that's one kilogram of chipotle morita, smoked mexican chilies.

today i'm out of chilies. 8-(

taking into account the 100g that i gave to a friend, i have a chili mileage of 2880 seconds/gram. i'm sure that factoid will fascinate you beyond limits.

-- karl kraus, wobei es sich fragt, ob der kraus über die (erlogene!) gschicht mit dem verschlampten hitler-brief gelacht oder gewettert hätte.

(see here if DSW is not a term you're familiar with...)

i've been reminded that my original pam_recent module couldn't support ipv6 because iptables' recent module didn't do so. nowadays that is no longer true, and i've just updated the module to version 1.11 which plays nice with ipv4, ipv6 and dual-stack setups.

here is the original post about pam_recent for context; the newest version (with documentation) is here.

"clearly we can't have that! so, up the pain!" must be mozilla's official line. point in case: firefox 31. (inflicted upon us as a security update from debian's marginally bearable ff24.)

by and large humans are pretty lemming-like and flock to the "oh, shiny!" but when it comes to FF 31 the natural reaction is more like "booh, shitty".

the ui layout is plain stupid. the options and choices are gone. it's less usable than all the older versions of FF. it's a memory hog. it manages to both waste more screen real estate and show less useful information simultaneously, which is quite a feat.

An editor is a tool for saving programmer-bukkake to disk. -- Anthony de Boer

oi! mozilla team: less wanking. please.

(unfortunately there are no real workable alternatives: midori isn't flexible or solid enough yet, and with chromium the stoopid never goes below 11.)

fortunately there are lots of other people who also hate the default setup and have spent some time cooking up useful extensions for getting FF back into a workable state:

• the classic theme restorer does most of the necessary heavy lifting.
• status-4-evar restores a useful status bar.

source: andrew bath's site

source: the ever-topical and refreshingly nasty First Dog on the Moon

wenn man das schiache enterl nach einem stückl text vom ambros fragt, dann bekommt man als allererstes resultat meine doktorarbeit zurück.

(auch bei der elendigen bagage isses noch nummer zwei.)

das find ich recht lustig - und passend, weil ich den text im vorspann zitiert hab: bei der arbeit gehts um kooperation, paranoia und misstrauen.

So the local *unspeakable* *elided* with the big ambitions, glib tongues, short memories and minimal brains have decided to play the "nasty evil terrorist" sock puppet once again - very likely because

• it's convenient for justifying all kinds of absolute abuse,

• the sheep will nod their heads and be suitably subdued by your fear mongering propaganda,

• and you never have to substantiate any of your divine inspirations - because you can always just handwave some soopersekrid rule that says you're not allowed to say anything about those "threats" - but hey, they're "imminent! honest, trust me". bwuahahaha...

As we all know pretty well there's a ridiculously low risk of the evil bad torrorists (who are obviously "everywhere" according to the *unspeakable*s) terminating you, yes you!; much lower than the risk of you getting mushed by traffic & croaking, or slipping in your bathtub & croaking or...gazillions of other causes.

As a matter of fact i'm quite sure that you're much more likely to be killed by your own government (or one of its allies and sundry henchmen) than by the nasty oh-so-ubiquitous terrorists.

Refuse to be terrorized! (and please do enjoy your noodles)

(dear english readers, sorry but that's all quite utterly untranslatable.)

wenn ich mir die letzten 40 jahre globale realpolitik anschauen würde dann wär mein resume 'mehr verlogene scheisse als die "seriösen" politiker kann so eine krach-rosa bettina auch nicht anrichten, und da wärs zuschaun wenigstens lustig.'

They are pretty cheap to buy, nowadays, but I prefer making my own if possible - that has the added benefit that I get to understand how it works (or why not).

The intertubes have linked to that diagram for ages, but that one doesn't work. The diode needs to be installed blocking the MAX's TTL output connection, not the input.

This is because the Yaesu radios use the Dallas 1-wire "bus" system, which works by holding the line level high when idle, and to transmit either of the two parties pulls the bus low (for different amounts of time to signal 0/1).

With the diagram as shown above the MAX's pull-up output overpowers the Yaesu's minimal current sink when it tries to pull low, so its transmissions go nowhere.

With the diode blocking against the TX pin, the Yaesu can pull the signal low to send and the MAX TX pin level is isolated. Transmitting to the Yaesu works because when the MAX pulls low, current flows across the diode and the Yaesu sees the low level. Slightly weird, but it works.

Here's the trivially simple Yaesu programming cable that I whipped up:

one FTDI breakout board (I have lots of MAX232s around, but dealing with the extra 5V power supply is less appealing than just using a cheapy usb-to-rs232 module), one diode and one dismantled 4-pin/TRRS plug.

