Awaiting Netcraft confirmation of its demise.

A funny Rammstein cover:

https://alfter.us/2021/06/17/who-knew/

School board wonâ(TM)t end face-diaper mandate, so parents toss them out, elect replacements, and end the mandate themselves:

https://alfter.us/2021/04/30/school-board-wont-end-face-diaper-mandate-so-parents-toss-them-out-elect-replacements-and-end-the-mandate-themselves/

More accurate temperature readings, and the ability to go to higher temperatures than with the usual thermistor:

https://alfter.us/2021/04/29/pt100-max31865-skr-1-4-turbo-marlin-how-to-get-it-all-working/

Adventures in custom electronics:

https://alfter.us/2021/04/22/a-password-manager-in-your-pocket/

https://alfter.us/2021/04/14/just-a-little-bit-warm/

New control electronics in one of my 3D printers causes somewhat of a Salvador Dali impression.

https://alfter.us/2021/04/13/hooray-for-old-firmware-in-shipping-hardware-p/

A bit of a rant on devices shipping with old firmware that doesn't work right when newer firmware is available that does work.

So I quit the sewer known as Farcebook a few months ago...took 11 years of posts, pictures, etc. with me. Some of them were automatically duplicated on my website as I posted them; the rest are in an archive I downloaded before letting the delete script do its thing.

Perhaps it's time to start posting a bit more often here again. :)

See Have Bruce Perens Keynote Your Confference at perens.com

OpenLDAP (slapd) has always been one of the trickier things to have to deal with. I'd have a hard time figuring out what the fuck kind of magic shit needs to go into slapd.conf to deal with some interoperability problem, but Google is everyone's friend. Invariably someone else has had the problem first, and so I'd just look up the magic incantation and that's that. It wasn't too hard.

But that was old versions of slapd. They've changed how you configure it.

Have you seen recent versions? The slapd.d database? slapcat followed by ldapmodify? OMFG.

Words cannot express my hate. The man-days lost. Fuck you, slapd team! What were you thinking, you evil pieces of shit?!?

I realized that I had not topped up my /. subscription in some time and went to do so. Saw this:

"Please Note: Buying or gifting of a new subscription is not available
at the moment. We apologize for the inconvenience. This downtime though
does not effect your current active subscription in any way. We will
keep you posted on the latest"

Any idea what's going on? Are they sticking to a pure ad model (all blocked anyhow, but I did like to subscribe as I like the ol' barn.)

(Someone speaking to an intern): "When you send stuff like that, save it as doc, not odt. That way, people who don't have Openoffice can open it."

Last September I went on the most amazing thing ever: the first ever Motorhead's Motorboat! A heavy metal cruise full of great bands that went Miami - Key West - Cozumel - Miami. Four days of partying and heavy music.

They're doing it again this year. I've already pre-booked on Motorhead's Motorboat this time around.

Perchance did any of you go on the first or looking at this one?

So 104 people were killed by police in the USA during August, 2014. To my eyes, that's an absolutely enormous figure. As a Brit, I compare it to the 1 person killed over 3 years by the UK police. Yes, they're two different countries, yes there's a lot more people in the US, yes they have different cultures, yadda yadda yadda; people are dying here.

Let's do some maths:

• Population of the USA: 319 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/bpotuf9)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot in August is then: (104 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.000033%

That's a scarily huge percentage, given that it's normalised by population. Bear in mind that police in the USA are not ... shy ... at shooting at suspects, and neither are they 100% accurate. Some of the casualties are in fact bystanders.

Now let's consider extrapolating for the period of time that most shootings occur (i.e.: suspect between the ages of 15 and 40), and see how that changes things:

• Chance to be shot over 25 year period = (104 x 12 x 25 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.0097%
• Rounding that, since this is an extrapolation, we get 0.01%

Now that's an amazingly large percentage chance of being shot dead by a policeman. Let's do the same thing for the UK:

• Population of the UK: 65 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/kzsalbe)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot over last 3 years is then: (1 x 100%) / 65,000,000 = 0.0000015%
• Therefore percentage chance for a person to be shot in August 2014 is 0.0000015 / 12 / 3 = 0.0000000427%
• Therefore percentage chance to be shot over 25 year period is 0.0000000427 x 12 x 25 = 0.0000128%

Compare 0.01% and 0.00001% and remember these are normalised by population. Yeah.

Turned 0x30 on Christmas Eve. That sounds better than 48. I expect to start acting 20 when I hit 50.
insert goatse link here.