Lovely Lycra

Pearl Izumi have released quite a nice Lycra cycling bib (sort of combined cycling shorts and, er, "suspenders") which combines my love of gadgetry with my lycra sports kit fetish.

I give you the cycling shorts with integrated MP3 player!

At $500 I think I'd just get myself some regular lycra gear and a Nano...

[http://www.pearlizumi.com/product.php?mode=view&product_id=758231]

Posted by Alex at 7:39 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Living with Vista - part 3: a poor sleeper and an early riser

I've written before about how Vista's new power management sucks. Since then I've found that getting it to go to sleep (even with the modifications to the advanced settings) is a bit flakey at the best of times. I think I've tracked it down to uTorrent - if it's running (or even has been running) then Vista will refuse to go to sleep.

So, assuming that I even get it to go to sleep I've been finding that Vsta is waking itself up at 4am each night (and not going back to sleep even though the inactivity timeout is set to 1 hour). I've eventually tracked this down to Media Centre's automatic listings update feature. Turn this off and it won't wake itself up - not a great workaround for those that use it a lot :(

Posted by Alex at 9:43 AM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A spam quandary

At the moment I make use of Exim's sender verification callout feature which tries to work out whether the (supposed) sender's email address given in the HELO is legitimate or not. For this is connects to the remote mail server and tried to do a RCPT TO for that email address. If it can't find a mail server or gets rebuffed then the email address is rubbish and Exim rejects the mail even before it gets accepted. This cuts down on a huge volume of mail and also stops the "drive by" spamming of innocent third parties that might get an NDR.

The problem with this is that people are idiots. Most often an automated system (typically shopping carts it seems) try to send as apache@domain which is not a valid address on that system, rather than myshop@domain which probably is. Sometimes these systems set the reply-to header in the message, but this isn't visible in the envelope.

This is causing me an annoyance. On the one hand, if I leave it on, I seem to end up missing semi-important mail (even FON can't get it right it seems). On the other, if I disable it I end up receiving a deluge of junk mail (ok, I have spam assassin to sort it for me, but it's still annoying to have to spend money on the bandwidth and storage).

It would be nice if I could start blocking on SURBLs and RHBLs natively with Exim.

Grrrr...

Posted by Alex at 1:50 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Talk Talk arseholes

I just got cold called by someone from Talk Talk broadband trying to flog me ADSL. My home number has been on the the TPS for well over a year which legally requires companies not to make marketing calls to me. It takes a maximum of 28 days for it to take effect, and I've never had one until tonight.

What's made me particularly angry is that I queried why I was being called as my number is on the TPS. The lady on the phone demanded to know what my "registration number" was and they'd then stop calling me.

I stated that this wasn't how the TPS worked to which the lady said that without a "registration number" she didn't believe that I was on a do not call list. I was particularly angry at this remark and demanded to speak to her supervisor. She then hung up.

 Arseholes. Thank $deity for online complaints forms...

Posted by Alex at 8:30 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)