OLPC Humor
by Paul FischerSome things are just too funny when cats are involved.
Wildlife Photos and Whiled Thoughts
of Paul Fischer
THE FAILED CITIES: HATH A DARKNESS . . .
by Paul FischerIn addition to offering its listeners their regular story for the month of
December, Variant Frequencies has prepared a special holiday surprise for
fans of the two-time Parsec-nominated FAILED CITIES MONOLOGUES, as well as
all those who’ve supported the podcast in the past year. We are proud to
present THE FAILED CITIES: HATH A DARKNESS, an exclusive 10,000-word
eChapbook written by Matt Wallace and produced by Variant Frequencies.
Download the file here:
http://www.variantfrequencies.com/media/FCM-HathADarkness.pdf
(more…)
OLPC – Give 1 Get 1
by Paul FischerWatch the video! I got mine!
Just $400 buys you two, one to keep, one to give. Plus, you get a year of WiFi from TMobile!
Canon EOS Digital Rebel SLR + Lens and Extras for Sale
by Paul FischerI have just put my old Canon EOS Digital Rebel SLR camera up for sale on eBay. It works great. I have posted some pictures on Flickr that my sister-in-law took with it last weekend. If you’re in the market for a digital SLR from someone you know and trust, look no further.
The Monster Under the Bed
by Paul FischerAnother great video from your friends at the ADD Cast.
When night falls, the monster under the bed comes out to eat your toes. But what could possibly cause that monster to want to change jobs? Who is the real monster under the bed?
Watch it on Lulu.tv!
Martha and Paul Guest Host Popular Internet Video Show
by Paul FischerLulu TV‘s hit Internet show, This Day in Alternate History (TDAH pronounced Ta-Dah!), was guest hosted on Sunday Nov 4 by your favorite podcast hosts Paul Fischer and Martha Holloway.
In this episode of TDAH, we report from the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan. If you’re a Godzilla fan, you can’t afford to miss this one. Great Godzilla questions will be answered, such as what kind of women he like, his favorite recreation, why he really stomps Tokyo, and who is true love is.
Watch it here!
TDAH is up for The Best Video Blog of 2007. Please vote to help our friends at TDAH continue their rise to fame and fortune.
NaDruWriNi Podcast Nov 2 2007
by Paul FischerIn solidarity with our NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) peers, we will be podcasting at 9pm on Friday Nov 2, 2007. This is for the ADDCast.
We are twisted and incapable of being serious about it. We’ll be bringing on people who are drunk and attempting to write anything. This pandemonium will take place over a Skype call, through the magic of the Interweb.
Contact Paul at addcast@gmail.com to sign up for the event. Put “NaDruWriNi” (National Drunk Writing Night) in the subject line.
Hubble Picture of Galaxies Colliding – Macbook Pro Background
by Paul FischerThe Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait, tweeted about this photo from NASA. I liked it, but NASA doesn’t provide 1440×900 images for use as background images for my Macbook Pro. So I made one myself, filling in the bottom with a little black space. Download and enjoy.
My old film camera is on eBay
by Paul FischerYou need a nice older film camera. I know you do.
Click It. You know you want to.
Catchup Blogging
by Paul FischerWe didn’t have much net access in Japan. I posted a bunch of stuff on my LJ but I couldn’t get it posted here until now.
It’s in reverse time order. I hope you enjoy it. Still processing pictures. I’ll post tons here once I get the site updated. Finally getting over jet lag, so I might actually get some work done on my projects.
10:34 pm – Saturday – Best Yet
Saturday was the best day yet. We logged a few new species, but more importantly the sun came out. The sun has been pissing me off, refusing to shine through the Typhoon. Today saw an end to that. The mountain top crater lake was still fogged in, but the rest of the day was bright and sunny. We got tons of bird pics and got a good long look at a Japanese fox.
Some pictures of us from Taiwan
by Paul FischerThanks to Mark Forman for hosting us and taking some nice pictures of our vacation.
