Author Archives: stuff writer

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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Shoprite wishes you a very Halal Christmas

Posted on 24 December 2018 by stuff writer

We bought a turkey for Christmas from Checkers/Shoprite. It cost a stack of cash, but you know, Christmas – all about Christ, the Son of God, come to earth to save us from our sins – good tidings of great … Continue reading →

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Freeradius Module-Failure-Message = “Failed retrieving values required to evaluate condition”

Posted on 7 November 2018 by stuff writer

One of my radius servers stopped doing its radius thing. Everything was going along swimmingly, and then it suddenly stopped at 1:00AM.  Restarts didn’t fix it. The way this server works is that the default handler receives accounting packets, writes … Continue reading →

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The corrupted gospel of the NIV, 1984 and 2011

Posted on 5 November 2018 by stuff writer

These editions, labelled “Holy Bible” claim to be translated from the original texts,  and all that, but they are actually based on the corrupt Greek texts dug out of the trash and invented out of thin air since the 1800’s.  … Continue reading →

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