On this occasion I also got to play around a bit with a 8mm Fish-Eye, definitely something I will be adding to my own line up, although I might go for one with AF and motorized aperture, although trying out a physical manual aperture was quite fun. But I can see advantages of having a physical aperture ring directly on the lens, makes it easy to change setup when an opportunity presents itself.

All in all a good trip, and nobody was (too) offended by having a lens put in their face.

[Show as slideshow]

12►

So what better way to test new equipment, than to annoy (but in a polite way) the family. This time it fell on my grandparents and my uncle, whom I used as target practice (turned out quite a few of the target practice shots were quite nice, so I ended up putting them in the final lineup).

[Show as slideshow]

At first my idea was to upgrade my flash to the 580EX II in combination with a Lastolite softbox and PocketWizard radio system – but then I ran across the Bowens Gemini stuido strobes which turned out to cost only slightly more than the aforementioned setup. It was a no brainer really!

So here are a few photos from the first day of playing around with my precious new strobes.

[Show as slideshow]

So naturally I had to grab my camera and go for a little walk, this is what I ended up with instead of sleep.

[Show as slideshow]

So naturally, having this chunk of glass in my hands, I just couldn’t help myself, getting familiarized with it – and all I can say is Wow. Now I’m just sad I can’t give it a Full Frame sensor to back the image quality and sharpness this lens gives, but that is in the pipeline for later (i.e. for when there is enough money to purchase a Canon 5D mkII ).

Anyway, here are some conceptual test shots of a few subjects I had around the home, enjoy.

[Show as slideshow]

I have just compiled exactly such a list, download here (Open Document Spreadsheet format).

Spawning items via console

To spawn an item in-game, open the console by hitting the “~” (tilde) key, then type in:

player.additem [BaseID] [Number]

You need to replace [BaseID] with the base id of the item you wish to spawn, and [Number] with the quantity of the item you which to spawn.

E.g. If I want to spawn some .308 Rounds I look up the Base ID and find it to be 0006B53C, I then hit the “~” key and type:

player.additem 0006B53C 10

And hit enter. Now I would receive 10 .308 Rounds.

Extracted list

The first part of the spreadsheet, is an extracted list optimized for printing, with all the most commonly used items (ammunition,  weapon mods and weapons).

Complete list

The second part of the spreadsheet, is a complete list of all items in the game with rows for the Base ID (called Form ID here), Editor ID, Type and Name, all of which is filterable via the drop-down boxes for quick access to specific types of items.

From here you can find e.g. all armor items by filtering Type to “ARMO”.

List of NPC’s

Altough the primary purpose of the list is for item codes, the list actually contains a lot more data than that. If you switch to the “Complete list” sheet, you will have access to a large amount of Form ID codes for various things in the game, such as NPC’s. All you have to do is select the appropriate type from the dropdown menu of the “Type” field, so say you are seeking a NPC Form ID, you shall select the “NPC_” type. The type names are from within the G.E.C.K utility, so they are all shortened to four letter words, some are easy to guess (such as “NPC_”) while others are a bit more tricky (like “RCCT”).

Interesting types of Form ID names, are:

• ALCH – Items used in alchemy (like “Human Flesh”, “Hydra” etc.)
• ARMO – Armors, Gloves etc.
• BOOK – Well, books
• CCRD – Playing cards (if you ever wanted a complete set)
• CDCK – Complete decks
• CELL – Names of the cells (places) in the game
• CMNY – Various currency items (like NCR $)
• KEYM – Various keys for accessing stuff
• NPC_ – All standard game NPC’s
• PERK – Well all the perks you can acquire

Those are the most interesting, but there are plenty of stuff in there, just waiting to be discovered.

Download

So go ahead and download it from below, and enjoy.

Fallout New Vegas Item Codes.ods

Often though one desires to disallow anonymous logins but neither have SSH login for users of the server (i.e. only ftp access), this might be the case for say web hosting or similar services.

What having a valid shell means, is that the binary pointed to by the user configuration (/etc/passwd in the 6th and last column) must be listed in the /etc/shells file to be considered valid. To disallow SSH login on a local user, you would normally set the users login shell to something non-existent such as /bin/false, /bin/nologin, /dev/null or similar. But doing so will make vsFTPd disallow logins for any such user.

As it turns out, there are two ways to fix this. The choice is up to you.

Fix 1. – Disabling valid shell check for vsFTPd

This fix will make vsFTPd skip the “valid shell” check altogether. As vsFTPd uses the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) system,  the fix is as easy as opening /etc/pam.d/vsftpd and uncomment the following line using your favorite editor:

#auth   required        pam_shells.so

The line is often located at the end of said file. The pam_shells.so module, is specifically made for checking that a given user has a valid shell, thus there is no loss in security by dropping it from vsFTPd’s authentication. Now restart your vsFTPd server (in case you are running it in standalone mode) by issuing:

$ /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

If you are using inetd or similar, the changes will take effect on the next session instantiated with the ftp server.

Fix 2. – Adding invalid shell to shells file

This fix will make whatever invalid binary you have put in your user configuration (/bin/false, /bin/nologin or similar) look like a valid shell without being it (as it’s a non-existent binary). All you have to do is simply append your invalid shells to the /etc/shells file:

$ echo "/bin/nologin" >> /etc/shells

This will make PAM think /bin/nologin is a valid shell and thus the valid shell check will pass for vsFTPd (and any other service!) without the user actually being able to do a SSH login.

Personally  I prefer the first fix as this surgically disables the faulting check in vsFTPd without changing the premise for any other services or changing the system wide environment in general. Adding the invalid shell to the shells file, may or may not adversely affect other services (probably not).

So stating the problem more clearly; We know the production cost of some product and we want to determine a provision so that it is equal to a percentage of the sales price .

We know that the sales price is the production cost plus the provision:

Our requirement can thus be stated as:

Thus we can use this formula directly to calculate a provision matching a certain percentage of the sales price knowing the production cost and said percentage only.

As an example say you have a production cost of 242,- and want 15% of the sales price to go to provision, then we can calculate how much you should add in provision and by definition what your sales price should be: