Last week Aldi OZ had an especially odd item on special: blood stain removers, 8 units per pack. Just how did I survive for 39 years without such highly crucial, essential stuff that you need every single day?

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

Nope - I'm in the wrong movie...or more likely: I work for the wrong gang. Maybe they 'award' us these things so as to properly weigh us down here in the trenches, to make sure that no dreams or hopes escape and fly away.

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

The current wanking draft for HTML5, section 8.2.2.2 translates into the W3C saying 'standards are a good thing, but we are clairvoyant and know better than all of you, so fuck them standards and all the people actually relying on standards compliance!'

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.

I've got these Ikea spice racks in my kitchen, and the way I installed them they needed to be fastened to the wall for stability. I didn't want to drill the tiles, however.

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.

...doesn't have to be high tech. I've got a new toy that I really like: It's a Aristo 868 slide rule, and I find it pretty amazing how much you can do with it. Best of all: no batteries :-)

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

That's my trusty HP 28S, which I got in 1988 - RPN forever! But still there is a certain minimalistic appeal to the simple magic of sliding log scales...

I like gumtree quite a bit: it's free for private ads, no registration required, simple email-based access and best of all it works. When my nephew visited we needed a car seat for him, and the second ad I responded to worked out. Now that Emil is back in Vienna the seat is surplus. I posted an ad two days ago, had four responses within 24 hours and sold the seat today (for the same amount as I paid two months ago). Very nice.

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

From the aptly named 'strange but true' category (in the Sydney Morning Herald news) here's a story about ridiculously gullible people.

(with apologies to any non-Austrian readers for the utterly untranslatable title...)

Today we turned this:

into this: and here's the story.
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The laundry and the water heater are renewed and I'm declaring the renovation work in this place done, finished, over. (I know, I know, famous last words and all that - but at least I don't plan any further biggies). Here are some photos of the exercise.
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Not bad: since the new meter went in, I consumed electricity worth $81 - and received $43 credit for the energy my solar panels created.

but then that's maybe a good thing? Because Tron = pretty cool for 1982, but Tron Guy = doubleplusuncool, anytime.

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.

I think it looks great - I'm pretty sure my sisters will say it looks like an abattoir... It's certainly very nice for working and it's also pretty frugal for the amount of light (about 2A at 12V on the left side, a bit less on the right).

Look, a leak - quick, get a plumber!

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:-)

That's a screenshot from a recent TV advertisment where Dolly Parton threatens she'll visit Oz real soon, after leaving us in peace for the previous 28 years.

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

dear wikileaks webhamsters, would you *please* stop inflating every single damn cable with all the navigational fluff? it's all empty carbs, you know, and makes mirroring you a FPITA.

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.

include, amongst others, that they're patronizing little FPOS.

Some time ago I wrote up my experiences with running gpg remotely. This post documents the most recent changes I've made to my setup, which finally make my gpg (and ssh) keys fully mobile and 'migratory'.

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.

What do you do with dead hard disks? I usually salvage the magnets; the larger ones make perfect holders for things like tools, knifes or mobiles.

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.

zeit wars, und gut is: der letzte von den 'adligen' gfriesern, ein gewisser otto, ist jetzt endlich abgebankelt. zeit hat er sich gelassen - wie mit allem anderen, wie zb. dem herrschafts-ansprüche aufgeben (das hat bis 1961 gedauert...na hallo?!?).

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.

..of those high-energy photons, please! Ahem. On Monday the sparkies performed the solar installation on my roof (6 big panels for a nominal 1.5kW of lovely solar electricity).

We'll see how much of my energy needs that will take care of (it won't be all for sure; I usually need about 11kW/day and a 1.5kW installation won't provide more than 60% of that) - but the feed in tariffs for exporting energy to the grid are good (so far): you get quite a bit more for your exported kW than you pay for consumption.

Now I just need to wire up the inverter's serial port and start logging performance with rrdtool...

Making the news today: QLD coppers have arrested a journalist - for attending the AusCERT conference and publishing articles about the conference. Hello, WTF?!?

