james holden

I caught the tail-end of a facinating programme this morning about number stations, which broadcast encrypted messages on short-wave all around the world. The broadcasts begin with some sort of signature, like a series of notes on a xylophone, and consist of a recorded human voice slowly reading a list of single digit numbers in groups of five, sounding somewhat like the recorded voice you get when dialling 1471 from your home phone.

Some are scheduled, some are not, some are in morse code. Starting somewhere around the middle of the cold war, these stations started broadcasting on the edge of the frequency spectrum, and rather curiously, are still broadcasting today.

Simon Mason featured on the programme maintains a website on the subject. He also has a copy of the programme available in WMA format.

And the Lincolnshire Poacher? Well nobody really knows. The lincolnshire poacher appears to broadcast from somewhere in Cyprus, but nothing is known about who it really is or what is messages mean.

The hard disk in my laptop failed again yesterday :-( Fortunately it’s still under warranty, so I’ll have to dig out the receipt and go and swap it.

The good news is that I was mostly able to recover my data. Here’s how:

• Boot Knoppix in failsafe mode. Flip back to a text console using Ctrl+Alt+F1.
• Get the networking running. You’ll need to run /etc/init.d/pcmcia
• Set up an NFS server on another box. You’ll need to add a line containing /somewhere/with/lots/of/space *(rw,sync) to /etc/exports and then run exportfs -a
• Mount the NFS share from the poorly computer using mkdir /tmp/mnt ; mount -t nfs server.ip:/somewhere/with/lots/of/space
• Examine the partition table using fdisk -l /dev/hda to find your home partition.
• Image it with this command: dd if=/dev/hdaX of=/tmp/mnt/home.img conv=noerror,sync. This might take some time to run, depending on how broken the disk is. You’ll end up with a large file on the NFS server which you can mount as a loopback device.

After taking the day off yesterday and looking at lots and lots and lots and lots of potential ones, we found a new house!

The slides from my DVD authoring talk are up. You can download them in Openoffice.org through this link.

I’m doing a talk tomorrow night at WYLUG, the West Yorkshire Linux User Group, on DVD authoring under Linux. It’s at 7:00pm at the University of Leeds school of computing. I’ll be covering how DVD menus are structured and what tools exist on Linux to produce them. There will be some notes posted up here later in the week.

Google seem to have sneaked in an extra feature to their web search that suggests possible alternative searches. It devises other searches based on synonyms of the search terms, which is pretty clever. There is an extra option added to the page list, like so:

Reuters seemed to not notice the more obvious meaning in this headline from this morning:

Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope’s funeral

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The IFPI and MPA have produced a code of conduct which they hope ISPs will adopt. Some highlights are:

• “remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders”
• “require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed”
• terminate contracts of recidivist
• implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers
• implement filtering technologies to block sites that are ’substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services
• voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement…
• To enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities

Obviously, any ISP adopting the code of conduct will be committing commercial suicide. Wishful thinking, I believe it’s called.
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I didn’t end up getting round to the PVR box this weekend, because we wend to Harewood House instead, which is only a 15 minute drive away from here. I took a few snaps with my camera phone which are on the site now.

iusedtobelieve.com is a fastastically funny site where adults can list the false beliefs they had as children. There’s a rating system so te funniest beliefs are easy to find. Some of the ones in the sex section are particulalry amusing.
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