yaleman.org

Homepod Mini Acting Like It Is Always Touched

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:52:03 +0000

It’s weird issue fixing week, one of my HomePod mini’s started playing up a while back and it basically was acting like the touch sensor was always “touched”. Before that it was randomly starting music every few minutes and stopping it, which was… a little cursed.

I think it might have gotten a weird voltage spike from the house power because the AC-DC power supply on one of my Sonoff smart switches on the same power board died around the same time. It worked with UART power, but just not from the wall power.

Cloudflare, ESPHome and Home Assistant

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:28:56 +0000

I finally fixed a weird issue i’ve had on the ESPHome builder in Home Assistant for YEARS… I couldn’t download firmware from the web UI. The logs would just show a HTTP 400 error with “Missing argument configuration”.

Turns out it was some odd Cloudflare cache interaction where it was dropping query string values - caching was set to “ignore query string” - but this wasn’t breaking anything else in the platform. Just this one specific thing.

Garage Door Opener

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:16:27 +0000

This is what I use for the single-relay ESP32 board I have in my garage as the garage door controller.

This is the board:

Files

The Fusion360 model file based on this case model but I added the button.

Object	STL	3MF
Case	Case STL	Case 3MF
Button	Button STL	Button 3MF
Lid	Lid STL	Lid 3MF

ESPHome Garage Door Button Config

Basically you can tap the physical button or the “Garage Door Trigger” entity in Home Assistant and it’ll trigger the relay for 300ms which is enough for my garage door to think I pressed the button.

So I Got Upgraded To iOS 26

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:15:01 +0000

Yeah, it happened. Here’s the things I’m changing as I find them.

Safari Tabs

Go into settings -> apps -> Safari, set it to “bottom” so that you can get back to the tab view with one click rather than having to go into a menu etc.

Option 'require_ssl' Does Not Exist In The Schema

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:29:18 +0000

I was trawling through the logs in my Home Assistant instance recently and this was coming up a lot:

2026-01-21 23:52:38.204 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.addons.options] Option 'require_ssl' does not exist in the schema for Node-RED (a0d7b954_nodered)

Took me a little bit to find it, but going to Settings -> Addons -> Node Red -> Configuration tab.. then clicking the … and opening the YAML config, I found an extra line in the config and removed it, fixing the issue. It would have been something from an old version that wasn’t removed automagically.

Use a Specific SSH Key for a Github Repository

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:43:45 +0000

Include this block in your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host *.github.com github.com
 Hostname github.com
 User git
 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/pub/%n.pub
 IdentitiesOnly yes

Then you can have a key ~/.ssh/example.github.com and clone from git@example.github.com/owner/repo and it still connects to github.com but with that specific key. Super handy if you end up with a bunch of different corporate accounts and have deployment keys and nonsense.

The %n makes it use the hostname you provided, so it looks for the relevant key.

Utoipa recursive objects causing stack overflows

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:48:15 +0000

Here’s an example of an Enum which is completely legal in Rust and … makes utoipa / axum stack overflow while generating a schema:

#[derive(ToSchema)]
pub enum Filter {
 Eq(String, String),
 Cnt(String, String),
 Pres(String),
 Or(Vec<Filter>),
 And(Vec<Filter>),
 AndNot(Box<Filter>),
}

The problem is that whole “contains itself” thingin the second half of the variants. Again, completely legal, nothing weird about it, but codegen just falls in a heap.

Here’s the fixed version with appropriate attributes:

Inline Mounts On Macos Docker Container Builds

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:14:55 +0000

Well that’s a learning; in Dockerfiles you can have steps that look like:

RUN --mount=type=cache,id=cargo,target=/cargo do whatever

RUN --mount=type=cache for example from the docs…

And it’ll only mount the cache folder for that step.. turns out if you do that on a mac, the underlying filesystem of the cache thing is a mac filesystem, so shit gets BROKEN AND WEIRD when the container’s Linux and the programs expect Linux filesystem things.

IPv4-Mapped IPv6 Address Cheat Sheet

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:55:57 +0000

Sometimes networking is cool, sometimes it’s just weird. Linux loves to use IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses when passing information to servers, so here’s a quick cheat sheet on working them out…

Minecraft 'Failed to verify username' Error

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 22:55:31 +0000

From this post on the minecraftforge forums, user “LastAi” mentioned adding the following to your startup parameters:

-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

This worked for me in CurseForge (settings -> minecraft -> “Default Additional Arguments”)

IKEA SOMRIG and RODRET Pairing

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:00:06 +0000

It took me a little bit to find, but if you can’t get your IKEA Zigbee things to work, press the “link” button four (4) times to “factory reset” them and put them in pairing mode.

The rear of an IKEA SOMRIG with the link button highlighted

Ecowitt WS90 Bunnings Mount

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:02:43 +0000

The ECOWITT WS90 “Wireless 7-in-1 Electronic Sensor Array Haptic Rain Gauge and Ultrasonic Anemometer” has a place for a 25mm tube to sit on.

I couldn’t find an antenna mount with a 25mm tube, but the “20mm” galvanised pipe assortment fit just fine.

For this you need:

20mm Galvanised Pipe (400mm) use whatever length makes you feel happy. I won’t judge.
20mm Galvanised Tee
20 x 15mm Gavalnised Reduced Hex Nipple
Galvanised Round Flange With 15mm Drill Mall

I ended up using the 15mm flange because there wasn’t any 20mm on the shelf, and I needed a fitting to go between the Tee and the plate anyway.

How I Am Using Obsidian

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 01:56:35 +0000

Tips on using Obsidian

The basics

This goes for how I blog as well, but If I had to search for something on the internet to find information, I’ll generally brain-dump the search terms as well as the answer because that’s how I’m going to find it later.

Organisation

I use … a variation on Zettelkasten. It is an organisation system where “one idea is an object”. Don’t make megaposts unless they’re indexes, IMO. Break them up, they’re free.

What Is Using Port 5000 On My Mac?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 07:48:28 +0000

Turns out it’s ControlCentre - because by default macs are set up as AirPlay receivers.

$ sudo lsof +c0 -nP -i4TCP:5000 | rg LISTEN
ControlCenter 698 yaleman 10u IPv4 0x431cfa88f6905b65 0t0 TCP *:5000 (LISTEN)

Go into System Settings -> General -> Airdrop & Handoff and turn off “AirPlay Receiver”. You can also just search for “airplay”.

Airplay Settings

$ sudo lsof +c0 -nP -i4TCP:5000 | rg LISTEN | wc -l
0

Fixed!

Element not Found Connecting to Samba Share

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:49:42 +0000

Well, that was a weird start to the day. I started getting the following error while attempting to connect from my Windows 10 machine to my Samba fileserver:

System error 1168 has occurred.

Element not found.

I’ve been using my yaleman@domain SPN-style username for a long time to keep the permissions correct across the filesystem… and now it just stopped working? Random.

I had to create a new user without the full SPN in Samba (smbpasswd -a yaleman) and it works now. Stupid Windows.

YouFoodz Classic Roast Chicken & Mash

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:19:39 +0000

I thought “more like lots of potato with a tiny bit o’ chicken” but they hid the chicken deep under everything else. The sauce is nice enough… gravy-adjacent?

YouFoodz Fuel'D Italian Beef Ragu

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 04:23:03 +0000

Pretty tasty, looks like a proper ragu. Not overly oily once it’s all mixed in 😄

Haneda To Yugawara

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Flying in from Singapore was pretty chill, JAL premium economy is lovely with wide seats and lots of leg room. Nobody can recline their seat onto yours but it means if you do want to lay back, you lose all your leg room because the seats push forwards. ANYWAY. We landed, customs was quick and then it was time to find some food before we picked up our hire car.

Breakfast of champions in the airport, sushi and all good things.

uv and pytest

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 01:18:59 +0000

It took me a while to figure out why uv run pytest wouldn’t work - it wasn’t finding my library!

Turns out:

uv uses the presence of a build system to determine if a project contains a package that should be installed in the project virtual environment. If a build system is not defined, uv will not attempt to build or install the project itself, just its dependencies.

Installing Ansible-Lint On Macos With Uv

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 02:18:17 +0000

I had a weird issue trying to move from Poetry to UV as my package manager for one of my repos. I’ve got ansible-lint in the required packages, running on MacOS, so it shouldn’t complain about will-not-work-on-windows-try-from-wsl-instead because the package isn’t required for MacOS. But uv tries to resolve for everything, so blep.

Rust, Enums And Magical Custom Values

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:13:47 +0000

As part of the Kanidm project every object has Attributes which we catch in a chonky Enum. But being an IDP used by humans, they want to be able to use custom attribues, which makes it hard when we’re trying to strictly type and catch typos. Enter… serde and its parsing magic.

Monitoring a Juniper Switch Interface With Nagios and SNMP

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 02:59:42 +0000

Here’s how to do monitoring things if you’ve got a Juniper switch and Nagios.

MISP “you don't have permission to access” on login

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 01:23:33 +0000

If on login/access you get an error like this:

When Did I Install Rosetta On My Mac?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 01:01:55 +0000

I was wondering when I installed Rosetta 2 on my mac, here goes…

iscsid Can Not Create Netlink_Iscsi Socket

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 05:17:06 +0000

After updating my Ubuntu Raspberry Pi node, I had a load of failures, one of which was iscsid failing on startup.

Odin And Frong

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 22:35:13 +0000

Once upon a time, in the mystical realms of Asgard, there existed a strange and unexpected friendship between Odin, the All-Father, and Frong, a slightly weird frog with a penchant for riddles and mischief.

Odin, known for his wisdom and relentless quest for knowledge, often wandered through the realms in search of hidden truths and forgotten lore. On one such journey, he stumbled upon a peculiar pond nestled in a grove of ancient trees. As he approached, he heard a peculiar croak, unlike any other frog he had encountered.

mDNS On Mikrotik RB5009

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 19 May 2024 02:28:47 +0000

Getting mDNS working cross-VLAN with a Mikrotik router requires running a container to do the handling. You’ll need a flash drive or some other kind of storage set up on the device to make it work.

jamfRemoteAssistConnector High Cpu Fix

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 17 May 2024 01:06:29 +0000

The only real fix is to uninstall the stupid thing, IMO.

Easy SRI Hashes For Unpkg

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 22:17:50 +0000

Calculating Subresource Integrity Hashes is annoying with some things, and it took me a little searching to find how to do an integrity hash for unpkg, so here’s some info!

Welp, I Paid For That

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:18:28 +0000

Home loan balance: 3 cents.

Not bad for just-over-40 years old. Thanks to everyone in my life that’s helped, most especially borysSNORC. 🥰

Charts.yaml Missing While Deploying Helm Release Through Terraform

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 01:04:23 +0000

If you see this nonsense when deploying a helm chart…

Model Collapse and the increasing value of "pre-AI" data

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 10:46:52 +1000

There’s a curious callout at the end of this article talking about “model collapse” where an increase in non-human created data being used as sources creates problems on the outputs…

Although there is no agreed-upon way to track LLM-generated content at scale, one proposed option is community-wide coordination among organizations involved in LLM creation to share information and determine the origins of data.

In the meantime, to avoid being affected by model collapse, companies should try to preserve access to pre-2023 bulk stores of data.

Installing Python packages From subdirectories with Branches

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 10:20:26 +1000

Sometimes you just need to do weird cursed things…

Removing Kubernetes namespaces stuck in 'Terminating'

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:29:25 +1000

Here’s a handy set of commands for removing namespaces which are stuck in “Terminating” status for whatever reason.

Bluetooth Scanner With ESPHome and an ESP32

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 07:37:49 +1000

This is a super-simple one, but took some searching to find it. Add the following config to an ESPHome device and deploy it, and it’ll spam regularly in the logs every BLE device it sees.

You need an ESP32 (because they have bluetooh) and it uses the esp32_ble_tracker module.

esp32_ble_tracker:

text_sensor: 
- platform: ble_scanner 
 name: "BLE Devices Scanner"

Pretty simple, spams shit out of the logs with what’s going on every time it finds something. You really don’t want this on a device you care about, or are logging the output of, because it’s heavy on CPU/memory and noisy but it’s good for tracking things down! There’s config options to slow it down as well, but who’s got time for that? 😁

Fuzzy Power

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:59:02 +1000

So, I get a weird “buzzy” or “fuzzy” feeling when using things connected to a USB charger, unless they’re good quality grounded devices.

And yes, this includes Apple’s devices, until I use the “extension cable” which is a three-prong grounded cable.

