Broken Light Bulb Base Removal Hack

Article: 7901 of alt.hackers
From: joskam@xs4all.nl (Jurjen Oskam)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Broken Light Bulb Base Removal Hack
Date: 28 May 95 21:52:38 CET
Organization: Spot v1.3a #1208 - Amiga
Lines: 48
Approved: First Post
Message-ID: 2fc94506@xs4all.nl
NNTP-Posting-Host: xs1.xs4all.nl
X-FTN-To: Jerry Leslie
X-GateSoftware: AmiGate 1.3a (24.3.95)
X-Posted-By: joskam@xs1.xs4all.nl
Status: RO

In a message of 28 May 95 (17:23:41) Jerry Leslie wrote to All: (about
"Broken
Light Bulb Base Removal Hack")

Hi Jerry!

 JL>   The front porch light burned out. No problem, just replace the bulb.
 JL>   No, it broke, leaving the base of the bulb in the socket, probably

If you have a tennis-ball lying somewhere, then that's the thing to use when a
light-bulb cracks and leaves the base in the socket. Just place the tennisball
where the bulb used to be, and unscrew it.

ObHack:
My mail/news setup. At home I have an Amiga 1200, with a very nice Fidonet mail
reader called Spot. I wanted to use it for reading my news/email, but the
problem was: no UUCP available. On the Amiga, there are UUCP <-> FidoNet
conversion programs available, but since I didn't have UUCP that wouldn't work.
Or so I thought. SOUP, however, was available in the form of the program
'uqwk'. When reading the SOUP specifications, I discovered that each
messagefile is in rnews format. Hey! One of the converters could convert single
rnews-files to fidonet .pkts and so, imported by the fidonet-reader. So what I
did was:

  - On my account, invoke uqwk to create nice SOUP files.
  - LhA-ed the messagefiles, and killed the controlfiles. While
    I was at it, included my mailbox in the archive too.
  - Get the archive to my 1200
  - Using an ARexx script to automatically unpack and convert the
    mail/news. ARexx can do interprocess-communication, so it can
    tell the fidonet mailreader when it's finished and so can
    start importing the mail/news.
  - Reading the whole lot. :-)
  - When replying, the converter needed a 'sendmail' and a 'NNTPpost'
    program. Since I don't have UUCP, I didn't have these available.
  - Wrote another two ARexx scripts to intercept the calls to
    'sendmail' and 'NNTPpost', and save the emails/articles to a
    seperate directory.
  - Packing the replies, and sending it to my account.
  - Wrote a UNIX script to process the mail and news, and send new
    stuff

Phew! Since I'm a complete UNIX moron, I'm quite proud of it.. :-)

---
Jurjen Oskam     -=*Finger joskam@xs4all.nl for PGP public key! *=-
Key fingerprint =  E3 9F E7 5C 16 3B D2 B2  4F 86 BA 66 96 0C 44 F1

... Fact: fourteen out of every ten people like chocolate.

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