John Cleese’s “Creativity. A short and cheerful guide.”

April 11, 2021 Incoherent ramblings

This book reiterates some of the hare-brain/tortoise-brain points from Cleese’s “Professor At Large.”  However, despite the redundancy, it was worth reading just for the following remark:

“Begin with simple stuff, such as…, Who are you writing for?  You might be writing for academics, in which case you don’t have to be interesting.

I thought this was so funny, but was it intended to be funny, or just reflect reality?

Some neighbourhood sidewalk art

April 10, 2021 Just for fun

A bitcoin ransom entrepreneur

March 25, 2021 Uncategorized , ,

I call the bluff. Let’s see the video!

Hello!                                                                   

Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you.                                                            
Several months ago, I got access to the device you are using to browse the internet.                                                     
Since that time, I have been monitoring your internet activity.                                                            

Being a regular visitor of adult websites, I can confirm that it is you who is responsible for this.
To keep it simple, the websites you visited provided me with access to your data.                                                          

I've uploaded a Trojan horse on the driver basis that updates its signature several times per day, to make it impossible for antivirus to detect it. Additionally, it gives me access to your camera and microphone.                                                  
Moreover, I have backed-up all the data, including photos, social media, chats and contacts.                                                   
Just recently, I came up with an awesome idea to create the video where you cum in one part of the screen, while the video was simultaneously playing on another screen. That was fun!                                                                                   

Rest assured that I can easily send this video to all your contacts with a few clicks, and I assume that you would like to prevent this scenario. )

With that in mind, here is my proposal:  
Transfer the amount equivalent to 1350 USD to my Bitcoin wallet, and I will forget about the entire thing. I will also delete all data and videos permanently. 

In my opinion, this is a somewhat modest price for my work.                                                                
You can figure out how to purchase Bitcoins using search engines like Google or Bing, seeing that it's not very difficult.

My Bitcoin wallet (BTC):                                                           
1Lg6nE6zFaMZHiPTFR9nSwuAL6hzeegToC

You have 48 hours to reply and you should also bear the following in mind:                                                          

It makes no sense to reply me - the address has been generated automatically                                                                      
It makes no sense to complain either, since the letter along with my Bitcoin wallet cannot be tracked.
Everything has been orchestrated precisely.                                                                   

If I ever detect that you mentioned anything about this letter to anyone - the video will be immediately shared, and your contacts will be the first to receive it. Following that, the video will be posted on the web!  

P.S. The time will start once you open this letter. (This program has a built-in timer and special pixel ID - [№78853473])
Good luck and take it easy! It was just bad luck, next time please be careful.   

Introducing a fixed capacity directory (Linux).

March 23, 2021 Linux , , , ,

I have a dump directory that is too easily filled up (with cores and dumps) if a programming error makes our system misbehave catastrophically.

Here’s a nice trick to create a small filesystem with fixed capacity so that the owning filesystem (in my case /var) can’t be filled up:

dd if=/dev/zero of=dump.loopback bs=1M count=10
mke2fs ./dump.loopback
mount -o loop dump.loopback ./dump
chmod 777 ./dump

XPG laptop: how to turn off the annoying ‘lock unlock’ screen indicator.

March 17, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , ,

My macbook harddrive appears to be pooched, so I’m using my personal Windows laptop for work until I can get it fixed.  There’s been an annoying feature of this laptop that I hadn’t figured out, but after trying to use it all day, it was well past time.  In particular, if I hit Caps-Lock, I get the following screen indicator:

close to the top left corner of the screen, which often obscures what I am trying to type!  This indicator is extremely stupid.  I know when I hit caps lock: it’s when I hit caps lock, and don’t need something to tell me that I’ve done it.  If I did not know what state it was in, I can look the keyboard caps lock LED.

I found a couple Q&A’s about similar issues:

I tried the Settings configurations, and disabled the toggle stuff, which did not help.  This suggested that there was vendor (XPG) supplied software that was controlling this annoyance.

To track this down, I ran the sysinternals Process Explorer, and searched for xpg:

 

Sure enough, after brute force killing all these xpg processes, the annoying Lock-Unlock indicator goes away. After a restart, I found that there’s an xpg application running in the background, and sure enough there’s an option to be annoying:

It turns out that there’s also a pop up indicator that occurs if you press Num-Lock. I also won’t miss the XPG application notifications for Num-Lock either — there is also a keyboard LED for that!