>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> WELCOME TO <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ___ ___ __ __ _____ ___ / __| ___ / _ \ ____ \ \ / / _ _ | __ | ___ ___ / __| | (__ | _ \ | _ | |_ / \ V / | \| | | __| \ \/\/ / \__ \ \___| | / |_| |_| / / |_| | .` | |_____| \ /\ / |___/ |_|_\ /___| |_|\_| \/ \/ --- * ISSUE 4 * --- --- * C R A Z Y N E W S ! ! * --- Welcome to the fourth edition of CrazyNews: you've seen the web site, you've spodded on the talker - now read the newsletter! --- * Contents * --- * Introduction * The News! * Admin Admissions! * Osy's Travel Tips * The Little Debate * Residents' Homepages Competition * CrazyStats * CrazyLands Tutorial * Telnet Client Review * Submit Stuff * Mailing Information --- * Introduction * --- Oooer, its time again to hurriedly put together another CrazyNews! (j/k) Hopefully this will be the last newsletter before we go live with the twice monthly CrazyNews Bullettin. The Bullettin will be shorter but will have more up-to-date information and news in it. If anyone would like to contribute in *any* way then please email us at the usual address. Anyway, you shouldn't need an introduction anymore as this is the fourth CrazyNews to hit your mailbox and be auto filtered into the trash can ;), so I'll leave you to carry on reading! Seeya soon, ~Raist --- * The News! * --- * Ostrich runs riot in the UK * No I'm not talking about a wild animal that escaped from a zoo, or the beasts from the infamous ostrich farms doing a protest! If you've been a regular reader of the Globe Trotting section you will realise that Ostrich has now reached her UK stop. She'll be spending a good few months down in Colchester causing plenty of mayhem and organising plenty of spodmeets! (We hope). * Gladys the Travelling cow has moved * Gladys can now be found at http://www.gladys.org Her new pages include all the old stories and some new adventures, including the long awaited 'Sherman Tank Tour'. COMING SOON... Stories: "Gladys gets married", "The G-Files", "Gladys crashes a talker" Features: "The history behind the cow" * Social of the Month... * Flink - can anyone come up with a finite definition for this social? * Spod-Meet * Due to the great success of the last Crazylands spodmeet in Colchester, (Essex, UK), held at Swiff's and Merlin's abode, we will be holding another one w/e of 5-7th June. I'm sure there will be much eating of tuna-bake and diiiip, plenty of coke will be drank and possibly a little spodding may take place! Tell us about any local CrazyLands Spodmeets you are holding in your area! * Marriage Announcement - 2nd Reading! * This is to formally announce the irl (!) wedding of JOSIE (aka Monique) and MAHISWARADAS (aka Salamandir) on the 21st of June, 1998 at The Rose Garden in Woodland Park Seattle, Washington - U.S.A. All spods who read this message, who can get there, are invited. RSVP to Salamandir at slmndr@aa.net In The Holy Name of Tina Chopp. Rev. Dr. Guido S. DeLuxe, DD, LDD, OGG, OHS, ST, MSU High Priest -- The Church of Tina Chopp cotc@aa.net -- http://www.aa.net/cotc/ * 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 on their travels in 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. Skid and Simba have set the arrival date of 23rd June to get into the UK (and have a load of events planned for their stay here - including more spodmeets in Colchester!). Westerngirl is also leaving her native lands this summer for a Western European trip (quite popular this Europe place, isn't it? - Ed). She'll be visiting France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Greece, Switzerland and the British Isles - all between June 14th and August 28th, apparently. You never know, Super Westergirl may zip past your neighbourhood, so look out! :) 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'! * RC5 - Team EW is 'Moving On Up' * Team EW is moving up through the ranks of RC5 code crackers! At last look Team EW were 392 out of thousands of teams taking part. 