http://wargeeks.org/blog.php The War Geeks Clan Community Forums en Sun, 20 May 2012 03:18:47 GMT vBulletin 60 http://wargeeks.org/images/misc/rss.jpg http://wargeeks.org/blog.php http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/10-Google-is-deliberately-trying-to-annoy-me Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:48:04 GMT I think Google is deliberately annoying me. I first noticed this issue... I think Google is deliberately annoying me. I first noticed this issue with the Google Talk client. I allow the client to store my password, so it can sign me in automatically, which it does, most of the time. Some times, however, it refuses to sign in and gives me an 'Invalid Password' error. Really? From a stored password? If I retype (my rather lengthy) password, the client happily signs in, and I can continue with my life.

I have been using gtalk for quite a long time, and never had the issue. Then it started happening every few days or so, and then it stopped doing it for months at a time, and now it happens again. It never does it to me with the Miranda client I use while at work, and it hasn't happened to me on my Droid.

It seems, now, that the issue has migrated to the web sign in facility.

I have a LOT of Google Accounts, so it stands to reason that I let my browser store the password for my accounts to make the sign in process less painful. In the last short while or so, particularly with this "new" sign in system, I am getting the same damned issue. I can understand them invalidating my cookie for GMail so that I have to sign in again, but then NOT accepting my auto-filled in password? Really? So now I have to re-type the stupid thing there too.

Why, Google, why? ]]> TG http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/10-Google-is-deliberately-trying-to-annoy-me http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/8-Experimenting-Again Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:15:04 GMT I am hexperimenting with booze again. Not so much in the Flatspin manner,... I am hexperimenting with booze again. Not so much in the Flatspin manner, but rather in the mixing and creating manner.

This time, it's Chocolate!

I have:
1x bottle of Count Pushkin vodka... probably not the best choice, but I don't think it's the worst.
1x bottle of Evan thingymabob bourbon - although not too badly priced is definitely not a bad bourbon. Shaped very much like a bottle of Jack.
9x Bar One (100g)

Each bottle was decanted to around the half-way mark, and then stuffed full of chopped up bar one until the alcohol reached the neck. Re-sealed the bottles (ie, put the tops back on), and stuffed them in the freezer where they will stay for approximately two weeks. Every day or so, I'll give the bottles a jiggle just to help them dissolve. Theoretically, after two weeks there should be some nice chocolate-ish liqueur, considering the bar ones are mostly nougat.

This is not something that I've completely sucked out of my thumb; I read some articles about doing this, although in the articles the authors used mars bars, and didn't try experimenting with bourbon. I, for one, have high hopes about the bourbon, as it has a fantastic "woodsy" scent, which I think will go well with the chocolate. I'll update everyone after approx two weeks have passed; if I remember.

This is not the first time that I have experimented with "infusions". I have previously created some flavoured vodka infusions.
Some things I have learned about that experiment:

1) If using a citrus fruit, use the flesh only. DO NOT include the skin, as it will make the liquor much too bitter, even if you sweeten it with sugar.
2) If making a chili infusion, do not use the crap chili's they sell at pnp. Those are usually cayenne peppers and they are frikkin' hot. And use gloves when handling them. Ouchy.
3) Don't make a chili infusion.
4) If shooting for a cherry infusion, DO NOT used glazed cherries. While it works, it tastes bleh. Using various bottled cherries in water have worked reasonably well, but I still want to try this with fresh cherries (which were very scarce to find at the time I was messing about with this. I happened to spot some fresh ones just the other day.)
5) Use a decent vodka. Russian Bear is awful... trust me, I've used lots of it.

On a side note, while I was getting the booze for the choc experiment, I also grabbed a bottle of "Van Gogh" black cherry flavoured vodka (I LOVE cherry flavour!). Damn this stuff is smooth - and has a fairly decent flavour.
I also grabbed a bottle of Vat 69 scotch. This is the stuff that Capt. Nixon carts around with him in Band of Brothers (fwiw) (Thanks for the reminder Gas). Definitely not a bad Scotch. ]]> TG http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/8-Experimenting-Again http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/7-Tolkein-anyone Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:40:34 GMT To my utter shame as a nerd/geek, I have to admit that I've never read Lord of the Rings. Here's my story:

After watching all the geek films and stories in the wrong sequence, I decided I better do it right. The Hobbit is the prequel so it has to go first. Tolkien was after all a master of the best book of the last century. Unfortunately it was NOT the hobbit.

