News archive March 2023 - Koos van den Hout

Somewhere in November last year I saw that Weird Al Yankovic on The Unfortunate Return of The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour was also coming to Utrecht! So getting tickets was a good idea, especially when it turned out the tickets were going really fast.

So I went on 20 february 2023 and I had a great evening. The concert was at Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht, which is cycling distance from my house. A friend came along and he found it a great idea to park at our house and cycle to a bicycle parking really close to the concert.

I looked up the setlist: “Weird Al” Yankovic Concert Setlist at TivoliVredenburg Grote Zaal, Utrecht on February 20, 2023 | setlist.fm and comparing that to earlier Weird Al Yankovic concerts it's clear he took a different route in this tour. Mostly own work, some of the 'in the style of' songs. He did the extended extended version of Albuquerque with lots of types of Donuts and he 'restarted' the song to make the sauerkraut joke again.

The previous Weird Al Yankovic concert I saw was in Amsterdam was more the style with the parodies and the costumes. Setlist of that concert: “Weird Al” Yankovic Concert Setlist at Melkweg The Max, Amsterdam on September 30, 2015 | setlist.fm. This was a concert with standing room and I turned out to be in the splash zone for the end of 'smells like nirvana'. A group of fans had their own aluminium foil hats for 'Foil' so Al was really enthusiastic about their response and the whole audience had lots of fun.

To give space for the costume change there was also use of video. And when there was a bit of video with Al reacting to Eminem with 'Say what??' a number of times I expected Word Crimes and indeed that happened.

Anyway I enjoy the music of Weird Al Yankovic. I started with the parodies and I sometimes remark 'this is a strange version of a Weird Al Yankovic song' when I hear for example Gangsta Paradise or Like a virgin. The polka versions are always fun to me. I didn't really like the personal songs the first time but after hearing them a few times and discovering the layers including the jokes I start to appreciate them too.

And recently Rob o'Hara did an episode of his podcast You Don't Know Flack about Weird Al. Rob is also a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic and has seen him perform in the US multiple times. And listening to this podcast episode made me write down 'my' Weird Al story.

Rob also went on a pilgrimage of the sites in Tulsa, Oklahoma where the outside shots of the UHF movie were filmed: UHF - My 15 Year Pilgrimage. Now that is a Weird Al Yankovic fan!

The picture in this newsitem is from the same tour, just a few days earlier. I tried taking some phone pictures but there was nothing good and I found this picture with a nice license which captures the tour really great.

Ages ago I added a way to get access to my google contacts as a thunderbird address book. But on installation of thunderbird on a new laptop I couldn't find a simple answer to "how did I do that again?!?".

With access to the old laptop I was able to reconstruct my steps, so I'll note them here:

• Install cardbook as add-on in Thunderbird
• Go to this add-in in the Thunderbird userinterface
• From the top left 'hamburger' menu, select 'Address book', 'New address book'
• A window pops up asking 'Address book location', select 'Remote'
• The next window asks 'type of your address book' and gives google as default selection
• As username enter the standard address used for your google account. This doesn't have to end in @gmail.com.
• After entering the address, click 'Validate' and a window pops up with a minimal browser to log into your google account. Do this.
• After logging in the browser window will ask for permission for Cardbook to access your google contacts.
• After selecting a colour for this new address book you can use it.
• In the process google will probably send you alerts about this new login and permission.

And now my contacts are synchronized between android phone, google contacts web interface and thunderbird!

This year I participated in the EA PSK63 Contest again. This is a contest organized by the Spanish Amateur Radio Club Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles and they organize nice contests!

This is a 24-hour contest between 12:00 UTC on Saturday and 11:59 UTC on Sunday. Contacts were made Saturday afternoon and evening, and Sunday morning. The last contact was logged at 11:59 UTC on Sunday! I went for the 20 and 40 meter bands and checked a few times whether there was activity on the 10 meter band. In the end I made 182 contacts, 1 on the 10 meter band.

Besides the usual search and pounce approach (looking for other stations calling CQ) I also called CQ for periods. This got me a nice amount of contacts in a short period. The peak was 4 contacts within 2 minutes. With the new Yaesu FT-991A radio it's also possible to find a free frequency, center it in the passband at 1500 Hz and then turn the bandwidth of the receiver down. Big signals outside the passband have a lot less influence with this radio so I can receive signals on 'my' frequency better.

Ten years ago, on 6 March 2013 I passed the test for the Dutch novice amateur license.

It's been a fun 10 years! I made lots of new friends, learned new stuff and had great experiences. It's a great hobby, I really like it as a hobby that's absolutely not work.

Amateur radio is a hobby with lots of subhobbies. I got into different subhobbies than I expected and started in. And the subhobbies I do get into may even change again, depending on what I get interested in or lose interest in.

It seems it is also possible to cause something in Microsoft IPv4 space to do a scan for web vulnerabilities. It's starting to become part of a pattern here! Noticed in the logs:

20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:05:57 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 39297 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:05:59 +0100] "HEAD /api.zip HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:05:59 +0100] "HEAD /source.zip HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:05:59 +0100] "GET /server-status HTTP/1.1" 403 975 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:05:59 +0100] "GET /.nginx.env HTTP/1.1" 404 972 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.2 Safari/605.1.15"

..

20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:08:55 +0100] "HEAD /status HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:08:55 +0100] "HEAD /callback HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:08:55 +0100] "HEAD /handler HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:08:55 +0100] "HEAD /plaid HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
20.220.235.164 - - [05/Mar/2023:15:08:56 +0100] "HEAD /plaid/item/webhook/ HTTP/1.1" 404 694 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

For a total of 751 attempts via http on one site, receiving a redirect to https and following that redirect. I wonder if I can determine which scanner was used from the pattern of URLs tried.