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 * Web Page Competition Announcement * Take a look at this month's residents' homepages winner (well done!), and take special notice of the announcement at the bottom of the section... remember, it could be you! --- * Admin Admissions! * --- Hiya everyone. Yet again I've not managed to invite another admin to write something for this section - I keep forgetting to ask. Hopefully you'll be getting to hear from another admin in the next issue! Things have been chugging by as always on CrazyLands, with a few notable events... On the up side, we seem to have some more involvement in CrazyNews. Ostrich is taking part in the editorial team and is writing a series of cool travel tips (and associated stories) for the next few issues at least. No doubt members of our travelling population (of which there are many) will be interested in reading these before they leave on their respective trips. On the down side, we've had to say goodbye to MoonDoggie as part of the staff team. I'd like to thank MD again for all his contributions to CL in the past - most notably the many months of site hosting he offered us on his SKL servers. We also seem to have a strange bug which causes CL to wibble every so often. It's proving quite hard to trace because it's not in an expected place - but Nevyn is hard at work on the problem as always so hopefully next time I write this article it will be gone. I'd just like to remind people about three things: o We're still offering CrazyLands T-Shirts, there are some left. Just email us at crazy@crazylands.org if you want to buy one. o The newsgroups are available for you to use still, and there's a full on line tutorial (help ng_tutor). It would be especially nice to see people use the... o ...big debate newsgroups! We're still doing the debates and it would be cool if people wanted to take part a bit more. On a similar note, we still want articles, jokes, and anything you think other people might want to read in CrazyNews. Raist and the editorial team would LOVE some more input from you guys! Well, hope you're all well, and no doubt you'll hear my ramblings in some future issue of your favourite talker's newsletter ;) Take care, ~Swiff --- * Osy's Travel Tips * --- As many of you know, I've been travelling for nearly 7 months now, to various places around the world. I've learned a lot along the way, and thought that a few of you might be able to benefit from my experiences, especially if you're planning a trip of your own in the near future. Or, maybe you're just up for a good story! Either way, that's what my contribution to CrazyNews is going to be about. The first thing that any spod must consider before leaving home is of course, "How am I going to check my email while I'm away?" Many inexperienced types will tell you that hotmail is the answer to this question. I beg to differ. Before I left home, Simba told me about www.backpackers.com where anyone can get a free web-based email account which is accessible from all Internet Centres (many of them do not allow telnet). Backpackers.com is not only an email centre though. On it you will also find: "Community" - a bulletin board for posting and reading other travellers' discoveries about a country/city; "Internet Access Points" - a search system with which you can find out where the Internet Centres are in the next city you plan to visit; and lots of other things useful to those on the road. It's also handy for anyone who simply does not feel they have enough email addresses, and would like to have another one for free! To find out more, please send me email (jane@crazylands.org) or ask me on CrazyLands. Better yet, check out www.backpackers.com for yourself! 'Till next time! << Ostrich has globetrotting plans to make! >> --- * The Little Debate * --- The Debate: Should Microsoft be banned from releasing Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) with their new release of Windows 98? This is your opportunity to air YOUR views on different topics. As Swiff mentioned last month in his tutorial (and this month!) you should post your comments on the debate to the relevant newsgroup on CrazyLands. This month's debate newsgroup is called: CN.Issue4 If you would like to suggest a topic for discussion please send submissions to: crazynews@crazylands.org --- * Residents' Homepages Competition * --- This month we announce the first winner of the CrazyLands Homepage of the Month Award, and it goes to: ~~ WINNER ~~ Pumbaa for his 'Gladys Homepage' ~~ WINNER ~~ For those of you that aren't familiar with Gladys, the website is based on Gladys and her travelling adventures around the globe. Visit http://www.gladys.org to see her! Pumbaa also gets a special link from the main CrazyLands web site. If you'd like to enter this competition all you need to do is make sure that your webpage is part of the CrazyLands webring. Check out http://www.crazylands.org to see if your webpage is included. If your site doesn't appear on the web ring email Nexus (nexus@crazylands.org), who will arrange for your link to be added. SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Every 12 months, the last 12 winners of the residents' homepages competition will be re-reviewed. The best of the still surviving web pages will receive a FREE CrazyLands T-Shirt (specially reserved) and another cute little logo for their web page - so get writing those pages!! --- * 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... we _still_ hope! This month's CrazyStats effort: Longest up time ever: 22 days and 7 hours+ Current Residents: 981 (up 2% on last month) Total Online time of Top 20 spods: 1.77m minutes (yes, million) or 1228 days and 21 hours+ (up 608 hrs in 4 weeks!) --- * CrazyLands Tutorial * --- Eeek! What, no tutorial?! Has anyone seen it? It went missing. Okay, I'll be honest... Swiff forgot to write one! It's all his fault! Hopefully this regular feature will be back with a vengance in the next issue. I've heard rumours that there will be a twinkles tutorial starting soon, so be afraid, be very afraid. ~Raist --- * Telnet Client Review * --- This month's review is on TUsh and XTUsh. TUsh is a free MUD client available via the internet and runs on a number of UNIX platforms. TUsh was originally developed by Simon Marsh (the guy who wrote the base of EW and EWToo talkers) for use directly with EW talkers. It offers you many of the same features as TinyFugue (see issue 2), but to a lesser extent. It will make connecting to most EW talkers and most MUD's a much simpler and cleaner task (as does most telnet clients). Prompts are properly recognised and kept at the bottom of your screen, along with the current text you are typing. This client has a simple alias and triggering system - both of which can be used very effectively. They are not, however, nearly as powerful as the ones offered by TinyFugue. Colours are also fully supported. This client allows you to have setup files containing predefined alias's, triggers and sites (places to connect to, such as CrazyLands). TUsh also keeps a history of what you type, so going back to previous commands and editing them is possible. In the basic (main release) of TUsh, this support is not easy to use - however, it has been greatly improved in the later versions of the system - called XTUsh. XTUsh is essentially the same kind of client but with some features added and bugs fixed. Keyboard support and telnet protocol support has been greatly improved in this 'child' of TUsh. The author, Jonathon Sloman, has also implemented his own graphical support protocol which lets graphics to be used through telnet based talkers. Unfortunately, this has to be supported by the talker program itself and to date, the only talker that I know about which supports this, is Foothills. Because this client is not as popular as it once was, there seems little point in new talkers supporting this custom protocol - which I believe is undocumented. Basically, the main reason for using XTUsh is because it fixes most of the bugs that are found in TUsh. I do not know if TUsh and XTUsh are still supported by the people that wrote them, but I do know that they are totally usable clients in their own right. They are a good alternative to TinyFugue in my opinion, should you want one, and were heavily used by Spods in the early days of the talker world. This client scores... Usability : **--- Compliancy : **--- Cost : ***** (free) Features : ***-- Overall : ***-- More info: TUsh Written by: Simon Marsh XTUsh Written by: Jonathan Sloman (sloman@sna.co.umist.ac.uk) Review note: This review was done on a fairly old version of the clients and as such changes may have occured since. Unfortunately, I did not have time to search for a later version or a web page for this client. Reviewed by Swiff. --- * 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 any time. * Adverts * Looking for a copy of Dragon Warrior 4 for the NES, in PAL format. I've been looking for it for 3 years with no luck. Anyone that finds it for me, I'll steal Swiff's keyboard at some stage and make you an SU (or I may even pay for it instead)! Sent by: ~Grim (grim@ewtoo.org) Systems Knowledge Link - check us out! We offer Telnet shell accounts with unlimited access, 5 meg disk space, Web Page hosting, email account, FTP access and access to TinyFugue (as reviewed by CN, issue 2) This account is $7 US or $5CDN a month. We also offer domain name hosting, talker site hosting and much more, all at competitive rates! Sent by: MoonDoggie (info@skl.com / http://www.talkersworld.com/) --- * 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 4)! * ---