I’m having some fun with a Nigerian 419 scammer at the moment. It all kicked off with this email from about a week ago:

Dear Beneficiary,

Re: Payment of your withhold/Outstanding contract/inheritance Fund of USD$2.4 Million.

Regards to our earlier correspondence in respect of the above subject matter,kindly be informed that we have here in our bank
and file record the above mentioned sum on your name that has been approved for immediate payment to you.

In view of this and considering the number of applications and request we have received regarding this same amount,we are
requesting for the re-confirmation of the following information so as to enable us ensure that this fund is paid to the rightful and original beneficiary.

1)Your full name and address.
2) Your telephone number(s) and fax No.(if any)
3)Your age and occupation.

The above information are required to enable us cross-check with the information in our record and to ensure that you receive
your fund directly.We have had people here submitting several application claiming that you gave them power of attorney to
receive the fund on your behalf.This is why we needed this re-confirmation of information from you.

We are anticipating your most urgent response.

Thank you.

Respectfully,

Ms Kemi Martins
For:SKYE BANK PLC

Fairly standard stuff, and the type of thing I’d usually just delete and think nothing more of. Occasionally I report the sender to their email provider in the vain hope that something might be done and they get disconnected, but that’s getting less and less effective. If time and mood allows, I now prefer to pick a spammer a week and just screw around with them for a while. I justify this to myself in a few ways: a) scammers have too easy a ride on the internets, b) them dealing with me and my perceived stupidity takes up their time for ultimately no reward, c) it’s fun and d) an actual, proper, confirmed Nigerian scammer is just too good an opportunity to pass up. I’ve been replying back-and-forth to the email address in question (skyebkgroupplc@live.com) from one of my disposable webmail accounts for a few days now and I’m acting a bit…startled. I mean, come on, I thought my bank account was doing OK and now I hear I’m in line for some free money — how could I miss an opportunity like this!

The guy on the Nigerian end of things (82.128.116.64) has sent me a file today, asking for my bank details so I can have my new VISA card sent directly to me. He sent skye_bank_form.doc (31kb), and I must open it, fill it out, and return it. What he’s actually going to get in return is skye_bank_form-completed.doc.zip — I’ll explain in my best naïve voice that I had to include some bank statement scans and the file is a bit larger than I expected. Mmm, juicy bank statements – an excellent reason to open the attachment at his end.

I won’t actually be sending bank statements, of course – I’m sending him a zip bomb. When he opens skye_bank_form-completed.doc.zip, it’ll extract a file called skye_bank_form.doc, which will look like a Word document in WinZip, and he’ll eagerly open it. The thing is, skye_bank_form.doc is full of zeroes. Lots of zeroes. A hundred gigabytes of zero — or, in old money, 107374182400 zeroes…one hundred and seven billion, three hundred and seventy four million, one hundred and eighty two thousand four hundred zeroes. That 100 gigabyte file zips down to a few megabytes and will extract to full size when he opens it. Which will likely crash his computer. Or kill it completely. Or something worse, I don’t know — and I don’t care.

Here’s how I did it. This assumes you have a UNIX-esque operating system, I’m sure it’s possible for Windows but you’re on your own with that. Make sure you have enough free space on your hard disk, and you’re not doing anything important, then open a terminal prompt and type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=skye_bank_form-completed.doc bs=1m count=100k

That command takes a never-ending zero generator (the /dev/zero part) as its input file, and dumps it to skye_bank_form-completed.doc, with a blocksize of 1 megabyte, and it stops when it has 100000 blocks in a row…a thousand megabytes is a gigabyte, and a hundred of those make a hundred gigabytes. That’s stage one complete. Next: zip it. A billion of the same character in a row will compress exceptionally well. My hundred gigabyte file has been squished into a file that’s of an email-friendly size…and is currently headed along the interweb choobs to a dial-up account in Nigeria.

Long post coming up, be warned. Skip to the end for the tl;dr.

It’s been a while since I last put thoughts into words here, suffice to say it hasn’t been wasted time. It’s fair to say I haven’t been thinking about houses 100% of the time, but I have stuck to my plan for thinking about houses and doing something house-related every day. I need to work to keep my house geek badge of honour. Or something.

The main point of this post is to explain the happenings of the last but one weekend (days three and four of Project Cooper Acres). I travelled down to Devon, and subsequently Cornwall, for a photo tour weekend, organised by Michael Palmer. Staying at the Home Farm Hotel, there was a cunning plan hatched to spend the Saturday around the Devon area taking photos, and then have the ‘official’ tour with Michael (photo chap) and Russ Hewer (driver chap) of Tailored Tours on the Sunday.

