BMW F 650 GS Voodoo

I have had problems starting my trusty F 650 GS without opening the throttle. Some people in the forums suggest the “F 650 GS voodoo” below, other people claim it doesn’t exist and is BS. There is a definitive answer to this - it’s legit, if the throttle valve calibration is off. The official F 650 GS repair manual, Ausgabe 11/99 states on page 61.8:

• Zündung einschalten
• Gasdrehgriff bei stehendem Motor ein- bis zweimal ganz öffnen. Motronic erfasst Drosselklappenstellung.

… which roughly translates to…

• Turn on the ignition
• With the engine stopped, fully open the throttle grip once or twice. Motronic detects the throttle valve position

Start without twisting the grip from then on.

Don't use Spamhaus

Ah, the joys of running your own mail server - mine has bounced incoming mails for the last week. The cause: Having the Spamhaus blocklist in my acceptance chain. Their promise was that the data set is available for free for low-volume non-commercial users. Which my mail server is. Which they have now randomly decided my mail server is not. The number of queries they received from me in said week: 16.

Last week, another blocklist provider went full Leeroy Jenkins and classified every query as spam. Great stuff.

Three-dimensional text in a thumbnail

I couldn’t find a textual answer to this problem, so here it is: Let’s say you want to make a thumbnail from an existing picture and add three-dimensional text. That is: Something in the foreground (e.g. a face), then the text, then something in the background. The trick is to add a layer mask. Here are the steps for GIMP.

1. Open the picture
2. Add a text area with your text
3. With the text area still selected, go to Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask > White (full opacity)
4. Use a black brush to hide parts of your text behind objects and a white brush to bring it back.

Seems simple enough once you know the steps…