A. is fascinated by yurts. We might end up living in a yurt up on the moors, spending our evenings seaching for a stray wifi signal and tending the windmill.

Link: Build your own yurts

It feels as if ITV have been saying that GL would be up for sale soon for years now, but they’ve finally got round to making it official. That probably means that at least one buyer is already lined up.

This article claims that both Espresso (an educational multimedia company) and Pearson are interested. I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t also made an offer, they’ve certainly been emphasising the school IT market recently, and aren’t short of cash.

Link: Granada Learning next for chop

(Espresso’s stuff looks wonderful)

The Tube family
Originally uploaded by pyrator.

Spooky image of dummies from The Tube (a long dead TV series I’ve never actually seen) sitting somewhere in the old Tyne Tees TV studios.

Link: More images of the TTTV studio exodus on Flickr

Mr Dorje’s advice is: “Never shake the bucket of nuts before you’re tied to the yak rope.”

Wise words, and a motto I shall, henceforth, live by.

Link: Asia’s newest sport - yak skiing

I’ve found PFQueue to be very helpful while trying to clear/redirect the queue of bounced spam bounce messages. Postfix’s own mail queue management tools are rather lacking, and although Webmin’s queue management is useful, it’s nicer to be able to quickly shuffle around 5000 messages at a time from the shell with PFQueue.

Judging by the 6,000 bounced spam messages rattling around in my mail router’s queue, all addressed to blatantly made up “people” at binary-ape.org, my domain is being used to fake the ‘From’ addresses of thousands of nasty spam emails offering penis medicines to fundamentally stupid people.

It really is astonishing that people can give their credit card details to sites with randomly generated URLs like “ftqolspstmtleil.com.r1vpvibat2rpsu9.[-censored-]”, with the aim of actually using the ‘medicine’.

I don’t think much can be done to save email. Even adding new antispam measures like SPF will do little to help, unless there is an organised movement to simply drop all messages sent without adequate safeguards. SMTP email, as used today, has to be abandoned.

The XMPP/Jabber protocols, although never meant to replace SMTP, could easily do the job with only a few, simple extensions to the existing set.

We went to see Kung Fu Hustle this morning, and it was good. Stupid, shallow, but great fun, and very funny. We went to the day’s first showing and there were only about a dozen people in the audience, but it still got one of the best audience reactions I’ve seen - everyone was laughing every few minutes. A couple of scenes are strangely moving too.

I had to narrate the subtitles to A. while the snakes were on screen and she shut her eyes.

A masterpiece of graphic design from the BBC.

How a Solar Sail Tacks

And written in NewtonScript too. I wish I had a Newton that was compatible with a Wifi card.

Link: All About Jake

Brown inquired, “How do you feel about your horse being gay?” of one of the policemen, stating that his colleague’s was clearly not gay. After repeated comments on the sexuality of his horse, and despite warnings from the policeman about his behaviour, Brown’s offer of an apology to the horse was rejected and he was handcuffed and taken by the officers to the police station.

There’s nothing offensive about having a gay horse, surely?

Link: Student arrested after ‘gay’ horse jibe (student paper)