Category: Activities

Here’s hoping!

A few weeks back, I bought a Linksys WRT54G. I only had minor problems with my existing wireless router, but I’ve been hearing some great things about how customizable this one is because it’s open source and runs Linux. Hey, $60 for a Linux box is pretty impressive.

However, if I loaded it moderately heavily, like if I attempted to bittorrent the latest Doctor Who episode while listening to mp3s NFS mounted from my server, the wireless connection would start acting weird, and eventually stop transferring data at all, while showing full signal strength in MacStumbler. But the wired connections to the Linux server and the G4 downstairs kept working. But the only way to get wireless working again was to go downstairs and power cycle it. Which is a pain in the knees.

So it was recommended that I try one of the third party firmwares out there. I’m not sure if I want all the bells and whistles of the full Sveasoft distro, and so rather than paying the $20 for it I thought I’d try on of the free ones. I just installed dd.wrt.v22.prefinal3.1.bin. It adds a few nifty features, most of which I don’t care about. But it does have busybox on it, so I can ssh into the box. That’s just weird. But what I really want to see if it can go a few days without needing a power cycle.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Spammers are the scum of the earth!

In the last 24 hours, there were 2541 attempts to deliver mail to xcski.com.

Of those, 1871 (73%) were rejected by the mail server because they came from known spam sites, or because they gave an invalid “HELO”, or various other spam symptoms.

56 messages were to non-existant addresses, either old addresses that were retired (I use temporary addresses when I’m dealing with merchants and retire them when I don’t need to talk to the merchant any more) or spammers with bad address lists (people have been spamming 5bptomblin for over a decade now).

4 messages were to deliberate bait addresses (addresses which I put on comment on the main page of my web site), which are redirected to a spam reporting system called Vipul’s Razor.

311 messages (12%) were caught by SpamAssassin or bogofilter.

Of the remaining 299 messages (12%), at least some of that was uncaught spam, but I don’t know how much because I’m not the only person who gets email at xcski.com. I tune and train my spam filters, so yesterday only one piece of uncaught spam got through to me. But the others here do not train their spam filters the way I do, so they probably get more uncaught than that. But that means that at maximum, 12% of the email xcski.com gets is real, legitimate mail from people who have a reason, possibly a bad one, to send us email. I know for a fact that at least some of that email is from mailing lists that my step-daughters never bothered to unsubscribe from, but which they never read. So the real percentage of wanted email is lower, possibly much lower.

What spammers have done to the wonderful medium of email is criminal.

Kayak customization

Last night I did some work to customize the fit of my kayak. The foot pegs are too close, and the bulkhead is too far away to get my thighs pushed into the thigh braces. I took out the foot pegs (but left the rails there, because I wasn’t sure if I wouldn’t be leaving screw holes if I took it out. Then I trimmed a piece of 1 3/4 inch foam that I’d bought from Bay Creek Paddle Center so that it was an extremely tight fit, and wedged it into the end of the boat. That gives me something I can rest my feet against when I don’t want to push into the thigh braces, or if I extend my feet a bit it does push me against the thigh braces. Later, I’m going to try to shape the remaining chunks of foam into a couple of triangular blocks that I can put down in the bottom end and glue them to the foam so that I can rest my heels on them when I want the stability of the thigh braces without having to hold a foot extension the whole time. I’m also wondering if I dare put something under my knees, or if that would make it too hard to exit.

One little problem – when I was pushing the foam down into the bottom of the boat, I put all my weight on the top of the back-band, which tore out the two top straps which keep the back-band from twisting. Now I have to be careful when I get in that the back-bank doesn’t end up underneath me or twisted. I think I can do that just by putting a finger or thumb on it, but I might end up having to put a strap of duct tape or something there.

The cockpit is so tight (even before I did this) that I have to move one leg into the centerline of the cockpit to exit. I think I’m going to have to wait for the water to warm up a bit and practice doing wet exits so that this move becomes second nature.