What I did on my vacation from reality

xkcd’s forums don’t want to let me log in, so I’ll post here.

I was reading this xkcd strip, and curiousity got the best of me, so I wrote a Perl program to decode it. Initially, I came up with junk, until I realized it was 8-bit ASCII, not 7-bit — odd, because it’s a 483-bit code, and 483/7=69, whereas 483/8=60.375, but whatever.

So. Here’s a transcript of the binary code, and here’s the program I wrote to decode it. (Here’s the first draft of the program, and here’s a more compressed version with some amateur ASCII art touches that I formatted for my girlfriend (all three versions are hereby released into the public domain).)

And here’s what the string decodes to: (more…)

Okay, so I went through the major freaking hassle of going behind Ubuntu’s back and sneakily upgrading the kernel to 2.6.27 while it wasn’t looking.

I’m pleased to confirm that the rtl8187B is supported out of the box.

Also, I think once you load snd-hda-intel, the pcspkr stops working until the next boot. Huh.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

I’d rather have SpamAssassin getting my mail than Google (no offense, Gmail guys).

So, it occured to me that the Gmail folders are, DUH, just another IMAP folder. All I had to do was figure out the path:

[514] cuervo@skull ~ $ telnet imap.gmail.com imaps
Trying 66.249.83.109...
Connected to gmail-imap.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]startssl

telnet> startssl
* OK Gimap ready for requests from 76.176.98.151 i38if10040852wxd.24
A LOGIN "stuff@gmail.com" "password"
A OK stuff@gmail.com authenticated (Success)
B LIST "*" "*"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "INBOX"
* LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "[Gmail]"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/All Mail"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Drafts"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Spam"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Starred"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Trash"
B OK Success
C LOGOUT
* BYE LOGOUT Requested
C OK 73 good day (Success)
Connection closed by foreign host.

And then tell fetchmail to grab it:

poll imap.gmail.com
	proto imap
	user 'stuff@gmail.com'
	pass 'password'
	ssl
	keep
	folder [Gmail]/Spam