Year: 2004

Email Roulette

Someone once said that you are really lonely when you don’t even get any letters from SPAMers. Well, if you are really lonely, or really bored, or both, then check the Email Roulette website. It is an interesting service, where you register and send messages. Your messages are delivered to random people whom you don’t know. They choose to either respond or not. You get messages from random people too, and you can also either respond or not. There is an tweak with anonymity too.

See, you are no lonely anymore.

Port forwarding with Putty

Putty, it seems, is the most popular Telnet/SSH client for MS Windows (although it does run UNIX too). It is small, free, stable, and flexible. It has all the functionality one will ever need (with a few exceptions, of course).

Secure Shell (SSH) provides for a number of interesting uses. One of them is port forwarding, also known as tunneling. It is used when there is a need to pass encrypted information between two hosts while the original protocol for information does not support encryption, or another encryption level is required for some reason.

Apparently, Putty can help poor Windows souls with port forwarding too. This step-by-step tutorial with a lot of pictures shows exactly how to do it. The example used is encrypted email traffic.

Scanned pictures from trip to Malta

Malta buses. Postcard.

Since I now have a scanner, I decided to wait no longer and start practicing my mad scanning skills. I jumped into a heap of photo albums that Olga and I gathered over the years and discovered that we actually have a few pictures from the trip to Malta. We lost our camera that time and I thought that all the pictures were gone. Surprise, surprise, the camera was lost with a new film. Not only we have a bunch of pictures (not very aesthetic though), but we also have a few postcards that we bought there.

I took all of these pieces of paper and scanned them at once. It took me about 2 or 3 hours, but I don’t have the experience yet. It was getting faster towards the end. The scans are OK, but I will read more about the process and hopefully it will get even better.

The resulting photo album is here (about 50 images). Stay tuned for more graphical documents from my crazy past.

Picture of the day

No smoking

Ok, today I almost missed it. First half of the day I was in Nicosia because of some paper work that we needed to do with Olga in the Russian Embassy. The second half of the day I was fixing and studing my home workstation after upgrade to Fedora Linux Core 2. I also was doing a lot of scanning of old pictures. Tought and busy day.

But I managed it. On the way back from Nicosia, Olga and I passed by McDonalds, where I made a couple of pictures. Both of them turned out pretty good for the ‘Picture of the day’ project. Check them out here.

I also think with sadness about two missed opportunities. First, there were a lot of yellow cars near KEO factory. All of them were staying in line and had a KEO logo on the side. I was too bored and lazy to stop and make a picture. Second opportunity present itself nearby the St.Mary’s school, which is close to my place. School started today it seems, because I saw a couple of kids with parents, all dressed up, walking in the direction of the said school. All four looked really nice. But I was still bored and lazy to stop. Now I am punishing myself for that.