Katsura Sunshine at The Forge, London

The most excellent Rakugo storyteller Katsura Sunshine recently assumed his Artist in Residence position at The Forge in London - I was lucky enough to enjoy and document his performance. If you get a chance to see one of his shows whilst you're in London, do not pass up the opportunity, they're great fun and perfect for the whole family.

Katsura Sunshine at The Forge, 23 April 2016

The Forge also celebrated its seventh year of operation in April this year! Belated congratulations to them πŸ™‚ If you go to the Forge for a visit, try the Camden Brewery beers. Dangerously delicious.

LADYBABY at HYPER JAPAN Christmas Market 2015 interview and photos

Late last year I was able to interview the "singing, dancing, DESTROYING" kawaiicore group from Japan called LADYBABY. If you're new to J-Pop, they're quite something. If you're used to J-pop, they're still quite something. Infectious fun, ridiculously cute outfits and ludicrously catchy songs.

Check it out on TokyoGirlsUpdate. If you're a LADYBABY fan, join the Fan Club on Facebook.

And check out my galleries from HYPER JAPAN 2015 on Flickr:

Updating jwhois on CentOS to solve v6nic errors

I use fail2ban on my servers, and I noticed whois queries to v6nic.net were running into problems. If you're having the same problems, here's how to fix them.

I use fail2ban on some of my servers, along with the "jwhois" application (to automatically return whois info in the automated fail2ban emails I receive).

I noticed that 43.229.53.15 was coming back in my emails as follows:

 [Querying whois.v6nic.net]
 [Unable to connect to remote host]
 missing whois program

This is because v6nic.net is defunct and has been taken over by a cybersquatter (discussion about this on the Red Hat Bugzilla). The whois server whois.apnic.net works adequately in its place.

The version of jwhois available from the epel repo for el6 (CentOS 6) is out of date:

jwhois.x86_64 4.0-19.el6 @base

rpmfind lists 4.0-43 for Fedora Core 24 as the latest version, but this isn't compatible (loads of dependency issues if you try and manually install).

So, let's fix it manually.

jwhois derives its list of whois servers from /etc/jwhois.conf (by default). Let's do a search/replace all with nano.

Assuming nano is installed (sudo yum install nano -y) do the following:
Press Ctrl \
Type in whois.v6nic.net and press Enter
Type in whois.apnic.net and press Enter
Press A to replace all found instances
Type Ctrl X to exit, then Y to save the changed file.
Done!

Related reading, if you've got nothing else to do...

Schwing!

I've had really crummy quality audio clips from Wayne's World as my phone notification sounds for years -- thought it was time I make my own better ones from my DVD, and publish them online for other people who also want their phone to go "schwing!" for every Whatsapp. πŸ˜‰

Here's four clips I particularly enjoy.




I ♥