Category Archives: General

Powercut in Italy

I read in the paper yesterday that a serious powercut hit Italy the day before. Granted, it was on Sunday that the powercut happened but I was shocked that such a major event escaped under my radar until Monday evening. UserFriendly is the first mention I’ve seen of it online, but now that I’m looking for it, I found it on rte.ie too.
There’s an expression here, “Ireland is closer to Boston than Berlin”. The reference is to economic policy but holds too for English speaking media which is sad.

Modem upgrade

For ages I’ve had to use an internal winmodem (using the closed-source hcf drivers available online), but Owen gave me a USR external modem yesterday which I just replaced my old modem with. On booting Linux, Kudzu recognised that the internal modem was removed and configured the new external modem!
The only problem I had with kppp was a “NO DIALTONE” error in the log. Doh! I forgot to plug in the telephone cable!
The external modem is faster, apt-get runs at 5.9kb/sec instead of 4.4kb/sec, and there’s no annoying stutter when the modem dials.
Thanks Owen 🙂

The latest works – optical illusions

Don’t look at this page if you tend to get migrane as some of the images here will probably set off a major headache if you look at them too long! These optical illusions look great, and I wonder why all those demo coders spent so long doing mandelbrots and full-screen anims. They could have simply used an optical illusion and let the viewers eyes do the work!

Spamassassin – scoring on DSL lines

Since upgrading to Spamassassin 2.60 yesterday I’ve noticed a (small) increase in false positives. There were only 4 out of 132 spams caught overnight, but almost all were from dsl or dynamic IP addresses. The default score for this test is 2.5, but if you add the following to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf you can change the score:

score RCVD_IN_DYNABLOCK 0 1 0 1

That’ll give it a ‘1’ instead of 2.5 which is probably more reasonable. (Ironically, most of the emails caught were from “Karsten M. Self”, a critic of TMDA, who posts directly from his dial-up machine!)

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.