| In which Sergei finally gets some armour |
[Aug. 2nd, 2008|01:17 am] |
Earlier today I looked up the date of my first LARP event. It was Foundation, just over two years ago. I was slightly surprised; I didn't think I'd been at it that long and still think of myself as a complete beginner who hardly understands any of the game. Nevertheless, I've caught the LARP bug and am likely to continue for the forseeable future, so I've decided that for my tenth event, I will actually get a proper armour physrep. Darkblade seem nice and sensibly priced, so I'm thinking about their Ryder armour and articulated vambraces, unless anyone has better ideas? I've already looked at the stands at events and the websites of LRPStore and Norton Armouries. I'd also appreciate any recommendations on where to find appropriate boots or boot-tops.
Edit: I now have some Elven Armour and Scales Greaves from Primal Forge, who were very helpful (answering questions and such) and shipped promptly. |
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| BBQ, today & tonight |
[Jul. 27th, 2008|08:50 am] |
For anyone reading this whom I haven't invited by some means or other (or who has forgotten), there's a BBQ at my place all day and all evening today (we may be slightly interrupted by the weather). Everyone and anyone welcome. Turn up whenever. Bring friends, food, drink and anything else you fancy :p Contact us for exact address. |
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| Next week (shortcipher in shocking case of organisational fail) |
[Jul. 17th, 2008|04:47 pm] |
I'm taking all of next week (21/07-25/07) as holiday. This is mostly to work on a side project, but if anyone feels like meeting up to e.g. see a film, or coming to visit, company would be appreciated at any time of day (except Friday evening), as Susan will be away and I don't intend to code 24 hours/day. Here are my contact details (or comment here). Films I currently want to see include The Dark Knight, Wall•E (seen) and Hancock. |
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| On the inability of smartphones to bilocate (a short review of recent purchases) |
[Jul. 4th, 2008|09:35 am] |
I don't particularly approve of the apparent extinction of no-frills mobiles, but I'm one of those strange people who actually find smartphones (at least the ones that are at all smart) useful, simply because I'd otherwise carry a PDA and a phone. Unfortunately, on those occasions when I want to use both functions at once (e.g. a phone call involving looking at my calendar) until recently I found myself switching awkwardly between phone-to-ear and phone-in-front-of-me where I can see the screen. Obviously, having a headset solves this, but for most of my day I'm at my desk wearing headphones, listening to music, so to take those headphones off and, either at the start of the call or during it, put on different ones, is doubly inconvenient. Enter the A2DP device I mentioned previously, and some convenient headphones built into a lanyard. ( tl;dr ) |
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| Notes from a disk rescue |
[Jul. 3rd, 2008|04:09 pm] |
For 9 or 10 months, I've had a media server at home running MythTV on Ubuntu. It does the usual DVR operations and network streaming fairly well (there's only one tuner, so we can only receive one channel at once, but it's quite possible to, for example, watch two recordings at once in different places). On Monday, we noticed that machine was complaining of disk errors in syslog.
Rescuing 500GB is not fun, but ( ddrescue works - details mostly for my own reference ) |
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| The importance of providing clear diagnostic information |
[Jun. 29th, 2008|01:43 am] |
Telephone numbers for drama purposes (such as the Doctor's): surely these ought to return something better than [...] has not been recognised . Might I suggest: This number is imaginary. Please rotate it by 90° in the complex plane and try again. :-p I might also suggest that this show in particular, if they were going to put a number on the screen, could have used a valid one and put something interesting on the other end. Also, I would very much have preferred if there was some common substring to all the fictional numbers (like 555 in the US), such that they can be recognised without consulting that list. |
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| Headphone recommendations please |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|01:34 am] |
Further to my previous post, I now have convenient portable 3.5mm stereo output of music (phone/FM/PC) switching to phone calls (with a microphone for those). What I don't have is some headphones suitable for outdoor use. ( Complications )
Therefore, oh wise and generous friends-list, what should I use for my outdoor listening? Goals are comfort, sound quality, portability and road safety. Bonus points if they score sufficiently well on the first two that I'm happy with them for indoor use as well.
Edit: I bought the Philips SHE9600(s?). |
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| Picnic meme, last call |
[Jun. 21st, 2008|01:09 pm] |
This is a picnic meme. There will be a picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK, tomorrow (Sunday the 22nd of June), from around 2pm. We'll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it'll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun. |
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| My mobile might not be reachable at the moment |
[Jun. 17th, 2008|01:28 am] |
For the next few days, my mobile phone is not to be relied upon (and might temporarily appear to be a non-existent number and suchlike). After that, it will be reachable on the same number. Please use one of the other ways to contact me if you can't get through to my phone. Edit: This has now completed; the only remaining issue is I no longer have SMS receipts by default (Treo's carrier DB doesn't even give me the option, grrrr). |
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| Picnic meme reminder: Sun 22nd June |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|09:23 am] |
This is a picnic meme. There will be a picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 22nd of June, from around 2pm. We'll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it'll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun. |
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| Phobile moans |
[Jun. 12th, 2008|04:33 pm] |
Just over a year ago, I considered mobiles/PDAs and bought a Treo 680, a relatively hackable, well designed device on which, aside from phone calls and SMSs, I run a calendar, a to-do list (and general note-taking), an MUA, Tomtom sat-nav, Simon's puzzles, an OGG player occasionally and a few of the other 25,000 Palm OS applications. My mobile operator from 2005 until recently was dot mobile, a Vodafone reseller, which was priced for students, put minutes and SMSs in the same pot and offered GPRS at £1/MB. Unfortunately dot just went into administration and transferred me to Vodafone, whose terms are less favourable, and, fortunately or not, the 3G iPhone is about to arrive (and seems representative of the direction in which these devices are heading) so it looks like it's time for me to take another look at all of this.