Hugo Awards 2007
by Paul FischerHUGO WINNERS
Best Novel: Rainbows End
by Vernor Vinge (Tor)
Best Novella: “A Billion Eves”
by Robert Reed
(Asimov’s October/November 2006)
Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife”
by Ian McDonald (Asimov’s July 2006)
Best Short Story:
“Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt
(Asimov’s, July 2006)
Best Related Book:
James Tiptree, Jr.:
The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s Press)
Best Dramatic Presentation,
Long Form: Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Dramatic Presentation,
Short Form: Doctor Who
“Girl in the Fireplace”
Best Editor, Long Form
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Editor, Short Form:
Gordon Van Gelder
Best Semiprozine
Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, and Liza Groen Trombi
Best Fan Writer
Dave Langford
Best Professional Artist
Donato Giancola
Best Fanzine
Science-Fiction Five-Yearly
edited by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan, and Randy Byers
Best Fan Artist
Frank Wu
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2005 or 2006
Naomi Novik
WorldCon The Day Before
by Paul FischerDidn’t sleep much last night. The Uber suite at the China Trust near the Taiwan airport had rock hard beds. One large solid block of wood with a millimeter of foam on it. Flying into Narita was uneventful, and the train was long time to get to Yokohama.
First pass through Tokyo. No sign of Godzilla. He must be sleeping. I hope he shows up for the interview or I’m going to be really pissed. I didn’t come all this way not to get 5 minutes with the big man himself.
Got to the Intercontinental Grand Yokohama this afternoon. Wicked cool place. Massive. I think the restaurants are all 5 star gourmet or something. $100/person for a meal. We went a la cart to save a little money. I don’t mind paying for a good meal, but I couldn’t enjoy it as tired as I am.
Mur Lafferty’s ears are burning.
Had dinner in the Italian place. They were very accommodating to the fact that I can barely digest anything anymore. Great roast pork and veggies. Martha had a pizza. Great food, but very expensive. Thankfully snacks and drinks aren’t that outrageous.
Got Martha settled in the Newsletter staff room with Matsushita-san. Met some of the staff. Sean, who we met last year, is here and he’s translating again. He’s a life saver. I actually managed to translate some japanese into english for someone contributing to the news letters. But then there was nothing else to do, so I abandoned Martha and Matsushita-san in favor of a chat with Nobilis and sleep.
Need to hunt up some public domain footage and audio of Godzilla and the signing of the documents that ended WWII. Need background material for my interview with Big-G.
The Beast is being held captive by Japanese Customs. They want money. Hopefully I can get a translator to help me in the morning. I really need The Beast back on my shoulder.
Trip Update – Out of Taichung
by Paul FischerWe’re back in Taoyuan. Took the Bullet Train north. Wicked cool ride.
We had an awesome time with Mark Forman and his family. We owe him a lot.
Made up two quick videos in our spacious hotel suite.
Video 1 (6 MB)- My entry in the coolest 7th Son T-Shirt location ever
Video 2 (29 MB)- Our upgraded suite at the China Trust
More on Taichung, Forman, and stuff later this week as I have face time with the Mac to create. Until then, I’m counting the days until The Beast and I are reunited.
I forgot to mention in the video. This hotel room comes with it’s own fish!
Travel So Far
by Paul FischerJourney to the airport
The cab showed up 15 minutes early and I wasn’t able to have my normal fried egg breakfast. I rattled me so much that I forgot to grab my big camera. I didn’t realize until I got through security at National that I missed it. I am a seasoned traveller. I always use 3 bins when I go through the x-ray machine. This time I only needed two, which worried me, but I didn’t figure it out until I got to the other side.
I need to pay better attention to some things. I really do. Who goes on a birding trip and forgets their birding camera? Yours truly, that who.
As soon as I figured it out I jumped on the Coconut Telegraph and started beating the jungle drums. The tribe woke up on Tweeter and Skype and came to my rescue. Marc, a.k.a. Grailwolf, offered to pick the camera up from home and ship it to me in Asia. Marc is a brave man, and is now learning how far down the rabbit hole you go when engaging in international shipping.
The hope is that the camera will meet me in Japan. It’s an expensive mistake, but not as bad as if I had to buy a whole new one. We’ll be bringing home a nice gift for Marc and his new bride Heather. They asked for a Japanese school girl. I don’t know what the limit is on those, we’ve got 3 requests now. I wonder if I can get them in the duty free shop. 🙂
Got to Japan and was able to get free Internet from the ANA airlines lounge which I think was a level below where I was charging my laptop. Not great throughput, but enough to get email and see that Mark and Marc had been in contact and all was being taken care of.
Martha and I had sushi in Narita Airport in Japan. Oh man, it was awesome. It was fresh and flavorful, and very close to the best I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to taste it outside the airport. My assumption is that airport sushi should be a 6-8 on a scale of 1-10. Which means it can be a whole lot better outside the airport.
The trip to Taiwan was a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Didn’t realize Taiwan is 1 hour behind Japan. So our 3.5 hour trip became 2.5 hours. We caught a gypsy cab to the hotel. For a while I thought we were being taken for a ride, but the cost was reasonable and even though I thought we were going in circles, we weren’t. The hotel was nice, and we dealt with the first leg of adjusting to the new time zone.