There’s a small difference on those Apple cables - inside the “mating” connector are ground tabs which connect to the “lug” on the power brick. It’s a little hard to see, but if you squint you can tell the difference.

Unable to Run Search While Using map Command in Splunk

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:27:19 +1000

Sometimes errors are just a little too confusing for me on a Monday.

I was trying to run the following search:

| makeresults 1 
| eval cheese_id="12345", index="cheese" 
| map search="index=$index$ cheese_id=$cheese_id$ sourcetype=cheese_info"
| table cheese_id, name, description

And couldn’t work out why it was throwing the following error:

warn : Unable to run query index=cheese cheese_id=12345 sourcetype=cheese_info | table cheese_id, name, description.

Turns out that if I’d squinted a little harder at the example in the documentation, I’d have realised that I need to prepend searches with search. The UI does this automatically, but API things don’t.

Writing Rust-style Python

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 29 May 2023 08:08:05 +1000

This post by @kobzol highlights some good methodologies for writing Python in a more defensive manner.

I learned that typing.assert_never allows one to inform their IDE/type checker about code which should be unreachable.

Similarly, simpler Union typing and the existence of the pyserde package make for more powerful access to data - but I’ll have to test serde against the venerable pydantic which has been my go-to for the longest time.

A good read for sure!

Finding and decoding ClamAV Signatures

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 09:47:59 +1000

Sometimes you just need to figure out what ClamAV is looking for…

Configuring SSH Key Auth Into Windows 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 11:35:36 +1000

This should apply to Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 (build 1809 and later).

Weird issues installing greenlet 2.0.1 on macOS Ventura

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 09:35:17 +1000

I finally updated to ventura the other day, went to hack on github-linter and … dependency hell.

Updating to 2.0.2 seems to have fixed it.

Structures Are Not Supported for XSD `simpleType`s

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 09:42:11 +1000

I was trying to parse some XML (well, Atom, but you get it)… and started getting this while using the rust quick-xml crate.

thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Unsupported("structures are not supported for XSD `simpleType`s")', examples/test_quickxml2.rs:79:42

Flying to Morocco

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:55:03 +0100

BNE-DXB, Worst. Flight. In. My. Life.

Window/Document-level Keyboard Events in Tauri and Yew

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 08:02:20 +1000

I’m writing a GUI app in Rust, trying to get it working with Tauri’s tooling, using Yew to generate the actual user-facing code. I thought it would be easy to get a thing that notices when I hit a key, and do stuff with it. Pre-yew-0.19 you could do this with a KeyboardService, now it’s a whole thing with gloo.

Convincing Kubernetes to Trust a Backend

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 19:56:02 +1000

I run Kubernetes at home. Yeah, I’ve said it. It’s out there now.

Now we’re past that, here’s how to convince traefik to talk nicely to a HTTPS backend server, in this case a test instance of GoatNS. I use Terraform for my configuration management, k3s to build/control the platform, with its built-in traefik for routing traffic.

Terraforming Cloudflare DNS LOC Records

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:03:52 +1000

After confirming that they do support DNS LOC records, I couldn’t find any documentation about how to successfully create them using terraform, so here goes:

Docker, rust, cargo and 137 Errors

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 11:09:16 +1000

I kept getting OOMKilled when trying to build Rust apps in Docker containers on GitHub Actions (and also locally, using buildx). The return code of any cargo command that touched the list of crates would end up with the command killed after 30-90 seconds.

I found two solutions:

On Cough Syrup and Cold Medicine

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 17:35:46 +1000

This is a great article, with fantastic takeaways: How to understand cough medicines.

AWS ACM Moving to Dynamic Intermediates

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 07:45:43 +1000

I wonder how many things are going to break when AWS changes how ACM certs are issued. They’re moving to “dynamic” (ie, randomly allocated) intermediates starting 11th October 2022, which is surprisingly soon!

They say not to use certificate pinning, but lots of people do, and I’m sure there’s a load of custom config/deployment methods out there that’ll rely on some kind of static intermediate.

Good luck, friends!

Stop Edge Sleeping Tabs

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 09:48:30 +1000

Microsoft’s Edge browser is pretty cool, I use it instead of Chrome because .. somehow Microsoft has become less creepy than Google?

They’ve recently added efficiency mode, which is handy until it starts sleeping the tab that Octoprint is on, which queues up all the “live view” features and somehow makes them replay at super-speed when I go back to the tab.

AAAAANNYWAY. I did some searching and couldn’t find the answer to “how do I stop Edge from sleeping pinned tab” because that’s not a thing (article on what can stop a tab to sleep here).

Livejournal 19 Year Anniversary

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 22:03:37 +1000

Well, I definitely feel old…

Curiously, I didn’t even have to log in to view my virtual gift…

Housing Cost Increases and Perception

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 11:00:46 +1000

The low cost of borrowing money combined with a few other forces have really pushed up housing prices around here lately, and people keep telling me that “oh but your place has gone up in value, it all works out!”

I knew in my bones it wasn’t right, but I did some quick math.

	Mortgage	Townhouse Value	House Cost	Mortgage Increase
2019	$250,000.00	$320,000.00	$480,000.00	$160,000.00
2022	$250,000.00	$450,000.00	$680,000.00	$230,000.00
Increase		140.63%	141.67%	143.75%

This is based on similar houses in similar locations, as I’ve been looking for some time.

GitHub's Dependabot and Actions

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 11:36:52 +1000

I sent this to a friend who I’d been talking to about automation things, they probably didn’t expect this huge wall of text 😁 Since this isn’t a DM over social media, I’ve included the code and cleaned up the links, and shared it so hopefully I can find it in the future and it’ll help someone else who’s interested.

I’ve had this on my todo list so here goes.. I was going on about how cool Dependabot is, and how it automagically makes Pull Requests (PRs) for updating packages in repositories… since you asked for some details it’s probably easiest to show an example of how I’ve got it set up.

Terraform, AWS Access Keys and Keybase

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 10:43:46 +1000

Per the Terraform AWS Provider docs for the aws_iam_access_key resource, I figured I’d try this Keybase PGP thing.

This is the config I’ve got (and stayed with, because it wasn’t wrong):

resource "aws_iam_access_key" "example_key" {
 user = aws_iam_user.example.name
 pgp_key = "keybase:yaleman"
}

While trying to apply the config however, I got this error…

│ Error: Error retrieving Public Key for keybase:yaleman: unable to fetch keys for user(s) "yaleman" from keybase
│ 
│ with aws_iam_access_key.example_key,
│ on example.tf line 26, in resource "aws_iam_access_key" "example_key":
│ 26: resource "aws_iam_access_key" "example_key" {
│

Well, that’s annoying and slightly vague!

Terraform, Kubernetes and Github Container Registry Oh My

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 21:53:03 +1000

After much muttering and searching and and then some help from the lovely people on the rands slack, I ended up with a snippet for authenticating my kubernetes cluster to the Github Container Registry using terraform configuration.

tl;dr: create a dockerconfigjson-type secret and use it in the image_pull_secrets field

Create a secret with the authentication details:

resource "kubernetes_secret" "ghcr_auth" {
 metadata {
 name = "ghcr-auth"
 }
 type = "kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson"
 data = {
 ".dockerconfigjson" = jsonencode({
 "auths" = {
 "https://ghcr.io" = {
 "auth" : base64encode("${var.github_username}:${var.github_pat}")
 }
 }
 })
 }
}

The github_pat variable has a Personal Access Token with access to read:packages. It’s not actually a variable in my config, because I’m way more secure than that, but… it’s an example.

Week in Review 2022-05-29

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 29 May 2022 23:54:12 +1000

This week’s been pretty slow, still catching up on work and reading and software updates and dying laptop after my holiday. Woo.

Monday

Went splat.

Started blogging the Ghan trip.

Went food shopping.

Ugh, did I mention splat. Such tired.

Tuesday

Great quote.

pro·duc·tion| prəˈdəkSH(ə)n |
noun

A test harness that escaped CI clusters

Watched Better Living through Chemistry. Sam Rockwell always plays a great character and Olivia Wilde and Michelle Monaghan really spiced up a zany script.

Mi Scusi Day 2 - Darwin City

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 13 May 2022 13:07:51 +0930

Friday the 13th, WooOoOoooo.

Slept in a bit - we flew in a day early in case there were flight cancellations - thanks, COVID.

I went out looking for some breakfast, and by 9am it was already ~30º outside. After toddling around for a while, marvelling at the number of massage parlors and bars promoting their Defence-Force discount, I found a lovely bacon, egg and avocado roll at Monica’s Café - a nice family-run establishment directly across the road from the hotel.

Mi Scusi Day 1 - Flying to Darwin

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 May 2022 23:48:09 +0930

Today we started the journey, flying to Darwin on QANTAS in business class. Woo. Business class is pretty nice, with better food, more room for my wide hips and more leg room - which is nice when you’re a freakishly tall person like I am.

Indian-style Chicken Dish, with a double serve of chocolate and snackage.

Darwin Airport, welcoming as fk.

It’s very clear that folks are being watched while moving around the city, with cameras on every light pole and I’m pretty sure running a surveillance company is a winning ticket in this place.

Week in Review 2022-05-08

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 May 2022 19:43:31 +1000

This week’s been busy, lots of leaving the house. 😄

Monday

kanidm

Whoa, I was made a member/owner of the kanidm organisation today. That’s a fair bit of responsibility, and it’s great to have that trust.

Kanidm!

I did a rolling comp at the range, as part of the many shoots this month to keep my licensing up. I shot good, which isn’t hard when you’re shooting at paper. I started a new range-game to try and concentrate on my hand-eye coordination and slow down between rounds.

Week in Review 2022-05-01

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 May 2022 23:22:18 +1000

Monday

M1 macbook things - THE FAN TURNED ON. It was weird.

Thanks, rust. <3

ADHD Side Quest Chain

This one was quite the adventure, so I figured I’d write it down.

“The fan under the stairs is ticking”
Pull fan out.
Ew, that’s real dusty.
Pull out vacuum to suck up dust.
Oh the extension lead’s stuck, pull that out from under the mat.
I need to pee! Do that.
Wash hands.
Mm, I’m in the kitchen, snack time.
Grab a handful of Pepperoni. Thank the good lord ALDI for 100gm packs.
Have a drink.
Oh yeah, fan!
Oh it’s real dusty I could put it on the back of the vent and find the old fan duct.
five minutes of looking for the fan duct upstairs
Oh I’ll have to 3d print one.
But I should clean the fan first.
goes and changes the filament on the 3d printer
installs a brace on the 3d printer that he finds
No no no, fan cleaning!
Connect vacuum to power cord (see point #4).
Cleans out the clogged pipe of the vacuum
Cleans up the floor, because the clogs (leaves and sticks) went everywhere.
Actually clean the fan
Vacuum the floor a bit
I still need a fan duct.
an hour and a half of designing one
Five and a half hours after THAT (print time), install fan back in duct.

Next day: Installed the grille over the fan duct.

Week in Review 2022-04-24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:36:34 +1000

Monday

threegoldbees.com

Redeployed the site, for the first time in a long time because images were missing and it was generally just not playing nice. I removed all the <center></center> HTML randomness, which made Hugo happier. I wish there was a blog engine which was more human and less Wordpress.

Updated the terraform module configuration to AWS’ v4 module syntax. Delicious yak milk.

yaleman/sprintf

added automagic testing from github_linter.
actually fixed up the testing,
re-fixed it, after breaking it again.

Movies

I watched Shot Caller after spending a good half an hour cruising for something to watch. I liked it. Good non-linear story telling without it being a gimmick. Doesn’t pull any punches, and it’s very economical in its delivery. Great cast.

2022-04-17 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 19:39:30 +1000

Monday

yaleman/fail2ban-importer

Rewrote it so I could be sure it might work. More complex, but also simpler.. woo?

Tuesday

yaleman/github_linter

Added a new fix in the github_actions module, adding dependency checking based on the new github action.

Wednesday

yaleman/github_linter

Updated the fix from Tuesday in the github_actions module, removing dependency checking based on the new github action for private repos. I probably should have read the docs. :D

yaleman/TA-pushover

Moved across to using ucc-gen, it’s… a thing.

Week in Review 2022-04-10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 10:03:23 +1000

Monday

yaleman/shrinky

Added tests to cover every line of the code, so I can auto-merge things now if they pass!

Released v0.0.4 to pypi as an official package.

yaleman/github_linter

fixed up some typing issues in the test suite
added a bandit workflow file for github_actions Python checks, to see what bandit testing will look like.
ran codeowners over all my repos
ran github_actions over all my repos and testing went booooom on a few things. Oh welllsssss… mainly just “yes, actually fix that test” and so forth - what this project is for!

yaleman/mqtt-monitor and yaleman/memes-api

Added a bunch of testing to allow things to update quicker when dependabot does its thing, because automation’s great!

