Those with iPhones will be delighted to find that Pants in Motion now has a mobile theme! Now you can read my rarely-updated blog more easily!

ENJOY!

I was already up to date with my WordPress updates, and so should you be too if you want to avoid hassle. The most recent releases can auto-update themselves so it’s worth going through a manual update yourself (which only takes a few minutes) for the peace of mind that comes later.

And here’s a helpful link.

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/

Note to self:

When you measure out a distance between two spots on the floor, REMEMBER TO ADD A COUPLE OF METRES for slack! And for the distance between the switch and the hole!

What a waste of time and money. Back to Jaycar I go to get 15 metres of ethernet cable instead of 10!

A few weeks ago our naughty greyhound nommed through the ethernet cable that connected the router in the geek room to the switch in the front room, killing Net access for the PS3 and stopping the Airport Express from seeing the network. I got around it by switching the Airport to act as a wireless client and bridged the switch through it, dropping the connection speed from gigabit down to about 60-megabits. Good enough for my purposes, until Crumpet bought an iPhone.

Now, the current iPhones don’t have 802.11n networking, so I had to rip the network apart and start again. It’s working, but the connection between the two rooms has dropped again, to about 10-20 megabits, which is just painfully slow when you’re trying to copy a 2Gb media file to the PS3 to play.

I figured I’d have to run another ethernet cable under the house – not a problem now that we’d put up wire fencing to stop the dogs getting under there. Problem was I bought Cat6 cable instead of Cat5e, thinking it would be better-shielded against all the electrical wiring under the house. Cat6 is a right bastard to fit into an end connector designed back in the Cat5 days, and that kind of connector is naturally all I have!

I finally got one end (excellently) wired up and tested this evening though, and I’ll do the painful undoing of the wire fencing and crawling under the house tomorrow. I needs me my gigabit ethernet!

I just got a notification that a video that I had uploaded to YouTube contained audio that had not been cleared by Warner. YouTube had automatically disabled the audio.

Now, I am a believer in fair use. I credited the band in question and didn’t use the entirity of the track, plus it was overdubbed with the sound of cars going around a track, so it wasn’t something you’d want to steal.

As I’m apparently not allowed fair use anymore, I decided to delete all my YouTube videos. Why should I promote bands if I’m just going to be slapped for it? Good luck getting people to buy your music if they don’t know it exists, Warner. And thanks for not defending fair use, YouTube.

I bet this is the sort of thing Crumpet would like me to write for her.

If you value a free Internet, you might want to join me in the city.

Has anyone tried using the Netgear ReadyNas Duo as a media server with the PS3?

If so, can you play .mkv files and other media files not normally supported by the PS3 with it?

Really? That’s your question?

I just got this email. How many problems can you see with it?

From: europeean.securedbanks@yahoo.com
Subject: Security Issue
Date: 26 November 2008 6:51:14 AM

Dear Customer,

We are collecting information about our customers for verifying our database that recently was hacked. We cooperate with the EU and US banks so we can process the mails and the accounts faster. If in the next future you receive a mail from another bank please reply our message to the bank that contacts you so they can know that you already been contacted buy us. As you see, email is in plain text so we can better protect you from html phishing. Please DO NOT click on any links that could appear in this email. To protect your privacy and acconut information we need you to reply to this mail with the following information:

Personal Info
Name :
Country :
State (ONLY FOR US RESIDENTS) :
Billing Adress :
Zip (optional) :
SSN :
Phone :

Bank Information
BANK NAME :
Account Number (optional) :
Credit Card Number :
Name That Appears On Card :
Expiration Date :
*CVV2 :
PIN :

*You can find your CVV2 on the back of your credit card (3 digits number)

Thank you for your cooperation!

Sincerely yours,
FCB Customer Service.

It’s amazing. They weren’t even motivated enough to make a bogus website.

I need to start writing some letters to my local Member regarding the planned censorship of our internet. I doubt I’ll do as well as this stunning example.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” – H L Mencken