Arriving at the hotel on the Friday evening, a couple of pints of local cider was consumed and a plan to visit Sidmouth and Seaton on the Saturday was hatched by fellow photo tour conspirators and camera nerds PJ Kent, Ryan Doughty and Sheila Morris. My ulterior motive, as well as spending time with real people on a work-free weekend, was to get to know the area more. East Devon and West Dorset are shortlisted on the Where Will Cooper Acres Be Built list. Actually, they are the shortlist. I like the area, albeit what little I’ve experienced of it, and what I’ve seen in Hugh’s never-ending stream of telly and DVDs. In addition to the photos I would be taking, there would be in-depth reportage and other such investigative things going on.

We started in Sidmouth on the seafront. I had a fairly good start on the photography front with a few candids and right-place-right-time shots – you’ll find the full set from the weekend here on my Flickr page – and Sidmouth struck me as a fairly typical south coast seaside town in summer. The weather was pretty meh, overcast clouds, lots of humidity and not really great conditions for fun photography. This was the first time I’d been to a south coast seaside town in high season, naturally I was expecting tourists everywhere and I was right, even despite the yucky weather.

After Sidmouth, we schlepped over to Seaton, home of the trams. The weather was now taking a turn for the worst and intermittent rain was just getting annoying with the associated humidity. I don’t like humidity – no, scrap that, I loathe it. I’m useless in humid environments and I get cranky. And no-one likes a crankypants, least of all 3 people who haven’t spent time with me to get used to my faults and foibles. After 30 or so minutes or so in Seaton, I’d had enough – the weather was just wiping me out and I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend with impending moaning. As something of a British traditional trait, we’re the best in the world at complaining about the weather. No-one comes close.

Two seaside towns done, there was one more that I wanted to visit while I was in the area. This was a little further afield and subsequently involved a 1h45m cross-country drive to get to. Totally worth it, though.

I was keen to get to Crackington Haven, new home of Neil Dixon (beardy type) and Jen Dixon (professional absintheur). Subconciously, I’d been waiting to visit them for some time. I didn’t want to trek out straight from Abingdon as it’s a 3h45m drive and I really wasn’t looking forward to that. Getting to Crackington Haven from East Devon was far easier and faster, so it made sense to use the time I was in the area to pay a visit.

The drive to Crackington Haven was easy. I was expecting small roads full of slow caravans and lost tourists, and I was wrong. The misconceptions about travel infrastructure I had were quickly proven wrong. Truth is, I’d discounted Cornwall as somewhere to live because I thought it was too far from civilisation to be feasible, especially as there are plans to run a home-based business beyond the Internet-related stuff we do now. The drive in was a doddle, and the roads were eerily quite for a weekend in high season.

On the final leg of the journey, I drove through a field of wind turbines. Lots of them. I love wind turbines, I find them magical and they always make me smile. I love the industrial design and the noise they make when they go round. I’m a simple soul, really. After the wind turbines, there were houses with honesty shops at the end of the drive, including locally grown/made jams and vegetables. Brilliant. Not something you get round Abingdon way, in the main.

Arriving at Crackington Haven was a breath of fresh air – literally. Being on the Atlantic coast, the wind coming off the sea was clean, fresh, and a world away from the humidity from earlier in the day. I was in Crackington Haven for two hours, during which time Neil cooked scones (he’s quite the baking ninja), took me to one of the finest beach I’ve seen in my short and sheltered life, and without trying appears to have persuaded me that our new life and new house now belongs in Cornwall.

I drove back to Honiton with mixed emotions. The landscape and locality of north Cornwall is nothing short of perfect for our needs and – frankly – it’s the first place I could see us properly setting up home in, without feeling like we stick out like weirdos.

So, that’s the plan. Live in north Cornwall. Though I will need to take Emma down there to make sure she likes it. The Dixon bed and breakfast service is looking mighty appealing.

tl;dr: we’re going to live in north Cornwall.

It’s hard to believe, but I have been a published author for a year now. This time last year, The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A to Z was hot off the press and we were preparing to take a car load down to the Big Green Gathering for a week-long signing fest. Alas, it was not to be. The Gathering was cancelled at the last minute, and so I put together an online version instead.

Due to last year’s problems, the BGG isn’t running this year either – so it’s time again for the Big Green Blog Gathering. All next week, over on my lean green, blogging machine, I will be hosting days of fun and frolics in the virtual sunshine.

There’s plenty of room if you want come along, and if you want to join in and give a talk in the virtual yurt, or help with the weeding in the permaculture garden then give me a shout. It’s so hip, it even has a Twitter tag. But no Facebook group. Not yet.

As you know, Pete and I have decided that we would like to move. In fact, we’ve decided that a move is the only thing that will save our sanity. We’ve had various discussions about how and when this might take place, and have considered selling up and renting, building our own home and buying a (very) smallholding somewhere out west. The idea is that I will have the peace and quiet I crave and we will have enough room to swing a cat.

