Rob's Ramblings

Saturday 31 May 2008

Spam...

Grr....

Almost 3,600 emails over the last 23 hours, the majority being delivery failure messages. Some a**h**e spammer is spoofing one of my email addresses as the 'from' address on their crap.

It's not the first time, but what makes it worse this time is it's a (normally) little used email address that gets forwarded to my main google mail account by virtue of 'getmail' running on a machine here. So every mail is fetched in full and resent out to google. So using up a considerable amount of my bandwidth.

Thank goodness I'm on an "unlimited" package, though how anybody is going to react to seeing thousands of emails eminating from my connection (even if they are all to myself) I do not know.

My SPAM folder, emptied automatically after 30 days, currently has 18,137 unread emails in it. Ouch.

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Monday 26 May 2008

iPlayer, 4od, download locations..

I've been fighting with this for a bit, off and on. I've got iPlayer and 4od installed on my laptop, but it's got precious little space on it to actually store anything. (Silly thing came with the hard disc partitioned into three drives, and c:\ is currently languishing with only about 500MB spare on it.) I've been unable to do more than download one thing at a time.

Now, I've got a couple of TB elsewhere on the LAN, thanks to some little nas boxes, but how to get iPlayer to use it.

It didn't take too long to find a registry key:
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Kontiki\4od1\downloadDir (and iPlayer and Sky are in the same location) but after I pointed it at \\nas\public\Kontiki\4od1\ downloads would fail immediately.

Today I worked it out. Simple really. The Kontiki "Kservice" service is installed to run as the Local System account. Unfortunately this doesn't have access to the nas box! So, I changed the "Log on" option for the service to my user account, which does, restarted the service, and hey presto, it works!

For better security I should really create another dedicated user account for it, and give that access to the nas box, but hey ho, it works for now.

Oh. and 4od support said it was impossible to change download location. Hmm.

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Monday 19 May 2008

Dust Devil

Aside from the numerous benefits of owning a dog (companionship, early warning of postmen, unconditional love..) there are a few disadvantages.. (eaten post, always under your feet to trip you up..)

Today it was time to spring clean the bedroom. Whilst it's had it's regular tidy ups and hoovering, today I decided that the mountain of boxes, computer parts, discs and miscellaneous junk under the bed needed shifting. Here was the other doggy disadvantage. The thin layer of dust was joined by a positive snowdrift of dog hair. The Dyson did a sterling job on 95% of it, but it's been a struggle getting the last bits up. I swear the carpet is made of the same stuff they make Velcro from.

Now to fill up all the space I've made with boxes from elsewhere.. Tidying up is never ending..

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