Letters from Adelaide

Woo! I’ve got one! There’s currently a new spam email scam going around, which tells the recipient they are going to be killed (!) unless they pay $8000. Here’s the full text:

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don’t comply. I was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within 10 days.

Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you. If you are in doubt with this I will send you your name and where you are residing in my next mail.

Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about

Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $8,000 is all you need to spend. You will first of all pay $3,500 then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead to you and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $4,500. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.

Warning: do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because I will extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead, and the person knows some members of your family as well.

For your own good I will advise you not to go out on.

So, there you have it. I wonder if they’ll take Visa?

Joking aside, this is pure evil. While I can happily laugh this off as another pathetic (and badly written) attempt to separate me from my money, I can imagine there being many people who would completely freak out if they received one of these. So, if you have any friends who might receive and be affected by one of these, please be sure to tell them its a hoax.

Today I learned how to rip … er, download, videos from Youtube for using offline, and how to extract the audio from music vids. Couldn’t be easier.

1. Getting the video.

This is easy, using the youtube-dl application, which can installed with

    sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Then just run

    youtube-dl -t <URL>

where the -t option uses the video title as a file name.

The file saved is type flv — flash video — which can be played natively using Movie Player or similar.

2. Extracting the music.

If you just want the audio from the file, use ffmpeg as follows:

    ffmpeg -i yourfile.flv yourfile.mp3

Could not be simpler.

Is there no end to the crunchy, vitamin-enriched goodness of Linux? I think not.

Disclaimer: all of this is potentially illegal; the information provided here is for research purposes only.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, flash video, flv, youtube

Iemma’s free city WiFi network disappears | Australian IT

This sounds like a tragic malfunction of poltical sense, but … it’s probably the right decision. While I’m a fan of wireless networking, and the idea of free wireless broadband anywhere I go is appealing, the reality is that this technology will pretty quickly be replaced by mobile/cell-based WiFi access. Yes, you have to pay for that, but … look, it’s pretty amazingly cheap really, less than you probably pay for your mobile phone. Those who really need WiFI on the go can afford it. The rest of us can afford it too, if we really, really have to have access to Facebook while sipping our latte in Cibo. So, politically, why should taxpayers be footing the bill for something that’s already readily available?

You just wait, in two or three years, we’ll all be seen in Cibo or Starbuckets with our little 3G mobile broadband dongles hanging from our laptops. And nobody will regret the demise of today’s wireless networks.

Tags: technology, wifi, mobile, 3g, broadband, wireless

Tax junk, subsidise fruit: AMA | The Australian

According to this story in the Weekend Oz, the AMA is calling for “junk foods” (i.e. foods high in fats and sugars, previously known as “food”) to be taxed, and for fruit and vegetables to be subsidised.

Point one is that there’s already a tax on these foodstuffs — it’s called “GST”.

Point two is that this would place another administrative burden on the poor old retailers, who have already suffered enough. And no doubt it would require a whole army of administrators to “manage”.

And point three, this is another attempt to replace the application of personal responsibility and common sense with a “nanny state” social engineering solution.

And finally, what does it matter if people get fat and die young? With 6 billion people in the world, do we all really have to live longer? Especially those too stupid to moderate their own eating habits? And won’t living linger place more of a burden on our social services and pension schemes, so isn’t it in the national interest for people to cark it once past their productive years? Boo to the AMA!

Tags: health, eating, food, fat, sugar, longevity, social engineering

All this fuss and bother over the Olympic torch relay could have been avoided by one simple thing: the relay should have been managed from start to end by the IOC, or by it’s national counterparts. That China as host is in charge of the relay is responsible for making it a magnet for protests about China’s record on human rights. If China was not involved in the running of the torch, then the focus could have remained on the games and the “Olympic Spirit”, and there would have been much less opportunity for protests.

Tags: Olympicgames, torch relay, protests, human rights

Juts now watching the Insiders talking heads program on ABC, we had Julia Gliiard talking about the 2020 Summit in Canberra, and she apologised for “sounding like a scientist in this interview”. Now. much as I admire Julia, this is the sort of thing that really gets my goat. We need science — without it we’d still be living in caves — and we should all admire the work and intelligence that goes into science. There’s no need to apologise, and Julia should instead be promoting and supporting science and scientists. Which I’m sure she does, but we need more people to push the idea that science — the application of intelligence — is a good thing.

I’ve only just today noticed this, so I’m guessing this is a new feature on Facebook : on the home page, there’s a new box on the right hand sidebar showing “people you may know”. Clicking on “show all” expands this to show you the details of how you may know these people, by listing the friends you have in common.

