Plantagenet Penguinista

...made almost too easy (step by step AKA click by click). Starting Writer here in Australia will open a blank, A4, portrait-layout page. Click the Format menu, Page. Click the Orientation radio-button to Landscape. Triple-click the 2.00cm in the Left field to highlight the number. Type 1 <tab> 1 <tab> 1 <tab> 1 to set all of the margins to 1cm (which may need to be varied for your printer; experimentation is necessary). Click on the Page layout dropdown & set it to Mirrored. Click the OK button. You are now done setting up the page. Click the Insert menu, Frame. In the Size section, click the Relative check-box under Width (to ON). Double-click in the Width field to select the numbers, type 48% . Click OFF the Autosize check-box under Height. Click the Relative check-box (to ON). Double-click in the Height field to select the numbers, type 98% . In the Anchor section, click the To page radio-button. In the Position section, click the Mirror check-box (to ON). Cli...

Here’s a little puzzle which hopefully falls within your specialty. I may need to set up a system so that wireless users can clock on using what amounts to an Internet account. The idea is that the wireless itself will use standard routers (WAPs) talking WPA2, the clients will then “connect” through the wireless to a server, which then transproxies, records traffic, maybe rate-limits when talking to the main link. The idea which first floated to mind was using PPPoE, but the RP-PPPoE service only speaks of using an Ethernet interface without an IP address, which seems incompatible with that idea. PPTP (PopTop) has also been suggested, but that requires kernel patches rather than standard software, & can apparently be broken. A major utility factor is minimal setup on Windows-XP or -Vista clients, hopefully also Mac & others. Local security (encryption) is also good, but not critical. Ideally, a laptop is powered up, finds the wireless, is given a WPA2 key, cloc...

I had winsomely hoped for a little more honesty, but a decade of habit has just showed through. I have a form in hand (version 4, it seems) from a Registry Officer which paints me as a disinterested lout & casually fails to mention the enormous amount of interference employed to directly prevent me from doing anything useful. The outright errors (to say nothing of the falsehoods) are multitudinous. I have about two dozen individuals around the world who will patiently explain that in every dealing with them I’ve been absolutely honest & shown total integrity. I can probably round up half a dozen individuals who will mention times (many times, for some of them) in which they’ve experienced the liar lying (& in a few cases, been hurt & or distressed as a consequence). At least some of the above may be necessary in order to circumvent an act (a ploy) of “poor, poor, pitiful me.” I think this is what is referred to as a “no win situation” ...

Here, we have Stephan's Quintet, a bunch of five galaxies which hang around together. Or do they? Some people became curious, so they did a little research, & discovered that NGC 7320 (lower left in image) has a redshift of about 800km/sec versus roughly 6000 for the other four. The indication is that 7320 is much closer than the others. Unfortunately for any triumphalism which this may invoke, 7320 (& 7319, upper left) has faint but continuous gas/dust tails leading to another galaxy, 7319C, illustrating that they’re all connected, so at roughly the same distance. Oops... Meanwhile, 7319 has a quasar (QSO) within it. Interacting with the dust near the core of the galaxy. With a massively higher redshift, indicating that it is much more distant than the galaxy it rests in (over 90 times more). All of this is of course impossible. But it exists, it is still happening. We can see it. We can point to it. Never mind... Oh, one other little impossibility: as well as being wild...

Mr Obama’s proposed Financial Stimulus package, which he is (wait for it) trying to borrow the money to implement, is serious money. How serious? To equal it, you would have to earn more than a million US dollars in every single day since Christ. If you slogged through a ten-hour day, that’d be USD$100,000.00 an hour. If you worked Mondays to Fridays only, USD$140,000.00 an hour. For me, even spending that much would be difficult. Spending a million dollars (about 1½ million Aussie dollars), no worries. Doing it for the thousandth time (having earned a little over a tenth of 1% of the package) would be a bit harder. When you got as far as the crucifixion (call it ≈25AD from a birth in ≈2BC, so roughly 8 billion dollars), what would you spend it on? After being visited in the green nation by his two brothers from overseas, Paddy wandered into the pub to order 3 pints of Guinness in three separate glasses. Then he sat at a table on the other side of the ...