The hobbit is set in the LOTR's Middle earth, before the LOTR but after the scene setting wars and Isildur's chopping Sauron's finger off and so on. Golem has found the ring and lost it and the story is about Bilbo Baggins finding it. And also giant spiders, a special sword, and a hundred and one other nifty odds and ends that make handy plot-hole sealant.

The story is illogical, badly motivated and not very credible. I'm not talking realism, I know its fantasy. I mean suspension of disbelief is not happening. Tolkien hates some of his characters so much that he just keep raining crap on them from start to finish, and they end up taking the brunt of the blame, even though they're supposed to be misguided good guys, with plenty enough of bad guys to go around. Mostly he hates dwarves in this one. It put me off Tolkein so much that I could never again muster the motivation to read LOTR. Sux for me I guess.

Finally, because the motivation of the story is so lame, Tolkien pulls not a rabbit, but a dragon out of a hat. Bilbo succeeds where everyone smarter, stronger, better and more noble than him have failed, on his own dumb luck and lots of help from the author. I've read a book by Clive Cussler once where he wrote himself into the book as a holiday maker who stumbles upon the trapped, wounded hero and rescues them. The hobbit does worse.

So after that ordeal, I didn't have the strength of willpower left to read LOTR, but I did watch the movies. The first one really, and eventually saw the rest when someone else rented them. They basically work on this "went there, did that, met that guy who helped them, went there, did that," etc etc cycle, so if they really deserve all this hype about best book of the century, I bet a lot was left out of the movie. In fact I pray it, or I'll lose all hope for humanity's ability to judge books.

If after that rant you still want to see a Hobbit move or (god forbid, several) Peter Jackson is making it. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...-hobbit-films/ He's apparently had a lot of trouble getting a cast, crew and everyone else. When his director abandoned him he decided to do that himself. But there you go.

PS. Wish I could spell also LOL. ]]> GeroW4lll http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/7-Tolkein-anyone http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/6-Encrypted-email Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:30:10 GMT Image: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png So I started fiddling...

So I started fiddling about with email encryption again today, for the first time in years.

OK so it's not really foolproof (see comic). Because I generally refrain from felonious behaviour and terrorism, I probably don't need it. Who is really interested in spying on my private emails anyway? Right?

But I just get this paranoid feeling when I'm about to hit send on that PG13 rated love letter (hehe). I hear that email is just about as secure as sending a postcard. All the people at the post office can read your postcards, including that weird guy in the sorting room. He might also be sniffing or licking it. Ewwww. In the same way, anyone with access to any of the mail servers your message travels through can read it. Not to mention that anyone sniffing your packets (heheh I used sniff and packet in the same sentence) can invade your privacy too.

Since I use Mozilla's Thunderbird already, these instructions from Life Hacker came in quite handy. I upgraded the instructions by using this file http://ftp.gpg4win.org/gpg4win-light-2.0.4.exe which is a newer version of GnuPG for Windows, and selecting GPG2.exe when asked where the executable was.

The Enigmail addon for Thunderbird makes this absolutely the easiest way to encrypt email in Windows. It seems in Linux it's commonplace.

I tried to set it up on my work notebook on Outlook, but it doens't work on Microsoft Exchange server yet. Microsoft apparently didn't document the addon interface for Outlook so well, so the GPG developers are having a tough time. For my family I could set it up on Outlook with difficulty on a pop mail address, but errors including decrypted mail occasionally left on the server is some of the known problems.

Finally on Outlook Express it will never work as there doesn't even seem to be an add-on interface. I did install GPG on the pc and I was able to encrypt and sign a message, and to decrypt the reply by copying the encrypted gibberish block and pasting it to the GPG clipboard crypto app. It's nifty enough but cutting and pasting is really clumsy compared to the Thunderbird solution. I better just move all my family over to Thunderbird. ]]> GeroW4lll http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/6-Encrypted-email http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/5-Have-to-put-this-somewhere-PGP-key Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:45:59 GMT -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (MingW32) ... -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
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Please stop ruining our nasal passes
with the vile putrescence that smells like asses not flowers,
that arises from your footsies all the time.

Your constant annoyingly bad habit
of removing your socks, dagnabit
and wiggling your wayward toes while
throwing them vomit inducing socks about the house
makes our eyes water and if bottled could be used to delouse Punky.

E'en the cockroaches are dead
from the smell in their head;
The awfulness that comes from your toes
is enough to shrivel one's nose.