This is a fairly obvious feature to offer, but I’m stunned by the coincidences in common friends that it throws up. For instance, that Katie knows Romana and Pru and Simon and Toby — which doesn’t sound surprising, except that as far as I know, none of these people know one another, and knowing them I have no reason to expect that they should know one another. (Except that Simon seems to know everyone, but …)

Maybe this is the “Adelaide Syndrome” — that everyone knows everyone in Adelaide, with only two degrees of separation. But I still find it astounding.

And cool. Thanks, Facebook.

Tags: Facebook, social networking

Facebook is a wonderful thing — I love it, and so (apparently) do 55 million others. It is an excellent example — perhaps the definitive example — of a social networking application. We can maintain contact with friends through messages and the Wall, and share stuff — our photos and videos, and things we’ve found on the web.

But I have one gripe — which is rather ironically counter to the persistent media concerns about social networking. My gripe is that Facebook is a a closed system. You have to be a member of Facebook in order to see its contents (apart from Pages, which can be made public).

Case 1: I use Flickr to share my photos with the world. Flickr is OK (in fact more than just ok), but it is only good for sharing photos. I can’t get the rest of my life in there too. Facebook also allows me to share photos, but only with my Friends, or members of my Network. So what I’m doing now is sharing photos in two places — Flickr for the world, FB for my friends. And it’s becoming a little tiresome, what with having to decide where to post each picture, and whether to upload it twice, and so on. Right now, the best I can do is use the Flickr widget on my Profile to include my latest Flickr posts.

Case 2: Facebook provides Notes, which I could happily use as my Blog, except — nobody can see it except my friends and people in my Network. If I’m going to spend time writing a carefully crafted work of genius, such as this post, I want the world to see it. I want Google to be able to find it and toss it up to the world in response to their search queries. So Notes cannot be used the way I like, and I’m forced to use an external [see that word, "external"?] blog application, which I can then feed back into my FB profile using RSS or an app. (I’m actually using the excellent WordPress application, so I don’t really have much reason to whine.)

Of course, I’m not alone in using these widgets to bring in external data into my Profile. Many, many users are doing this. Which suggests, surely, that many of us would not actually object to non-FB users being able to look into our pages and see (some of) our gathered content.

But, there’s no option in the Security settings on FB to do that. I assume this is deliberate policy, but is it for our protection, or is it, as I suspect, FB protecting its market share?

In the long term, it may not matter that much. (In the LONG term, it doesn’t matter at all, of course.) FB is growing so fast that pretty soon everyone on the planet will have an account. We already have 11.5% of all Australians, and an astounding 25% of Canadians. (Must be those long winters.)

So until then, I’ll just bypass the otherwise excellent FB tools, and use third-party apps to bring in my stuff from elsewhere.

What the heck is a peck? Actually, a peck is a unit measure of dry volume in the Imperial and US systems, equivalent to two gallons, with four pecks to a bushel. For all I know, this is still a measure in common use amongst farming types, in relation to wheat and so on.

I bring this up because I’ve been pondering the introduction of the metric system of weights and measures, along with decimal currency, in Australia, and wondering if that marks the beginning of the process of turning us into a nation of dumb-asses which culminated in the celebration of the turn of the millennium one year early.

When I was a lad, life was a rich texture of complicated, antique and arcane systems of measurement, which we learned to deal with by memorising tables in beautiful blank verse, which I can still sing-song in my head to this day: “eight pints one quart / four quarts one gallon”; “sixteen ounces one pound / fourteen pounds one stone; eight stone one hundredweight” etc.

Calculations of currency offered similar delights, with our twelve pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. Not forgetting sixpences, zacs, two-bob and guineas. Humans have a natural tendency towards invention which delights in such complexities.

Yes, these were complex systems, but they had the advantage of offering an intellectual stimulus, a challenge to our brains, providing continuous and regular exercise of our mental faculties. Yes, the metric system is simple and direct, but it lacks the beautiful complexity of these old systems, and delivers none of the same mental advantages; it’s the pre-eminent dumbing down of society, and we’re poorer for it.

Kay just solved an interesting problem with her Vista laptop :
She was looking up journal articles for her course, and frequently found she could not read them, because the text was gray on a black background (or sometimes some other ridiculous colour combo).

After some mucking around, she found an option in Adobe Reader preferences, under Accessibility, to “replace document colors”. This allows you to override the document settings, and specify black on white.

Since I’ve never seen this problem before, and the same pdf documents were fine on my Ubuntu laptop, I’m guessing this is a problem caused by Vista.