The Clan of the Cave Bague

I’ve really not been playing very much recently – I just don’t seem to have the time these days. I haev, though, had a brief session on The Third Age, which I never did complete. I seem to remember I got as far as a stupid frustrating bit with loads of cave trolls before giving up in disgust. Anyway, I’ve started again from the beginning and I have to say I’d forgotten just how pretty this game is. It’s a standard Final Fantasy-like RPG with turn based combat, but with a fairly linear storyline. All in all, though, it’s a bit of lightweight fun. So, I have a Gondorian Warrior and an Elfy ranger person and we’re running about in the woods killing orcs and hairy woodsmen. Which is ace. And there are no crate puzzles (that I’m aware of) so I can relax.

This little puppy, though, is where what little gametime I’ve been snatching is being spent. It’s bejewelled, with spells, and level ups and maps and castles and gaaaaaaaaah. It’s just ace, addictive, colourful and bloody difficult. It’s driving me nuts, but it’s such a lovely lovely game that I really don’t mind.

Our old grey moggy passed away today. She’s been with us for near enough twenty years. She was a friendly, gentle cat who doted on the children, even when they yanked her tail. She was very cuddly, very affectionate and will be missed very much.

She has a special place of her own now, between some rosebushes – a place where she loved to lie in the sun.

At last, I’ve settled on a mail configuration that I like, blocks viruses, is fast and has outstanding spam filtering. There’s a few bits to it, but essentially, it works like this:

Mail arrives on port 25 (port forwarded through my firewall) where ASSP is listening. ASSP is, on the surface, a bog standard SMTP proxy, but has extremely clever spam filtering. It does all the usual things – Bayesian / adaptive filtering, DNSRBL lookups, spoof detection, etc, but it also has a very neat grey-listing feature. Basically, what this does is occasionally tells the upstream MTA that it’s too busy and to try again later. Most spam bots will, at this point, move onto the next target – ASSP learns that this is a spammer and will refuse connections from that particular host.  ASSP also runs everything through ClamAV to look for malware, before punting it to the real mail server – postfix – running on a completely different port and only accepting connections from localhost.

Postfix, helpful little chap that it is, delivers mail locally in maildir format, where it’s served up to our hungry email clients via Dovecot’s IMAP service. Net result of all this, of course, is that it’s quick, it’s lovely and it has nice crap-evading properties.

It’s been a while since mail was as quick as news on our machine (Leafnode FTW, by the way), so it’s good to be able to glance at mail without the disk grinding its way through fifty tons of spam.

My daughter has a teddy bear called “Socket”. It’s unclear where he’s an RJ11, RJ45 or – god forbid – a straightforward ball-joint socket.

I’m trying to encourage her in the direction of RJ45, but only time will tell.

There’s nothing I love more than badly translated manuals and websites, and the homepage of KWorld is the best example I’ve seen in ages. Apparently:

Want to have high quality digital TV, but not be able to give up analog TV? Annoyed by your big and ugly IT hardware which can’t fit in your stylish?

Don’t worry! KWorld listen to your heartfelt wishes!

You owe it to the English language to go to KWorld’s home page IMMEDIATELY and bask in the Japlishy goodness.

And remember:   The design of light and handy is matched stylish you.

What an absolutely beautiful movie – right up to the point where it suddenly has the most miserable ending in movie history. I’m now thoroughly depressed.

Bah.