Small cars for tall people – state of the nation July 2013

My PRIMARY method for adding a vehicle to my “to buy” list is based on whether I can sit upright with good posture and still see out of the windscreen. I don’t care if I have to slide the seat all the way back and down, if I can sit upright and see, it’s on my list. If the only vehicle I could buy on the market cost $50k and was bright pink - I’d have a good look around the second hand market, then buy that pink money pit.

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ADSL Slow? Here’s a quick help rant.

So, someone posted about their ADSL speed on Facebook, then asked me about how they can make things better. Meanwhile I got in a bit of an argument with a guy who runs one of those back yard computer shops because he said wireless would make a ~5mbit ADSL connection slower, and copied and pasted generic garbage from Bigpond’s help pages to back his point up. Ugh.

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Scanned!

I’m running through our deployment of Riverbed Cascade at the moment and was checking traffic to an external host, noticed that it had gotten a hit from researchscan010.eecs.umich.edu on port 80. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if it was responding (having research in the name) and it did!

Cute 🙂

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My first SCA Fighting Bruises

I got authorized on the weekend, having some test bouts against Niall and Liadan, the crown prince and princess (and my good friends). It was an honour to fight them, and get clubbed like a baby harp seal. 🙂

Now I just have to learn to let the armour take the hit instead of my flesh 🙂

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HTC One X Volume “stuck down”

Driving to work this morning I tried to set my phone to make noise, since it’s on silent when I sleep. I unlocked it, pressed the volume up button, and it stayed stuck on silent. I could drag the volume slider up, but it’d instantly flip back to silent again.

Tapping the little speaker icon to set it to vibrate worked, which was odd. I thought the button was broken/stuck on, but it wasn’t showing the volume setting all the time, so.. meh?

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Don’t laugh…

“Of course I won’t laugh ,” said the Nurse to the patient , “I’m a professional. In over twenty years I’ve never laughed at a patient.”

“Okay then,” said Bob, and he proceeded to drop his trousers, revealing the smallest adult male organ the Nurse had ever seen in her life.

In length and width it was almost identical to a AAA battery.

Unable to control herself, the Nurse tried to stop a giggle, but it just came out.

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Statseeker + VMWare ESX = Time Stopped

It seems that if you’re running a host that’s running ESX 5.0, there’s a bug with FreeBSD VM’s which causes the internal timer to just freeze. It’s fixed by a patch released for ESX version 5.0, or upgrading to 5.1.

This came up with a FreeBSD 8.3 guest running our Statseeker instance where the time just up and locked, then refused to go forward. A reboot would fix it, then it would lock up again at some arbitrary point in the future.

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OpenVPN gateway inside Mikrotik router

I set up an OpenVPN endpoint at home so I can connect to my home network and access resources relatively securely and easily. Originally this post was me beating my head against the table to get it right, but I finally did before I hit publish, so I could post it as a success!

Quick design specs:

  • My internal network is 10.0.0.0/24
  • The internal gateway is a Mikrotik RB750G on 10.0.0.1
  • The VPN gateway IP is 10.8.0.1, and the same machine has 10.0.0.2 on the internal network.
  • The  VPN client(s) get assigned an IP in the range 10.8.0.0/24
  • Authentication’s done by certificates

The “pretty” view of the network is as follows:

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Spam of the year

 

This was posted as a spam comment on one of my posts today, and was so spectacular I couldn’t help but post it up. Putting it as text would have just helped the crazy monkey become more legitimate, so here it is in an image form, for your perusal. 🙂

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