Right now it seems the coppers are backpedalling quite furiously, but they certainly deprived him of his freedom (temporarily) and seized his ipad (not so temporarily).

Well, if I was a letter I'd also feel like being abandoned after having those two parasitic muppets pasted on me. (for my few colonial readers, Karl Kraus said "In Austria, sending a letter means to abandon it". He was obviously not enamoured with the ÖPTV's services, and used the nuances of German to the limit: "Aufgeben" means both posting a letter and abandoning something (as in: all hope), and "heissen" is good for both expressing "is called" and "has the meaning of"...)

It's a good day in my world when my favourite game, Sturmovik, fully works on Linux under Wine, and better, more reliably and at least as fast as on Windoof.

That also includes the TrackIR, thanks to these guys and their Linux-Track project - which is still a bit rough in places but generally works fine with a variety of hardware (from webcams to TrackIRs).

In addition to the Linux-track stuff you'll also want the Linux-Track WINE plugin which presents Windoof apps with a TrackIR-compatible API. That thing was a pain to get running, and you might want to check out this patch by me to make it work properly with recent Linux-Track revisions.

Apart from those: no real problems after some initial conf.ini tinkering; no more inexplicable stuttering under Windoof, no more dualbooting and smooth performance with graphics options close to the top levels.

About a year ago I bought an OpenBench Logic Sniffer, an open-source (both hardware and software) 32-channel 200Ms/s logic analyzer. Dirt cheap ($50) and very cool and useful, some software present in debian (sigrok) and the standard client (in java) isn't shabby, either. Of course it came without a case, and of course I couldn't leave it like that.

Here's where my genetic inheritance (a slight dose of pack rat) comes very handy: I don't throw things away lightly if I can see a likely future use for them. I very much like repurposing stuff in unexpected ways (eg. small bottle of nail polish remover plus pipette from the hair potion plus spade drill = small bottle with pipette for contact lens fluid when camping, or: dishwasher rinse aid bottle plus yet another pipette = oil can with applicator for lubricating the bicycle).

Because of this tinkering bias I really detest planned obsolescence and the thinly disguised downcycling spiral that we're sold as "recycling" all the time...and I'm extremely pleased whenever I find another elegant new (and unintended) use for something others call "disposable".

Hence I didn't buy a project box or case for the logic analyzer, but rather dug through my Box of Boxes, Bottles and Useful Plastic Things. I didn't have to dig deeply; after 5 minutes with a scalpel and the hot glue gun I had the OLS mounted in this perfect enclosure:

The box once held adhesive plaster strips and was simply way too useful to end up in the trash.

The analyzer itself has already proved to be a super-useful new member of my electronics tools toolche^Wzoo (other members: a Tektronix 2246 oscilloscope and a HP 3312A function generator).

The Tek is not a storage scope, so diagnosing complex and/or non-repeating signals is pretty much a no-go. But I needed just this kind of capability to fix yet another problem bugging me.

Some of you may remember this description of "dervish", the custom head unit I made for my bedroom music player, which provides an interface between a PC and an LCD module plus IR remote control reception via just one serial line (and a PIC, of course). The dervish is housed in a repurposed transparent floppy box, by the way :-).

The dervish had been whirling fine for the last three years, but suffered from occasional runaway phantom IR repeats that I couldn't track down. Two hours with a breadboard, an IR receiver module and the logic analyzer finally made me realize that the remote control I'm using doesn't follow the specs very closely, and really screws up the signal timing when the batteries run down. Another hour later I had tightened up the code for better rejection of dud signals and all is well again.

Last year I needed/wanted a new laptop, something with decent battery life but still lightweight and with a useful vertical screen resolution. The Acer C110 I had before was nice but lasted less than 2 hrs on battery. So I got an Atom-based unit, an Acer Aspire One 751h: 1.3GHz Atom Z520, 2Gb memory, 160Gb disk, 1366x768/11.6in display, 1.37kg (weighed it myself), 6+ hours of battery life, and - very important to me - a decent, full-size keyboard, all packed into the size of a sheet of A4.

