Ugh, ill

I be ill. I've spent all weekend with a fever followed by chills followed by more fevers. It's some sort of cough or chest infection with tonsilitis. Liz has been looking after me, except she now has it too. I went to the doctor's and, while listening to my chest she noticed I have a rather nice cluster of moles on my back which she wants to keep an eye on - so I'm going back on Thursday to have them photographed. I wonder if I could ask them to frame it for me? That'd make a good talking point wouldn't it? After a dinner-buffet, while nursing a brandy and discussing the past, to show the guests the picture of the cluster of moles on your back. "And that was last year, imagine what they must look like now".

Maybe I'm letting my imagination go a bit too far with this one.

Air - Premiers Symptomes

I found this fercheap in a charity shop in Aberystwyth last weekend and have been listening to it on repeat since. Amazon had been advising me to buy it for quite some time but, to my credit, I controlled myself. However, if you like Air, you will almost certainly love it.

SpamWars update: Looks like BlueSecurity is coming back online. Here's hoping they get the frog back online again soon.

Curbing Spam in Gmail

As BlueFrog appears to be dead in the water (pun only partially intended) I've had to resort to my old method of spam control: Filters. While GMail filters my spam automatically and does a splendid job of it, it annoys me slightly that it will put a number next to the spam folder which is the total number of unread messages in that folder. Like I'm going to read my spam. I know it's petty, but it irritates me. BlueFrog solved all that as it marked spam as read once it had been reported, thus saving me a job.

So now I've started to build up my list of email filters once again. One interesting thing to note since the whole spam-wars started is that spam is getting simpler to filter again, they're spending more time blasting millions of these emails out rather than trying to make them more difficult to filter. And so without further ado, here is a nice little list of filters you can put into GMail to filter out the current load of junk mail that is making its way through th system.

These filters could potentially lead to false-positives depending on the kind of content you get in your emails, but in my case it's certainly not likely. These filters have reduced my spam in my spam folder from about 35 a day to 2.

BlueFools

BlueSecurity have made complete and utter fools of themselves. They finally managed to get their site back online again yesterday with a defiant message against the spammers. "Great", thinks I, "we shall be able to keep fighting the good fight". What I didn't know was that the pillocks had simply set their domain to point to their blog on TypePad. No I do not kid. The DDoS that had taken their site down was now headed straight towards the Six Apart network, thus killing TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type and all the other Six Apart hosted sites.

What a bunch of fucking morons. Now their site appears to be completely down, as does BlueFrog. I'm 100% pro-frog, but 100% anti-shifting-a-DDoS-onto-someone-else's-network. I'm guessing that this one very stupid move may signal the end of the BlueFrog. They've fucked up good and proper and the spammers will now win. Way to go BlueSecurity.

Full Story

Blue Frog - (and the Spam War)

I meant to write about this the other day as it's very important news, but I completely forgot. Those of you who actualy visit http://ma.ttlowe.co.uk to read my blog (as opposed to using the RSS feed) may have noticed a new addition to the page: A "bluesecurity" logo which links to their site. I placed the logo on my blog to show my support for the Blue Frog spam reporting tool. Here's the gist:

Blue Frog is a plug-in for your browser (and a few mail clients) which interacts with your webmail. It automatically trawls your spam folder and reports any new spams it find in there to bluesecurity, who analyse the mails and then do one of several things: They start by submitting opt-out requests to the site that originated the email, and the company the email is advertising on behalf of. They also maintain a "do not intrude registry" which they make available (in a secured form) to spammers and tell them "if you intrude on any email in this list there will be retribution from the entire community". The great thing about all this, is this:

It's working.

The spammers hate it. For every spam they send out to a blue-frog protected member they get an opt-out request back. They seem to think they're just "trying to make an honest dollar", but they're killing people's inboxes. They're breaking the law (Blue-Frog only reacts to non-can-spam compliant emails) and they need dealing with. This is the first time we've seen the spammers running away from a spam protection utility, because they realise they can't contend with it.

However one or two have tried to fight back (although that was kind of inevitable). The bluesecurity website was DDoS'ed for most of yesterday and is just back online again today. Luckily the blue-frog website was secure and the system remained operational. There was precious little information coming from the blue-frog people, but then they were probably busy dealing with the huge spike in spam that's been reported over the last few days.

It's now a war against normal people and spammers - although the spammers seem to think it's a war against bluesecurity and spammers. Bluesecurity are standing up for real people who just don't want to receive this crap in their inboxes each day. So download Blue Frog now, and help take back the Internet!

Emo Rangers

Emo Rangers on Google Video - I think I briefly caught sight of my sister in that video.

I've been having lots of weird dreams lately. The night before last I dreamt that my Mum and I were opening a food shop (or possibly a restaurant, I'm not sure anymore) in a shopping centre. While I was sorting some stuff out, a man walked in and offered to sell me a bottle of soy sauce for $400. I've no idea why he was selling in dollars. I thought it was a rip-off, but my Mum was interested. Next thing I know, there's me, my Mum, the bloke with the soy sauce and someone else who I think was a solicitor, all sitting around a table discussing the possibility of a sale. I was trying to coax information out of the seller about what made this soy sauce worth $400, and how buying it would ultimately benefit us. At that point I woke up thinking "what the- ?"

Last night I dreamt about, in no particular order:

...and that's only the stuff I can remember!

