Battlestar Galactica

Like many other people with DVRs and some affinity for sci-fi tv, I’ve been sucked into the new Battlestar Galactica series. I’m exhibiting similar symptoms to what my old college roommate said:

“It has some strange sort of mind control over me, I’m afraid to do anything else while I watch as I might miss something.”

Part of my attraction is that the executive producer is writing a blog about the show, with some entries being about the show and some being about his personal life. It lets the average consumer of the show ask questions of the main creative driving force, getting the answer straight from the source. I like that. Probably the best answers for me are to the more mundane questions, like “Why are the corners on the paper cut off?” and “Why “frack”?”.

But, every few entries, he just knocks the reader off kilter with something like “Don’t be a whore!

ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org and SpamAssassin

Looking at some logs, I noticed a bunch of entries for dns queries failing to things like: lame server resolving ‘14.182.8.69.ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org. After some digging around on Google, I found a mailing list post from rfc-ignorant.org announcing the removal of the ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org zone.

Looking at the SpamAssassin docs, this the right line to put in your local.cf to disable this particular test:
score RCVD_IN_RFCI 0

Yay, fewer log messages to look at every day.

Ceiling drywall done

All the drywall on the ceiling is hung, only took us another 4 hours or so. When you are putting up whole 12′ sheets without cutting them, it goes much faster.

Now Dad needs to insulate the walls and find someplace to get 8’x54″ 1/2″ drywall so we only have one seam on the walls.

Printing a mirror image

If you’ve ever had the need to print a mirror image of a document (ie, text to put on a teleprompter), you know there’s no easy option in Microsoft Word to do it for you. And you’ve searched the web to find that the only choice is some rare versions of the HP DeskJet drivers that have “Mirrored Output” options. Don’t be fooled, there is another way!

If you’ve got an HP LaserJet, go download the PostScript driver for it. Install them. Then, we you go to print, in Printer Properties, Click the Advanced button. Expand the PostScript Options section and set Mirrorer Output to Yes. I’ve done this with both a 4100 and an 8150, so it’s probably fairly common among the newer LaserJets.

You are probably asking yourself how, or even why, I figured this out. Well, one of the people around here does video production and bought a low tech teleprompter set up last year. Of course, I write down how to do this, so I spent 45 minutes this afternoon figuring it out.