Nice gear - except for the not-quite-Intel GMA500 graphics crap, for which no decent (semi-)free drivers exist. I won't bore you with the tedious story of getting decent graphics going - it was quite tedious, but I'm really stubborn.

So here are some of my lessons learned, hopefully helpful to you people out there. The features and subsystems not mentioned (the majority) worked out of the box or without more than normal configuration steps required.
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...if the fellows have to advertise "free shipping". I'd also like a few "Tomohawk"s with that order, please :-)

From a spam that recently made it here (identifying bits redacted):

Subject: Free heroin shipping!
From: <*certainly dud from*>
To: <*me, myself and i*>
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2011 14:34:25 +0100

FREE HEROIN SHIPPING!


1. Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
2. Rocket fuel and Tomohawk rockets (serious enquiries only).
4. New shipment of cocaine has arrived, buy 9 grams and get 10th for free.

Everebody welcome, but not US citizens, sorry.

ATTENTION. Clearance offer. Buy 30 grams of heroin, get 5 free.

Please contact: <*some other fool*>

PHONE 0093(0)4765***
FAX 0093(0)4485***

Afghanistan

Every time I walk past that room I have to suppress a fit of silly laughter - because I can't help associating the idea of "completing" students with the video of how a Trabant final inspection used to work.

Now for the all-important question: Can student brains also be improved by just a few judiciously applied hammer blows? ;-)

A real treat for mathematicians - but does scaled-down bratwurst taste scaled-down, too?

Inquiring minds simply have to know.

(But even really inquiring minds won't like to find out that font "fixed" in Tk 8.5 is a totally different beast from the same font in Tk 8.5...)

Not much canola involved, though. That's my bicycle chain being soaked overnight in 50/50 ATF and gearbox oil, after I cleaned it yesterday evening (soda bottle, kerosene and a few drops kitchen degreaser, plop chain in, shake, fish it out, done). I read that chainsaw oil is even better for lubricating bicycle chains, but that's what I had readily available at home. The gearbox oil is very thick, the ATF not so, both are meant for lubricating gears, so what could go wrong.

Having an SRAM "powerlink" in the chain makes opening the chain and getting it off really easy and fast, and involves no tools except two hands - with at least twelve fingers, as it's a bit fiddly the first time. Taking the chain off is generally messy, but that's no big deal - I use cheap disposable latex gloves from the supermarket for such grease-fests anyway (but, unfortunately, kerosene eats through the cheap latex gloves /very/ very quickly).

I actually do like preventive maintenance: it's great to fix things and make them work again, but to me it's even cooler to make them work perfectly before they break down completely. I know, pedantic and perfectionist, get a life and all that - I simply can't help it :-)

This preference of mine could be a bit of generational back-swing, because my father absolutely hates preventive work - and often pays a heavy price for that...

(that's the Gold Coast in QLD.au, not the region in Africa.)

The next Gold Coast Barcamp will be held at Bond on the 2.4.2011, and I will run a small keysigning session. If privacy and strong crypto interest you and you're in the region, have a look at the overview page here.

I detest udev. With a passion. Because of bugs like #453356 or #339797 and as a matter of general principle because it's overcomplex, brittle, and Just Plain Wrong. No, a dynamic /dev is not generally desirable. No, I don't want you to fuck up my /dev and slow down every single boot by redoing the same damn crap all the time. No, I don't like your rule language or your lousy diagnostics.

So I consider myself the president-and-first-member of the G.R.O.S.U. ("Get Rid of Slimy Udev") club. But I do eat my own dog food (debian developer and all that), so here's my alternative setup to avoid udev without losing useful capabilities:

Udev itself I get rid of by creating a dummy dependency fulfiller package using equivs. Here's the resulting .deb for the lazy ones.

The few hotplugging activities that I do like to handle (eg. initializing the Bluetooth env if/when I use the killswitch, or auto-mounting removable storage) I take care of with hotplug: ancient, trusty, simple, totally sufficient.

Here's my cut-down-and-minimized hotplug package. Share and enjoy.