Cloudflare and the Billion Requests

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 13:32:16 +1000

The Email

March 2022 Analytics Snapshot

We’ve aggregated data from 26 of your Cloudflare sites during the month of March. Cloudflare served 788.57 GB of data, and mitigated 2.04k firewall events.

I was like “wow, that’s a lot more data than usu… wait, over a ¿BILLION REQUESTS FROM JAPAN!?!?!?

For comparison, February 2022’s stats had 183.7 GB of data and 214 million requests from Japan. Ok, that’s still a load of requests, but 4x as much is weird.

Week in Review 2022-04-03

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 20:49:56 +1000

Tuesday

kanidm

Fixed an issue with kanidm group list that wasn’t logging because I’d used info!() instead of println!().

Wednesday

Realised (after it was pointed out to me by GitHub support) I was super stupid and had set the wrong “uses” string on my actions defintion, and that’s why they were all queuing and being weird.

Once I got that working… I continued to be stupid and break things until I just copied the config from something else and it was much less broken. If only I had a whole project built specifically to avoid this kind of inconsistency? 🤔

Week in Review 2022-03-27

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 20:55:10 +1000

Monday

github_linter

added github-linter-web as a script command to load the web interface easier
fixed a bug in the DB code, where it was derping on integer responses

Wednesday

github_linter

dependabot - configurator works now (ok, not really, see Friday’s fixes)
pyproject - fixed handler for certain value types
docs - now creates/updates a CONTRIBUTING.md

Thursday

pyaussiebb

Moved the dependency on pydantic from dev to main, because… it broke things.
Released v0.0.15 for this fix.

kanidm-builder

added support for Ubuntu Impish, which worked fine until I hit this unmerged PR in aptly, because they don’t support the new zst compressed packages 😭 So far there’s been this attempt, and also this one. One day they’ll actually patch it… or I’ll figure out how to make a repo another way.

Friday

github_linter

Added the ability to create a templated SECURITY.md file if it’s missing - applied the change to 128 repositories in one run! Also … seem to have broken the Auspost repo somehow, actions got super weird.
Fixed quoting issues when it does config updates to dependabot.

mqttgpio

Moved it into its own module instead of a single script, so it’s installable now.
Fixed a bunch of typing issues and made pylint and mypy happy.

auspost

Migrated to poetry packaging.
Bumped minimum python version to 3.7.
Did some typing fixes.
Seriously upset something in github actions… it’s been janky ever since.

qbtapi

fixed testing properly

goodwe2pvoutput

Fixing up mypy errors and some other jank - disabled typing on imports

Saturday

Had dinner at a great new Japanese place, Gurume in Gumdale. Damn good japanese food!

Week in Review 2022-03-20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 23:33:18 +1000

Wednesday

pfsense-api-client

updated the docs
added support for a standalone requests.session object to support TLS ignorance
moved the login functionality out to its own function, so it’d get better documentation in the manual

memes-api

moved to aioboto3 to make things … work way better
fixed pagination issues where certain counts would page wrong
changed opengraph previews from the “full” image to the thumbnail to save some bandwidth and processing time for everyone

Thursday

Updated pyaussiebb to fix an issue acknowledging FetchTV services as a thing. Lots of testing and I re-learnt how to set up Home Assistant in a dev container so I can get someone who (thankfully) reported it as an issue and was willing to test it for me!

Recursion Is Fun Is Fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 14:52:58 +1000

So I’ve got an AWS Lambda function written in python designed to help auto-merge PRs that @dependabot has submitted. It queries all my github repositories, then auto-merges them based on particular configs. It’s done this way because then I don’t have to remember to configure each and every repository individually, and it does it in two stages:

A scheduled execution.
- This checks to see if it’s scheduled, then invokes the function with parameters specifying the repo to check.
The subsequent “invoked” runs, which interact with the GitHub API to do the per-repo checks.

I’d recently made some changes and failed to test them properly - the “am I scheduled” was running, but ALSO the “run on a repository” check.

2022-03-13 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 22:51:49 +1000

Monday

Global Rest Day!

Assembling all the furniture things.

Tuesday

Hung out at the Mailroom and set up the internet, they nearly had to break down the little door in the wall where the infrastructure cable was hidden. Thankfully it all went well, and the speed’s good.

Later in the night I blocked myself from remote access to the router, awks. As the site-to-site VPN between sites still worked, I got back in through an SSH tunnel via an Access Point, which directed traffic to the router on port 22 from “inside” :success:.

2022-03-06 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 23:36:17 +1000

OK, I have to mention it. Fucking Russia. Seriously? Invading Ukraine? Get fucked. You insane pack of fucking morons. I don’t blame the boots on the ground - the’re clearly being treated like mushrooms.

🇺🇦 > 🇷🇺. I only hope as many people as possible get out of this alive.

Wednesday

I’ve been poking around at this idea in my head for a while, so I started yaleman/memes-api - basically shove images in an S3 bucket and it’ll make a little memes-library. I’ve got my own version at memes.yaleman.org and it works pretty well. CloudFlare’s in front of it, so it caches all the things, significantly reducing bandwidth required for the task.

2022-02-27 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 23:55:45 +1000

Uh, so it’s been a bit moist around here lately.

Monday

Um.. stuff? My NAS sync is finally working. Systemd services which can’t deal with usernames with the domain included are frustrating, but I worked around it by specifying the UID like an animal.

github_linter

Added a check for .github/CONTRIBUTING.md - creates a basic “here’s how to help” file
Ran mypy --strict and chased down a lot of issues. There were, and still are, many.

Tuesday

pyaussiebb

added the endpoints for get_orders() and get_order(int)
did a load of mypy yak shaving, --strict really kicking my arse, but it’s good.
hit bugs around running test_line_state against things that don’t support it, need to figure out if it’s worth checking for available tests before any invocation of a line test.

Traefik things

Someone mentioned traefik, I commiserated and quickly fell into the ADHD trap of “oh lordy a distraction and quickly had a config working for running the dashboard through the “normal” router. Something to document later, I still hate their docs/config style and lack of sensible examples. “Here is a full example” and then supplying snippets of code? No.

2022-02-20 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 23:01:53 +1000

Monday

After reading Casey’s post about ffmpeg, I finally got around to sorting out the install on my M1 macBook. Turns out, my homebrew install was all kinds of broken.

Tuesday

I picked up a Telstra Smart Modem Gen 2 (Technicolor DJA0231) for $20 from Facebook Marketplace, hoping to pick up some more speed on my terrible FTTN NBN connection. Alas, a waste of money and time, FTTN that is. What a criminal waste of our country’s time and money.

gobject-introspection building in Homebrew for ffmpeg 5.0

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:09:18 +1000

I haven’t been able to get ffmpeg (or a few other things) to build in Homebrew for a while, it’s been rather frustrating - especially when it fails with a message saying “do not contact Homebrew about this” … you packaged it! How else could I fix it?

Turns out, there’s a brew doctor command that can help sort things out.

➜ brew doctor
Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew maintainers
with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use Homebrew for is
working fine: please don't worry or file an issue; just ignore this. Thanks!

Warning: You have unlinked kegs in your Cellar.
Leaving kegs unlinked can lead to build-trouble and cause formulae that depend on
those kegs to fail to run properly once built. Run `brew link` on these:
 unpaper
 ipython
 pango
 harfbuzz
 sdl2_ttf
 libraqm
 gobject-introspection
 pillow
 librsvg
 graphviz
 handbrake
 ocrmypdf
 libass

Copied the list of kegs above and ran this to force the update:

2022-02-13 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:27:02 +1000

Monday

Automagically tracked a weather balloon with my new kit.
Was bombarded with security updates from Github, updated my auto-merge bot to use pygithub while updating the list of packages to auto-merge.
Migrated the storage for my Splunk instance to Smartstore. Woo, minio!

Tuesday

Realised some cert renewals had gone wonky, because the acme package had just … disappeared?
Reissued a cert for my old fileserver, it’d been on a staging cert for… years?
Found the Home Assistant upgrade of doom was still plaguing me, the temp sensor in my server rack wasn’t being read, so fan control wasn’t turning on the exhaust fan. Eeek!
Changed from oh-my-zsh to starship.rs as a shell prompt automator. It’s different, but it’s faster and less broken.

Thursday

Updated Django on drinkz.org because of an update. I love having testing and automated-ish deployment for these kinds of things.
Rebuilt portDB.yaleman.org using Pelican, including Vue.js based static site search

Friday

Fought with Fedex about a package they claim to have failed to deliver, left a card, then 8 minutes later recorded it as delivered to someone called “Olivia” - but couldn’t tell me where. The link between them and TNT is clearly a nightmare, this is the second international package that’s wasted hours of my time finding because they lose things.

asdf path completion fix

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 09:12:22 +1000

If your asdf completions or path aren’t working and you can’t figure out why, try re-shimming things:

asdf reshim python $(asdf current python | awk '{print $2}')

VueJS static site search and Pelican

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 08:37:25 +1000

I’m slightly chuffed by this, I was doing something and build Vue.js based search from a statically created index.

The fun part was storing/passing a “category” variable from the page’s HTML to the Vue app, and only slightly problematic by using Pelican to generate the site.

Pelican uses {{}} for tempalte variables, same as Vue, so I had to reconfigure Vue’s delimiters (hence the || around item.message)

Passing the category from the static HTML to Vue

The searchmeta app is defined in the div#searchmeta tag.
The data-category attribute of the div#searchmeta tag is generated by Pelican. It’s used on the categories pages, so that search only shows the in-category ports.
searchapp.getCategory() looks for the attribute and sets it to searchapp.category

Generating the search data

I generate a list of the pages, like [ "tcp/1", "udp/53" ] etc, and it’s stored as a static JSON file in the Pelican theme. In this case as /theme/searchdata.json.

First Sonde Tracking!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 22:10:38 +1000

A tiny update on my post from yesterday - I had to restart it to get it back on the MQTT server, but … it successfully tracked a Sonde today!

And of course, because it’s data, I had to Splunk it…

Using the Location Tracker viz

Given I’m located in Tingalpa, about 7Km from the launch site, and the antenna’s sitting inside my house in the bathroom, I figure it did pretty good, tracking the thing until it was ~50KM away in Helensvale… that single red blip was from yesterday sometime. My software’s a bit better now :D

Week in Review 31 Jan - 06 Feb 2022

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:18:41 +1000

Monday-Wednesday. Can’t remember. Working, hiding from COVID, doing the thing. RMB was a close-contact to her later-found-COVID-positive niece, who’d been working at their house, so we’re all avoiding people.

I did a RAT with a negative result; I haven’t had any symptoms.

Thursday

The Aussie Broadband integration for Home Assistant was released as part of core. It’s based around my pyaussiebb package, but the HA part was done by Brett Adams, who’s much more patient than I am.

Friday

Upgraded to the new version of Home Assistant. Woo, ABB data. Boo, it broke because we didn’t test with VOIP services. The PR’s already been done.

Tonga Volcano Eruption on Smart Home Sensors

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:50:01 +1000

On 2022-01-15 04:14:45 UTC, the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai Volcano erupted, with a truly epic amount of force.

From Wikipedia:

On 15 January, the volcano violently erupted again, about seven times more powerfully than the eruption on 20 December 2021. There were numerous reports of loud booms across Tonga and other countries, such as Fiji and as far away as New Zealand and Australia. A boom was heard in Alaska seven hours after eruption. The eruption set off a massive atmospheric shockwave travelling at about 300 m (1,000 ft) per second. Near the eruption, the explosion damaged property, including shattered windows.

Things I am proud of

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 01:10:00 +1000

Here’s a few random things I’m proud to have been part of.

“Current” Projects

Kanidm - Active participant in the dev process, generally just working to make 📎 clippy happier and clarifying documentation.
pvoutput - for managing solar power data on PVOutput.org
pygoodwe - GoodWe Solar API library.
goodwe2pvoutput - Ties the above two projects together, taking the data from your Goodwe inverter and upload it to PVOutput.org.
pyaussiebb - Interacting with my favourite ISP, Aussie Broadband
github_linter - I realised that I have so many projects that I needed a project to manage the projects. Yeah, I know.

Random Projects

drinkz.org - a little Django site to keep track of beverages I’ve owned/enjoyed/tried.
terraform_lambda - A terraform module for spinning up an AWS Lambda Function
aws_redirector_module - Terraform module for setting up a CloudFront-fronted S3 redirector. Redirect one URL to another.
mqttgpio - A MQTT-based controller for GPIOs on a Raspberry Pi, which integrates with Home Assistant.

