>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> WELCOME TO <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ___ ___ __ __ _____ ___ / __| ___ / _ \ ____ \ \ / / _ _ | __ | ___ ___ / __| | (__ | _ \ | _ | |_ / \ V / | \| | | __| \ \/\/ / \__ \ \___| | / |_| |_| / / |_| | .` | |_____| \ /\ / |___/ |_|_\ /___| |_|\_| \/ \/ --- * ISSUE 2 * --- Woah! We made it! Through wind and snow, and against all odds here's the second edition of CrazyNews! So make yourself a drink, pull up a chair and enjoy... --- * C R A Z Y N E W S ! ! * --- Welcome to the second edition of CrazyNews - your favourite talker's very own monthly newsletter! --- * Contents * --- * Introduction * The News! * Admin Admissions! * The Big Debate * CrazyHumour * Residents Homepages Competition * CrazyStats * CrazyLands Tutorial * Telnet Client Review * Future Features * Submit Stuff * Mailing Information --- * Introduction * --- In this issue we introduce a competition for everyone to enter - Webpage of the Month. The Big Debate also kicks off with what should be a pretty un-contraversial issue but it will serve as a good introduction to newsgroups and discussions. Thanks to the people who suggested a topic - we'll be featuring them in the months to come. This month the Admin have been coding away long sleepless nights to bring you some of the things we promised last month particularly the newsgroups for the Big Debate, so a big thanks goes to them for their hard work in delivering some cool features on our already top talker. The only area we haven't had a response to is the Classified Ads which I realised was my fault as people probably thought they could be used more for a personal nature ;) The Classifieds are however really intended to be used for you to buy and sell items, rather than looking for love! Again, please support this newsletter as it is YOUR newsletter, so any contributions are welcomed. If you have any input, whether it be comments, technical expertise (for features), ideas on new sections, content, etc, details on how to contribute are in the section at the bottom of the newsletter. We promised a lot in last month's issue so read on and see if we deliver! ~Raist (Editor) --- * The News! * --- * CrazyLands T-Shirts: *THE* Official Spodding Gear! * Help support CrazyLands and show your true colors by getting your hands on one of the new, limited first-edition CrazyLands T-Shirts which are still available at a great price! They look great and will help to keep CrazyLands running. For more details look at the web page (http://www.crazylands.org) or email: Canada: nexus@crazylands.org Price, 20 Canadian Dollars USA: mulder@crazylands.org Price, 16 American Dollars UK (and elsewhere): swiff@crazylands.org Price, 10 UK Pounds * Globe Trotting CrazyLands Residents! * Simba and Skid are due to invade Europe early this Summer visiting different spods (and *real* people!). Their itinerary includes: Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Austria, Poland, Germany and back to Britain before their return home to Canada and US. Ostrich is also out and about at the moment, she started her tour of Europe properly a few weeks ago. Take a look at her web page (try the link from the CrazyLands Webpage) to see her latest piccies and find out where she's got to in Europe! Last Autumn various spods visited each other around the world, so this time we'll keep you posted of any developments - send us a postcard here at CrazyNews (crazynews@crazylands.org)! If any of you are visiting anywhere this year, let us know and we'll set up our own 'CrazyWorld - Places to visit Guide'! * New Things * CrazyLands Admin, Nexus has had a new car for a while - and hasn't crashed it yet!!! Zettl and Amyth have bought a new house - good luck with the move! * Gladys and her Amazing Adventures * Insider information has it that the world-renowned Gladys will shortly be unveiling something new and special. Watch this space... * CrazyLands Effects Weather? * Toronto saw some very crazy weather last week; they had a foot of snow and this week they had summer temperatures of 20 - 25 degrees celsius with people walking around in shorts and going to the beach! Could this be a symptom of CrazyLands bugs effecting the weather? * RC5 - Team EW is Moving On Up * Grim - an EW talker spod for many years - has arranged a team to work on the cracking of the RC5 codes which is organised by Distributed Net. If team EW wins the prize by cracking the code, Grim is going to use the prize money to start an EW server on the Internet which will offer a home for some of the EW related services (like the EW programmer mailing list). Information about the programmers mailing list, Team EW and the RC5 effort can be found at: http://csc.liv.ac.uk/~u5ral/rc.html ...or email Grim at: grim@ewtoo.org --- * Admin Admissions! * --- Hi again! I'm pleased to say that Raist has managed to get another issue out, and pretty much on time too! This is extra impressive after he lost his entire file system and the issue with it only last week! We were hoping for a bit more contribution to the issues, but hopefully that will happen over time as people see this is a regular newsletter and not just a one off. Things still seem to be going well on the new site, we've not had too many complaints about lag and the machine has definitely been stable - the site's currently up time is well over 31 days! If only the talker itself was quite that stable at the moment. We seem to be making lots of upgrades to the code still - and coping with some old bug fixes as well. To be honest, there's some really exciting base changes going in, which will let us write some even more powerful user commands, and expand on the systems like aliases, twinkles and so on. Look out for some excellent new stuff coming to the talker nearest you soon ;) I know a lot of you have been annoyed by the lack of help files for the new commands. I can only apologise for them not being written. Its a massive job which is still being worked on - so many changes happened