Giant clicky not actually clicky, dammit, keyboards in Australia!

11 September 2007 — dan

The other day, someone e-mailed me to ask where an Australian shopper could find one of those wonderful clicky keyboards I keep going on about without having to pay fifty US bucks, or more, for shipping from the States.

There aren't any Australian dealers of new or used buckling spring or keyswitch keyboards, if you don't count that silly Das Keyboard thing. Well, not as far as I know, anyway; feel free to tell me if you know of one.

So the best advice I can usually come up with is "use the eBay e-mail search notification thingy and wait".

But this time there seemed to be no need to wait, because there were...

Ipex buckling spring keyboard

...a bunch of these Unicomp Model Ms for sale on Australian eBay right now!

Except then a reader who's already bought one, from this same eBay seller, wrote to inform me that these are not actually clicky keyboards at all.

The bloody seller has the hide to say "The many different variations of the keyboard have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling spring key design ... Model Ms have been prized by computer enthusiasts and heavy typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback resulting from a keystroke." in the listings, thereby clearly giving readers the impression that they're buying a buckling spring 'board.

And these are indeed "real" Model Ms. But, as explained on the clickykeyboard.com Buyer's Guide page, these are the "library" kind of Model M that's actually just a high quality rubber dome 'board. Big, heavy, solid, probably very reliable, but not the nice-keyfeel clicky 'board you're hoping for. They do not have "the tactile and auditory feedback" that an honest listing would not have damn well mentioned.

I apologise to anybody who's bought a keyboard already based on what this post said before I found this out. What a bloody swindle. Shame on you, Fistok.

And now, the rest of my orignal post, with a few more annotations:

The more observant among you may have noticed that these keyboards do not have a standard layout, and are in fact openly described as "terminal" keyboards. This is usually bad news. Old terminal keyboards seldom have a standard PS/2 interface, and so there's no way to plug them into a normal PC without doing something ridiculous like grafting in whole new electronics, or making your own interface converter with a microcontroller.

The seller assures me that these ones, however, have a standard PS/2 plug and all worked fine when he tested them on an ordinary PC.

[But I didn't ask him if they were really buckling spring, since he used the words "buckling spring" in the listing. More fool me.]

So they're just a PC keyboard with a funny cursor key layout and a bunch of extra function keys that may or may not be of any use to you, but will make you look very important.

And they're $AU19.99 plus $AU10 to $AU20 delivery, depending on where in Australia you are. He'll deliver overseas as well.

[The price still isn't bad, if you want a novelty keyboard that'll work with a normal PC. If you want a clicky keyboard, though, don't buy one of these.]

Once again, gentle readers, I call upon you to buy these things up so I don't end up buying one myself.

[Fat chance of that now, of course.]

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 9 Comments »

Godly techno-weirdness of the day

9 September 2007 — dan

Pop quiz, hotshot. You're driving down the highway, and you see this:

Mobile phones for Jay-sus-ah!

It's fifty feet high, and you don't remember seeing it the last time you went this way.

And yes, it's on the premises of a church.

What is it?

Obviously, it's a cell-phone tower, whose construction was paid for by a cell-phone company.

I think you'd probably get better reception from the Rio Jesus, though.

Posted in Religion, Strange Tales. 2 Comments »

Joey, the Amazing Fetching Cat

9 September 2007 — dan

When you throw a toy for a kitten, it'll sometimes bring it back.

Most cats grow out of this behaviour when they reach adulthood.

Joey, though, is now getting on for three years old, and shows no signs whatsoever of losing interest in fetching.

Especially if you throw his favourite toy, a coiled-up pipe cleaner.

He also likes clothes baskets. And shoes.

Posted in Animals, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »

More whiskers

8 September 2007 — dan

Apropos of this post, my sister also has a shed-cat-whisker storage unit.

Another whisker storage unit

Hers is tougher than ours.

Posted in Animals, Humour. 6 Comments »

At least it's not from the Prime Minister

8 September 2007 — dan

One of the simplest ways to get yourself a sample of the current crop of spam is by using a "spamtrap" e-mail address. Such an address is not advertised as being a way to contact anyone, but is visible to spammers' automatic address harvesters. You can, for instance, put such an address on a Web page with the foreground and background text colours set the same, so that no human can even see it when reading the page normally.

Because I write the I/O letters column for Atomic magazine here in Australia (and reprint it on Dan's Data six months after paper publication), I get to see all of the spam that makes it through the filters on the io@atomicmpc.com.au address. The I/O address isn't a true spam trap, since it has a real purpose, but it's certainly not subscribing to any mailing lists.

Recently, io@atomicmpc.com.au has been receiving regular press releases from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, which is the local branch of Lyndon LaRouche's completely sensible and entirely not batshit insane political task force.

Most recently, these messages have informed me that the only thing standing between us and the complete financial collapse of Western society is LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, which includes a number of modest proposals along the lines of nationalising the entire US financial industry.

That seems simple enough. I'm sure that right after George W Bush and Dick Cheney finish having gay sex on live TV, they'll get right onto making it happen.

Woe betide the world if they ignore Lyndon's predictions, after all. Remember how his pan-ethnic street gangs conquered the USA in 1973? Remember how domestic terrorism tore the USA apart in the Reagan years? And, of course, everybody knows that the British Royal Family are drug pushers!

(A bit of a long walk to the joke, but worth it, I think.)

It's possible that I'm only getting the LaRouche spam because the Citizens Electoral Council are still rockin' a 1994-era mailing list system that doesn't send a confirmation e-mail, and someone subscribed io@atomicmpc.com.au as a joke. (Ah, for a return to those halcyon days when you could effortlessly subscribe anyone you liked to dozens of random newsletters...)

