My wife and I are helping clean up my mom/dads house. In the process we found the rules to one of our favorite games: Aggravation Rummy.

This game requires 2 Decks and is played with jokers
Played with 3-7 players

Start by shuffling the two decks together. Deal 10 Cards to each player, and place one card face up. There are 7 contracts that must be filled before you can continue into the next round.

1. 3 sets of 3
2. 1 set of 3 and a run of 4
3. 2 sets of 4
4. 2 runs of 4
5. Run of 4 and a set of 4
6. 4 sets of 3 
7. Run of 7 and a set of 3

Melding Rules
The above table shows the initial meld requirements. Having laid down your initial meld you can add more cards to your own and other players' melds in the same or subsequent turns.

In runs, aces count high or low but not both. J-Q-K-A and A-2-3-4 are allowed but K-A-2-3 is not. There is no rule against a player laying down two consecutive runs in the same suit, such as 3-4-5-6 and 7-8-9-10 of hearts, as separate runs, but once they are on the table separate runs must remain separate - runs cannot be joined or split.

A set can consist of any three or more cards of the same rank - identical cards can be included. A pair (needed for hand 14) is two cards of the same rank. There is no rule against a player melding two sets of the same rank.

Jokers and twos are wild. A set or run may contain any number of wild cards to substitute for missing cards, however it may not excide more then 50% of the original meld. The player must specify (if it is not clear) whether the meld is a run or a set, the rank of the set, and the rank and suit of a run. Wild cards once melded cannot be moved - a player who holds the real card represented by a melded wild card is not allowed to substitute the real card for the wild card.

Buying

When it is your turn, you are able to buy the face up cards. You can only buy the cards when you are able to lay down your meld, or use the card in an existing meld after you have already laid down your meld. The penalty for buying the card, is you much pick-up all face up cards in the pile.

Scoring
Play ends when a player "goes out" by getting rid of all the cards from their hand. This can be done by putting down all the cards in melds or by discarding one's last card. Each of the other players scores penalty points for the cards they are holding:

Wild cards (Jokers and 2s) 20
Aces 15
Picture cards 10
3s to 10s 5

At the end of the 15 deals, the player with the lowest score is the winner, the next lowest is second, etc.

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1. You need a file to mount as a HDD device - using DD, the following will instantly create a file of SIZE Gigabytes:
   

   • dd if=/dev/zero of=myharddisk.img bs=1000 count=0 seek=$[1000*1000*SIZE]

2.  You need to make this file look like a block device (Choose a free /dev/loop device):

   • losetup /dev/loop0 myharddisk.img
     

3. Start partimage manually from the command line, pointing to your loop device
   

   • partimage /dev/loop0 backupfile.000
     

4. Remove the file from the loop device
   

   • losetup -d /dev/loop0
     

5. Mount the new file on a directory
   

   • mount myharddisk.img /path/to/dir -o loop
     

6. Enjoy the backup's files

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So I have a need for a encrypted disk - as a loop back file. I wrote earlier on how to restore a partimage backup to loopback, so lets see if we can make this work.

1. We need to tell the kernal how to encrypt disks with a module

   • modprobe cryptoloop

2. Create the loop file (like before, but with urandom to help hide the disk, the count is MB*1000 so in this case 1M)

   • dd if=/dev/urandom of=myharddisk.img bs=1000 count=1000 

3. Create the loopback device (I'm going to use TwoFish)
   

   • losetup -e twofish /dev/loop0 ./myharddisk.img

4. At this point, you will be asked for a password - create your own
5. Create the file system of choice (ext3 for me)

   • mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop0  
     

6. Mount the new loop back point /dev/loop0

   • mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/my/mount/point

Enjoy!

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