at one that we've not been able to keep up with them. Once the help files have been done (which should be soon I hope), then we'll probably include a list (in an issue of CrazyNews) that you can use - so look out for that, maybe next month. Oh, as a last thing, you should all know that we've implemented a better bug and suggest reporting system in the latest version, so that any bugs you report or suggestions you make will reach us quicker and hopefully be dealt with easier. Well, I'm going to say so long now and leave the rest of the issue in Raist's capable hands (so he tells me). I hope some of you want to contribute things to the next issue, I know we're looking for anything in the way of articles, private adverts, jokes, reviews, comments, or even just letters in general - about the talker or otherwise. Any submissions should be emailed to: crazynews@crazylands.org See you all on Crazy! ~Swiff --- * The Big Debate * --- The Debate: Should EW style talkers (not necessarily CrazyLands) have objects in them or not (like MUD's do)? This is your opportunity to air YOUR views on different topics. As Swiff mentioned above you should post your comments on the debate to the relevant newsgroup on CrazyLands. This months debate newsgroup is called: CN.Issue2 If you would like to suggest a topic for discussion please send submissions to: crazynews@crazylands.org --- * CrazyHumour * --- (We need some good jokes, help! - Ed) ... Frequently Asked Questions for Etch-A-Sketch Technical Support Q: My Etch-A-Sketch has all of these funny little lines all over the screen. A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: How do I turn my Etch-A-Sketch off? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: What's the shortcut for Undo? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: How do I create a New Document window? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: How do I set the background and foreground to the same color? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: What is the proper procedure for rebooting my Etch-A-Sketch? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: How do I delete a document on my Etch-A-Sketch? A: Pick it up and shake it. Q: How do I save my Etch-A-Sketch document? A: Don't pick it up and shake it. - Inspired by the Dilbert cartoons? ... Think you can do better? Okay, you probably can! - send your best jokes into the address at the bottom of the issue! --- * Residents Homepages Competition * --- As I mentioned at the top, each month we will be awarding a 'Best Homepage Award' to the resident who we deem wins! Who are we? At the moment 'we' consists of a few SU's and Admin but in the future we'd like a few volunteers to surf residents web pages to pick out a winner each month. Criteria for judging will be on content, originality, features, use of html and presentation. The winner will get a special link from the main CrazyLands web page, to their page for the month (as well as keeping their web ring entry of course). Only residents web pages which are included on the CrazyLands web ring will be judged in the competition and the judges decision is final. Check out http://www.crazylands.org for all residents homepages. If your site doesn't appear on the web ring email Nexus (nexus@crazylands.org), who will arrange for your link to be added. --- * CrazyStats * --- For the number geeks among you here is CrazyStats! Every month we'll give you a list of stats that will guarantee to kill off the most lively of conversations. Thanks to some new code, we'll be getting more detailed stats soon - we hope! However here are a couple to kick off with: Longest up time ever: 22 days and 7 hours+ Current Residents: 964 Total Online time of Top 20 spods: 1.63m minutes (yes, million) or 1133 days and 21 hours+ --- * CrazyLands Tutorial * --- This months tutorial is on the new newsgroups system. Newsgroups have been added so that people make responses to the CrazyNews Big Debate. Each Big Debate will have its own newsgroup where people can post opinions or responses. If you have never used Usenet (on the internet) before, a newsgroup is simply a topic where a list of articles appear which are supposed to relate to that topic. The way newsgroups have been implemented means that you can carry on posting news exactly how you used to, and it will all go to the Misc (the main) newsgroup. That way, you don't even have to use the new system or look at other groups at all if you don't want to. All of the news sub commands (news post, news read) and so on, will work on your default newsgroup. Unless you change it, this default groups will be misc. You can change your default group on a permanent basis, (for example, if you always end up posting to a group about your main interest); or on a temporary basis, should you want to post and read several articles from a group without specifying the group to be used each time. To operate on a specific newsgroup, or to change your settings related to groups, you can either use the new newsgroup command, or use the sub command group in the news command. For example, the command: news group check misc ...is the same as... newsgroup check misc To list the newsgroups available, type: newsgroup list This should list all the groups for you, with the number of articles on the left, and the description on the right. The description of the group may be truncated so it fits in the space. If this happens, a ... will appear at the end of the description to show that there is more. You can find out detailed information about a group by typing: newsgroup show_info The name of the group appears in the title banner and the description will appear at the top of the information, followed by some general details. These details are more for administration purposes, but may be of interest. Here is an example output from this command: Crazy 07:40:PM> newsgroup show_info misc -------------------------------- misc --------------------------------- The default newsgroup for all miscellaneous articles. