Cape May Vacation 2010

Here’s some pictures and a slideshow from our vacation to Cape May this year. If you don’t have a Flickr account you’ll only be able to see a few of the pictures since I have it set that only friends and family can see them all (just trying to protect everyone’s privacy.) It’s free to sign up though and it’s way better than putting all you pictures up on Facebook. Let me know if you want a DVD with the slideshow and/or the pictures (I can include all seven hundred-something pictures that I took.)

Download: Mobile | Standard | HD

Mech Warfare

This is all kinds of awesome. These guys build this remote controlled mechs and fight them in a model city.

Genie in a Bottle

From collinson.fr:

This man and his wife were playing a round of golf on a very exclusive golf course surrounded by multi-million dollar homes.

The wife says to the husband, “Be careful honey. Don’t slice your next swing or you may break a window and God knows how much that would cost.”

The husband swings and of course, the ball flies through a huge plate glass window of what looks like the most expensive home.

The husband, being a very honest man goes up to the house to survey the damage with his wife. The window is shattered, and he even broke what looked like an antique jar on a shelf across from the window.

He rings the doorbell and the door is answered by a very nice looking man. The husband tells him, “I am so very sorry. I was the one who broke the window and I will gladly pay for it.”

To this, the man answered, “No, you have done me a great favor. You see, I am a genie and I have been stuck in that jar that you broke for thousands of years. Because I am now free, I may grant three wishes. I will give one wish to you, one wish to your wife, and I will keep one wish for myself.”

The husband is thrilled with this idea.

The genie asks the husband, ‘What is your wish?” The husband thinks for a moment. “I know, I would like to have one million dollars every year.” The genie said, ”

The genie then asks the wife, “What is your wish?” The wife replied, “I would like to have a villa in every country in the world.” To this, the genie said, ”

The husband then asks the genie, “What is your wish?” The genie replied, “Well, you see, I have been cooped up in that bottle for thousands of years and I have not had any sex for that long. What I would like is to make love with your wife.”

The husband looks at his wife and says, “You know, honey, he did give us all this money and a villa in every country of the world. It’s fine with me if you would like to do this.”

The wife thinks for a moment and agrees. Upstairs they go, and make wild passionate love for three hours.

The genie and the wife are laying there, the genie smoking a cigarette and the wife laying there exhausted. The genie asks the wife, “So tell me, how old is your husband?” The wife answers, he’s 32, why?” “I was just wondering”, answered the genie. “Don’t you think he’s a little old to believe in genies?”

Siemens Fractal

If you weren’t already aware, there’s a huge campaign on world-wide to push us towards having more rail systems everywhere. This is most prominent here in the US with the drive to get high-speed rail in place. The company, at least here in the US, that is driving this is Siemens.

The other morning on my way to work (here in DC) I saw a train pull in and one of the cars had it’s entire outside covered in an ad for…trains. Talk about a fractal.

Fringe Countdown

I’ve been missing mah Fringe so I decided to make a little countdown page to keep track of how long it will be until the season premiere.

Bert & Ernie – Ante Up

This is old but hilarious. They have the timing down perfect.

How Secure Is Your Password?

I found this neat site to check how secure your password is. I was a little suspicious at first since it was possible that this could be sending it my password back to some database. I looked at the source and didn’t see anything that could possibly be sending information back to their servers. To be safe though, you could kill your network connection after the page loads to make sure it can’t send anything out.

How Secure Is My Password?.

Creating an Address Book for Alpine from a CSV

If it wasn’t obvious from my last post, I’m getting into Alpine and I think it’s pretty nifty. So after getting setup to send and receive mail using your GMail or Google Apps email address, you’ll probably notice very shortly that you don’t have an address book setup. It’s kind of a pain to copy and paste from some other address book and it’s kind of violating the spirit of the command line anyway. Now, GMail lets you export your contacts as a CSV and it’s not too hard to convert it. You’ll have to modify your CSV to the format of: Nickname\tLast First\tEmail\tFcc\tComment. This is pretty easy either with awk (sticking with the command line) or, if you’re a glutton for punishment, a text editor. If you make sure you’ve downloaded the Outlook CSV you can run

cat contacts.csv | awk -F',' '{print $1"\t"$1" "$3"\t"$15"\t \t"$14}' > ~/.addressbook

which will get you most of the way there but it may not work 100%. You may have to go back in and make some tweaks. Once ready, open Alpine back up and go to your address book. You should now see all your addresses.

Setting Up Alpine for GMail or Google Apps Email

If you’re like me you like to have as much of your world accessible from your command line as possible (IRC, Email, etc.) The two main options when it comes to email are Mutt and Alpine. Alpine is a rewrite of Pine which hasn’t had a release since 2005 and doesn’t appear to be maintained anymore. Mutt is arguably the more flexible and powerful of the two but as far as difficulty, it’s in the realm of writing your own email client. Alpine, on the other hand, actually has a configuration interface built-in. I know, fancy right? The funny thing is that it’s actually easier to configure Alpine by hand-editing your .pinerc than it is to use the configuration interface.

I run my email mainly on Google Apps since it allows me to have a custom domain email without the hassle of running my own mail servers. If you’ve ever setup a mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook, with your GMail or Google Apps account you will have noticed a bunch of “[Imap]” labels appearing in your account. That’s because most clients don’t know how to properly interact with GMail. Good clients will let you specify the proper folders (which are translated as labels in GMail) so that the integration is seamless. The major upside to this is that you can go back and forth between your client and the web interface without having to look through different folders for your drafts and sent mail. So here goes. You can either find these lines in your ~/.pinerc file if you already have one or just make a new one (`touch ~/.pinerc`.) Also, the code below may be wrapping at odd places so make sure you click on the “view source” icon to get the plain text.

personal-name="Your Name"

#This is where you'd specify your custom Google Apps domain.
#Use gmail.com if you're just setting up a normal GMail account.
user-domain=yourdomain.tld

# Use user@gmail.com for GMail accounts and user@yourdomain.tld
# for custom domains.
smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com/submit/user=user@yourdomain.tld/novalidate-cert

# Where your Inbox lives.
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}inbox

# This is where your "Sent Mail" goes.
default-fcc={imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}[Gmail]/Sent Mail

# Here's the default folder when a message
# has no other labels/folders.
default-saved-msg-folder={imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}[Gmail]/All Mail

# This is where your drafts go.
postponed-folder={imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}[IMAP]/Drafts

# And your deleted messages.
trash-folder={imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}[Gmail]/Trash

# This is where it looks for all the folders so you don't
# *necessarily* have to be so explicit about their
# locations like I am.
folder-collections="user@yourdomain.tld" {imap.gmail.com:993/user=user@yourdomain.tld/ssl/novalidate-cert}[]

# Some personal preferences for sorting.
folder-sort-rule=alpha-with-dirs-first
addrbook-sort-rule=nickname-with-lists-last
sort-key=Thread/Reverse
threading-display-style=struct
threading-indicator-character=+
threading-expanded-character=-
threading-lastreply-character=\

Public IP Finder

A few times a year, for various reasons, I find myself in need of a way to programmatically determine my public-facing IP address. So, I just decided to write and host my own. So far you can pull xml, json and raw text formats. For example, you can run `curl http://ip.flakweb.net/?api=xml` at your Linux command line (Windows users, good luck) to get your IP in a simple XML format. So, if you had a BASH script where you needed your public IP you could just do `IP=$(curl –silent http://ip.flakweb.net/?api=text)` to grab it. Anyway, anyone can feel free to use this. If you’re going to use it heavily I wouldn’t mind getting a few bucks via the Pledgie link on the site but whatever.

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