I wouldn't be surprised if they just bought a "Press" e-mail list or ran their own Web-page troller, though.

Posted in Humour, Spam, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

Dare you enter... the Nostalgia Pit?

31 August 2007 — dan

Herewith, a site with a reasonably complete archive of scans of old Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (back to the Commodore Review days, up to the Amiga Review days) and Professional Amiga User magazines.

I can't remember when I started writing for ACAR. January '92 might have been my first issue (sound sampler review, page 16), but I suspect I did a piece or two before that. After a while, I was the Assistant Editor, and stayed in that job until the publishing company went broke.

(Entertainingly, I was listening to this, one of the few MODs lurking in my large MP3 collection, when I turned up my review of ProTracker in the March '93 ACAR.)

Posted in Nerdery, Shop talk. 9 Comments »

The Human Mind... boggles.

31 August 2007 — dan

Last night I watched, or at least attempted to watch, an episode of The Human Mind (subtitled "And How To Make The Most Of It"; this debut episode is reviewed here by someone less annoyed than me).

The Human Mind managed the remarkable feat of being staggeringly dumbed down, yet also, frequently, incomprehensible.

Robert Winston's made some great documentaries, but this sure as hell wasn't one.

For me, the high point was a guy who can flawlessly remember ten consecutive shuffled packs of cards. We were told that he did so by walking around London, looking at landmarks, associating mental images of things like teddy bears and cakes with suits and numbers, and then associating, say, a teddy bear eating a cake with Tower Bridge in order to be able to remember that this point in his walk was the Jack of Diamonds.

Just do that 519 more times, and you've got it!

It's just that simple!

Yes, that really was all the explanation we got. Perhaps something that'd make sense of it got left on the cutting-room floor.

As it stood, though, I found this part of the show very much like watching Look Around You, but without the humour.

The episode also featured a fireman, whose story was told over about three hours of brightly coloured stock footage of fire and explosions and men with big hoses, without which the audience was presumably expected to go and watch the football instead, or just drool until we all died of dehydration.

This fireman once saved a bunch of other firemen by ordering them to leave a burning building where, a mysterious intuition told him, something awful was about to happen. Which it did.

After eight or nine more hours of stock footage - and interview footage of the fireman, who was interviewed in a slightly smoky room, to make sure we didn't absent-mindedly start thinking he was a pastrychef - we were told that he'd actually seen very clear evidence that a backdraft situation was developing. And then he just got a bit of a hunch before he added it all up consciously.

This doesn't sound like a very big deal to me.

But apparently it was worth a third of the episode, all by itself.

Oh, and the beginning of the episode sang the praises of the Durham fish oil trial, in which omega-3 oils apparently made kids smarter.

Except that study is complete bollocks [latest update here!]. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that fish oil supplementation does anything for brain development in otherwise well-nourished children.

I suppose Winston's just phoning this one in from the voice-over booth and trousering the proceeds.

You wouldn't think he'd need the money, but I don't know why else anyone'd want to put their name on crap like this.

Posted in MiniReviews, Science. 9 Comments »

Pitter patter, pitter patter of the phish

31 August 2007 — dan

"Mjlawson29" is one of eBay's most famous users.

Search for most eBay usernames and you'll just get a few hits from actual eBay pages. As I write this, though, mjlawson29 has "about 537" Google hits, from all over the Web. Pretty good for someone who isn't actually an eBay user any more!

A cursory examination of those hits will reveal that mjlawson29's fame comes almost entirely from the work of a tireless phisher, who's been sending phish-spam about allegedly unpaid items from that seller forever and a day. I get one of them every couple of days, if not more often. Have been for months.

Apparently this phisher thinks this repeated strategy is like playing the same lottery numbers over and over.

It is, of course, actually more like approaching the same annoyed commuters every single day with the same story about how you just need money for a bus ticket because otherwise you won't be able to make it to your grandma's funeral this afternoon.

Mjlawson29 was a real eBay user, with good feedback, but isn't any more. It looks as if they chucked it in at the end of September 2006. Coincidentally, the first mjlawson29 phishing spam that someone bothered to post to Usenet is from the start of October, 2006.

It feels as if I've been getting these phishes for a lot longer than that, but I don't archive my spam (only so many hard drives in the world, folks...) so I'm not sure.

I'm inclined to suspect that the sudden wave of undeserved abuse generated by the phishes drove mjlawson29 away from eBay. But who knows; maybe they just decided to take up a new and exciting career in stealing people's logins.

Project Honey Pot has a couple of entries for the phishers responsible for this particular crap-stream, and also ties them to several other repeated eBay-name phishes.

Have you also heard from "babyphat96", "loriweiss", "nascar*stuff*" or "selectiveseating", over and over again? I know I have!

(Loriweiss was a real user but is now gone; I don't know whether babyphat96 or nascar*stuff* were ever real, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. Selectiveseating is real, and still trading.)

It'd be simplicity itself for these phishers to harvest a new eBay ID to broadcast with each phish-run, but instead they stick with just a few, and use them over and over and over again.

Now, you would get repeated messages from the same user if that user genuinely did think you hadn't paid them for something. But you wouldn't get 'em for a year. And, as I said the last time I mentioned the output of these particular phishers, sending the same spam to millions of recipients ensures that the identifying features of that spam will become famous.

Phishers don't want to be famous. It's like being a famous secret agent.

Posted in Scams, Spam, Strange Tales. 3 Comments »
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