2011 archive

webcam mark II

Upgrading the slugs to squeeze killed the webcam. At first I thought that squeeze was missing the necessary gspca drivers, but no, a quick look in /dev revealed an entry for video0 and “lsmod” reported “gspca_zc3xx” loaded correctly. This is a different driver to that which my camera loaded in lenny (spca5xx) but a quick …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/09/27/webcam-mark-ii/

squeezing the slugs

Debian 6 (squeeze) has been the current stable version since February 2011. The latest version (6.02) was released in late June. I have put off updating my slugs from lenny (old stable) for a while because I wanted to see how others faired before committing myself. Indeed, initial reports on the debian arm list indicated …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/09/26/squeezing-the-slugs/

my wife bought me a kindle

"speedbump" cartoon by Dave Coverly

I feel it only right to add to the post below by noting that my wife bought me a Kindle for my birthday. I have since found one useful aspect to electronic publishing. A Kindle can reduce the weight of your luggage when going on holiday. But I still prefer the “real thing”. “Speedbump” cartoon …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/08/14/my-wife-bought-me-a-kindle/

in praise of dead trees

cartoon of man buying e-book

As an unashamed gadget freak I suppose I should applaud the rise of the e-book in all its wondrous forms. But actually I much prefer the “real thing” (TM). Some while back I became involved in a series of email exchanges about e-books in general and the Amazon Kindle in particular. That exchange made me …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/08/14/in-praise-of-dead-trees/

what time does the pub open

I wanted to check the opening time for a local shop and petrol station this morning so I plugged in a query about opening times to my favourite search engine and hence came across a rather useful little wiki called, not unnaturally, opening times. That sort of single purpose site is exactly what makes the …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/08/14/what-time-does-the-pub-open/

who are you going to call

Like most email users I get my fair share of spam and other internet crud. Mostly I ignore it, but I received an intriguing email a couple of days ago which purported to be a mailer daemon “Delivery Status Notification” informing me of a failed delivery to some address I had not even heard of. …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/07/18/who-are-you-going-to-call/

one reason I don’t use apple

Being a linux and FLOSS fan has its advantages, not least the fact that most, if not all of the software I would want to use (and indeed, /all/ of the software that I actually do use) is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. And given the much smaller target …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/07/02/one-reason-i-dont-use-apple/

I know I shouldn’t do this

image of alpha.gov.uk webiste

but I just can’t resist it. The Cabinet Office has launched a trial version of a new central government portal called alpha.gov.uk (snappy title). This trial site is a taster for what the designers hope could be a “new, single UK Government website”. I cannot help but be amused by the fact that one of …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/05/11/i-know-i-shouldnt-do-this/

irony is not dead

Installing counterize to analyse trivia’s logs has been instructive. I now know that some of my most visited pages are consistently those of a “how-to” nature (in particular, those about postfix, dovecot and, strangely, reflashing the old BT home hub). In many ways this is satisfying since one of the objectives of this blog is …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/03/29/irony-is-not-dead/

from russia with love

A few weeks ago I installed pflogsumm on my mail server in order to automate my mail log scanning. For some time I had been conscious that my mailer had been rejecting a lot of mail with “user unknown” but I had never really investigated that in any depth. Running pflogsumm over the logs on …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/03/27/from-russia-with-love/

no police here

screenshot of www.police.uk website

The UK Home Office launched a new crime statistics website today at www.police.uk. The site is supposed to show “Local crime and policing information for England and Wales”. I’m not entirely convinced of the merit of the site in the first place (and can see all sorts of potential objections arising in some of the …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/02/01/no-police-here/

is my computer off

This site is probably even more pointless than most webcams, but it, and the site it was inspired by, amused me. Having found this, I just had to register a similarly pointless domain of my own. So now I am the proud owner of theinternetisoff.net Make it your home page. You know it makes sense. …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/29/is-my-computer-off/

now I feel bad about blogging

El Reg has a wonderful ROTW post here. One “Matt Kracht” lays into an article by Andrew Orlowski about P2P bitorrent users saying: “I hate… no, I *loathe* when bloggers try to move to online news sites. If there’s one thing that web 2.0 has done, it has fucked up journalism so bad that nobody …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/27/now-i-feel-bad-about-blogging/

I guess they do it differently over there

nimbus 2000 sheeva plug

I came across a potential new entry to the “slug replacement” competition today in the shape of a 2GHz Sheeva Marvell based plug computer by Ionics called the Nimbus 2000 (all the company’s products seem to be named after cloud types – wonder why). In addition to that rather fast ARM CPU, this little beast …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/26/i-guess-they-do-it-differently-over-there/

wordpress setup

I have just added a couple of new plugins to this blog and tidied up some old cruft that I had been meaning to get around to for a while. One of the plugins I have added is a really rather good statistcs tool called Counterize II. It provides a very quick (and impressively comprehensive) …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/24/wordpress-setup/

click here

The Cory Doctorow article referenced at the end of the post below mentions URL shorteners as potentially dangerous because they completely obscure the actual URL you will be taken to if you click them. By way of experiment I thought I’d post one here just to see how often it is used.

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/23/click-here/

damn, I think I got hit by a 419er

I am normally pretty careful about my on-line security and privacy. I take a lot of care to ensure that my home network is nailed down tightly and all the clients and servers on it are also nailed down as well as I know how. I don’t use software which is susceptible to the majority …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/23/damn-i-think-i-got-hit-by-a-419er/

critical security update to wordpress

This blog comes to you courtesy of those excellent free open source authors who have contributed to wordpress. Unfortunately, in common with all software, wordpress inevitably has some bugs. Worse, some of the those bugs can occasionally be sufficiently bad as to make the software vulnerable to remote exploitation by ne’er do wells and other …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/04/critical-security-update-to-wordpress/