To my surprise when I received my copy of 2600 24:4 yesterday I found a fifth hope armband in it, at first I didn’t know it was an armband and thought I had come across as nice little wallet type thing to keep my lockpicks in. then it unraveled and my train of thought went from wristband to armband.

Supposedly there will be another Hope con this year, and potentially the final as the hotel they stage it in is under threat from being bought out and torn town.

The question remains whether they  meant to send it to me or if it was an accident, I’ll have to email them about it.

So I had everything working in Linux on my Laptop yesterday, including the SD card reader which had been described as buggy elsewhere.

Then I had the brilliant idea to get disk encryption to work, which now works but other crap, following a reinstall does not, like the SD card reader. Frustrating or what?

As a little sideline, X will randomly decide that a file in your home directory is its configuration if said file is named xorg.conf, I had not noticed this until today. Really annoying when you restart X, it errors out on you and disables itself, only for you to find out that it tried to use the config for a computer with completely different hardware.

From now on, I will be documenting everything I do when setting stuff up, I do it in labs, why not at home?

Thanks to amarok and daapd I do on the other hand have the ability to listen all of my music…

Now to get VNC to let me connect to an existing X session, or setting up IRSSI proxies, VNC would be preferred so I can log in one location.

At least there’s one positive side to all of this, I can be sent to prison for up to five years now thanks to crazy fascist laws!

This is assuming I don’t hand my encryption keys over, woo!

Dear person who came to this site by googling for “kids that are 8 having sex.com”

Walter wants you to know that you’re entering a world of pain.

My tickets came a couple of days ago, now I just need to purchase my tickets to get to London and I’ll be set for a pretty fun weekend of, seeing my parents, going to a friend’s birthday party and then going to see Die Krupps on Sunday the 3rd of February!

I originally wanted to see them on the Saturday in Sheffield, but had a lot of stuff to do in London which is why I’ll be seeing them there.

Should be fun, really looking forward to it.

So I’ve recently gotten around to buying a laptop, up to now I’ve not really thought I needed one (and still do), but I was convinced by the large deposit my parents made in my bank account <Insert giant shrug here>, one thing for sure it will make being at home more pleasant which is an upside.

This will probably make a few people cringe, but I went with a Dell as they gave me the most bang for my buck, T7500, only 2GB of RAM because I decided to change the specs to something more useful to me, and aside from the fact that I couldn’t change the graphics option (Intel X3100) and the enormous delivery charge of GBP60 there is really nothing to fault them.

While mentioning delivery, they put my system together on the same day I ordered it, sent it out on Sunday and I had it by Tuesday, so again pretty fast but for that much money you really do expect them to overnight it, considering that I know overnight delivery for 6kg costs around GBP50.

It came with Vista, which is a giant pile of junk but then I’m no fan of Windows anyway, so I may keep it or use an MSDNAA copy of XP instead, I want to keep some compatibility for uni stuff (Damn them!).

Once I’ve backed up the masses of stuff I have somehow already managed to generat, I will reformat the drive, getting rid of the crappy backup partitions Dell have set up for a start, then installing Lunix!

I’ve always wanted to try a couple of set-ups, including encrypted disk and SE Linux patches, so I’ll probably do that, as well as a shell script I have probably lost, but which is still floating about (could always write it I guess) which will allow remote command execution by reading instructions off web server, like a laptop lojack, but not.

I commented on something similar on arsgeek a while ago, and it looks like they have changed the instructions to acknowledge the fact not everyone uses something Debian based, so it should be fun if it works, and since the laptop has an integrated webcam it could turn out to be of some use.

This engadget post mentions laptop chop shops, while to be expected is slightly scary, good thing your average thief sees not to be as organised and probably just sells it on via eBay.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

We had two fire alarms on Saturday, one at 3:40am and then another at 5:30am, which as you can imagine was about as much fun as it always is!

The first time around, although I was up because I wanted to go cycling in the middle of the night, I was a little slow to get downstairs thanks to not being able to find my socks, after finding my socks the second time was obviously much quicker.

Anyway this isn’t really about fire alarms but the insane things they make me d; I felt really hyper so once downstairs I started climbing stuff and lapping the building, once we were allowed back in I ran up nine flights of stairs (twice) each time celebrating that I was the first one up!

I was already up and by 7am had my breakfast so I decided that I’d cycle to the national space centre, I’d never been there and wanted to see it, instead I ended up doing something completely different.

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Or so it feels anyway, or has been increasingly so this week and finally peaking today!

I had a rather ineteresting extravaganza planed but that’ll have to be postponed until I feel better.

In other news christel has started the fat attack blog so check it out, it’s for a good cause and your interest may help to keep her motivated!

More from me when I feel less like killing people in order to vent the rage I feel for my weak immune system.