CHIRP works fine with that cable and both my VX-5R and VX-7R.

"Gold Coast Show Day" - das ist ungefähr so weltbewegend als wie ein Kirtag in der Provinz irgendwo hinter St. Blöden.

Mehr weltbewegend find ich das Feiertags-Faktum an sich; etwa so unglaublich als wie wenn in Wien alle frei hätten und alles zu wäre, weil's in Sopron den "Tag des Kukuruz" zelebrieren.

I find the new 'good & cheap' cookbook by Leanne Brown pretty cool and very inspirational - and it's free :-)

Cooking for just myself isn't my idea of fun, but a number of the eminently practical ideas from Leanne's book I've already used successfully.

I'm lucky in that I don't belong to the prime audience for her book, however; for me the appeal lies in her simple, straightforward, low-to-no-frills and fast-ish cooking projects.

I just finished rebuilding an Ikea Jansjö lamp into a portable camping lantern. It's not quite Luxo, Jr. but it'll do.

The Jansjö has a very long flexible neck, and to me that's the most essential aspect: it lets me have light on the table surface without having anything to suspend a lantern from. All the other common camping lanterns suck in that regard as they need to be suspended - or they produce lots of glare and no light on the table.

The Jansjö has one 3.5W white LED and needs 4V. I threw away the transformer and the concrete weight for the base, then glued the base to a plastic cylinder that once held 25 dvds - that has just the right diameter and has space for one adjustable LM2596-based step-down converter, and one set of repurposed laptop lithium cells (four in series).

Very simple, same XT60 plugs as all my other rechargable stuff, and packs up reasonably small.

(alternate title: patience, grasshopper...)

Recently I complained about the underwhelming replacement receiver, which my readers (yes, all ten of you!) might actually remember.

The issue wasn't just that it was doing poorly in stereo mode, but rather that it didn't drive the main/front speakers worth a damn. Next to no sound even with the volume at 11.

Well, there's a reason for that Sony box not doing its job - and I found it and fixed it. Poring over the service manual (yes, there is one and I found in less than an hour) after work today I thought Hmm, mostly digital, zero adjustments, few discrete components. As it's a deader I might as well open it up and look for obvious problems and/or gut it.

(For the youngsters out there: "service manuals" are magic tomes of arcane knowledge, hardly heard of on this side of y2k. In the hands of a wiza^Wstubborn old phart these can provide great enlightenment.)

Alas, no obvious leakers of the magic smoke presented themselves. So, after staring at the circuit schematics in the service manual a lot more (yes, I have no life), I decided that checking the power amp transistors and the driver IC would be Good Things To Try, given that the manual specified test voltages for them.

This meant a total disassembly of the box as you couldn't get to any of the test points from above. A while (and hundreds of screws) later I had it all in pieces. The transistors proved to be ok. The driver IC wasn't testable with everything disconnected.

A bit of online research revealed that these driver ICs (NEC µPC2581V) do run very hot, are not unheard of dying themselves and easily fry components in the vicinity. Sony didn't put any heatsinks on them in this model and a number of electrolytic caps were basically touching the IC cases - and there's your problem.

These caps weren't testable in circuit, so I started desoldering. Three out of the four that I replaced were cooked, one still had some marginal capacitance left.

Lots of screws later, a final function test: the thing works! Evenly firing on all channels. Hooray for being stubborn!

(Never mind that this exercise took me a good five hours this evening, and that in the meantime I had given up on the Sony and replaced it with a NAD T741...)

Two weeks ago my old, well-used and -liked Yamaha CR-840 receiver lost its magic smoke - literally: Sparks, loud popping sounds, and a fair amount of smoke - in the room, not in the electronics where it belongs.

Being the cheap bastard^W^Weconomical person that I am, I started looking for a slightly more modern replacement. This may have been a mistake. *sigh*.

In the end I bought a Sony STR-DE695 'AV' receiver for $70. Well, the FM receiver part of it is junk - it receives very little. With the same (admittedly lousy) roof antenna I get a quarter of the stations. Sensitivity, zilch.

And that newfangled 5.1 stuff? I begin to think that it's just a shorthand for "5 speakers and 1 sad sucker" . My much older Sanyo (mid-70s, 2x2 speakers in Glooorious Stereo) sounds heaps better than the new thing. What the Dolby PL this and DTS that and 'NEO' whatever does to stereo inputs sounds pretty underwhelming - at least to me.

I'd seriously consider to disconnect my center speaker (again) and just drive the other 2x2 speakers as two stereo pairs - if only the Sony wasn't so totally anemic when run in stereo mode...

