Sun, 26 Mar 2006

Richard Was Right

This is, of course, not news to him, and I acknowledged he was right when he made the point, but my technique of allowing *@khan.org coming to my inbox proved to be unworkable.

You see, what I would typically do when signing up at certain businesses is to provide "business@khan.org" as the email address. This was for two reasons. First, it would provide a way to track down spammers who resell addresses (or businesses who get hacked or are easily hackable, i.e. NetSol, etc.). Second, and more useful, sorting e-mail by the actual recipient address could be a useful organization technique.

Recently, however, I've been getting emails from my IT department (who knew khan.org had an IT department beyond Richard and myself?) saying that my account has been inactivated, or my password was updated. Conveniently, these emails would contain ZIP files of some .exe file for me to run (strange, my IT department doesn't know I use a Macintosh?), and would be sent to addresses like "mark@khan.org", and "john@khan.org" and many, many variations of the same.

I began getting in excess of 100 50KB messages a day of this sort over the past few days, and this led me to change my delivery mechanism, as Richard predicted I would several years ago.

This was a bit tedious (I had to log into sites like google, cnn, etc. and shift the registered address from google@khan.org to khan@khan.org), and it took about 15 minutes to complete, but if it means I avoid 5MB of email downloads every day, seems well worth it.

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Thu, 09 Mar 2006

DVR Recommendations?

So I pulled the trigger a couple weeks ago, and now I'm a Comcast Cable TV customer. As a switcher from DirecTV they had some sweet deals going on. In particular, if you allow them to take away one of your receivers (I had one sitting around gathering dust that I bought back in 1996), they offer a $55/month switch package with 2 premium networks (HBO and Encore, although you might be able to pick your own), including HDTV channels, locals, and unlimited rooms.

Compared to the $80+/month DirecTV offered with only half of the same number of HD channels, not only was the service itself better from Comcast, but the price was lower too. Um, OK, twist my arm.

Only problem is, the DVR kinda sucks. Compared to my DirecTiVo, the UI is pathetic, the remote is awful, and using is a pain in the ass. Nice thing about having cable service, though, is that with a nifty CableCard ready HD DVR, I should be able to swap out the Motorola beast they gave me with one off the shelf, which brings me to enquire, "what is the best HD DVR on the market?"

Is it a TiVo? ReplayTV? Should I put Linux/MythTV on a MacMini? Help me out here. The most important factors are HD, ease of use (including tangibles like remote control and intangibles like UI look and feel), followed by capacity, and at a distant fourth, price.

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rus -http://rus.berrett.org/blog/- writes: Re: DVR recommendations

If I were going to do it....I would build and configure a mythTV backend on a dedicated Linux box somewhere on my home network and then run the mythTV frontend on the Mac Mini. That way I could hide a beefy backend box built on Linux (or FreeBSD) that does all of the heavy lifting in my garage, and then have something nice and stylish like a Mac Mini sitting in the TV cabinet running the frontend and slurping all of the video files down from the backend server over my home network. I believe that the mythTV frontend will compile on OSX. hth. --rus.


Khan -- writes: Good advice

Although I don't know if I have the patience to build out my own MythTV box. From what I have heard, it's less than a "fun" tech project.


-- writes:

Yes, MythTV can be hard to set up. But I'd still vote for MythTV, although I admit I don't do HD. If the KnoppMyth (http://www.mysettopbox.tv/) distribution works for you then it's pretty easy to set up (not quite "15 minutes or your money back", though). The reason I like it is because I have the freedom to do what I want. For example, I ran out of space for recordings (I record way too much TV) so I got a bigger drive. No problems. I also have a perl script that scans the TV schedules and sends me mail about shows I might like. On the other hand, things occassionally go screwy and I have to figure out how to fix it.




Wed, 08 Mar 2006

Spam Redux

Thanks to my friend Richard (by the way, welcome, finally, to the blogosphere), I realize the spammers had evened the score. The spammers had posted their csaino (sic) and icnset (sic) spam on my site again, despite my workaround.

I never claimed my workaround was particularly sophisticated or unbeatable, but in response, I've upped the ante. Again, nothing impenetrable, but just enough unpleasantry to make myself less of a target.

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rus -http://rus.berrett.org/blog/- writes: on-line pharmacy - buy direct and save $$$

You're paying too much for your viag@r@!!! check our prices agianst your local pharmacy. lol.


Khan -- writes: They got through again?!

How did they fool me again?!



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