"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" - Adolf Hitler

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.

IMNSHO the cablegate-gate serves assange right, after dribbling out just some of the cables and in homeopathetic amounts over a year.

Information wants to be free after all:-)

Partlejuice indeed: looks like she spent those umpteen years well interred and/or hitting the botox clinics.

if you downloaded the latest cablegate snapshot via bittorrent you might be surprised that it's only about 300 megabytes (for 150k cables) - but you WILL be unpleasantly surprised when you unpack that archive: it expands (like kudzu) to a whopping 30+ gigabytes.

the reason: every single cable page is infested with links everywhere else and then some, so that the actual content is just about 3%.

take this cable for example: after ripping out all the gunk between <div class='pane small'> (might have called the css class 'pain, big') and the closing </div> after 'courage is contagious', the page shrinks from a whopping 168k to just 6k. the cleaned page thus consumes only 3.6% of the disk space and network bandwidth of the fugly original beast (and don't forget there's 150 thousand such occurrences right now).

nobody, dear leakers, is going to mirror 30+g of you strutting your fluff on a daily basis - but a decent, still navigatable 7g would be a very different story.

I'm likely not the cheapest around (cf. 'pay peanuts, get monkeys') but then I'm quite good at what I'm doing and have a fair amount of experience (22+ years various Unixes, C, Assembler, Lisp, 19+ years Linux, 15+ years Perl, 10+ years as Debian Developer - thus quite familiar with Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu - and so on...)

Like before I use the kernel key storage system to cache passphrases (and that won't change until I switch to gnupg2 with the agent). But now my keys are all stored on a usb stick, in an encrypted filesystem.

When I login the first time any day, I load the keys from the encrypted storage into a RAM disk. (A simple symlink in ~/.gnupg is sufficient to convince gnupg to find the secret ring.) When I leave for/from work I nuke the RAM disk - that way the keys are always only present where I physically am.

The big new change from the previous setup is that now I use sshfs when I need to use gpg for anything on a remote box: I ssh into the target box with a remote port forwarded back to a listening instance of sftp-server on the local box (which has the keys in RAM). With agent forwarding on, the sshfs connection doesn't require entering passwords, and the mount point is of course set to be the same as the RAM disk location for locally loaded keys, so to gpg it's totally transparent. (I'd never do any of this if not all machines in question were under my exclusive full control.)

sshfs is no speed daemon, but then the secret ring file isn't large. sshfs with -o directport on the forwarded port reuses the existing outbound ssh connection, so one single outbound ssh connection does it all - and another benefit of that setup is that the keys vanish from the remote machine as soon as the outbound ssh connection is shut down.

The one simple shell script doing all this setup is less than 60 lines long: simple, neat, sufficient.

Here's my ghetto mobile mount, mk.2: a 3x3cm piece of thin sheet metal sellotaped to the back of the phone and two fat ex-disk magnets screwed to the dashboard. Plenty strong, vibration-proof and completely invisible under the silicone phone cover. And, of course, zero cost.

aber sogar einen widerling wie den da erwischt es irgendwann - und jetzt kriechen ihm, wie in ö ja so üblich und komplett erwartet - posthum die ganzen schwarzen und sonstwie ewiggestrigen deppen in den modrigen arsch.

However, their support isn't bad and they sent me the protocol specification within one day of me asking. Here is the Growatt Serial Comms Protocol as PDF. The comms protocol is a tad odd, and the spec isn't 100% clear in all situations but with a bit of fiddling I got a perl reader to work. The comms implementation isn't very robust; while experimenting I managed to send it into a catatonic state a few times, and it stuffs up the message checksum that it sends every now and then, too.

Without further ado, here's my perl proggie. It doesn't work with the growatt's super-weird dynamic address mode (shows as "MOVE" on the LCD); knock through the menus and set a fixed address value first. The perl proggie also expects a unixy box with /bin/stty because I couldn't be bothered to do the tedious termios fiddling from within perl.

me: hello, alex speaking.

her: hi it's <female, australian> with telstra, how are you?

me: fine, thanks. (that's a polite lie: i hate the telco monopolist and avoid them wherever i can. they shouldn't have this number, btw.)

her: that's great. please note that this call may be recorded or monitored for training and quality assurance purposes. are you ok with that?

me: no, i'm not. i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: *brief pause while some thoughts scramble through her hamster brain, which is obviously completely lost when things leave the crib sheet path* oh, but why do you not want that call recorded?

me: i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: but what's the problem?

me: i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: ok, i won't be able to continue this call then. have a good day. *click*

me: *happy*

Next time I think I'll ask for extra anchovies with my pizza (if male sales weasel) or request some telephone sex (if female).

So a number of the more unwilling members of my flock decided to bail out early - which is of course their call (at the ork place they can switch subjects until end of week 2) - but it still rankles to have this kind of desertion just because you a) expect them to start working in week 1 (*duh*!), b) don't dumb down the content to the level of 'reading for dummies' and c) require that they allocate a few working brain cells to this here university education thing.