OK. The hotel was better than nice. It was actually pretty cool. And fried eggs on the American Breakfast side of the buffet were a delight. The hotel staff were amazing. They got us a cab to the bullet train to Taichung and let us pre-pay. The train hit a top speed around 300 Kph. That’s about 186 Mph! It was so smooth and fast it was awesome and very very clean.
Mark Forman met us at the station and took us to our hotel. Then we toured a city south of Taichung where they do a lot of fishing. That’s were the current batch of Flickr Photos were taken. Today we’re supposed to hit the electronics markets. Mark and I are going to see if maybe we can’t think of doing some things to introduce some products into the US market. Who knows, maybe we’ll find the next Tickle Me Elmo.
First photos from Taiwan
by Paul FischerGot the first photos online this morning before breakfast. I’ll try to get more online later. But, WTF, I’m on vacation. You’ll get the photos I give you like it. I’m not stressing anymore!
🙂
MoShang releases free Internet Album
by Paul FischerSo Speaks Mark Forman!
Jean Marais (Moshang Zhao in SL) has released a new CD of remixes called Asian Variations for free via Creative Commons. We ask that you’d help by linking to Asian Variations on blogs, playing music from this on your podcasts and vlogs, interviewing Jean on your podcasts and just helping to promote in any creative way that you can think of. Thanks so much and enjoy this fine chill out selection. Jean’s email: moshangmusic@yahoo.com
I’m listening to it right now. I’m into track three and this is just awesome!
-Paul
Beating IMAPS and SMTPS (TLS) to a pulp
by Paul FischerI think I have finally beaten IMAPS (IMAP with SSL/TLS don’t ask me which) and SMTPS (SMTP with TLS) certificate configurations on my server.
In my case, I am using an OS X 10.3 which has built-in IMAP and SMTP (postfix). They both come pre-configured to use a server.pem file in /var/imap and /etc/postfix respectively.
We use secure IMAP and SMTP to protect our home email server. I’m mostly concerned about people not being able to sniff our passwords.
We use a self-signed certificate and for the past several years we’ve been using different certs for IMAP and SMTP. In the new setup, we use a single cert and put it in both directories. Easy peasey!
This new config satisfies Apple Mail (a.k.a. Mail.app) and Entourage so we’re very very happy with it.
The IMAP and SMTP server config is stock Apple OS X server 10.3. We chose CRAM-MD5 authentication for both. SMTP SSL is set to “use” and IMAP SSL is set to “require”. Once you do that, all you need to do is make the certificate and put them in place. Then restart the server.
1) Create the CA and the cert. You’ll need to answer some questions. The key is for “Common Name” to be the FQDN of your mail server. If your mail server is mail.foo.com, use mail.foo.com for “Common Name”. I used it for “Common Name”, “Organizational Name”, and “Organizational Unit” just to be safe.
sudo openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.cer -keyout imapd.pem -days 3650
2) Concatenate the two files into the server.pem file that OSX wants.
cat imapd.pem imapd.cer > server.pem
3) Copy server.pem to the correct locations
cp server.pem /etc/postfix
cp server.pem /var/imap
4) Restart IMAP and SMTP servers
On the client side, use Mail.app to connect to the IMAP server using SSL on port 993. You’ll get an error message about the cert not being signed by a valid root cert. That’s OK. Hit the “show certificate” button. Holding down the option key, click on the picture of the certificate and drag it to the desktop. It should create a file with the FQDN of your server and “.pem” on your desktop. Open your keychain and select X.509 anchors from the left hand column. The choose File->Import and choose the .pem file.
Now, when you look at your certificates you should see one with the FQDN of your server. Double click on it, and scroll to the bottom. Hit the little black triangle to the left of “Trust Settings”. Scroll down and the first box you come to is labeled “When using this certificate”. Change it from “Use System Settings” to “Always Trust”. This should change all the boxes below it to “Always Trust”. Close the window and exit KeyChain.
Finally, configure outbound mail to use your server on port 25, with SSL. Choose “MD5 Challenge-Response” for the authentication method first. If this doesn’t work, back off to “password” but make sure that authentication mode is configured on the server. Our old G4 iBook wasn’t able to do MD5 authentication. But the new Macbook Pro was. It may be some difference in the Intel vs PPC binaries, or it may have something to do with the speed of the machine.
I hope this helps anyone else who is trying to make this work. Cheers to you for fighting the good fight.
-Paul