Talks

The first scheduled, practiced talk I have done so far is “How to (not) fail2ban with Splunk”. The slides are here: talk-fail2ban-splunk.

Making Boxes to Store DVDs in my Billy Bookcases

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 16:53:04 +1000

I wanted some boxes to sit in my Billy bookcases and hold my DVD collections on their end, making it easy to pull out and see if I wanted, but otherwise less noticeable.

Materials

I used a 4’x8’ plywood sheet (12mm non-structural) - you could do this with a 1200x600 piece.
Wood Glue
Nails (having a nailgun makes this fast to build)

Making the box

Cutting Things Up

Cut 3x200mm wide pieces, along the width of the sheet. ie, you want pieces 1200x200, not 2400x200. 😆
- If you’re using a big sheet, measure each time - remembering the kerf will take a little bit.
- Small sheet? just cut it in thirds.
Stack two of the slices up, clamp them together so they’re all aligned and cut two pieces 710mm long for the sides.
Mark the other piece to match the length of the sides, then deduct two thicknesses of board off that length and then cut there - that’s your bottom.
- The “ends” overlap the bottom, so they grip it from the sides (and the nails help).
Since it’s the same width, the offcut can be cut down to make the “short” sides to the height you need - it should be 200mm, but match it up since we’re not robots.

Assembly

Lie the bottom piece with a long edge facing up, then glue + nail a “short” piece to one end, to make an L shape.
- The reason I don’t do it with the bottom laying flat is it’s really hard to get the alignment right, the nails in and the glue from dripping on the bench.
- To help hold the pieces upright, you can just attach clamps on the non-working end at bench-level, which is enough to provide support.
Glue + nail a “long” side on top of that, starting in the corner of the L and working out.
Glue + nail the extra “short” end.
Glue + nail the other “long” side.

At this point the box structure’s done!

Queensland COVID Contact Tracing

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 21:52:19 +1000

I finally got around to making a Splunk App for Queensland Covid Contact Tracing, parsing the Queensland Health webpage which lists exposure sites in Queensland.

… and then they gave up.

Mumble mumble. I’m double-and-a-booster vaccinated (Pfizer x3), but that doesn’t mean I’m completely immune, and it’s getting wild.

Sigh. I guess it had to come to town eventually in a big way - I guess?

Stay safe, folks.

Unifi APs lbd exit code 256 repeatedly

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 22:47:39 +1000

Original thread on the unifi forums

lbd exited with code 256 and restarted by inittab, 141,020 times one one AP in 48 hours

This process has crashed more than a few times lately…

Model UAP-AC-IW, firmware Version 5.43.43.12741

The common response from @UI-Glenn was “disable band steering” - which I had done. Any chance of an actual fix soon?

I logged a support case for this, which led to me upgrading the firmware on the Unifi controller (self hosted, on a Ubuntu 20.04.3 VM)

Norton Lifelock Purchase Scam Email

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 08:56:54 +1000

Here’s a scam email, just so you can find it if you’re searching for it.

From: some random @gmail.com address.
Subject: “Payment processed successfully”
Source: gmail DKIM pass, so a hacked account.

Payment ID : 947GR924DR815
Payment Due Date : Oct 25, 2021
 

Norton



Dear Customer ,

Thank you for subscribing our services again and renewing your annual subscription.

As part of your automatic payment, your account has been charged with $419.94

This deduction will reflect in your statement as NTC-TB charge within 1-2 business days.

So if you have any concern with this direct-debit charge or you didn't authorize the charge, please feel free to connect with us at +1 888 - 721 - 7167



Description
Devices Covered
Expiration Date
Amount
Advanced Life-lock Security
05
Oct 24, 2022
$419.94





Your membership will automatically continue as long as you choose to remain a member.

Anytime you wish to cancel the services kindly visit "The Account Section Page" and follow the instructions to cancel the services.



Thank you 

Life-lock Security Dept.
Help care # +1 888 - 721 - 7167

This is a system generated mail. Please do not reply to this mail ID.

Getting a Plex Claim Code for Docker

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 11:58:41 +1000

Go to https://www.plex.tv/claim/ and it’ll present you with a claim code, which expires in four minutes 🤔

SQLite Syntax Error Near ON

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 07:29:31 +1000

If you get a weird error like

sqlite prepare error -> SqliteFailure(Error { code: Unknown, extended_code: 1 }, Some("near \"ON\": syntax error"))

syntax error near ON

While trying to use UPSERT ... ON CONFLICT(yyyy)…

It could because you’re running Ubuntu Bionic or another similarly old version - your SQLite version’s before 3.24.0

From the SQLite documentation for ON CONFLICT:

The phrase “ON CONFLICT” is also part of UPSERT, which is an extension to INSERT added in version 3.24.0 (2018-06-04)

Console Screen Blanking on MacBook Pro Running Ubuntu

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 13:09:13 +1000

I’m running an old i7 2012-ish Macbook as a docker host since it still works and it’s pretty capable for the job.

The screen kept staying on while just sitting at the text login screen, which was a bit of a worry for the lifetime of the LCD.

I have finally figured out how to fix it! Woo! 🎉🥳🎉

Edit /etc/defaults/grub and update the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry to have the following two entries:

Brother MFD PKCS#12 file is too large

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 09:56:17 +1000

While trying to update the HTTPS/TLS certificate on my Brother MFD, I got the following error:

The size of PKCS#12 file is too large.

I’m using a Let’s Encrypt-generated certificate and had packaged the full chain.

The fix I found was to just use the end cert. I generated it using this command, on a box where I generate my cert for this printer with certbot:

sudo openssl pkcs12 -export -out ~/brother.pfx \
 -inkey /etc/letsencrypt/live/brother.example.com/privkey.pem \
 -in /etc/letsencrypt/live/brother.example.com/cert.pem

One day I’ll automate the upload, but they randomize the login form, use CSRF and have a few other protections that make it surprisingly complicated. Woo, security?

Kanidm LDAP Auth Source for SimpleSAMLphp

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 09:49:23 +1000

This is an example /config/authsources.php when using Kanidm’s LDAP connector to provide user details and authentication.

The user needs to be posix-enabled and members of a posix-enabled group saml_admins will be marked as Administrators in SimpleSAMLphp.

<?php
$KANIDM_HOSTNAME = 'ldaps://kanidm.example.com';
$KANIDM_SEARCHBASE = 'dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com';
$KANIDM_LDAP_PORT = 636;

$config = [
	// admin creds, user needs to be part of the posix-enabled group "saml_admins"
 'admin' => [
 // The default is to use core:AdminPassword, but it can be replaced with any authentication source.
 'ldap:LDAP',

 // Give the user an option to save their username for future login attempts
 // And when enabled, what should the default be, to save the username or not
 'remember.username.enabled' => false,
 'remember.username.checked' => false,

 // The hostname of the LDAP server.
 'hostname' => $KANIDM_HOSTNAME,

 // Whether SSL/TLS should be used when contacting the LDAP server.
 'enable_tls' => true,

 // Whether debug output from the LDAP library should be enabled.
 // Default is FALSE.
 'debug' => false,

 // The timeout for accessing the LDAP server, in seconds. The default is 0, which means no timeout.
 'timeout' => 30,

 // The port used when accessing the LDAP server.
 // The default is 389.
 'port' => $KANIDM_LDAP_PORT,

 // Set whether to follow referrals. AD Controllers may require FALSE to function.
 'referrals' => true,

 // Which attributes should be retrieved from the LDAP server.
 // This can be an array of attribute names, or NULL, in which case
 // all attributes are fetched.
 'attributes' => array('uid'),

 // The pattern which should be used to create the users DN given the username.
 // %username% in this pattern will be replaced with the users username.
 //
 // This option is not used if the search.enable option is set to TRUE.
 'dnpattern' => 'uid=%username%,ou=people,dc=example,dc=org',

 // As an alternative to specifying a pattern for the users DN, it is possible to
 // search for the username in a set of attributes. This is enabled by this option.
 'search.enable' => true,

 // The DN which will be used as a base for the search.
 // This can be a single string, in which case only that DN is searched, or an
 // array of strings, in which case they will be searched in the order given.
 // kanidm
 'search.base' => $KANIDM_SEARCHBASE,

 // The attribute(s) the username should match against.
 //
 // This is an array with one or more attribute names. Any of the attributes in
 // the array may match the value the username.
 'search.attributes' => [
 'name',
 ],

 // Additional LDAP filters appended to the search attributes
 'search.filter' => '(&(class=posixaccount)(memberof=saml_admins))',

 // The username & password the SimpleSAMLphp should bind to before searching. If
 // this is left as NULL, no bind will be performed before searching.
 'search.username' => null,
 'search.password' => null,

 // If the directory uses privilege separation, the authenticated user may not be able to retrieve
 // all required attribures, a privileged entity is required to get them. This is enabled with this option.
 'priv.read' => false,

 ],
	// normal users, account needs to be posix-enabled
 'ldap' => [
 'ldap:LDAP',

 // Give the user an option to save their username for future login attempts
 // And when enabled, what should the default be, to save the username or not
 'remember.username.enabled' => false,
 'remember.username.checked' => false,

 // The hostname of the LDAP server.
 'hostname' => $KANIDM_HOSTNAME,

 // Whether SSL/TLS should be used when contacting the LDAP server.
 'enable_tls' => true,

 // Whether debug output from the LDAP library should be enabled.
 // Default is FALSE.
 'debug' => false,

 // The timeout for accessing the LDAP server, in seconds. The default is 0, which means no timeout.
 'timeout' => 30,

 // The port used when accessing the LDAP server. The default is 389.
 'port' => $KANIDM_LDAP_PORT,

 // Set whether to follow referrals. AD Controllers may require FALSE to function.
 'referrals' => true,

 // Which attributes should be retrieved from the LDAP server.
 // This can be an array of attribute names, or NULL, in which case all attributes are fetched.
 'attributes' => array('uid', 'mail', 'memberOf', 'displayName'),

 // As an alternative to specifying a pattern for the users DN, it is possible to
 // search for the username in a set of attributes. This is enabled by this option.
 'search.enable' => true,

 // The DN which will be used as a base for the search.
 // This can be a single string, in which case only that DN is searched, or an
 // array of strings, in which case they will be searched in the order given.
 'search.base' => $KANIDM_SEARCHBASE,

 // The attribute(s) the username should match against.
 //
 // This is an array with one or more attribute names. Any of the attributes in
 // the array may match the value the username.
 'search.attributes' => [
 'name',
 ],

 // Additional LDAP filters appended to the search attributes
 'search.filter' => '(class=posixaccount)',

 // The username & password the SimpleSAMLphp should bind to before searching. If
 // this is left as NULL, no bind will be performed before searching.
 'search.username' => null,
 'search.password' => null,

 // If the directory uses privilege separation,
 // the authenticated user may not be able to retrieve
 // all required attribures, a privileged entity is required
 // to get them. This is enabled with this option.
 'priv.read' => false,

 ],
];

mkdocs and Python Libraries

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 18:56:16 +1000

Documentation for libraries is handy. Automatically generating most of it from source code is even more handy.

Here’s a quick how-to on setting up mkdocs with the mkdocstrings plugin to automagically build docs for your project.

mkdocs.yml

This goes in the root directory of your project.

It sets various things like the Name of the site, theme etc.

site_name: aussiebb
theme:
 name: "material"

plugins:
 - search:
 - mkdocstrings:
 default_handler: python
 handlers:
 python:
 rendering:
 show_source: true
 watch:
 - "aussiebb/"

nav:
 - "Home": README.md
 - "aussiebb": aussiebb.md

Relevant documentation:

NBN and Physics, or Why My Internet Is Slow

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 11:13:31 +1000

As an Australian, I’m afflicted with two things:

Living in a deadly paradise full of Drop Bears, Hoop Snakes and Cassowaries. Only one of these is fake.
Terrible internet, crippled by the ridiculous decisions of multiple corrupt governments.

They installed “Fibre to the Node”, or VDSL. The technology that New Zealand had had for decades and nobody in their right mind would deploy these days.

Second-generation systems (VDSL2; ITU-T G.993.2 approved in February 2006)[5] use frequencies of up to 30 MHz to provide data rates exceeding 100 Mbit/s simultaneously in both the upstream and downstream directions. The maximum available bit rate is achieved at a range of about 300 metres performance degrades as the local loop attenuation increases.

