Author Archives: Tomi

Autumn’s first snow

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This morning the winter has come to the Southern Finland! It’s 4 Celsius degrees below zero. It’s freezing, and a little bit too hazard to cycle to the train station, but one’s need to go to work. Scenery is pretty everywhere, and virgin snow falling is so magically captivating. Still, I hate it, and snow in any form should be banned by the law!

Premium Dungeons & Dragons 3.5

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Wizards of the Coast made a long waited reprint of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 core books (I – III), with added errata – called the Premium reprint. There is nothing new in those books, for them who had the previous 3.5 books already. I did only had the PHB, with almost all the books for 3.0 revision.

After serious thinking of, do I even need those anymore, I did order them, and finally received them yesterday. The books seems well made, and sparked old inspiration within me, while reading and leafing those through. Like these ten past years had not passed at all. Gladly there will be 3.5 D&D gaming on next Saturday after long hiatus, run by a friend of mine. Perhaps, I will do also some DMing in some near distant future.

The Saga of Xanos, the half-orc Mystic Theurge shall continue…

Sending emails with groovy from xml file

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If you have an xml file containing people’s emails like:

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<!--?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?-->
 
    Mikko Mallikas
    mikko@null
 
    Minni Muodikas
    minni@null

You can easily send simple email messages to them with Groovy:

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def doc = new XmlParser().parse("/tmp/emails.xml")
 
doc.person.email.each {
  doCommand("echo \"Body text here \" | mail -s \"Subject here\" " + it.text())
}
 
def doCommand(command) {
  String[] cmd = ["/bin/sh", "-c", command]
  def proc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd)
  proc.waitFor()
}

Note that this works only on linux, due the mail program used not found in Windows OS.

My customer experience saved!

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The pink Smart Cover arrived today with the regular mail, so no need to call or rant about it. Hooray! But, it would have been nice if there had been some clearer (for dummies) indication of two separate shipments.

iPad for the family

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I ordered our first iPad (16GB + wifi + 3g) on Wednesday, and it was delivered directly to home on Friday! Within two days, which is awesome. However, the pink iPad Smart Cover was not. I hope it will be delivered on Monday, or my customer experience with Apple plummets from the sky. And I need to start to do some customer service calls, which I hate.

The problem is that there were no notifications that those two items are going to be delivered seperately or together. However, it has been marked online as delivered, but Apples delivery instructions suggest that items might be delivered with different delivery dates anyhow.

The device? It’s totally cool. It has the approval of the Wife for reading emails, without using the desktop computer. Retina display truly allows me to read my roleplaying PDFs one page at the time, and really be able to read the text like a printed product. Of course the children have fought over it, to play with it. Althought, my son said that Samsung Tab would have been better, with more excessive amount of free games. But, I went for the retina display. 😀

Oh, and this was written with it.