Author Archives: stuff writer

EPSON ink tank printers are a ripoff

Posted on 25 March 2023 by stuff writer

Bricking a perfectly good printer EPSON ink tank printers are a ripoff. The particular printer that irked me is the Epson L382, but they are all a ripoff. The promise of ink tank printers is that you buy the printer … Continue reading →

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Thanks, but no thanks, BibleProtector.com

Posted on 10 January 2023 by stuff writer

Matthew Verschuur of Australia has undertaken to prepare a definitive copy of the “Cambridge Edition” of the KJV circa 1900, which he calls the “Pure Cambridge Edition” (PCE). He has taken time to check punctuation and capitalisation and spelling against … Continue reading →

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“Unable to negotiate SSH” after “upgrade”

Posted on 9 November 2022 by stuff writer

If you update to Ubuntu LTS (version 22.04), you will want this in your .ssh/config: Failure to do that gets you this: The dear old NSA of the USA is gently shoving everyone away from effective cryptography towards backdoored nonsense, … Continue reading →

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Licences are a lie

Posted on 3 November 2022 by stuff writer

My wife and I have two cars. To drive these cars according to government rules, we need six licences: two for the cars, and two each for us (the one car is bigger). It is, however, well nigh impossible to … Continue reading →

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A values-driven political party

Posted on 7 September 2021 by stuff writer

A problem The political party system is broken. There are a few major problems: People seek elected office in order to personally benefit (not to serve) People in elected office are subject to corruption Political parties promise to use their … Continue reading →

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Pop goes the (LED) light bulb

Posted on 20 November 2020 by stuff writer

Spar sells a LED light bulb: it’s nice, until it pops – and that doesn’t take long. It fairly bright, it uses 7W of power, it has the bayonet style connection. There’s a problem though: it doesn’t last. It popped … Continue reading →

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Lockdown demonstrates that the bill of rights is worthless

Posted on 16 April 2020 by stuff writer

The constitution of the republic of south africa (oops, didn’t type capital letters, sorry) of 1996 includes a pretentious section labelled “the bill of rights”. This purports to provide the following rights, all of which have been summarily take away … Continue reading →

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ASUS UX581GV Laptop: sorry, no thank you

Posted on 22 October 2019 by stuff writer

Work brought me this ASUS UX581GV Laptop: a wondrous machine with two high resolution screens, both with touchscreens. Much as it pains me, I had to refuse this machine: it has some serious design flaws, and it is incompatible with … Continue reading →

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Plugin ‘SPIDER’ registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed.

Posted on 12 August 2019 by stuff writer

I fixed a stupid error which had me stumped. Here’s the answer for posterity: I was doing this on mariadb to install the spiderdb engine, and it was not working: The .so file was present, and there’s really no reason … Continue reading →

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Ignoring out-of-band network policy systems with iptables

Posted on 7 August 2019 by stuff writer

I’ve been working on parental controls using an out-of-band policy engine. It is easy to subvert, if you care to, since the controls it implements are very light, and it is not actually part of the conversation between you and … Continue reading →

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