scrambled channel

Well I’ve just had my own Call of the Wild experience having just read this paragraph via email:

If you think I’m talking nonsense then you are unaware of what a sigil is and how they are used in black magic to achieve the aims of the magickian. You should also be aware that the skull and crossbones is an emblem of the Knights Templar who are the precursors to the Freemasons. Freemasonry is the most power secret society that controls most of the world but it is a religion with its roots in Kabbalah that worships the horned devil god baphomet (GNU anyone? See the statue of Baphomet at Yale University) amongst other evil deities such as Molech. In order to reach the 33rd degree of Masonry you have to have no choice but to get involved in blood ritual and vampirism and at that degree you are said to have become one with Lucifer. These people thrive upon the negative energies of pain, suffering and fear. Do you really want your OS associated with people like this?

However, the pure:dyne guys can easily change their design for something that doesn’t represent a body of people who want to enslave you and offer your blood upto daemons (what are unix services called?). Unfortunately you cannot escape the occult references in the world of Linux because there is actually anoccult agenda beneath it but we should try and stamp out evil where we can!

OK, I’ve yanked it from it’s context, but this is one of the odder things I have read on a list in a while. I’m looking at nightmares of bearded guys wearing Debian tshirts sacrificing newbies users to “the horned devil god [B]aphomet”. The archives of the dyne:bolic list are found here if you want to have your own Louis Theroux experience.

Anyway, I’m off to check the flat for 12 foot lizards.

I have just moved into a new flat in Leith and am pleased to announce that I am within range of an open wireless network from a nearby pub. This means I won’t have to go through the normal internet purgatory while moving and won’t be coerced into spending too much time in said pub (though it is rather nice).

I can understand not using encryption in this context. However, I do find it a bit strange that they haven’t even changed the password for the web admin tool for the router…

I don’t exactly no when this started, but I noticed that pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or F2 etc) no longer dropped me down to a tty. This really annoyed me a for a couple of hours, especially since I’m using feisty and have experienced X locking up on a couple of occasions. This problem occurred whether I was using Gnome or XFCE4.

It turns out that you have to enable keyboard raw mode by pressing Alt+SysRq+r then Ctrl+Alt+F1 should work as expected.

Looking further into this, I discovered several other useful key combinations, especially handy when dealing with crashes:

• Alt+SysRq+s - sync all filesystems
• Alt+SysRq+e - terminate all processes (send SIGTERM) except init
• Alt+SysRq+i - kill all programs (send SIGKILL) except init
• Alt+SysRq+I - kill all programs (send SIGKILL) including init
• Alt+SysRq+u - attempt to remount all mounted filesystems read only
• Alt+SysRq+b - reboot without unmounting or syncing
• Alt+SysRq+o - shut down

For these combinations to work, you need to have it supported in the kernel but I think it should be in most kernels supplied by modern distros.