...

Sunday: the water filter (under-sink twin system, in the kitchen) is leaking badly. Repair attempts showed that the plastic filter housings had developed cracks and were about to start spraying water big-time.

Sunday, part 2: So I bunkered some 20l of filtered water in a plastic water bladder, just to tide me over until the filter was back in operation. However, the collapsible water canister has also suffered a puncture and leaked almost as badly as the filter.

Monday: I checked with the original supplier of the kit (7 years later, and the local company is still thriving, a good sign) and it turns out that the cheap filter housings that I ordered in 2004 should be replaced every 5 years or thereabouts. I ordered the (marginally pricier) premium housings on Tuesday, got them on Wednesday and all is well again.

I heartily endorse PSI Filters: they are local(-ish: Tasmanian), their prices are good, and their advice and customer service are great.

Today we turned this:

Recently I bought some pretty cheap LED strips (5050-type, 60 LEDs/meter, flexible, waterproof and self-adhesive, can be cut every 5cm, cost $72 for ten meters) for overhauling the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen. One old laptop PSU went into the range hood casing (displacing the trashy light sockets that thing had) and the left side is powered by a low-profile LED transformer. Mounting the stuff is a breeze: cut to size, cut and peel back a little of the silicon waterproofing, solder on wires, then peel off the backing paper and stick it in place, done.