Khobbits Blog

If you’ve been paying attention in #kh (on swiftirc) or other channels you might share with me, you’re probably aware that for the most part of the year I live in student accommodation. While I’m living at university all of my belongings in the family home get put inside a cupboard in what was my old room. The room now is occupied by my brother, and as such when I return although most the time we arrange to have him sleep in the old bedroom, the fact it no longer is my room is something of a hindrance. There is a smaller box room where my brother used to sleep but its not big enough to accommodate a computer or even the belongings I bring back with me.

A few people I’ve discussed this with offered suggestions and a few didn’t believe what I said about the box room so I took a few images.

Left Boxroom

Another thing I mentioned lately was my ’suitcase’ of books, and since the topic of books came up a bit lately I decided to find my copies of Artemis Fowl. Since I had the suitcase unpacked I thought I might as well snap a few images off at the same time.

Bed of Books

There is a post on lifehacker at the moment about different online backup services, and the leader in the polls seems to be mozy back. I’ve been using mozy back for a few years now, and for the most part there have been no problems what-so-ever. Having a look at the write ups on mozy and the lack of a mention on the referral codes seemed begging for me to leave a post.

Firstly why would anyone need to backup online? that should be the first question. There are a few reasons, first if you loose the data in the first place chances are something has gone badly wrong, that could include things like natural disasters, fires and theft. If the data is gone from your computer the hard copies you made on CD could also be gone. The next reason is someone similar, apart from being used as a backup, you can also access backed up data elsewhere. If you don’t have access to your computer for an extended period and need some data you can use the online service to download the data. Finally I’d say its easy. There is no burning CD’s or manually checking which files need backed up, the software will manage it for you.

The free version of mozy will let you backup up to 2gb of data (2.2 if you use a referral). The software scans your computer for files to backup, and using a quite simple interface you can select what you want using default file types and locations like “backup office documents”. You can also mark full folders/files/extensions to backup including future files. It is pretty much a setup and forget ordeal, might take half an hour, but you might never need to touch the software again.

I currently use it to back up two PC’s (under one account) and it does so with very little maintenance, a few times I’ve edited the rules to include/exclude files and folders but it was mainly out of choice.

Oh one final note, it uses an incremental backup system, it only backs up that which has changed since the last backup, so there’s no need to upload over a gb of data a couple of days a week, you instead will find it backing up odd mb when you’ve gone off and left your pc idle for a while.

If you want to get started I’d suggest visiting https://mozy.com/?ref… If you struggle to find the free sign up, at the time of writing it’s centre bottom of the page linked. There is no need to sign up for the larger account unless your a business or intend to use it to back up a decent chunk of data.

Any frequent users of any of the services run on the khobbits.co.uk domain might have noticed that alot of things have begun to forward to khobbits.net. At the beginning of the month I got an email from the people who currently host khobbits.co.uk who have decided to go bust. Basically by the start of April it wont be long before khobbits.co.uk stops being hosted, khobbits.net I have hosted with dreamhost, as part of the signup deal I got two domains for free, but they refuse to host khobbits.co.uk due to it having been previously hosted with them for a period of a few weeks back when I was scratting around for hosting after I just bought the domain.

I do have a few ideas about how I can keep the khobbits.co.uk domain active but I don’t see any reason not to move everything to khobbits.net which nomatter which way I deal with khobbits.co.uk, will be better hosted.

If anyone can find an issue with any of the domains I manage don’t hesitate to drop me an email. I’ve yet to set up khobbits.net for email, so use the old domain for now.

It’s been a while since I blogged about any post I found on digg, but I read this article (rant?) today about the diving dollar, and why it’s not going to get much better and thought I’d stash it somewhere, and here seemed as good as any. The falling dollar has been on my mind for a while, and I’ve been tracking the exchange rate carefully, mainly to try and get the most from my GBP as possible.

read more | digg story

Well some people have been pestering me on irc lately for bnc accounts, so I thought i’d make a bit of information available.

You can get a bnc in one of two ways, you can be invited by someone with ‘vadmin’ these are accounts which have been given the ability to add other accounts, most accounts added by kh or manacit will have vadmin although the account limit will probably be very low if not 1, people who gained accounts from an vadmin may never own their own group without having their account recreated from scratch by manacit or kh.

The chat channel for kh and mana bnc is #OrgasmicBNC, although users don’t have to idle here, although on occasion you may find yourself there after a bnc outage or large update. Vadmins are also asked to hang about in channel for user management purposes.

Warning to vadmins: People who do give accounts away are liable for their own and the people they invite’s accounts, if I find your account to be abusing bandwidth or cpu by spamming I might have to suspend the whole user account.