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Created: 01.44:36 AM - Sat, 02 April Last posted to: 01.44:36 AM - Sat, 03 April Postings: 11 Max postings: 100 Expire after: 90 days ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The newsgroup command should allow you to post, read, followup and perform all the same actions as the news command does, but will expect you to supply a group name with each command. For example: newsgroup post misc My articles subject ...should start a news posting to the group misc with the subject 'My articles subject'. You DO NOT need to type the full newsgroup name every time. You can type just the first part of the name, and it will try to match to a group if it can - in the same way commands do. For example: newsgroup check deba ...should match to the newsgroup with the name 'debate' - providing there isn't another group called 'debate1' for example. In that case, the system wouldn't know which group you were referring to and would not match. To change the group that is used by the news command, you have to change your default group. As mentioned, this can be done permanently or temporarily. To change it permanently, type: newsgroup set_default ...and temporarily: newsgroup set_temp The temporary group will be reset back to your permanent default group when you log off - of course you can just change it back by hand. As a nice addition, when you get informed about new news, you will be told to which group it has been added. Remember, the rules apply to articles posted to any group, just the same as they did for the old news system. Finally, it may not be possible for you to post to some groups. This is so there can be groups for announcements from the admin or su's for example. The show_info command will tell you if it is not possible to post to a particular group. Hopefully, you should now be able to use newsgroups. There should be help files for each command on the talker, and this tutorial will be available by typing: help newsgroup_tutor In summary, here's the syntax for each new command: newsgroup check newsgroup set_default newsgroup set_temporary newsgroup post newsgroup read newsgroup reply newsgroup remove Have fun using newsgroups! --- * Telnet Client Review * --- This months review is on Tinyfugue. Tinyfugue (Tf) is a free MUD client available via the internet which runs on a number of operating systems including Unix, windoze and OS/2. It helps you connect to a mud or talker in an easier manner than basic telnet. It lets you set up worlds which can be saved to allow easier access to regularly used sites. Tf allows you to connect to more than one site at a time using commands such as /world to connect and /fg to bring a world to the foreground. It also allows you to create macros and scripts useful to abbreviate regularly used commands and to create automatic responses to various inputs from the world(s). Tf also keeps a history of every line thats been shown, which means you can check to see if you have missed something using the command /recall. This text can also be saved to a log file using the /log command. Tf uses a line by line method of sending text to the world, which means that it is possible to edit what you are going to type with MUCH greater ease than telnet. This is achieved via a bar which splits up your input from the text that is sent down from the world, meaning that you don't see your typing mixed up with everything else happening in the world. This makes it much easier to follow conversations and other activities. Tf supports colours and all the usual fun and games that you find on talkers. It also seems to support the telnet protocol pretty well in most cases. This client scores... Usability : ***-- Compliancy : ****- Cost : ***** (free) Features : ****- Overall : ****- More info: Written by Ken Keys: kawkeye@tf.tcp.com http://tf.tcp./com/~hawkeye/ TinyFugue info: http://tf.tcp.com/~hawkeye/tf/ ftp://tf.tcp.com/pub/tinyfugue/ There is a mailing list for Tf discussions which you can subscribe to by mailing majordomo@tcp.com, with the body "subscribe tinyfugue". Reviewed by Merlin. --- * Future Features * --- Things to look for in future issues... * Web Page Competition Results * Next month we'll announce the first resident home page of the month. * Better CrazyStats * As mentioned, we're hoping to have bigger and better statistics! --- * Classifieds, Correspondence Section, Personals * --- * FREE SPACE FOR ALL TO USE! * Your advert here! FREE! This section is where ressies can submit info for other ressies to get in touch with them, to start (or end) a love connection, or to buy or sell goods or information! Please note that all adverts are free, and any one advert will only be run for 3 issues of CrazyNews. The editors reserve the right to remove an advert or decline to display it at anytime. * Adverts * WANTED: People with spare time and a text editor to write help files for small, but friendly talker. ~Anon --- * Submit Stuff * --- If you want to submit anything, use the following email addresses to send your stuff. Please remember that all the usual rules about content apply, and the editors reserve the right to change any submitted articles. Please make sure you say so if you do not wish your name and/or email address to be published!! crazynews@crazylands.org All submissions, jokes or debate topics, etc. crazy@crazylands.org Any email to admin, complaints, etc. --- * Mailing Information * --- This email has been sent to you because you're a resident on CrazyLands, the talker which runs at: crazylands.org 6969 See our web page at http://www.crazylands.org for more information. If you do not wish to receive this email, please log onto the talker and type: crazynews off Your email address is never published to users or external sources. It is a rule of the talker that you must set a valid email address however, so that you may be contacted if there is a problem or with important talker information. This is not a stored mailing list. --- * The End (of issue 2)! * ---