All of that seems impossibly far away and for several weeks I have been harbouring a substantially different dream – downsizing and living in a pair of LandARKS. A LandARK is a very funky, off-grid eco house which is built from a kit. I thought we could have two – one for a home and one for an office. With solar water heating and space heating from a wood burning stove we could be warm and cosy and energy efficient (although we’d need a grid connection for the office, at least. And the internets. We must have the internets).

Pete has never really shared this dream. It’s not about the downsizing – he’s as keen to get rid of the clutter as I have and has been enthusiastically ridding us of our possessions, one way or another. He was bothered by the fact that there are no photos of LandARKS – only artist’s impressions. He didn’t think they existed (although the smaller version, the GardenARK, was taken to various trade shows last year).

I have, reluctantly, come around to his way of thinking. I have emailed RuralZed to ask for further details, and received no reply. I have emailed Tensen Buildings (they do the woodwork, as far as I can see) and received no reply. Pete has rung both companies and left multiple messages on their answerphones – and received no reply.

And so it seems a need a new dream. Bummer.

The worst (best/heaviest, delete as appropriate) snowfall in years means we will not be venturing far from home for the next few days. I went to take some garden photos this morning, but my camera battery was flat and I will have to wait for it to charge.

Pete and I were watching Iron Man yesterday evening when it really started to snow, and decided to wrap up well and go out for a walk because the snow and the streetlights combined to make it eerily light.

We ended up finding a patch of grass down the road and attempting to build a giant snowman. The base was relatively easy:

We made a second body section, which was also pretty large, and it took us a long time to work out how to hoist it up on the base because it was very heavy and the sides kept collapsing under the weight (as did I!).

By the time we ran out of energy we had something more akin to a snow cupcake than a snowman, but it was pretty impressive :D

Lots of FarmVille players have issues with the way that the Fuel system works – you need Fuel to power the farm vehicles that make working your farm so much quicker and cut down on all the clicking you need to do every day. But everytime you use your vehicles, the Fuel level in your tank drops. It creeps up slowly over the day, but will max out the current unit of fuel and then stop. So everytime you use up a whole unit of fuel, you can’t get it back without buying more with your FarmVille cash, or finding some when you open a mystery egg.

The FV podcast is always promising changes to the Fuel system, but it doesn’t matter for the next few days because the Free Fuel Week event has started. Every day for the next five days you get a free tank of fuel when you first login to the game”

And there are two ways to share extra Fuel with your Neighbors. The first is to click on the fuel can icon in the top right hand corner of the game screen. (If you can’t see a Fuel can icon then you may need to click on the other icons that are there to read those messages first, then the Fuel can should appear.)

That will give you a chance to share Fuel with your Neighbours. The free fuel messages appear in your News Feed, so keep an eye out for them and see if you can collect free fuel from your Neighbors:

The news from the forum is that offering free fuel to your Neighbors only works once a day – so there’s no point clicking on the fuel can icon multiple times and spamming their News feeds. The extra notices will be duds. And each Neighbor is offered 1/5 unit of fuel, and it looks like only 5 Neighbors can collect, so you have to be quick if you want to collect fuel this way.

But there is a second way to share fuel with your Neighbors – 1/5 can of Fuel is now a giftable item. Send Fuel to your Neighbors when you send out your free gifts and request Fuel back if you need it. Those 1/5 cans soon add up, and you don’t have to be quick off the mark to get them. And don’t forget that we’re into the final couple of days for Holiday Presents, so make the most of them while you can!

We’re still in the run-up to Halloween, and the limited edition spooky decorations keep comin in FarmVille. For coins you can now buy Jack-O-Lanterns and Cat-O-Lanterns, Plant Monsters (what do they eat?), tombstones and a dreadful fence. If you’ve got FarmVille cash to spare then you can splash out on giant spiderwebs and gargoyle gates.

New this morning are the Mystery Boxes – spend 15 of your FarmVille bucks on them and open them to get a mystery prize. It could be a cool new decoration for your farm or up to 200 XP, but how good they’re going to be remains to be seen. I’ve seen people getting bicycles and tree swings so far.

People are getting into the swing of crop mastery now, but as there’s no way to rush it, getting those bonuses takes time! And although the ‘Shutterbug’ ribbon has been MIA for a few weeks, we now know what’s replacing it – the Crop Whisperer ribbon. As you help out on your friend’s farms you’ll be given sacks of fertilizer with which to fertilize their crops and gain points towards your new ribbon. Fertilized crops sparkle and give XP when they’re harvested, but so far the fertilizer has been given a limited roll out and most people are still waiting for their chance to start working towards the ribbon.

Download the mp3 or click the play button to listen:

Or, listen to this show episode at Mevio.

Download the mp3 or click the play button to listen:

Or, listen to this show episode at Mevio.

Download the mp3 or click the play button to listen:

Or, listen to this show episode at Mevio.