Rules: Apart from not using the bnc to spam, the only other guideline is dont do something that spoils the experience for other users, ie, getting banned from a channel, and switching bnc host, just gets bnc hosts banned from channels, and I wont put up with that sort of thing.

If an vadmin wants scripts loaded to their account and/or linked to an sub account they need to provide the script to me in email, and it needs to be written in a way compatible with sbnc (being tcl) and written in such a way I can check to make sure it doesn’t effect other users.

And finally, the kh web admin url is: http://khobbits.web-interface.org/ and the mana web admin is: http://mana.web-interface.org/

This bnc is ran with the money donated to the service, it currently costs around £2.50 a month, so 60p or $2 donations from members that can pay every now and again are welcome.

Over time I have ran quite a few IRC bots, IRC being Internet Relay Chat for people without the know. An IRC bot, is a bit of script or program that does automated tasks on a chat channel. Now, KHBOT was a creation of mine which stood the torrents of time, that is until i lost my most recent changes to hard drive corruption, after that I gave up on the project, and let a bot called RuneScript or rscript take over the niche that my bot had filled.

On IRC channels, with the invention of chanserv, there is little place for an IRC bot to manage access or ops, so it’s left to automate the more complex tasks, such as maintaining topics, hosting games or trivia. I play an RPG called RuneScape, with the goal of levelling up to become better at different skills, I created a mIRC script that would allow the lookup of your ’score’ in the high score list and return the results in channel. Now as time progressed I began to use this score to produce predictions on what you needed to do to level.

After putting up with rscript for a while, and it’s assorted features I decided it was about time I did something about making a better improved bot with my data. Darwin is the name of the new project, another IRC Runescape statistics bot, but this time it is together with a community I’m part of, called RuneSource, the site and the bot share the same database, a database of exp that we ourselves have gathered and can confirm it’s accuracy, unlike a lot of other sites which tend to share errors.

Darwin is a shared project between me and Filoni, who produces the calcs for RuneSource and also does his own set of statistics logging. Darwin is currently is a sort of eggdrop (tcl) and php hybrid, although I will be porting the scripts to mIRC later. The idea is; because most of the processing can be done on php, there only needs one centralised database, where bots can simply act as a relay to pass information. This means a wide span of mIRC and eggdrop bots can all run from one centralised place, so people can run their own bot but have the latest updates without having to do anything.

Btw anyone wanting cheap solid hosting, I would recommend dreamhost, they do nice solid accounts that do all the php and sql stuff you could ever need, unlimited db’s, separate cpanel accounts and all the other nice stuff.  Well anyway, anyone wanting $50 off their hosting here is a promo code for you “KH50″.  Now that will basically waver your $49 setup fee if you set up monthly, which I wouldn’t really recommend as if you pay yearly, that fee is free, and instead your actually getting months of hosting free. The promo code also gives you a free domain for the lifetime of the account. I recently went for the 2 year payment, with the happy host account it is $164.80 (after promo code) which works out to be $6.86 (or about £3.40) a month.

Edit: updated information march 08.

Now when browsing on the net, I typically bookmark certain websites I believe will come in useful in the future, or sites I might want to check back for updates, or just recommend to friends.  I thought it would be best to make a public list of some of these sites and descriptions about about why they own.

Hamachi
This app allows the setup of mini VPNs or virtual private networks, through a similar to IM client interface.  This means to the computers you add in side each of your little groups can access your computer as if it was connected via a LAN.  In application this means where ever you are, your laptop will have encrypted connection to your computer at home and behave as if it were on a local network.  Other uses could be encrypted file sharing using windows shared folders.  It also isn’t hard to use remote desktop through this app or set up a proxy, as the connections are encrypted before they leave your laptop, any wifi would never see the raw traffic.

meebo
This is a website that is a sort of web based trillian or gaim.  It allows the connection to a few popular IM networks via a easy website.  As a bonus the site provides a repeater app which means your home pc can proxy the service so that if your work blocks the site you can simply ‘host’ the site on your home pc.

freeware list
This is a cool site which lists tons of free software that does just about everything, if you ever want a tool or program but dont want to pay for brand name software check this list to see if there is a freeware version.  Typical examples are firefox, openoffice, spybot, avg and 7-zip.  At the top of the page there is also a list for open source apps.

Process explorer
This is a sysinternals app that is an alternate to the windows taskman for working out what apps are doing what, which one is using all your cpu and memory.  It can replace taskman or just run along side it.

Process tamer
This little app sits in your systray and manages the priority of all your applications, when a program starts eating up cpu it will lower the priority so it doesn’t disturb other apps.  It can also be used to remember the priority of apps so next time they open they will automatically be set to to whatever you like.  You might prefer itunes is set to high so opening firefox doesn’t make it skip a few seconds.