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I blogged about this today since I figured some /.'ers would be interested.

Drop me a line if you're moving to Vancouver.

First, the obligatory link to a mirror of the MIT Lockpicking Guide.

Second - as another poster noted, lock pins aren't typically made from high-strength alloys. A battery-powered hand drill (and a screwdriver to turn the lock when the pins are gone) is the best and fastest lock pick that there is. Didn't even leave any visible damage when I used this approach on a filing cabinet we'd lost the key to. Just pick a bit as wide as the key entryway, and drill down the line of pins.

Be advised that the lock tends to jam after closing again, as the remains of the pins fall back into their channels when the lock returns to its original position. But if you're drilling a lock, you're typically looking for a one-time solution anyways.

I use Dynu's Email Store/Forward service for $20 a year.

My ISP used to block incoming 25, and Dynu was my primary MX that could use ETRN to send to "alternate" ports, much like DynDNS.

Now that my ISP has come to their senses and has allowed me to run a mail server, it makes a great inexpensive failsafe in case of routing or power outages.

This is MUCH less than $100/yr :)

I had this happen to me, too, and I use Dynu as my MX, and you can set it to auto-forward my mail from there, to a non-standard port on your host (which for me, the first stop is my firewall, so I have my 'non-standard port' port-forwarded to 25 on my mail machine).

It's not free, unfortunately, ($20 a year I think), but the nice thing is that they'll store 100 MB of email if for some reason they can't deliver it to your host - and since my mail is all done off of my cable, and I live in a weird area (My power was out for 8 hours yesterday because of the intense winds we were having (I live in Maryland)), it's a nice solution for me.

Wow, what a coincidence, I've been researching the same topic recently.

Here are two providers that I've found so far:

• domainMX.net - located in Ontario (at least it's North America...)
• Dynu.com - look for the "Email store/forward" service.

Both of these providers seem to meet my needs and have reasonable pricing, under $20/year. There were some other business-class services out there that I ruled out due to $100+ monthly costs.

I use ISCA BBS (one of the oldest, largest telnet BBSs out there), and came across a great user browser called ISCA Big Brother (http://orangejumpsuit.dynu.com/bbsusers), that tracks BBSers login habits. I wonder what other BBSs out there have similar tools available? Searching through user profiles for their home pages can provide countless hours of entertainment.

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :

Mandrake \Man"drake\, n. [AS. mandragora, L. mandragoras, fr.
Gr. ?: cf. F. mandragore.]
1. (Bot.) A low plant ({Mandragora officinarum) of the
Nightshade family, having a fleshy root, often forked, and
supposed to resemble a man. It was therefore supposed to
have animal life, and to cry out when pulled up. All parts
of the plant are strongly narcotic. It is found in the
Mediterranean region.

And shrieks like mandrakes, torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad. --Shak.

Note: The mandrake of Scripture was perhaps the same plant,
but proof is wanting.

I like the 'often forked' line, as I'm planning my own.

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :

Mandrake \Man"drake\, n. [AS. mandragora, L. mandragoras, fr.
Gr. ?: cf. F. mandragore.]
1. (Bot.) A low plant ({Mandragora officinarum) of the
Nightshade family, having a fleshy root, often forked, and
supposed to resemble a man. It was therefore supposed to
have animal life, and to cry out when pulled up. All parts
of the plant are strongly narcotic. It is found in the
Mediterranean region.

And shrieks like mandrakes, torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad. --Shak.

Note: The mandrake of Scripture was perhaps the same plant,
but proof is wanting.

I like the 'often forked' line, as I'm planning my own.

The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Project is extremely similar and is based on the k12ltsp concept. Check it out if you can. K12ltsp is great for rolling-out massive amounts of LTSP servers quickly.

I'm sure you've got better things to do than explain a month-old 'out of context' quote to everyone, but I really appreciated seeing you jump into the fray, as always. I have a question for you that has nothing to do with Mono... Have you tried the Rox file-manager/desktop? What are your impressions? I've just started using it, and love the direction it's going. Do you think we might see a 'gnome-lite' ditching some of the heavies like Nautilus for Rox or equivelent? I know I can obviously do this on my own without you; but I'm really curious what your impression of Rox is. I run a tiny little project we've dubbed The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project and I'm concidering ditching GNOME and KDE for the fast-as-hell Rox with sawfish/pygtk. Your impressions/comments are highly anticipated. Thanks.

For you Mandrake users, I head a project to include LTSP and Mosix on a Mandrake configured kernel; to package and explain in very easy terms the whole process, and then eventually release a stripped-down Mdk, geared towards education (edu-tech is pretty much my field) ala K12 LTSP. We call it The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project. Check it out and lend a hand if interested. Thanks.

I'm trying to run a little thing we call The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project(We could use help) and I'm very interested in thin-client tech. The project is to further lower HW/server costs by adding process migration to the server/thin-clients. Imagine if we could also get USB mouse/keyboard support in there and shove about 4 pci vidcards in each box... get 4 heads from a $200 box(plus monitor/kb/mouse). Wow... think I'm going to login to testdrive and start compiling kernels. :)

Alan praises Mosix a bit in this interview. A bunch of us from irc.openprojects.net are working on a project to package full install/configuration scripts first for Mandrake users, then for everyone. Come check us out at The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project, as you probably guessed, we're also working on packaging LTSP+Mosix script for LTSP 3.0 with the author of the original ltsp_mosix howto.

It really saddens me that in this day and age, people so often fail to recognize the fundamental differences from somthing like a "trade school" and "going to college."

It seems, to me, to happen at an alarming rate among folks in the Computer Science field. They ignore the disctinction between education and training. Learning the skills one needs to program (just as one example) does not constitute education. That is training, the acquisition of skills, learning how "to do stuff." Education is completely different; one's goal is not to learn how to do things that will get you paid better on the job. The purpose is the open your mind to even a small part of the vast body of the knowledge acquired by the human race. There is a difference between an uneducated person and an educated person, and the distinction has nothing to do with "marketable skills."

So many folks (and, yes, so many folks in the CS, CE, EE arena) go to college in order to gain these marketable skills. They figure that "people will degrees get paid better," and this is sadly what our business-minded culture accepts. I, personally, am fascinated by Computer Science and that was going to be my undergraduate major, but I changed my major to History in order to avoid finding myself in a job-training program. If that was what I wanted, I would have made my way to the nearest Vo-Tech, but I wanted to be educated in the classical, true sense of the term.

Thank you, and I'm not knocking anyone in technical school... you folks knew what you were looking for :)

-Lawrence
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