( May contain ranting )
For the moment I guess I'll stick with the 680 and Vodafone move to O2 (see comments). I just wish I could use better hardware without it requiring such a locked-down OS as Apple's (or risking owning an iBrick). |
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| The case of the missing UPS delivery |
[Jun. 9th, 2008|05:13 pm] |
Did one of you lot send something via UPS to my workplace? Someone claiming to be from UPS called them on Monday 2nd (my birthday), asking if I would be in between 9 and 5 the next day to sign for something. My workplace told them I wouldn't (I was on holiday all last week); the caller asked for (and was given) three names who could sign for it instead. Apparently, no such delivery ever arrived. I've just called UPS and they say they probably have no record of any of this, but they can't be sure without a tracking number, which the caller didn't provide. Anyone care to own up? :-) Alternatively, does anyone know of any type of fraud or similar this caller might have been attempting? UPS said this type of call isn't generally something they do; they tend to only call if they have trouble finding the place or have failed to deliver something (and I quite often see UPS vans delivering successfully to this building), but they did say that a new driver started in this area last week. |
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| Doctor Who - speculation about Forest of the Dead |
[Jun. 6th, 2008|09:59 am] |
I have a theory: evire fbat vf gur qbpgbe. A relatively obvious possibility I suppose, but I'm still eagerly waiting to find out if it's correct. :-) Annoyingly, Maelstrom is this weekend. This means I have to wait slightly longer to find this out and I miss Strawberry Fair. |
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| Birthday meal (or, once more with organisation and tickyboxes) |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|10:42 am] |
Having failed to actually organise any birthday celebrations until the last minute, I shall retry. :-) On Wednesday 11th June at about 8pm, you are all invited to join me for dinner at The Fleur (menu PDF), accessible from Elizabeth Way (opposite Texaco) or Humberstone Road (where they have a car park). Also available on Facebook.
Poll #1870
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllRSVP
Edit: Booked! Feel free to turn up even if you haven't replied; they'll probably be able to accommodate you. |
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| Fun with transport, part 42... |
[May. 17th, 2008|09:12 am] |
This really isn't my week. Susan and I decided last night to go to Coventry for the weekend to see ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) si1entdave and friends. Unfortunately my car disagreed with this plan and became undrivable on the way. Dave is lovely and got us and our stuff to our destination, but I'm now scratching my head over how to transform a dead car near Coventry into a working car in Cambridge without making my bank account cry, if at all possible. I don't actually have any breakdown cover; I never got around to joining the AA...
As I've said before, why can't Coventry and Cambridge just be closer together? I'm sure there are enough bits in-between that wouldn't be missed. :-)
Edit: Fixed now. Nationwide Autocentre on Foleshill Road (Coventry) are to be recommended. |
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| It was going so well... |
[May. 16th, 2008|02:23 pm] |
That's my VM gone then. Three disks at once (possible reasons). :-( On the plus side, they're taking sensible measures to stop it happening again, so I think I'll stick with them for the moment.
Edit (2): all up and running again now. This time, I shall take proper backups… |
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| # Spammity spam, wonderful spam |
[May. 14th, 2008|03:15 pm] |
Now that I've set up that shiny new email configuration, I was interested in what actually happens to incoming SMTP connections. How effective are my various spam countermeasures? What proportion of incoming mail is genuine? Answers to all these and more, in the form of a delicious pie.  An SMTP delivery to my server will run through these checks in order, starting at 12 o'clock and going anti-clockwise.
It's interesting to note how easily I can turn a lot of spammers away. Anyone who sends a HELO hostname that isn't valid and resolvable, or continues trying to send mail when Spamhaus has listed them, is asking for trouble these days, yet spammers clearly still do so. Oh well, saves me some CPU cycles since I don't even get as far as SpamAssassin for those connections. :-)
A couple of things aren't apparent from the chart: address verification ("MAIL FROM is self or undeliverable") is only used for frequently forged sender domains where verification is known to work (including, obviously, my own). SPF before receiving the message didn't feature here because of the annoyingly high proportion of mail going through relays (my other addresses, occasionally a backup MX, etc). In those cases SPF is checked by SpamAssassin using Received headers, as is DKIM.
It's somewhat depressing, firstly that 77.5% of attempts to deliver mail to me are a waste of bandwidth, and secondly that I was expecting an even higher proportion. I don't think there have been any false positives here, except one or two marketing emails I didn't strictly ask for, which, really, aren't so different from spam and won't be missed. Obviously, shout if you've emailed me and it bounced. :-) |
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| My shiny new email config |
[May. 12th, 2008|04:50 pm] |
For just over a week now, I've had a Gandi VM handling my email and a few other services. ( Braindump: spam filtering / other tweaks, mostly for my own reference )
On the subject of spam, I can't help but wonder if some sort of global education campaign would help: Newsflash: The Internet is no different from the real world: not everyone is honest. Stop buying from spammers and the spam will go away. Someone, somewhere, is buying this stuff. That person needs to be cluebatted, hard, because spammers are seemingly not in jurisdictions that care about spam, so the only way I can see to stop them in the long term is to remove their market.
I haven't yet found a sensible way to keep a central list of contacts on the server; LDAP seems to be serious overkill but it's all Thunderbird and others will support. Does anyone know of a tiny LDAP server or similar for this sort of situation? For the moment I'll stick with my Palm Treo's contact list (which integrates nicely with mobile email clients) and keep typing addresses into the desktops I use. |
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cheerful
awake
geeky
pleased
annoyed
silly
frustrated
mixed
hopeful
sleepy
quixotic
confused
optimistic
2 (40.0%)
celebratory
blank
surprised