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This is a valid RSS feed

May 22nd, 2013

I fixed it up and earned this banner from w3c. [Valid RSS]

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Experimenting with an RSS feed

May 21st, 2013

Today I've written a small PHP script to convert my blog to XML and RSS. On the right hand side is now the RSS button with the feed. I'd appreciate it if someone who knows their stuff about this would send me an email if you noticed something wrong with this feed. Right now it only dumps the last 10 articles but I can make it higher or lower if need be. My PHP really sucks I noticed but somehow I managed to write this out.

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Second Video Blog (Vlog?) entry

May 21st, 2013

It's another bad hairday lol... I'm just very unkempt. :]

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OpenBSD fixes a panic I found

May 17th, 2013

I found a condition that made the kernel panic when I'd execute a certain code. It took less than a day to get an interested OpenBSD developer to produce a patch, after review it'll be committed before 5.4 hopefully. This is why OpenBSD and open source in general rocks!

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My idea for a virtual reality headset

May 15th, 2013

If you haven't heard of Oculus Rift then perhaps you're not reading the same literature and magazines as me. They are VR goggles at a reasonable price. Right now they are in development and we have still to see if they will make it out to the mainstream production. Anyhow I have thought of a useful tools for headsets such as these.

Basically I want to explore my computer for security and informative needs. What I envision is a filesystem displayed in a 3D environment ala fsn (see also fsv) by a program. This program also polls the kernel for events ala inotify and displays accesses with a pop-up or flash. This way a person can step back on the filesystem and gain the big picture. A replay function would be good so that one can investigate what happened.

Since in UN*X everything is pretty well a file this should unearth some questions hopefully, and then one has to search for answers. OpenBSD currently has no inotify mechanism, and I'm investigating whether it's worth it persuing this or whether my idea will be left for someone else... the decision process could take years same with the development process.

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Freifunk Schweinfurt is alive

May 13th, 2013

I have added an access point to my network. It is firewalled to shits but it lets UDP through. A wildcarddnsd is wildcarding the entire DNS tree from root to branch and gives out only 1 IP, it seems to work magic... here is the config file:

version "5";

wildcard-only-for "wildcard everyone" {
        0.0.0.0/0;
        ::/0;
}

zone "default" {
        *,soa,3600,miranda.solarscale.de.,hostmaster.solarscale.de.,1,3600,1800,7200,3600
        *,a,3600,192.168.32.1
}
So then I use redirection rules in pf to redirect all web and DNS to apache httpd or wildcarddnsd.
# grep rdr-to /etc/pf.conf
match in on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 53 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
pass in on em0 proto tcp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 80 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
The website says something like "dear neighbour, you can use UDP through this gateway but it's only outbound and doesn't return inbound". I have also rate limited how much can be sent, the rule for that is:
pass in log on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any keep state (max-src-conn-rate 1/20) 
This means that only 1 packet per every 20 seconds should emanate from this access point.

What I hope to achieve with this is that people will build their own SMS mechanism and send out SMS messages out via UDP to a gateway of sorts. It could be interesting for someone's car ie. as soon as the car pulls up in the parking lot next door it sends an SMS saying it's arrived at its destination.

This is no ordinary access point, you can't surf with it, you can't do much with it really. But it may delight someones nerdyness of what they can do. Non-nerds need not apply, and nerds in training are welcome. My next goal is to look at openwrt and see if I can better this access point somewhat.

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Crossing my fingers for Chris

May 13th, 2013

Tonight at 7PM EDT, Chris Hadfield undocks with two other Astronauts from the ISS. He's the coolest Astronaut I know of. Google for him and the ISS for some great youtube videos, they are really heart touching. I hope the landing goes well for him when he comes back to earth.

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Politics: I'm still a pirate

May 13th, 2013

I'm looking forward to the german election in the fall. I will be voting for the pirate party of germany as I think they are right on. My hope is that the pirates are going to overcome the 5% of votes needed to enter parliament. And then it'll be wake-up time for the bigger parties.

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Got a shot of moon and Jupiter

May 12th, 2013

By placing the camera on the railing of the balcony and putting on self-timer I reduced some of the jitter for the handheld pos camera.

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NASA Asteroid Mission, not a bad idea

May 11th, 2013

So what can you do with a chunk of mass? Well for one you don't have to bring it up by means of earth rocket. I believe the Americans are not being honest with us in some respect. Because the asteroid is either the forerunner or the initial counterweight to a lunar space elevator (see here). Even if this asteroid mission is a failure at least we can stroke out visionaries use of countermass being asteroids then. The asteroid as an LSE counterweight is gonna make the US a lot of money, in savings. They don't have to use precious fuel to land on the moon anymore but rather take the lift down to the surface of the moon. And that's where the money's at, at least in the foreseeable space-faring future.

I have drawn 2 LSE's roughly of how it looks like (one is international and the other belongs to the USA). The counterweights span from L1 to L2 lunar-earth orbit so the cables are around 100,000 km long.

Why do I think there is money to be made on the moon? Well for one the human space exploration is destined to go to the moon because we have too much space junk in earth orbit to sustain living there in reasonable safety. It is a fact that the ISS has to fire thrusters to evade space junk every so often and it takes supercomputers to figure out if any junk is threatening the space station. The moon on the other hand is still a space junk virgin. Also there is resources on the moon. It isn't just a dead rock made of silicon and basalt (in some respects I wish it was). No. There is elements that can harbour life as we know it, and we can mine the moon for resources. Take the fact that asteroids occasionally fall on the surface of the moon. These contain metals so they are just waiting to be mined. With a moon elevator the rocks could be sent to space and there they could be molten with an array of mirrors from the sun. By means of centrifugal forces the metal could be extracted and formed from the impurities. Then the pure metals could be brought back down to the surface of the moon to build further space capsules or a set of tubes that are part of the space bases that I think are inevitable. The trade between the moon and earth would likely be human cargo (such as specialists to better the industrial output of the moon) and data (on the far side of the moon there is no radio interference making it an ideal spot for radio-astronomy and SETI).

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