Neat new (to me) phishing spam

Appearing to be from ebay, a 'member question'.

"Question from smain1962

Hello
Hello, what happened with that item? Please respond Thank you."

All the links in the email are genuine.. except the 'respond' one: "http://3281702273/https://signin.ebay.com/[etc]" - the number will be the IP address of the naughty lookalike site.

Ten times cheaper but not 'cheap'

It's odd. (Well, I think it's odd, anyway.)

I have no problem spending £36ish on a ticket to ENO for a couple of hours watching an opera and think I've got a bargain. (Depends on the opera, obviously...)

But if a DVD costs more than £2 or £3, I go 'Hmmm, that's a bit expensive!'.

Partly, it's because there's a second-hand market for DVDs (have a browse of Amazon or CeX), a rental market and imports, but also because today's £29.99 special collectors edition disk is tomorrow's 'free with today's paper' promotional item - and at least two of those are down to the studios.

I had a £20 HMV gift token from some survey recently and had two looks around their extensive collection. I couldn't get the purchases up to £20. The money might have been free, but even so, '£5 for that? No thanks!'

In the end, I gave it as a birthday present to my nephew who was happy to spend it :)

Oh no, the central heating system doesn't work

In London at least, we're having the first cold nights since, ooh, February or March.

So last night was the first time the central heating was on for ages. And it didn't work.

The boiler went on ok (it does hot water too, so gets used once or twice a day), the pipes near the boiler got hot, and the pump got decidedly hot. But the radiators didn't.

Apparently, this is a Known Problem in such circumstances. Bits of sludge collect in the pump over the months and it has problems starting up. (Modern pumps run for a few seconds every day, even when the heating's off, to avoid this.)

When it happens again in a year's time, the cure for our system is to use a coin to take the big screw cover off the front (with a tray underneath, because there will be drips) and use a screwdriver to turn the pump's propeller a little. Put the cover back and try again. The movement you did should have cleared enough for it to start... if not, use the switch underneath the pump to set it to III (max power) rather than I (enough power normally).

PC 'desktop' environments part 2

While I'm having a post-fest :)

The poll about these was in response to having to use KDE (Linux) recently. You want flashy widgets? KDE gives you lots! Things fade in and out. No oportunity is missed to make it look 'pimped up'. Something in the taskbar shows some psychadelic display, because, well, you can never have too much eye candy, can you?

Erm, yes, you can.

There are some desireable programs that demand KDE - most of them named Ksomething - but demanding KDE makes them a lot less desireable for me.

One of the magazines did an issue on going from Windows to Linux recently and picked Kubuntu (KDE) rather than original Ubuntu (Gnome) not because it's more usable, but because it looks more like Windows.

Argh, because much the same applies to Windows XP's 'Oh, let's have rounded corners on our windows and neat effects and..' rather than just letting me get on with it.

Don't even get me started on Windows Vista. Never mind its 'bend over while we DRM your ass, because we can't trust you whereas you know you can trust us... err, anyway you're having it' attitude, it's the new user interface that means it's never going to get near a PC here. 3D angular translucent 'Aero' crap is still crap...

Ah, yes, the question. If you use KDE, why?