Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text
I noticed this on voidstar.com, a document containing instructions for turning off HTML email sending in about a zillion mail clients, excellent!
Inside Nikon’s D70 factory
There is a interesting look inside the Nikon D70 factory in Thailand that is set to produce 800 000 D70's in 2004, interesting pictures etc.
The projected production run for 2004 is 800,000 units of the D70 camera body from the Nikon Thailand factory. The D70 has been eagerly awaited world wide by photographers because it is the first Digital SLR camera body to challenge the immensely popular Canon 300D (Digital Rebel).
Nikon has gone Canon better this time and produced a camera that has capabilities so far not available at this camera's price point and some capabilities not available before at any price point. Although prices may vary in different regions, the current battle between Canon and Nikon is for the US $999. digital SLR camera market.
FBI shuts down ISP to investigate 1 person
I noticed on Boing Boing Blog a story about the FBI shutting down a whole ISP, shifting its servers to their HQ for data mining purposes in order to investigate a single suspected attack launched from their IRC servers.
This is a truly shocking example of the kind of freedom that Americans really enjoy, the privacy of citizens is non existent if the FBI can just pitch up and copy terabytes of data not belonging to the individual they are pursuing. Read all about it on the poor ISP's News Page. This is the kind of story that a few decades ago would be shoved in your faces as an example of the atrocities of Communism by these very same self righteous Americans.
The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host. According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.
After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.
UPDATE: This is covered here as well, link via slashdot.org
First Nikon D70 reviews
I am dying to get my hands on a Nikon D70 that was announced last December and again in January, so far they are not in the shops and no-one can get their hands on demo models to write about them.
A few preview reviews have been published but nothing major yet, I came across another today that was not mentioned before by a non-commercial reviewer and so far I have to say I cannot wait to get my old kit sold and buy the new camera.
The annoying thing is Nikon is not doing anything at this point to feed the hype, even the sample images that were released are of pre-production models and traditionally the difference in quality can be massive. The UK suppliers are taking pre-orders and quoting early March delivery, I hope they are right 
UPDATE:
I noticed a lot of people come here looking for sample images taken with the D70, here are a few links I found on-line to help you guys out:
dpreview 1 (lots here, read the whole thread)
dpreview 2 (lots here, read the whole thread)
Here is a shot of the box and its contents:
box and contents
And some more online reviews:
www.hardwarezone.com
dpmac.com
The Viagra Prank
The Viagra Prank is a must read! Thanks to Jay Allen for posting the link its a hose.
This guy takes you through the process of buying viagra from a spammer and testing out some of its insane claims, a good laugh!
Web log spamming scum.
For anyone who has been reading my pages about Fighting email harvesters and other unfriendlies. using .htaccess and other methods, here is a new one to add to your black lists.
ac903d6b.ipt.aol.com - - [18/Feb/2004:22:41:30 +0000] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "http://blog.johnkerry.com" "StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004"
Hopefully this is some hill billy John Kerry fan (Presidential candidate) and not the man himself being silly.
Collection of my black and white photos
A few weekends ago I was bored and it was too hot to go outside so I started playing with some of my nearly 4 000 photos that I have taken over the last 4 years.
I wanted a good selection of high contrast black and white photos and finally settled on 72 of my favorites. Eventually I had to get that down to 20 and today I have a collection of what I consider my 20 best photos for the black and white medium. I have a number of photos that contains people in various activities and specifically did not include them here, watch out for them later on.
The photos were all taken with either a Olympus C3000z, Nikon 5700, Canon IXUS v3 or my latest camera a Canon IXUS 400. Be sure to have your display to at least 1024 x 768 for optimal viewing. Any comments would be much appreciated.
The photos are here, all the work is licenced under the Creative Commons license that allows you to copy and display as long as you give me credit and do not modify it in any form or use it commercially. I have printed some of these in larger formats and they do come out quite nicely, if anyone would like prints I will be glad to oblige.
A Home User’s Security Checklist for Windows
I first noticed this via Roland Tanglao but I think he has a misshap with the link, some googling soon found the right url, it is a quick annotated checklist on how to run a secure windows machine at home, useful to give to some people who run ADSL connections on their windows machines and such.
Great experience on SAA domestic!
This weekend I flew Cape Town Johannesburg and back on SAA. I was very impressed.
Everything went right, I did my booking using voyager miles that I accumulated over the years and paid a grand total of R175 for my return ticket. I cannot remember a single detail about the flight that was wrong, the air planes were nice and big inside, lots of leg room and overhead storage room. The staff was super friendly and helpful - even greeting in no less than 5 languages, the food we were served on both flights were very nice and the flights ran perfectly on time.
I misread my return ticket to Cape Town and so missed the flight, without a single hassle at all they booked me on a later flight, even waiving the R75 ticket change fee.
Excellent and a huge improvement from the last time I flew them, its good to know you actually get something for your extra money you would pay.
Microsoft critical font update
Today I noticed my Windows Updated is telling me to update my Bookshelf Symbol 7 font and that it is marked critical. Immediately interested to know what is so critical about a font I read the knowledge base article which says:
A critical update is available to remove unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font that is included with Microsoft Office 2003. The Bookshelf Symbol 7 font is contained in the Bssym7.ttf file.
After some googling I came across the following statement from Microsoft:
Microsoft has learned of a mistake in the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font included in the Microsoft Office System client applications. Due to an unintentional oversight, we failed to identify, prior to the release, the presence of two swastikas within the font. We apologize for this and for any offense caused. Microsoft is taking immediate measures to remedy the issue for all customers.
Some further reading up about it got me across the following blog posting where someone points at legit use of swastika's, I think the world should just get over it and move on, this kind of censoring is insane.
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- I love the E4 ipad ripoff ad http://srt.ly/epad
- RT @garnaat: The only accurate model of the system is the system itself. All other representations are a compromise. <- what he said
- Parallels announces support for Google Chrome Operating System http://bit.ly/aCXXCJ
- RT @brunns: RT @jaywgraves: This is pretty awesome. http://bit.ly/aJ12Gb
- Kelway are totally wicked hardware suppliers. Threw away a £100 cable by accident, they gave me a freebie replacement
- Police stop runaway Toyota Prius http://bit.ly/904jED
- Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby http://bit.ly/cttcgQ
- RT @lochii: http://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic <-- mosaic now on github, yay!
- RT @littleidea: What does DevOps mean to me? http://bit.ly/alzrta #devops
- QCon presentation take #2 done I think, need to rehearse a few times now. Wonder if the iPhone remote for keynote is any good
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
Categories
Archives
Licence
