Email spies

This outfit and this domain are in cahoots, signing up PHP robots to mailing lists in order to archive those mailing lists, and publish the archives, without the knowledge or permission of the list members or maintainers.

Sure, there is no legal expectation of privacy in email.  But to publish an archive of someone else's mailing list without even telling them you're doing so, let alone asking permission, is damned rude at best.  One assumes the intended business model is to monetize other people's content via targeted advertising (and, some reports allege, by harvesting addresses off the lists for sale to spammers).

If you run a Mailman-based mailing list, and don't want Answerpot leeching your list, here's how you slam the door on their sockpuppets:  Simply go to each affected list's management page, go to the Privacy screen, and enter ^@zeusmail.org into the banned-addresses list.  This is a wildcard regular expression that will match any zeusmail.org address.  Then you'll probably want to go through and delete any zeusmail.org addresses.  The easy way to do that is from the command line:

# cd [Mailman list directory]
# for f in * ; do list_members $f | grep "zeusmail\.org$" | xargs remove_members -n $f ; done

(Note:  This example assumes that all Mailman tools are in your PATH.)

A clever technical trick

Per a gizmag article, Audi is experimenting with a new generation of super-high-end car audio systems.  In brief, Audi's new experimental system uses 62 speakers, a trunk full of amplifiers, three controlling PCs, and an advanced technique called wave field synthesis to create a spatial soundfield that not only has consistent stereo visualization regardless of where you're sitting in the vehicle, but can even make sound sources appear to be either inside or outside the vehicle or computationally simulate "any desired spatial impression" — which is to say, EAX for car audio, on steroids.

The system works best with specially created audio media that uses up to 32 tracks, each with spatial information encoded into it, but can reportedly generate dramatically better stereo imaging even from conventional sources.

So when every album you left in your 2018 Audi S12 has evolved into Queen's Greatest Hits, well, at least it'll sound good...

Daily Aphorism

#2

Theorem:  If life doesn't confuse you, then you're missing 90% of it.

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Note that one might infer a corollary from this that if life does confuse you, then you're not missing stuff.  That corollary would of course be false.

Again, there's a strong personal aspect to this one.  I first wrote this down somewhere around about 10-12 years before finally being diagnosed with Asperger's.  Yes, any part of life that had anything to do with people confused the living hell out of me.  Much of it still does; but at least now, I have a better understanding of why.

Understanding is something that you acquire over time.  Unfortunately, sometimes all you actually acquire is a better understanding of why you don't understand.