Cisco Switch S_sn and S_tc in Logs

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:23:07 +1000

If you see things like this:

[syslog@9 s_sn="306" s_tc="330"]: Aug 23 22:15:22.268: %SYS-5-CONFIG_I: Configured from console by yaleman on vty0 (10.0.0.155)

In your Cisco Switch logs, it’s because you’ve got the config entry:

logging message-counter log

Ew.

conf t
no logging message-counter log
end
write mem

Nagios, Kanidm and LDAP Authentication

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 15:04:40 +1000

Here’s an example Apache configuration file for using Kanidm’s LDAP server to authenticate access to Nagios.

The below file is also available as a github gist

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
 <VirtualHost *:443>
 ServerName monitoring.example.com
 ServerAdmin admin@example.com

 SSLEngine on
 SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/monitoring.example.com/fullchain.pem
 SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/monitoring.example.com/privkey.pem

 ScriptAlias /cgi-bin "/usr/local/nagios/sbin/"
 <Directory "/usr/local/nagios/sbin">
 Options ExecCGI
 AllowOverride None
 <RequireAll>
 Require all granted
 AuthName "Nagios Access"
 AuthType Basic
 AuthLDAPURL "ldaps://kanidm.example.com:636/dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com?name?sub?(name=*)" TLS
 AuthBasicProvider ldap
 Require valid-user
 </RequireAll>
 </Directory>

 Alias / "/usr/local/nagios/share/"
 <Directory "/usr/local/nagios/share">
 Options None
 AllowOverride None
 <RequireAll>
 Require all granted
 AuthName "Nagios Access"
 AuthType Basic
 AuthLDAPURL "ldaps://kanidm.example.com:636/dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com?name?sub?(name=*)" TLS
 AuthBasicProvider ldap
 Require valid-user
 </RequireAll>
 </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

rust openssl-src panic on install

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 10:36:45 +1000

I was trying to cargo install wasm-pack on an OpenSUSE Tumbleweed docker container and getting fucking stupid errors… turns out error handling is hard, let’s just assume everything’s going to work and .unwrap() all the things!

error: failed to run custom build command for `openssl-sys v0.9.65`

Caused by:

ared" "no-ssl3" "no-unit-test" "no-comp" "no-zlib" "no-zlib-dynamic" "no-md2" "no-rc5" "no-weak-ssl-ciphers" "no-camellia" "no-idea" "no-seed" "linux-x86_64" "-O2" "-ffunction-sections" "-fdata-sections" "-fPIC" "-m64"
 Configuring OpenSSL version 1.1.1k (0x101010bfL) for linux-x86_64
 Using os-specific seed configuration
 Creating configdata.pm
 Creating Makefile

 **********************************************************************
 *** ***
 *** OpenSSL has been successfully configured ***
 *** ***
 *** If you encounter a problem while building, please open an ***
 *** issue on GitHub <https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues> ***
 *** and include the output from the following command: ***
 *** ***
 *** perl configdata.pm --dump ***
 *** ***
 *** (If you are new to OpenSSL, you might want to consult the ***
 *** 'Troubleshooting' section in the INSTALL file first) ***
 *** ***
 **********************************************************************
 running "make" "depend"

 --- stderr
 thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Os { code: 2, kind: NotFound, message: "No such file or directory" }', /root/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/openssl-src-111.15.0+1.1.1k/src/lib.rs:469:39
 stack backtrace:
 0: rust_begin_unwind
 at /rustc/a178d0322ce20e33eac124758e837cbd80a6f633/library/std/src/panicking.rs:515:5
 1: core::panicking::panic_fmt
 at /rustc/a178d0322ce20e33eac124758e837cbd80a6f633/library/core/src/panicking.rs:92:14
 2: core::result::unwrap_failed
 at /rustc/a178d0322ce20e33eac124758e837cbd80a6f633/library/core/src/result.rs:1355:5
 3: core::result::Result<T,E>::unwrap
 4: openssl_src::Build::run_command
 5: openssl_src::Build::build
 6: build_script_main::find_vendored::get_openssl
 7: build_script_main::find_openssl
 8: build_script_main::main
 9: core::ops::function::FnOnce::call_once
 note: Some details are omitted, run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=full` for a verbose backtrace.
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...
error: failed to compile `wasm-pack v0.10.0`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `/tmp/cargo-install6Ag73g`

Turns out I needed to install make. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Splunk, LDAP and Kanidm

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 11:53:51 +1000

This is an example LDAP configuration for Splunk connecting to Kanidm via LDAP.

The configuration goes into /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/authentication.conf

Replace kanidm.example.com with the hostname of the Kanidm server
Replace dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com with the LDAP-format domain name of the system.
Map your groups to your users. I’ve got two groups in Kanidm, splunk_users and splunk_admins

[authentication]
authSettings = kanidm.example.com
authType = LDAP

[kanidm.example.com]
SSLEnabled = 1
anonymous_referrals = 1
charset = utf8
emailAttribute = mail
enableRangeRetrieval = 0
groupBaseDN = dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com
groupBaseFilter = (class=group)
groupMappingAttribute = dn
groupMemberAttribute = member
groupNameAttribute = name
host = kanidm.example.com
nestedGroups = 1
network_timeout = 20
pagelimit = -1
port = 636
realNameAttribute = displayname
sizelimit = 1000
timelimit = 15
userBaseDN = dc=kanidm,dc=example,dc=com
userBaseFilter = (class=account)
userNameAttribute = name

[roleMap_kanidm.example.com]
admin = splunk_admins
user = splunk_users

🪵 The 🪵 Great 🪵 Log 🪵 Post 🪵

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 22 May 2021 23:08:43 +1000

So… this started out as me trying to start a discussion about logging on kanidm/kanidm and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Awkward.

Is this about lots of logs, or great quality logs, or just ✨big✨ logs?

Yes. 🪵

Ok, so everyone should like their logs, and making logs likeable requires them to be usable. What makes a usable log?

Note: I’m not necessarily talking about platform metrics here; they’re related but not the focus.

Tokyo Neopolitan - Japanese Pizza

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 May 2021 23:26:52 +1000

I’ve been reading a lot of Craig Mod’s writing lately, and his article in Eater “Tokyo Neapolitan: The New Wave of Japanese Pizza” makes me really want to fly there. Right now. I feel like that most days, but … the art they bring to crafting things is just.. needed right now.

But Kakinuma is adamant that his pizzas aren’t, in fact, Neapolitan. “Absolutely not,” he said. “They’re Kakinuma-style pizzas. Look, Japanese people are really free. What I mean by that is, Japanese pray on New Year’s Day at a Shinto shrine, get married in a Christian church, and hold their funerals at a Buddhist temple. They’re beholden to no single point of view.” Kakinuma feels a freedom to push and pull within the general cosmos of Neapolitan-style, disregarding Italian tradition at will. “What’s wonderful about pizza is that it really is a bit like sushi,” he said. “You don’t touch the base ingredients. Your goal is to pull the richest inherent flavor from the ingredients at hand.”

IPv6 With Docker and Ansible

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 May 2021 08:30:51 +1000

Please note: This is not authoritative information; if you use it and kittens pop out of your router or there’s some way simpler/better way to do things:

don’t blame me for the kitten thing

please document it and send me a link so I can learn from you.

The Problem.

IPv6. It’s a thing. Who even wants NAT anyway? Docker’s neat, it lets you run containers and stuff. The docs about enabling IPv6 on Docker make it look so simple. Just assign an IP range, right?

Richard Branson and Neurodiversity

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:22:32 +1000

A recent post on Richard Branson’s blog about neurodiversity was a good read.

The world needs a neurodiverse workforce to help try and solve some of the big problems of our time. Many people on the autism spectrum excel in areas such as logic, technology skills, problem-solving, pattern recognition, precision, sustained concentration, analysis and other unique cognitive functions. Yet people on the autism spectrum are often overlooked for jobs that they might be brilliant at. It’s a staggering statistic that 85% of autistic adults are unemployed or under-employed.

On Languishing

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:17:48 +1000

This article on the New York Times about the idea of “Languishing” explains a lot about my productivity in the last year or so. I’m finally hammering away at a lot of little medium-effort tasks - and not just because I started being medicated for my ADHD at age 37. 🤔

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

512 Pixels on the Mac Chimes of Death

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 10:17:27 +1000

Quality post for sure - 512 Pixels on the historic sounds that Macs made when they failed to boot. I miss the whimsy in the personality of the early Macs. 🥰

I have to say the PowerPC Performa death sound with the little badoom-tish at the end was my favourite.

Patching Proxmox for UI Issues

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 11:05:32 +1000

I had an issue in the Proxmox VE manager, where on Safari (all the time) or Firefox, when the screen width was too low, the various UI elements made it so I couldn’t access the buttons in the top left.

I found that all of the necessary things to change were in /usr/share/pve-manager/js/pvemanagerlib.js.

Messing around, I screwed it up and had to learn how to extract a file from a .deb file to get the old one back. Let’s grab the package. Don’t judge me for running an old version, my firewall/router is on VM host, which makes upgrades… probematic. I’ve finally got around to making a temporary thing to use to run as a firewall to do the upgrade now 🤣

IPv6 Address Keeps Changing on MacOS With PfSense

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 23:17:43 +1000

I’ve been having this issue for a few weeks, where my IPv6 address kept changing on my laptop. It doesn’t affect me on other devices because they don’t have long-lived connections to things like SSH.

Turns out it’s a bug in pfSense which turned up in a recent update of radvd, where it’s not RFC8106 compilant due to mis-handling RA lifetimes.

There’s supposedly a fix coming in a future version (see here), but for now I need a working network!

Resetting Github PAT for HACS

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 21:43:58 +1000

I had to reset all my tokens for Github recently because I’m dumb and accidentally pushed one to a code repository.

This broke HACS on my Home Assistant install because the token wasn’t working and rather than gracefully handle that, or make it possible for users to re-enter it, it just dies.

What I found is that you really should remove the HACS integration, restart HA and re-add the integration, which will prompt you to do the “Github Device” setup

Logitech Unifying Receiver Stuttering

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:23:57 +1000

Well that was weird, I have been having loads of issues with my MX Master 3 for Mac stuttering and lagging and generally being a horrible experience. I have been using it with a unifying receiver plugged into my OWC Thunderbolt (4) Dock, which is sitting about 60cm away under my laptop stand.

Turns out - that’s enough distance and electrical noise to cause the problem. I moved the receiver closer (using a port on my monitor arm) and it works fine now! I generally hate wireless mice, and I’m not really sold on the weight of this one, but finding a fix for my ~$150AUD mouse being a complete arse is nice.

Disabling Firefox Sponsored Links

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 13:35:32 +1000

In another strange turn, Firefox has been prompting people with sponsored relevant links in the address bar and on the “new tab” screen. This is how to disable it. I’m guessing I don’t see these things because I typically run a Pi-hole and the data can’t get through.

Click in the address bar and type or paste about:config then hit enter.
It’ll probably throw up a warning screen, click through it.
Filter the list to find browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites - you can just type *sponsored* and it’ll show the relevant things. There’s likely to be four entries if you do the wildcard filter, the first two are the settings and the second set are if you want to sync them.

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites

I’ve got the browser* ones set to false and the sync* ones set to true, which seems to work. Double-click on them to change the setting.

LMIC_ERROR_TX_NOT_FEASIBLE Error on Arduino/ESP32/LoraMAC-in-C

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 09:09:25 +1000

If you get the LMIC_ERROR_TX_NOT_FEASIBLE error when doing TTNMapper or generally using the arduino-lmic library (my version is 3.3.0) then do this patch in src/lmic/lmic.c. This patch was shown to me by Chris from Accelerando Consulting.

Original code:

u1_t maxFlen = LMICbandplan_maxFrameLen(LMIC.datarate);
if (flen > maxFlen) {
	LMICOS_logEventUint32("frame too long for this bandplan", ((u4_t)dlen << 16) | (flen << 8) | maxFlen);
	return 0;
}

New code adds a check for maxFlen:

u1_t maxFlen = LMICbandplan_maxFrameLen(LMIC.datarate);
if (maxFlen > 0) {
	if (flen > maxFlen) {
		LMICOS_logEventUint32("frame too long for this bandplan", ((u4_t)dlen << 16) | (flen << 8) | maxFlen);
		return 0;
	}
}

There’s something about checking for max frame length that only gets triggered when you’re using the 923Mhz bandplan, and this fixes it. I’m guessing it’s part of the lookup in LMICas923_maxFrameLen in lmic_as923.c which return 0 but I haven’t had time to figure out what’s triggering it.

