Funny things you can do with the unix command line and linux sex positions.
Memory shopping
Rich: Oh… another thing… what memory does the Macbook take? I was thinking about getting a single 512mb memory card (simm… dimm… whatever they’re
called these days)
Paul: DDR2 PC2-5300 667 MHz wooha.
Rich: I’m guessing ‘wooha’ isn’t a technical spec. :-) But with all the Korean OEMs you can never tell.
Happy Canada Day!
In honour of this, I’ll share a few facts about Canada. Here’s the first one: Most Americans don’t know Canada is their biggest oil supplier:
A new poll suggests that only a tiny minority of Americans — four per cent — know that Canada is the largest supplier of crude oil to the United States.
Take that, Saudi Arabia!
My daily WTF
The Daily WTF is a great source for humorous (and sometimes unbelievable) technical blunders.
About six years ago (before PEAR and such), I wrote a simple OO wrapper around PHP’s mail() function. I haven’t really touched the code, but I did slap a CC license on it last year.
Today, I got this email:
From: DANIEL CROWE <[email protected]>
Date: June 29, 2006 8:05:59 am PDT
To: ######@paulschreiber.com
Subject: PHP MAILER SCRIPT: BY PASS SPAM FILTERSHello Paul Schreiber,
I saw your name in phpclasses.org forum. I Humbly want
to know if you can write a php mailer script that can
send bulk mails and bypass spam filters. This is
needed to send bulk mails and delivers directly into
recipents inbox directly.Do contact me back to [email protected].
Hope to read from you soon.
Daniel
I’m not sure how to answer this one. As Mark-Jason Dominus explains:
Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form “How do I use X to accomplish Y?” There’s nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems.
Blueberry muffins
Ingredients
1.75 cups flour
0.75 cup sugar
1.5 tsp. baking powder
0.5 tsp. baking soda
0.75 cup orange juice
0.25 cup oil (canola)
1 egg
1.5 cups blueberries
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Combine dry ingredients in bowl. In a separate bowl, beat together orange juice, oil and eggs—use a fork or wisk.
Combine all ingredients. Stir in berries. Put in muffin pan (2/3 full).
Bake 25 to 30 minutes.
Sending email from cell phones
With my old Nokia 6340i, sending email was as easy as sending a text message — you selected Messages > Write e-mail in the menu, entered the email address, subject, text, and off it went.
When I got my 6620, I was disappointed to find out that feature had been removed. Sending an email now required:
- configuring the phone for GPRS (which is different for Cingular customers who, like myself, are former AT&T customers than for “regular” Cingular customers)
- entering my email address, SMTP server, username and password
- paying 3¢/KB (yes, per kilobyte)
- … and waiting quite a while for the message to go through.
My friend Arthur tipped me off to a much better solution last weekend. Simply send a text to 0000000000 (ten zeros) with the first word being the email address of the recipient, and the email will go out lightning-fast, and you’ll only be charged the text message rate.
(keywords: cingular at&t sms text message cell mobile wireless email)
Update: Simon notes that this works on Cantel Cantel AT&T Rogers Cantel Rogers Cantel AT&T Rogers AT&T Wireless Rogers Wireless and passes along this handy tip sheet.
I found a FAQ for Cingular subscribers as well.
Funny stories from England
British girl describes (in hilarious manner) her (mis)adventures. Stoeis include how to travel by coach, avoid “religious nutters,” and what to do when approached by women carrying clipboards.
report smoking vehicles
I’ve called 1-800-EXHAUST a couple times, but it’s good to know bay area residents can report smoking vehicles online as well.
LAX “security”
Qantas Airways chairman Margaret Jackson was detained and frisked at LAX last year:
She said her briefcase had contained detailed plans of a new aircraft, including cross-section diagrams showing seat layouts, Australian newspaper the Herald Sun newspaper reported Wednesday.
“The guy said ‘Why have you got all of this?’,” she said.
“And I said, ‘I’m the chairman of an airline. I’m the chairman of Qantas’. And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, ‘But you’re a woman’.”
security screeners don’t
Bruce Schneier brings more bad news about US airport “security”:
It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently (see also this), testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn’t the “underwear bomber.”)