Ant-Weight Robot

I binned my old digital camera the other day as I never use it and the thing is older than a really old thing. I bought it while I was still in secondary school and it was cheap even back then. Before I binned it, though, I had the good sense to remove the flash card from it. Turns out that the flash card reader on my laptop can't handle it as it's too old, but the printer's flash card reader still has a slot which is perfect for it. So I just plugged it in today and loaded the pictures off it to see what was on there.

Well what a pleasant surprise: a load of old pictures of an ant-weight robot (sort of) that I built years ago for a bit of fun. I think it would have been either at the end of my first or the end of my second year that I built it. I remember taking the picturs, but thought I'd lost them all forever, but there they are!

This is an image of the Ant from the side. It was a very simple construction, made from bits of old radio controlled car kit. The two large wheels were from an old Meccanno set I have, and were attached to the servos using medium length wood-screws.

As can clearly be seen here, there was no "body" on the 'bot as such, just two pieces of bent card which kept the machine the right way up. Sticking out the top can be seen a wire which is, by the looks of it, one of the servo leads.

In this image the battery is more obvious and, if you look closely, you'll be able to make out the radio receiver box at the very front of the robot, underneath the two elastic bands. The front piece of bent cardboard, which was very important to the construction, can be clearly seen. This piece of cardboard prevented the 'bot from tipping forward when decellerating or reversing.

The battery, seen at the back of the robot was a standard 4.5 volt lantern battery which powered everything, as I recall.

The two servos were operated independently and each was on its own radio channel meaning that they were controlled completely independently by the driver (ie me). It meant the 'bot could go forwards, backwards, left and right or even spin on the spot. Albeit rather slowly. I'd love to say "but what it lacked in speed it made up for in power", but I'd be lying. It may have managed a bit of power if those wheels had had some rubber on them, but we'll never know.

The servos presented one of the biggest challenges in creating the ant, as servos are designed for controlling other devices; not driving things around. Therefore they have a limited degree of rotation and are full of controllers which allow the servo to know how far away from its central position it is.

But of course, I wanted the servos to do one thing: spin when I tell them to and stop when I tell them to.

This meant dismantling the servos and taking a knife to the gears inside. I had to strip a bit of plastic off the main spur gear which, if left in place, would have meant the gear could not have made a full rotation. Then I had to use a drill-bit to strip away some plastic on the inside of the gear (where it rotated). The purpose of this was to disable the mechanism that allowed the servo to know how far it had rotated and therefore did not stop rotating.

The servos were then blue-tac'ed together (I kid not) and then the radio receiver was held on to those by way of the two rubber bands in the picture, as was the battery. And possibly some more blue-tac.

As a first go, and as a very quick bodge-job, I personally think it wasn't bad. Sure it wasn't going to win any combats, but then I didn't build it to fight it. I built it to see how it's done. Building actual combat robots is an expensive hobby, and one I don't (currently) have the money to take up. But maybe, just maybe, one day...

Red Bull

From Brits are Bad Drinking Buddies, an American's take on drinking in the UK. Yes Burt, that's the website of the dude who made the graph paper PDFs.

Actually I could very well believe that we, as a nation, milk foreigners of their cash. There is a perception in this country that foreigners don't understand our money and have tonnes of the stuff to throw around. It's perhaps slightly unfair though to say that all brits are just out to get free beer off any American who should happen to show up.

I do like that quote about Red Bull :-)

Addition To The Family

I took Liz to Uffington Castle yesterday in order to do some stunt kiting and, on the way back, we ended up buying a lovely little baby rat who we've christened Katinka [Ingabogovinanana]. We're hoping we can introduce her to Hansel. This is the first time we've bought a female rat, she'll have to be spayed before she can be introduced to Hansel. We'd probably have her spayed even if she wasn't going to be introduced to another male though, as it greatly reduces their risk of cancer. One concern is that Hansel can be a bit of a pain sometimes, and if he doesn't take to her then we'll probably end up introducing her to Minsc instead.

In other news, I've been bitten by the bug of two old hobbies: Kiting and R/C cars. As I already mentioned, Liz and I went up to Uffington yesterday to fly my old stunt kite, and now Liz wants one :) Sadly the wind conditions weren't anywhere near as good as I had hoped they would be. And when we got home I took my Granddad's old Tamiya Thunder Shot Quick Drive R/C out for a spin. I found the rather funky turbo switch on the back of it, and so was able to bomb it around the car-park out the back for a while, pulling some sick skids and wheel spins :-D I reckon it's worth a mint as it's still got the original box and everything.

Talking of things that are worth a fortune... I've just inherited an old Atari 2600, boxed and in mint condition... plus a Toshiba MSX and 3 boxed Sega Megadrive II consoles!

Long Weekend

Hope you guys all enjoyed your Easter weekend. I personally spent it doing lots of driving, helping to move rubbish out of my Grandma's house, bagging stuff, driving it to the tip, throwing it around, driving back, helping my sister clean out her horse's stable, coughing and sneezing. Great stuff.

Yesterday Liz and I went down the allotment and did some more work down there. It's actually looking like a real allotment now. I'm hoping to get the old composter working properly (so far it's managed to produce some black slime) and then we'll be able to get some nice compost into the soil. Turns out some cunt has half-inched our rake, so we'll have to get another one. I believe we'll be able to get one from my Grandma's house, luckily.