Course Syllabus for Making New Friends as an Adult

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:57:13 +1000

I wish a semi-sane version of this was real, to be quite honest.

Course Objectives

Making new friends as an adult is difficult, especially for students who have just turned thirty and are approaching the precipice of death. This class will teach you how to navigate this emotionally demanding field, so that you can finally make new friends who will never find out about that one time you ate mulch for seven dollars.

Automatic RDP Certificate on Windows 10 Pro With LetsEncrypt

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 12:14:26 +1000

I’m sick of the “this doesn’t have a certificate” warnings. I:

have a Windows 10 Pro machine
want to use a LetsEncrypt certificate for RDP connections.
don’t have an AD/IPA/whatever domain to join
have the machine’s hostname in Cloudflare DNS

In this example I’ll use workstation.example.com as the hostname I’ll connect to, change this for your own hostname.

Install CertifyTheWeb.
Copy this powershell script to somewhere you won’t delete it (eg. c:\scripts\update_rdp_certificate.ps1):

# this grabs the certificate thumbprint and tells RDP to use it
$HOSTNAME="workstation.example.com"
$THUMBPRINT = (ls Cert:\LocalMachine\my | WHERE {$_.Subject -match $HOSTNAME } | Select -First 1).Thumbprint

if (!$THUMBPRINT) { 
 write-host "Failed to find certificate thumbprint for ${HOSTNAME}, quitting."
} else {
 write-host "Found certificate thumbprint for ${HOSTNAME}: ${THUMBPRINT}"
 write-host "Configuring RDP"
 & wmic /namespace:\\root\CIMV2\TerminalServices PATH Win32_TSGeneralSetting Set SSLCertificateSHA1Hash="$THUMBPRINT" 
 write-host `Done!`
}

Open CertifyTheWeb.
Register a contact for LetsEncrypt with some contact details under both the normal and test modes. Test mode is enabled by clicking on the advanced tab and ticking the Use staging Mode (Test Certificates) box.
Click New Certificate.
Select Certificate on the right if it’s not already selected.
In the Domains tab , enter the full hostname you’ll use to connect to the machine. ie. workstation.example.com. Remember to click the green + next to the domain name to add it to the list.
On the Advanced tab, set the Certificate Authority to LetsEncrypt. Until you’re sure everything works, tick the Use staging Mode (Test Certificates) box.
Click on Authorisation on the right.
Change the Challenge Type to dns-01 and the DNS Update Method to Cloudflare DNS API.
Add the a new Credential Cloudflare API token.
- You’ll need to give it permission to edit the DNS zone you want to issue certificates for.
Select the Zone you want to issue the certificate under by clicking the ... next to DNS Zone ID and selecting the zone name.
Click Deployment on the right.
Set the Deployment Mode to Certificate Store Only since we won’t be assigning this to any IIS Websites.
Click Tasks on the right and add a Deployment Task of Run PowerShell Script.
On the Task Parameters tab, set the Program/Script to the path of your script (eg. c:\scripts\update_rdp_certificate.ps1).
Click Preview on the right and check everything seems OK.
Click Test to make sure things work the way they should.
Click Request certificate and see how it works!

Remember to set the authority back to the production one and re-issue when you’re done. :)

Design vs Implementation

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 23:00:39 +1000

I’m trying to make a small pogo-pin jig so that I can program the ESP8266’s that make up a lot of projects I play with. Similar to the design in the article “Pogo Pins Make Light Work of IoT Switches”, I want some modules I can clamp over the top of things like the Sonoff Basic R3 or the D1 Mini without soldering on wires or pins.

The one I’m having the most fun with lately is the DETA wall switches - I can’t stand doing fiddly OTA updates - serial flashing my favourite build is just easier. Soldering on a low profile pin header is a pain in the arse, especially if you do it just wrong and the unit won’t go back together. There’s also the fact that there’s a mains-voltage module this faceplate plugs into, and I really don’t want to short on that.

Disappointing Padlocks

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 20:06:54 +1000

I have some tool boxes that have ammunition in them and I’m not exactly sure where they keys are. I figured I’d set myself the challenge to open them with the lock picks I bought years ago and never used.

Literally pushed a pick all the way in once and the first lock popped open. Laaaame. Second one took about ten seconds of random jiggling. The LockPickingLawyer would be suitably ambivalent about them - I didn’t expect much from home-brand locks I bought from a place literally called “Super Cheap Auto”

Monitoring cloudflared for fun and profit

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 13:37:44 +1000

This is a very hacky script for monitoring cloudflared, it requires curl and jq, which I think you should have on there anyway

You need the following line in the config.yml file, which sets cloudflared to expose the metrics/monitoring endpoint, or --metrics localhost:40355 on the command line:

metrics: localhost:40355

And… here’s the script. TL;DR, it checks the /ready endpoint, which returns {"status":200,"readyConnections":4} on good, or a 503 on not-working.

#!/bin/bash

SYSTEMD_TOPIC="cloudflared_monitoring"
METRICS_PORT="40355"
CLOUDFLARED_STATUS="$( curl --silent --max-time 5 "http://localhost:${METRICS_PORT}/ready" | jq -r '.status' )"
if [ "$CLOUDFLARED_STATUS" -ne 200 ]; then	
 echo "cloudflared status: ${CLOUDFLARED_STATUS} restarting." | /usr/bin/systemd-cat -t "${SYSTEMD_TOPIC}"
 /bin/systemctl restart cloudflared 2>&1 | sudo /usr/bin/systemd-cat -t "${SYSTEMD_TOPIC}"
else
 echo "cloudflared status: ${CLOUDFLARED_STATUS} OK" | /usr/bin/systemd-cat -t "${SYSTEMD_TOPIC}"
fi

References

Found the information in cloudflare/cloudflared#188.
Committed to the cloudflared repo in 38fb0b28b.
Argo command line option reference

Apple M1, terraform and golang

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 21:56:23 +1000

I was trying to apply a messy terraform config recently and kept running across an issue where the AWS provider would seemingly just get itself hung, using ~150% CPU. Killing it, deleting the terraform.tfstate and init/refresh/apply seemed to make it work sometimes. I thought I was having network connection issues, as it’d hang in random parts of a refresh or something like that.

The cause

Turns out it’s an issue with Rosetta 2 and golang fighting. There is more information in this comment from the Apple Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering account, where Rosetta’s handling of signals isn’t complete, but which has been fixed in recente versions of Rosetta.

Facebook Messenger weirdness on macOS

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 08:06:15 +1000

I’m stuck using Facebook Messenger, and they love trashing system performance in the browser, so I tried the “native” macOS app recently.

I’m not sure what I did, but after posting a sick medieval meme, it started reloading itself over and over. Kill, open, repeat - it just hung. Stuck cache? This is starting to turn into a theme…

I figured deleting cache things worked last time, let’s try it again…

rm -rf "./Containers/com.facebook.archon/Data/Library/Application Support/Messenger/Partitions/*"

Opened, and it was OK again. Sigh.

IPA and the Stuck Cache

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 16:17:42 +1000

Went to grab a krb ticket today, and this was a fun error to get. I checked all the usual timestamp things… nothing wrong there.

[yaleman@ipaserver 15:41 ~]$ kinit
Password for yaleman@IPA.REALM:
kinit: Clock skew too great while getting initial credentials

It wasn’t happening for anyone else, and it was working earlier, so that’s weird.

This was the error in the log files, that someone helpfully grabbed:

Dec 10 15:45:08 ipaserver.ipa.realm krb5kdc[7208](info): preauth (encrypted_timestamp) verify failure: Decrypt integrity check failed
Dec 10 15:45:08 ipaserver.ipa.realm krb5kdc[7208](info): AS_REQ (4 etypes {18 17 16 23}) 10.0.0.5: PREAUTH_FAILED: yaleman@IPA.REALM for krbtgt/IPA.REALM@IPA.REALM, Decrypt integrity check failed

I found a thread on the Kerberos mailing list about that error, which gave me some things to try.

AWS on Hosting Your Own DNS Services

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:48:48 +1000

Having just built a cluster of PowerDNS Authoritative servers in AWS, behind the Global Accelerator product, this AWS Security Blog Post gave me some great confirmation that I did things properly! 🧐

I finally figured out my weird font issues in VS Code

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 09:55:45 +1000

I can’t remember when it started, but it was a while ago - Visual Studio Code started to show very strange font things when I have Editor: Render Whitespace turned on.

This should look like…

FInding the relevant thing to search for took… far too long. I ended up searching for “dot” and then clicking on random things in the Wikipedia page until I found Interpunct, and the Catalan usage of it…

Regarding My M1 MacBook's Battery

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:26:43 +1000

Got my M1 powered MacBook Pro 13" today. Haven’t plugged it in since taking it out of the box - has gone from 88% to 39% battery in about four hours of “DO ALL THE THINGS SETUP SYNC BACKUP”. The i7 sitting next to it hasn’t charged from ~20% to 100% in that time…

— James Hodgkinson (@yaleman43381258) December 1, 2020

PowerDNS All Data Was Not Consumed Message

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:42:51 +1000

This was … annoying today.

I’m playing with upgrading a PowerDNS instance and started getting All data was not consumed when doing queries against particular zones. Turns out, it was the space at the end of the SOA record, somehow something was adding that in…

# pdnsutil check-zone example.com
[Error] Following record had a problem: "example.com IN SOA ns1.example.net dns.example.net 2020092142 3600 7200 3600000 172800 "
[Error] Error was: All data was not consumed
Checked 26 records of 'example.com', 1 errors, 0 warnings.

# psql -h nsdb.example.com


powerdns=> select * from records where type='SOA' and name like '%isdnsworking%';
 id | domain_id | name | type | content | ttl | prio | change_date | disabled | ordername | auth
----------+-----------+-------------+------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+------+------+-------------+----------+-----------+------
 15122753 | 1557559 | example.com | SOA | ns1.example.net dns.example.net 2020092142 3600 7200 3600000 172800 | 3600 | | | f | | t
(1 row)

powerdns=> update records set content='ns1.example.net dmain.netregistry.net 2020092142 3600 7200 3600000 172800' where type='SOA' and name like '%isdnsworking%' ;
UPDATE 1
powerdns=> select * from records where type='SOA' and name like '%isdnsworking%';
 id | domain_id | name | type | content | ttl | prio | change_date | disabled | ordername | auth
----------+-----------+-------------+------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+------+------+-------------+----------+-----------+------
 15122753 | 1557559 | example.com | SOA | ns1.example.net dns.example.net 2020092142 3600 7200 3600000 172800 | 3600 | | | f | | t
(1 row)

powerdns=> \q
# pdnsutil check-zone example.com
Checked 26 records of 'example.com', 0 errors, 0 warnings.

… wow.

Battery Equivalence...

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:04:00 +1000

This was oddly hard to find…

The Energizer A544 is equivalent to the 4LR44, a 6 volt battery - which my Merlin garage door opener uses. It also replaces the 6V PX28A.

Raspberry Pi USB Boot 'USB-MSD Boot Requires Newer Software'

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 17:45:05 +1000

I was getting this error when trying to boot my Raspi4 8GB from USB:

USB-MSD boot requires newer software

The fix is to grab the latest firmware from the raspberrypi/firmware repository like so:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware
cd firmware/boot
Mount the USB boot drive on my mac
cp -R * /Volumes/boot
Unmount the drive and put it into the Pi

This’ll copy the latest firmware (don’t delete any other files) and it should work.

ManageEngine Password Manager Pro Parameter Error

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 11:33:52 +1000

If you start getting an error like this, you need to update the SSL certificate on your SAML server ;)

It’ll show up in $installdir\logs\security-log-0.txt.

[10:52:00:698]|[06-18-2020]|[com.adventnet.iam.security.URLRule]|[WARNING]|[77]: Extra parameter found: the parameter Map : {[SigAlg = http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1][Signature = Tn+28vsQB9fXiL2SwGShT4gGwyNhDUbWWLPM1SZjc/K2M6xuwAS+zEL8fdDU9/XzAVvnRhrK4SRDitCWjCBwAUMiHLYONjMz6jNRs5HqjwFUCEk8slFlvup0oER2vq4w5BfbXBt7VKku85xOWqu7gHHAr9Xkhtlx8i/Xdmw0S4r/66V+bMHHKUm3dc/bJ/dEF8KOFdseSwNF2gDhiTX2iMyhIsrZeifjp5O/WpJJdi80WbX50kQrkGOJa17Pbvi9o9yoFBLtHDvyp2AfUXghW6kuA8d0unvBmo5dqr8kwTkungs/+IExBHbGIP8M/gKvAcUKgleP/99jXUxjct6GCw==]} for the URI : (/STATE_ID/[0-9]+)?/saml2|

Drone CI and 'Github Pages Promoted Build xxxx' causing failed builds

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 May 2020 08:42:06 +1000

I enabled Github Pages on Dewar last night and it started triggering these weird failing builds in Drone CI.