So, am I in danger of becoming a total loonie audiophart? At 42 I certainly qualify for the Old Fart part, but I'm not so keen on the Audiophool side of things. At least I'm nowhere near ordering vegan 99%-fat-free hand-spun oxygen-free enchanted platinum-plated triple-distilled bespoke cables for digital transmission...

There are very good technical reasons for why SMTP has an envelope that is separate from the mail headers. DMARC ignores those completely and insists that the envelope matches the mail body and headers.

Net result: DMARC completely breaks mail forwarding and mailing lists. The fun part for anybody running mailing lists (like me) is that there are no alternatives - to appease the DMARC cretins you'd have to violate real mail standards or make your lists broken by disabling useful features of proven efficiency (like VERP) and exposing all your subscribers to bounces and other crap.

In the physical world DMARC would be like prohibiting blank envelopes and requiring that all letters must have the full letter head printed on the front of the envelope.

"this letter contains a new credit card - please steal me!"

Clearly only cretins would think that's a good idea. The list of cretins who insist that DMARC being a great idea includes yahoo, aol and hotmail.

I hope yahoo's dumb move does serve to 'improve protection' - by prompting people to go to somebody more sensible for their mail hosting.

bundjalung n.p. was pretty nice, if busy and very windy. we had a good time nevertheless :-)

...für sonst nix gut aber immerhin brauchbar als Anlaß für Feiertage.

Bissl ein Kontrast: In Ö feiert man jeden noch so mickrigen Heiligen - hier in AU hauptsächlich die Scheinheiligen.

Start with this:

Minus all this:

Plus this:

Gives this:

It's somewhat obvious that I have spent a bit of money at subaXtreme, isn't it.

Weird coincidence: just a few days before the coffi^Wpallet arrived a total bimbo bumped into my car: I was waiting behind her in a right-turn lane, she committed to turning, successfully crossed the two lanes of oncoming traffic - and then suddenly decided, for no good reason whatsoever, to reverse back across those lanes...all the way into my bumper - thunk.

I guess the new bar will be pretty good not just for the silly roos but also for brainless suburban bimbos.

It's pretty obvious that 15.875mm is more than 11.1125mm. It's certainly not immediately obvious that 5/8" is more than 7/16".

(and by immediate I mean "at a glance, without mental effort".)

A few weeks ago I was wearing my Nirvana shirt (x-eyed smiley on the front, "flower sniffin, kitty pettin, baby kissin, corporate rock whores" on the back) and waited in the queue at the supermarket.

A woman behind me asked me what kind of company I work for: she had read the t-shirt text and thought it might involve gardening or rock walls...

nachdem jetzt langsam österreich nimmer andauernd mit The Sound of Music (falsch)verbunden wird, werdens wohl beim thema österreich jetzt für die nächsten 50 jahre mit dem komischen würschtl daherkommen. wunderbar.

my father wanted to know what kind of car i drive; apparently the soobies aren't exactly common in austria? - at least that was his excuse for not associating my answer ("2006 forester") with anything. well, here you are:

the elevator billboards in the office building lobby have not shown the correct weather screen a single time during our four months there. mind you, the stock tickers are current down to the milli-cent, but the weather? "feels like undefined".

i on the other hand feel reasonably good about work, what i do and who i do it with. sure, the last five months have been pretty busy and occasionally quite stressful but that comes with working in a small startup.

it's nice to be able to make a difference; the downside is of course that you do make a difference, whether you want it (e.g. having a stroke of genius) or not (e.g. having a bad day slogging through hard-to-grok undocumented complex tangles).

but i'm not complaining, except that i'm often too tired come saturday morning to even consider going flying - and that, combined with the vagarities of the wind & weather isn't ideal...

why? well, i've just rebuilt my blog engine to use markdown instead of raw html and homegrown hacks. (i had to rework surprisingly few articles, and grep, xargs and of course perl took care of that pretty quickly anyway.)

what, you thought i meant having tw*itter, freakbook, gargle and sundry 'social' garbage buttons on my site? YGTBK: in my book all that stuff belongs to the category 'naughties' and i'm not naughty.

another evolutionary change:

i've just finished the rebuil the site's engine using mojolicious instead of HTML::Mason 1.x.

i did it mostly for the fun of it, partially because i needed more mojo mojo for work anyway, and last but not least because HTML::Mason and mod_perl2 are somewhat uneasy neighbours.

...is really still great; I've been offering a mirror of it for almost 15 years now (but the link has changed a bit); the official version nowadays comes as html in frames (yuck), with the plain variant well hidden...

"Sie, mein Herr, sind ein Scheißschweizer."

too bad that the bastards in power will likely not give a damn...