Please, dear sister, leave your shoes on at all times,
lest we come to arms with rods and steel
and weld some odour-proof boots
onto your heels.
]]> TG http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/4-An-Ode-to-Stinky-Socks http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/3-Insurance Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:35:58 GMT I am sure you all are more or less familiar with this situation. You have... I am sure you all are more or less familiar with this situation. You have an accident, often it's the other person's fault, and they have no insurance. Which means that depending on your damage, you either have to rape your savings or claim from your own insurance. It happened to my ex-GF only recently and she was mighty effed off about it.

Where I come from, it is illegal to drive a car if it doesn't have at least Third Party Liability insurance. Cops can pull you over and ask for proof of insurance. You cannot drive without being covered for damages you may cause to others. By my logic this is right. I once had an accident that was only half my fault, and the other party was uninsured. However, they were very vocal in demanding compensation from my insurance. But had it been their fault - who can I claim from?

Recently I read an article that some people high up are thinking of making Third Party Liability compulsory in this country. It would certainly piss off a lot of people but ultimately it would be a step in the right direction. You can't expect others to pay their insurance so you can be compensated in case of an accident if you're not willing to do the same.

What's your take on this? ]]> rainy http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/3-Insurance http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/2-Beware-the-domain-scammers Fri, 21 May 2010 13:59:52 GMT Back in 2004... Back in 2004, I wrote about a company doing domain scams - trying to scare people into thinking that someone else was trying to register domain names that are similar to their own. It seems this practise has become very popular, as I am seeing many of these types of scams going through various mail systems. I try block them where I can, but you can't stop em all. They mostly seem to originate from China these days.

So, just be warned, that if you get an email from some company - particularly from China - that "someone" is trying to register your "intellectual property" (as they tend to call it), just delete it. It's a scam to try get you to register domain names that you don't need at incredibly high prices. Personally, I usually respond with a 'Fuck off', but that's just me. ]]> TG http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/2-Beware-the-domain-scammers http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/1-Stuffs-I-get-up-to-when-bored Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:55:04 GMT So since I have the attention span of a gnat, I get bored VERY easily. So... So since I have the attention span of a gnat, I get bored VERY easily. So I find things to do.

My latest thing (that I started this past weekend, amongst all the other crap I ended up doing), is bread making. This very manly pursuit is something I've never tackled before. Having done a bit of research (Google is your friend), particularly in to sour doughs, I gathered the things I'd need. Sort of. I bought white bread flour, brown bread flour (called 'Nutty Wheat'), and some digestive bran. Oh yes, and a few sachets of dry 'instant' yeast.

As I didn't have any sourdough starter, my first attempt would be a plain loaf of bread.

I only had a vague idea what I was doing. As I wasn't following any particular recipe, I had no idea as to the quantities to use, so I winged it. I took two cups of the nutty wheat, and two cups of the white bread flower (both Snowflake brand, if anyone cares), and sifted it into a bowl. Added 2 tsp salt, 2 tblsp olive oil, 2 tblsp sugar (for the yeast), 5-ish grams of yeast (half a sachet), and 2 cups of water (more or less). After stirring it for a bit, I dumped out the bowl contents onto the floured counter top and then folded and kneaded the dough. After I was happy with the consistency, I rolled the dough into a ball, and dumped it into the now clean and oiled bowl, covered it, and left it to rise for an hour.

The biggest drawback to this whole exercise is our oven. It is a fan oven, but the temperatures get a bit hinky; like it will be hotter in the back. So based on a tip I read, I dug out an old cast iron pot with a lid. I cleaned it up a bit, oiled it nicely, and then sprinkled bran over the bottom of the pot. This is to prevent the bread sticking - it works very well.

I finished up with the dough, let it rise again in the pot, while the oven heated up, then shoved in the whole kaboodle. I kept the lid on the pot for the first 10 minutes, and then I removed it. I also sprayed the top of the bread with water, as this is supposed to give a nice crispy crust. It seemed to work.

30 minutes later, I took the bread out of the oven, upturned it onto a cooling rack (bran = non-stick), and left it to cool. Turned out very well, if I say so my self. And my fussy kids liked it too, so it can't have been too horrible.

The next day, I made another loaf, this time using the white bread flour only. I also added some blocks of cheese, and bits of onion. It came out very nicely.

Since I didn't have a sourdough starter, I decided to make my own. It's fairly easy, but depending on your environment, can take a couple of days before some wild yeast shows up. For me, I noticed my starter bubbling up on the second day already.

Assuming the starter doesn't go moldy, I'll give it a bash this coming weekend, and make my first sourdough bread. ]]> TG http://wargeeks.org/entry.php/1-Stuffs-I-get-up-to-when-bored