After much searching I finally found a thread on the Drone CI Discourse “GitHub Pages triggering builds incorrectly” - turns out it’s a weird deploy hook thing.

Adding the “trigger” block to my .drone.yml fixed it (block snipped from the larger file):

kind: pipeline
type: docker
name: dewar

trigger:
 event:
 exclude: [ promote ]
steps:
- name: pytest

Quote from @bradrydzewski on the Discourse:

Proxmox VE and Management on IPv6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 17 May 2020 14:18:16 +1000

I try to run IPv6 all the things, these days. It makes connectivity from the outside world (when needed) much easier; once DNS is set up, who needs to connect via IP address anyway?

I knew connectivity worked because I could ssh to the IPv6 address, but pveproxy was being a pain (as usual). Turns out, it looks at /etc/hosts for the hostname on startup, to figure out where to bind to.

Splunk, SAML, and ADFS: failed to parse issuer

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 15 May 2020 14:21:04 +1000

Trying to get Splunk doing SAML auth against ADFS today. Was getting this error in splunkd.log.

05-15-2020 00:43:39.673 +0000 ERROR Saml - Failed to parse issuer. Could not evaluate xpath expression /samlp:Response/samlp:Status/samlp:StatusMessage or no matching nodes found. No value found in SamlResponse for key=/samlp:Response/samlp:Status/samlp:StatusMessageCould not evaluate xpath expression /samlp:Response/samlp:Status/samlp:StatusDetail/Cause or no matching nodes found. No value found in SamlResponse for key=/samlp:Response/samlp:Status/samlp:StatusDetail/CauseCould not evaluate xpath expression //saml:Assertion/saml:Issuer or no matching nodes found. No value found in SamlResponse for key=//saml:Assertion/saml:Issuer
05-15-2020 00:43:39.673 +0000 ERROR UiSAML - IDP failed to authenticate request. Status Message="" Status Code="Responder"

Turned off Authentication request signing and it came good. I can’t store the frontend cert in the ADFS config because it changes as often as the LetsEncrypt issuance period, so this’ll do for now.

Getting the TOTP Key From the Guacamole Database

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 07 May 2020 12:45:02 +1000

Guac’s great, but there’s no interface for changing the TOTP key once it’s set for a user.

I’m using docker-compose to build this, so your method might be different.

Connect to postgresql:

psql guacamole postgres

To make sure you’re in the right db, type \dt and hit enter, it should show you a bunch of tables starting with guacamole_.

This is the query, copypasta should do it.

select entity.name, uid.user_id, uattr.attribute_value 
from guacamole_user as uid, 
 guacamole_user_attribute as uattr, 
 guacamole_entity as entity 
where uattr.attribute_name='guac-totp-key-secret' 
 AND uid.entity_id=entity.entity_id
 AND uid.user_id=uattr.user_id;

And the result I get (I’ve only got one user)

Hexagonal Architecture in Netflix

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 08:30:39 +1000

This post on the Netflix Tech Blog about rebuilding one oftheir applications using Hexagonal Architecture patterns was a fascinating read. I’d never argue for every project to have a big universal interfacing method or connectors everywhere, but at some point you realise your platform needs it.

The idea of Hexagonal Architecture is to put inputs and outputs at the edges of our design. Business logic should not depend on whether we expose a REST or a GraphQL API, and it should not depend on where we get data from — a database, a microservice API exposed via gRPC or REST, or just a simple CSV file.

SK6812 LEDs, Tasmota and Home Assistant

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 07:40:28 +1000

Installing the requirements should be easy, just run:

pip3 install –user platformio

Truncated output should look like this:

Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple Collecting platformio Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/15/58/49a7134412731bd585f996d9c69e70f7eff0bacf795a7a55524dadf412cd/platformio-4.3.1.tar.gz (169kB) 100% |████████████████████████████████| 174kB 1.2MB/s Successfully built platformio Installing collected packages: bottle, marshmallow, pyelftools, semantic-version, tabulate, platformio Successfully installed bottle-0.12.18 marshmallow-3.5.1 platformio-4.3.1 pyelftools-0.26 semantic-version-2.8.4 tabulate-0.8.7

To set up the drivers to use the SK6812 properly, there’s a few configuration changes that need to be done. Open Tasmota/tasmota/my_user_config.h in a text editor and search for USE_WS2812. You’ll want to update the next few lines to match these. We’re going to make sure the DMA thing’s commented out, (// at the start of the line), the hardware’s set to be right, and the colour type is set to GRBW, because SK6812’s have their colours in a different order.

The Strangler, a method for migrating away from legacy systems

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 21:00:06 +1000

That’s a new name for it.. the Strangler. Putting a smart load balancer between clients and your legacy application can help with migrations.

You no longer need to get the new system up to feature parity for clients to start using it! Instead, new features get routed to the new server, while old ones stay with the legacy system. When you do have time or a business reason to replace an existing feature the release is nothing more than a config change.

OPNsense to Mikrotik IPsec VPN

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 08:05:22 +1000

I needed a VPN from one house to another for running the Ubiquiti Unifi AP’s I’m setting up at RMB’s house… I used to have mikrotik’s at each end so that was a fairly simple setup. This time it was from Mikrotik at one end to OPNsense at the other. IPSEC is … fun sometimes.

Here’s a diagram of the layout. A /16 at each house, connected over the internet.

+---------------+ +---------+ +----------+ +---------+ +---------------+
| Local Network +---+ House 1 +---+ Internet | | House 2 | | Local Network |
| 10.0.0.0/16 | | 5.5.5.5 | | +---+ 9.9.9.9 +---+ 10.1.0.0/16 |
+---------------+ +---------+ +----------+ +---------+ +---------------+

Configuring OPNsense

There’s a few steps to this one.

Marketing and Corporations, Always Ruining Society

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 10:13:30 +1000

The Woman Shaking up the Diamond Industry, a recent article in the New Yorker, reminds me of how terribly broken our society is due to corporate greed.

Talking about N. W. Ayer & Son, the company that De Beers hired to make diamonds more alluring to the market in the United States:

One Ayer copywriter, Frances Gerety, recalled that women formerly wanted their future husbands to spend money on “a washing machine, or a new car, anything but an engagement ring,” which was considered “money down the drain.” Gerety changed this perception by creating the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” for De Beers. Ayer loaned extravagant diamond jewelry to celebrities; as one of the company’s publicists put it, “The big ones sell the little ones.” Demand grew, and so did supply. In the nineteen-twenties, about three million carats of rough diamonds were produced worldwide every year; by the end of the seventies, the number had climbed to some fifty million carats.

HBR on the Worst Type of Leader

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 09:37:53 +1000

I won’t spoil the ending, but this Harvard Business Review article on one of the worst and draining types of leadership explains why I left my last work.

A young friend recently remarked that the worst boss he ever had would provide him with feedback that always consisted of “You’re doing a great job.” But they both knew it wasn’t true — the organization was in disarray, turnover was excessive, and customers were not happy. My friend was giving it his all, but he needed more support and better feedback than he received. He wanted a leader who would be around when he needed them, and who would give him substantive advice, not platitudes. As a measure of his frustration, he said, “I would rather have had a boss who yelled at me or made unrealistic demands than this one, who provided empty praise.”

Dodo, FTTC, Mikrotik and PPPoE

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 19:08:47 +1000

A family member has been using Dodo’s ADSL2+ service for a long time and it worked fine for their needs. Recently (before the rest of us, thanks Turnbull and co-conspirators!) she was upgraded to the Fibre To The Curb system, which meant a few tweaks. They sent her a shiny Huawei HG659, which I had no intentions of using. The Mikrotik in place was doing the job fine, took up less space, and maintaining it would mean nothing else had to be reconfigured.

Simple Overcast Stats

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 10:07:34 +1000

I use Overcast to listen to all my podcasts, it’s a great app by Marco Arment. Smart Speed shortens the listen time by shortening longish silences in speech like magic.

I’m a data nerd, and the app shows how many hours Smart Speed has saved (281 hours) but not the amount of podcasts I’ve got outstanding or how many I’ve listened to.

You can export the OPML feed for your account from the accounts page, including the “All Data” feed - which is handy to summarise the data I want. It’s an XML file, and I’m a python nerd so I used the untangle library to do it. I’m sure there’s better ways to do it, but this is a quick hack.

Woodblocks and Cup Noodle, our last full day

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 22:43:47 +0900

We started the day with weighing our bags. We left Australia with 18kg across our two bags and we have managed to double that with the weight of books and other souvenirs ^_^

As soon as we walked out of the hotel we saw a beautiful Nissan Skyline R35 GTR. Burble burble happy noises… from me, the car sounded great too!

Kamigata Ukioye Museum is in the Nanba area of Osaka, not far from the main train station. A 500¥ entrance fee isn’t bad for a private museum with a few floors of woodblock prints.

Osaka Castle and oodles of Noodles

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 23:52:22 +0900

Let’s start the day with some quick floof.

Japan, no. Pepsi, plz no.

Osaka Castle was today’s thing to visit. There’s an extended garden next to it, but that’s not open on Mondays, so we might come back on another day.

Kyoto to Osaka with Manga

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 20:41:28 +0900

Today’s a transit day, we are leaving Kyoto and heading back to Osaka. Given it’s only a half hour train away, we have some time to kill between the 11am check out and the 3pm check in at the new place.

The news from home isn’t getting any better, but the art showing what a clusterfuck our political leaders are has really started to catch its stride.

The only real plan we had today was to head to the Kyoto International Manga Museum. We dumped our bags in a locker at the train station and headed that way.

Nijo Castle, last full day in Kyoto

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 20:16:44 +0900

Waking up to more news of the horror befalling my home country wasn’t a great start. Fuck the liberals. Fuck Murdoch. Fuck everyone that’s had anything to do with the policies and corruption that have led to this truly horrifying state. That includes me I’m sure, so well, fuck me.

This is going to be a short post for sure. Today was the day of “please don’t take photos here” places.

Torii, Silver and the Palace

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 22:13:03 +0900

So it’s Friday the third, our second last full day in Kyoto and our first goal is to see Fushimi Inari Taisha and the Senbon Torii (The Thousand Torii Gates). A quick walk down the hill to the Kiyomizu-Gojo station of the Keihan line and we’re on our way to Fushimi-Inari station, the start of the Kyoto Trail. We’d seen these markers along the way to Shogunzaka, and a few times since, but this was #1!

Arashiyama Adventuring

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 20:58:01 +0900

Today we’re doing things in Arashiyama, western Kyoto. A bus to the train station, then on the JR West train to Saga-Arashiyama station. Oh how I’ve missed trains. Kyoto is a very bus-centric city and Google Maps just isn’t great at indicating where bus stops are around here. You can keep the free internet of the big cities, and their automatic doors, just give me my rail-riding steeds.

Golden Pavilion and Kembu

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 23:59:59 +0900

Today we were off to the Golden Pavilion, which meant we had a little bit of a walk to catch the 205 bus. The first few were full (like, people almost hanging out the windows) so wandered up to the city centre hoping people were getting off there.

It worked, we could get on, the bus was still packed, so I expected to stand for the forty minute trip to the temple. Most everyone got off at the Shimogamo-Jinja shrine, wow. Suddenly it was like we were the only ones on the bus, for a moment. Then a load of new people got on. So. Confusing.

Shogunzuka Mound and Kennin-Ji Temple

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:49:47 +0900

This morning’s goal was to climb the mountain to see the Shogunzuka mound and the lookout which has been built next to it. A quick bus trip to the subway, then one stop to Keage station.

These ticket machines are great. You can either use a ticket (the yellow slot) or tap the blue pad with your phone or NFC pass to tag on. They’re great. Even when you don’t tag just right and you break the light beam and the little yellow fence things pop out, the lights go red and it yells at you!

Rainy day in Kyoto

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 21:35:47 +0900

Woke up feeling a bunch better today. Turned off the ever-present aircon last night and my sinuses got a rest. That might have moved it down into my chest a bit, but hopefully not. I’m still coughing like mad. -_-

For the first time in the trip it was actually raining. Enough that we didn’t really see tramping to shrines and such as a doable adventure.

I found the Samurai and Ninja museum, Kyoto. I was worried it was going to be a bit twee, but we got a short demo by a skilled martial artist, a great overview of the history, and some shenanigans involving shuriken and blow darts.

