sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb

Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

Links:

Linux Weekly News,
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Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
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Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.

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Fri, 29 Jun 2007

Geoquest was fun, my report is on its way. - 17:30
So I had a good time up at Geoquest, thanks to Craig, Danealle, Bruce and Brendan for racing and to James, Zoe and Jane for supporting. Also to Aunt Jude and Grandma for moral support, additional help, all the food, etc.

My report is on its way, I know no one wants to hear excuses so I wont provide any... I thought I had only written a few words but wc claims I have 5500 or so in there already and I am only half finished. 

[17:15:59] 126 oneiros sjh /tmp/digicam/geoquest07>wc index.html 
 1139  5501 41252 index.html

I have 99 photos and 5 videos with the report this year too. Anyway when I finish writing the text, hopefully this weekend sometime, I will let my team and support crew have a geeze and then if they like it share it with everyone.

[/mtb/events] link

I wonder what we can dream up for xkcd - 17:16
A while back I wondered if xkcd should do a strip about the reaction of a hard core geek when they first learn of the existence of xkcd, how the person in question disappears for a number of hours not to surface until they have read the entire archive. I think it is a bit self referential to ever actually be in a strip though.

The rather interesting post the other day I read critiquing the art in various online comic strips pointed out how xkcd is not at all worth commenting on re art as it is not about that, also it pointed out that UserFriendly also is not about art, both are simply geek cliques or something. He may have a point, though I have to say in the case of xkcd especially it really does not matter as the content is so brilliantly funny to geeks it rally appeals. A counter to that is the point that it goes completely over the heads of most people. I tried showing xkcd to my sister a while back and she simply did not see the humour.

Anyway my latest idea for an xkcd, with thanks to DanielS for providing the source material (his apartment in Helsinki flooded) that lead to the idea. Wouldn't it be fantastic to have the floors in your house freeze over with ice and you could ice skate around your apartment.

[/various/ilmiwac] link

Sun, 24 Jun 2007

So many axes so little time - 17:15
I stumbled across this Buffy quote the other day "Buffy: I now have my weapons categorised from A to Z, from axe to... zee other axe"., definitely got me smiling. Thus I am wondering, can I think of an axe for every letter in the alphabet just to complete her weapons categorisation that may just be entirely made of axes.

A: Axe
B: Broadaxe, Battle Axe
C: Climbing Axe, Copper Axe
D: Dareg Axe
E: Ettin Axe
F: Firefighter's Axe, Frankish Axe
G: Gothic Axe
H: Hatchet, Halberd, Huribat
I: Ice Axe, Irregular Axe (yeah so I made this one up to accompany Regular Axe)
J: jey'naS (double sided klingon battle axe)
K: Klingon Battle Axe ('alngegh (single sided with a spike) or jey'naS (double sided))
L: Lumberjack Axe, Light Axe, Labrys
M: Maul
N: Nail Axe, Nzappa zap
O: Ono (japanese)
P: Pollaxe
Q: Quality Axe (thanks Brad)
R: Regular Axe
S: Spike Axe (this could almost be a specialist weapon in Buffy <g>), Star Axe, Stone Axe
T: Two Handed Axe, Throwing Axe, Tomohawk
U: Undead Killing Axe (again thanks to Brad, this is Buffy after all, I am sure she has such a weapon)
V: Valaska (Slovak), Viking Axe
W: Wood Axe
X: X (which is indeed an Axes, thanks Bill)
Y: Ye Olde Axe (another one from Bill)
Z: Zee other Axe

Thanks to Bill for X and Y, thanks to Brad for Q and U.

[/various] link

Thu, 14 Jun 2007

Office at the airport - 11:38
I was interested in Jon's post today detailing his experience of flying into Brisbane for work and that he liked not having to leave the airport at that end.

It does indeed add a lot of time (and cost) to get into a given city from the airport, in the case of Sydney it is often far easier to simply drive there from Canberra for work rather than fly and then commute to some location from the airport.

So the above reasoning is to some extent the thinking behind the Brindabella Business park offices spread out around the Canberra Airport. Companies and government departments can maintain a Canberra presence and yet make it a lot easier to do business with people from out of Canberra. Also the airport owners here want to make money and having offices pay rent on their land helps with the making money side of things.

The one negative I find with these offices is the location, to get there by bike you have to traverse a rather unfriendly road for a while and on busy mornings it can be difficult to cope with the traffic. This is obviously the Canberran in me speaking as compared to other cities it is nothing of note, most of the ride there is on lovely bike paths or through quiet leafy suburbs. (and it is only a 20 minute ride from the ANU area).

[/various] link

Mon, 04 Jun 2007

A Google mail complaint - 20:46
So like all the other sheep in the world I do have a Gmail account, though I do not use it for anything much or tell people what it is. However a while ago I set it up such that it will forward all email received to my main email address. Then I subscribed the account to a mailing list I found was not delivering to my normal address correctly for some reason.

So far all of this sounds fine, however I noticed over the past week there were a fair few email on the list I seem to have missed. I logged into Gmail and found it had rather nicely stopped a bunch of spam. However it had also stopped 42 list email in the past month or three. So I went through all the spam it had stopped and marked the list mail as not spam and thus they were moved into the inbox.

Now I thought to myself I simply have to forward (or bounce) all these 42 email to myself (there is no option to reprocess them with the default forwarding rule). Unfortunately this can not be done, there is no way to mass forward or bounce email to another location. Sure I could open every individual email and forward them, but that would take forever, and I admittedly would prefer to bounce them to me so the headers remain as they should be (bounce being a feature Thunderbird also does not have even though there have been open bugs against Mozilla mail since Mozilla was open sourced, but that is another rant for another time (I am aware there have been thunderbird plugins to do this sometimes but they tend not to be up to date)).

So looking through the help files for Gmail I find they are serious that there is no way to get more than one email at a time sent on. They suggest enabling pop3 and downloading the mail. Okay so I can do this, however upon trying it is about to download all the email that has ever come through to Gmail, not just the stuff in the inbox. I only want a local copy of these 42 email, if only it were not so hard. I guess I have heard of API's for Gmail that may be the next place to look.

Admittedly I use mutt as my primary email client and am not at all familiar with Gmail so I may be missing something but so far my rather specific needs are hard to come by. I guess at least I do have access to all my email data there rather than it be closed off and locked away somehow.

[/comp/software] link

Sun, 03 Jun 2007

Telstra Whitepages has a different idea of NSW than some - 17:28
I noticed today when looking for a friend's address on whitepages that Telstra seems to think Jerrabomberra is in ACT rather than NSW. All searches I do for anyone I know out there with NSW selected as the state come back empty. However when I change the state to ACT they all come back with matches. I wonder why Telstra seems to be unaware that all the people living out there have to register their cars in NSW and vote in Eden/Monaro for state and federal elections.

Of course I found it got even stranger when, on a whim to see if they knew about Queanbeyan being in NSW, I searched for some friends in Queanbeyan. If I select state as NSW I get some matches with some names. When I change the state to ACT I get completely different matches on the same names. I guess it is nothing new to see Telstra confused and not quite accurate or useful but still it is kind of weird.

[/various] link

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