Ask MetaFilter posts by Drexen

P.S. I'll find my phone. Who took my phone.

Drexen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:44:32 -0800

UK phone fraud: Someone stole my phone and rang up £3000 of calls to Nigeria. The phone company says it's my fault for not keeping tabs on the phone and I have to pay it. Is there anything I can do? I'm with O2. I got the phone with my 12-month contract but hadn't been using it, because I preferred the usability of my old Pay-As-You-Go Nokia... so when the new phone went missing on 18th May I didn't notice. I made a call on 18th (Sunday) and then the thief started making calls on 19th, continuing until 23rd May. In that time they made 60 hours of calls, some to Nigerian numbers, some to UK mobiles and landlines.

I discovered what had happened last night when I got a notice that O2 had tried to take £3,042.86 out of my account (it bounced, because I don't have the money). I called them up for advice and they told me I was liable for the whole amount as "we expect customers to contact us as soon as they realise their phone has been stolen," and that I'd have to pay it back within 6 months. The best they could do was refer me to a debt collection agency who would offer longer payback terms with less to pay per month. I told them I'd have to talk to the police before I committed to anything like that.

I phoned the police, who took the details and said they'd pass them on to the phone investigation team. However, the operator seemed pretty ambivalent about whether they'd give me a crime reference number as "the question is, why didn't you notice the phone was missing?" At this point I thought the phone must have been taken around the start of June and told her as such. Now they're supposed to get back to me in the next 72 hours.

After that I phoned O2 again to ask them to send me a list of calls, and to check whether they'd barred the phone, which they had. I checked my statement online and saw the details about the calls that I listed above.

So: Is there anything I can do about this? Am I really liable for this fraud? Surely it wouldn't be the case if this was a credit card. Is there some regulating body I can complain to? Should I talk to a lawyer? Just refuse to pay up? Or am I screwed? I can barely afford this, and that's assuming they give me a long payment term without much extra interest to pay.

Breaker! Breaker!

Drexen — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:50:19 -0800

I want recordings of people communicating over the radio, especially in a military or astronautical context. Gimme. I'm not looking for radio-show broadcasts. Recordings of police dispatchers, military transmissions (especially in the field), transmissions to and from spaceships, or ocean-going ships, airplanes... things like that, are all good. Heavy noise/distortion, jargon, and a sense of urgency (or emergency) are a bonus.

Ideally these would be available for free over the net, but I'd be interested in other options too. LiveATC is quite well-suited, but I need more! I'm looking for them partly out of curiosity/fascination, and partly to sample for music.

Organise my writing

Drexen — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:39:39 -0800

Help me keep my keep my short stories organised, with a view to putting them on a web-page. I have a habit of writing 'short stories' when I have some free moments - they can be anything from a few sentences to a few pages long. Sometimes I write them straight into Notepad, sometimes in an email to myself, sometimes in an online journal. I've gone through and collected most of them into one big .txt file with the format:

############ Title

Storytext in paragraphs

Paragraphs..

############ Title of next story

.. and so on. The titles use the same number of hashes each time.

The whole textfile is about 100 kb, ~17,000 words, 40 'pieces' averaging 425 words each. Now I'd like to put them all on a personal website. So I have two questions for y'all:

(1) How should I store/organise them?

It'd be nice if I could do things like mark up and edit titles and text, add taglines and pictures (and tags?), generate an index of the stories, add new stories to the collection etc.. without having to do a lot of copy-pasting within a big text-file. Is it sensible to move them into an Excel spreadsheet, or something like it, to make them easier to organise and export? If so, is there a way to do this automatically?

(2) How should I present them?

On one single webpage, or with individual pages? I draw and make collages and things, so some of the stories already have pictures illustrating them and I'd like to do that for more of them too, but I'm not sure of the best way to keep the images in a way that links them to the appropriate stories. Should I try and sort the stories into categories, by length, or just alphabetically by title? Should I add tags to them? Let people rate stories and sort them by popularity? If so, I'd like to do these things as automatically as possible, including generating a sensible index to keep track of/link to them - but how?

I'm using Windows XP and have a copy of Dreamweaver, and Nvu - I have more experience with the former. I have a basic handle on most aspects of simple web-design, but I'm far from an expert and don't really have any experience with things like CGI scripts (though I could give them a go).

Thanks in advance for any advice.

How to make Fallout 2 run fullscreen?

Drexen — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:20:25 -0800

Why is Fallout 2 displaying so.. small? [laptop, Windows XP] I'm trying to play Fallout 2 (newest patch) on a Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop running Windows XP SP2. The graphics controller is an Intel 82845G of some flavour with the newest drivers. The trouble is, it only takes up a postcard-sized portion of the screen! About half of the screen's width and height, centred in the middle. The whole game displays, just small. The mouse cursor travels only as far as the edge of the display.

I've tried running the program in various compatibility modes, but no dice. I seem only to be able to set the screen resolution (of Windows) to 1024x768 or 800x600; but if I choose the latter, it shrinks the desktop instead of actually changing the resolution, and Fallout runs at the same size. I know that the game's graphics are at 640x480 resolution. I've tried plugging the laptop into a (flatscreen LCD) monitor and it doesn't fix it.

The crazy thing is, I *did* actually get it to run using the full screen once. I had hooked the laptop up to my TV using an S-video out, and when I unplugged it, switched back to the laptop's screen, and started up Fallout, it was at the full size. After I restarted the laptop, the problem was back, and I didn't have any sucess replicating it. So how do I rebiggen it?

Thanks in advance.

How to build a budget gaming PC?

Drexen — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:40:57 -0800

Help me build a really mediocre gaming PC! I've finally got the resources to sink a bunch of cash into a somewhat up-to-date PC for gaming. However, I don't want/need to spend enough money to get me to the top of the gaming curve - I don't mind waiting a while before I can play modern games like Bioshock. I'm happy to stay back where the relatively cheap, but still nice games are - specifically I want to be able to play Half-Life 2 at a decent res/detail, but I don't need to max it out necessarily. The most recent game my now-defunct rig could (just about) play was Battlefield 1942, so it seems like there's plenty of great games to get through that were released between that and HL2 (and there's plenty of pre-BF1942 games I haven't got around to as well). My aim is to go for maximum cost-efficiency!

I've got a monitor, keyboard/mouse, printer/scanner and speakers, two DVD/RW drives, and I'll also have a ~300GB external HDD, but not much else I can add. Ideally I'd like to spend less than ~£200, but that's somewhat flexible. It would be good if the PC was pretty quiet. Bonus points if it'd be easy to upgrade it in the future. I can probably put the thing together myself (I've got a friend who can help if necessary). I live in London, UK.

Thanks in advance!

Who will buy my suit?

Drexen — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:13:17 -0800

I live in London. Where should I sell my suits? I recently inherited about 20 suits from my step-dad, and for the past few months they've been hanging in a cupboard while I figure out what to do with them. I've picked out about half a dozen I want to keep, and I'd like to get rid of the rest.

My step-dad was really into his suits. Some were made especially for him on Savile Row, some are tailored, and some are just by good labels. They mostly date from the mid-seventies, but there are no unfortunate zoot suits or similar - just typical plain or pinstriped business fare. I know some of them cost in the hundreds of pounds when they were bought. Some of them could do with cleaning, some with pressing.

So, do I have any chance of getting a decent price for them, and if so, where? Do I try my luck on e-bay, or are there any shops or traders who'll buy them from me? I live in East London and I have no car, so it's kind of difficult for me to transport them, but I'm willing to find a way to lug them about if it'll help me sell them.