Tokyo to Kyoto

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 23:00:45 +0900

Today’s goal: Get to Kyoto.

I went for a wander looking for the local chemist, my sinuses were spectacularly blocked last night to the point I was having panic attacks bordering on hallucinations. I swear, every time I go on holiday my sinuses just flip out.

No ghosts!

No punch buggies!

We made our way to Tokyo station knowing it’d be a shit fight to find somewhere to stash our bags for a few hours before the Shinkansen.

Star Wars, Comiket and all the things

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 22:31:17 +0900

Comiket at Tokyo Big Sight today, along with some other stops along the way.

Warning: if you don’t like manga, or drawings of scantily-clad women, skip this maybe? Also this is hilariously long and full of images/video. Too bad.

A’s running the schedule today so we are going to the Star Wars Identities exhibition on Tennozu Isle, Shinagawa, before going to Comiket.

This exhibition showcases pre-production and production items from all the movies, with a storyline of how identity is developed for people and the characters alike. There’s a heavy focus on Luke and Anakin Skywalker, as they’re the two major identities in the series.

Akihabara and Kitchen Street

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 20:20:30 +0900

Today’s goal was to explore what Akihabara has to offer a couple of anime/computer/japanese pop culture loving geeks.

On the way to the train station we came across the Edo Taito Traditional Crafts Centre, a collaboration between local traditional craftspeople and the municipality of Taito.

Upon entering we were given a very informative introduction by one of the staff, then discussed the facility and its meaning a little more. The craftspeople of Taito don’t have skills or time to market themselves so the municipality puts this place together to show their wares in an increasingly competitive market. They’ll also do periodic events with the masters showing and sharing their skills. They don’t sell very much at all in the centre, but have a register of artisans and will put you in contact with them.

Imperial Palace tour and Manga Hunt

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 20:05:20 +0900

Today was the day we’d booked in an Imperial Palace Gardens tour through TripAdvisor. For an hour’s guided tour with a licensed guide, 2500¥ was really cheap in my opinion.

Our guide was a lovely retiree lady called Eriko from Yokohama. She used to be an elementary school teacher, now does one tour a week of the Imperial Gardens.

We met at the Otemon gate, the main entrance gate of the Edo Castle during the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867).

xmas in Tokyo

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 21:51:41 +0900

Today’s Christmas, which means… basically nothing in Japan. A great reason to ignore it for the most part and enjoy the sights.

Today’s goals:

see the Meiji Jingu Shrine
visit the National Gallery and see Ueno Park
pick up our KFC dinner
see the light show at Tokyo station

Back to our local, the Asakusa station to catch the train to Ueno to see the park and the museum. Ueno Park is another one of those places of nature and serenity hiding within the bustling metropolis of Tokyo. As soon as you’re out of the station and up the stairs, the waterfall starts hiding the noise of the city, you’re surrounded by trees and it’s very peaceful.

Asakusa Yakinuku

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 21:23:08 +0900

Dinner was pretty great tonight. A classic Yakinuku place with limited menu, accepting staff and delicious sauce.

It was from Gyu-nabe Yoneku. No bullshit, old style place, good food, great staff.

Studio Ghibli Museum

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 12:41:16 +0900

If you haven’t seen any movies from Studio Ghibli, stop now. Go watch a few. They’re amazing. The art, stories and storytelling are glorious. Having said that, I know I haven’t watched as many as I’d like, more through the cost of local copies and lack of availability in general.

A visit to the Ghibli Museum was one of the “must do” parts of this trip. It was always on the “top things to do” lists while researching, and I love the worlds that Hayao Miazaki brings to life on and off the screen.

Shibuya and Shinjuku

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 23:36:46 +0900

The plan for today was to cruise around the Shibuya and Shinjuku areas, both known for pop culture and shopping.

On the way, since it was fine out, we went to visit the Senso-Ji temple and its surrounds.

A and I collected our fortunes, paying our 100¥ and shaking the tin. Mine was 五十五 (55), which turned out to be a “regular” fortune. A was not fortunate today so he tied his to the rail as is the custom, leaving bad fortune behind.

Asakusa in the rain

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 19:35:59 +0900

As we arrived in Tokyo today it started a very light spitting rain. Once we were booked into the hotel it started a gentle, but constant rain which I knew wouldn’t get any worse, but which was making my travelling companion want to grab instant ramen and just chill in the hotel.

No, say I! If we’re going out, we’re going out for good food!

A side benefit of being out on a Sunday night in the rain was the opportunity for some nice moody rainy photos, free of other tourists.

Osaka to Tokyo

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 10:50:35 +0900

When I was in school, dad collected and exhibited stamps. Being the son of a philatelist I was unable to escape my fate; I built a collection relating to transport and exhibited them a few times. I did it well enough to get me entry in to the youth philately trip to Germany in the late 90’s. Yeah, I’m a nerd.

While learning about all the ways people use mechanical contrivances to move themselves and their belongings around, I learnt about trains. Some of those trains go blisteringly fast. The two main fast-train runs in those days were the Japanese Shinkansen and the gloriously orange and French Trés Grand Vitesse (TGV).

Saturday night in Osaka

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 22:23:24 +0900

The best laid plans of mice and men and all that. Turns out, if you’re trying to fish for your dinner on a Saturday night in Osaka you’re either booking in at a restaurant or doing it in the river… we probably should have prebooked 😂

No worry however, my usual trick of “open TripAdvisor and eat” worked out spectacularly well. We were already in the Dotonbori district, so I found us Chibo, a Teppanyaki Okonomiyaki restaurant.

Trains and Tombs and Knives Oh My

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 16:13:40 +0900

Today we set out to find the Mozu Kofun tombs in southern Osaka. Our first train ride without the brain-melting pre-game of a long day’s transit. Namba station to Mikunigaoka Station didn’t take too long and it cost maybe… three dollars? It’s great what a huge population can do for infrastructure budgets.

The “pen pen pen” noise of train crossings is one I’ve known as an ambient noise for decades and brings back so many memories of anime and other media. Riding on the train today, it’s such a strange feeling to finally understand how much of the city culture of Japan revolves around them. Every couple of blocks you see a tiny side street crossing the line, with people on bikes and in cars waiting for the ever-present stream of trains.

Osaka and the payment adventures

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 16:50:44 +0900

The main goal today was to get JR train tickets for the rest of the trip. We’re going Osaka > Tokyo > Kyoto > Osaka > Hiroshima > Osaka > Kansai airport. This’ll happen over a few weeks, so the calculators I looked at showed it wouldn’t be worth the ~800-1100 for a 21 day JR rail pass. Our trips are occurring over about 23 days and we aren’t doing that many, so we opted to do it all as individual passes.

First night in Osaka

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 08:09:23 +0900

This’ll be a short one, as we got in late and crashed out hard. Finally getting to this point was quite the relief, only four hours late…

Kansai airport’s under heavy reconstruction at the moment and we turned up at about 11pm, so the only thing open was the train station and the vending machines. The latter was important, because that allowed me to get a SIM card for that all-important connection to the outside world!

Japan 2019 Trip

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 17:42:09 +1000

I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, since the moment I started learning about it; I have absolutely adored the culture and the people for longer than I can remember. It’s a culture of contrasts; their incredible technology lives alongside their deeply held and revered traditions.

When the Small Child was talking about going overseas for schoolies, he’d cycled through a few different plans, finally landing on going to Japan with a friend after the end of year 12. Unfortunately being in year 12 the friend didn’t get his butt in gear, so that fell through; fortunately for me, the idea of the trip was still good, so it’s him and me for three weeks in Japan!

Flying to Osaka

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 15:04:29 +1000

Coming into this trip there was a certain level of trepidation because of the industrial action that Jetstar’s been going through of late. Pay disagreements with the pilots and ground staff led to threats of flight delays or cancellations, then loads of flights cancelled for the day we left. Thankfully, we were one of the flights unaffected - Brisbane to Cairns early in the morning. Others on the same route, but later in the day were cancelled, so we got off easy.

Curving - Dog Body Language

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:12:20 +1000

This article on “Curving” - a dog body language element was fascinating to me.

Humans can utilize acts of curving with dog interactions. To approach a dog politely, instead of walking straight towards the dog in our very human direct way, you could walk in a slight curve. On approach, turning your shoulder away ever so slightly can put a dog at ease and is polite.

As the housemate of a dog with serious emotional issues, I really need to read more about this - anything to understand her better can only make life better for both of us. 🥰

Cybertruck

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 23:30:59 +1000

There’s not much to say really. It’s angular, it’s stainless, it evokes feelings of 80’s and 90’s cyber stuff and it’s a big electric truck.

If I can’t afford whatever it costs by the time it gets to Australia in a few years time, I’ll get my $150 back. If I can afford it, I’ll be buying a badass stainless steel electric truck.

Tax Fix for Automation Empire

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 21:50:07 +1000

After taking my time playing Automation Empire and really loving it, I got to a point where the tax system really destroyed it for me. The way they designed it was that tax was based on 2% of lifetime earnings for the save game that you’re playing. They claim that this made players have to work consistently to expand their profitability and push to finish maps, but the general sentiment in the forums (and for me) is that it ruins the fun of taking your time and exploring what’s possible in the game. They claim there’s a reset in the algorithm, but it doesn’t actually work.

Google's SRE Book on Eliminating Toil

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 21:38:19 +1000

For everything that Google does which I have strong opinions about, some of their SRE training and information is pure gold. I just finished reading the chapter on eliminating toil and it really hits home for me.

If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug. The definition of normal changes as your systems grow.

Carla Geisser, Google SRE

So, the more time you spend keeping things running, the less time you have to make them better - for you and your end users.

Troubleshooting the O365 Message Reporting Add on for Splunk

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 14:21:17 +1000

Periodically this thing dies on me. It happened again, so here’s my notes.

Messages stopped coming in, I got an alert, and found this log:

2019-11-11 13:53:56,750 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=connectionpool.py:_new_conn:809 | Starting new HTTPS connection (1): reports.office365.com
2019-11-11 13:53:57,019 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=connectionpool.py:_make_request:400 | https://reports.office365.com:443 "GET /ecp/reportingwebservice/reporting.svc/MessageTrace?$filter=StartDate%20eq%20datetime'2019-10-22T02:53:08.114678Z'%20and%20EndDate%20eq%20datetime'2019-10-22T03:08:08.114678Z' HTTP/1.1" 200 216
2019-11-11 13:53:57,022 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=base_modinput.py:log_debug:286 | No messages returned. Setting max date to 2019-10-22 02:54:08.114678

The “No messages returned.” bit was the kicker. Lies!

Nobody Dies in Longyearbyen

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 11:04:52 +1000

A fascinating look at the northernmost city in the world, touched by climate change in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Facebook Engineering and Ssh Keys

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 14:46:02 +1000

This post on the facebook Engineering blog about scalable and secure access with SSH really makes me wonder how this’d be doable at-scale, without a fleet of developers to build your own system to do it.

The advice at the end is probably the most important information any AAA system team can take heed of:

A few parting words of advice: When you build your CA, be it a small script or a complex system, make sure you keep track of all certificates you issue. If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of having a compromised certificate (and its respective private keys) and you don’t know how to revoke them, your last resort is to rotate the entire CA. If you end up having a programmatic CA, consider having short-lived certificates, e.g., 24 hours. This shortens the window of opportunity for an attack if you experience a compromise.

DictWriter instance has no attribute 'exit'

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 11:26:44 +1000

So I’m messing around with a DictWriter and was trying to use the typical “with” syntax I use with short-lived things in python… and got this error:

Error: DictWriter instance has no attribute '__exit__'

Turns out, that’s not really a thing, and I should have followed the example. Don’t judge me please for using Py2, Splunk hasn’t caught up (yet).

git xcrun error after catalina upgrade

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 10:36:34 +1000

It’s been pretty smooth after upgrading to catalina, but I got this error when trying to run git this morning…

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun

Easily fixed…

xcode-select --install

Let it do the thing and you’ll be back in business.

Updates:

If you’re still getting the “bash is going away” prompt, add export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1 to ~/.bash_profile)
terraform wouldn’t load because it’s not signed by something Apple likes, so here’s an article on how to fix terraform - tl;dr find the binary in the finder and right-click-open-allow it.

purplecon 2019

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 10:33:24 +1000

The 87th annual purplecon was delightful and fun. Eschewing the typical black hoodies and replacing them with sparkles was an amazing choice and drove the friendly, welcoming feel of the entire con.

All talks were required to be:

positive,
defensive, and
actionable.

Which means they’re not just stunt hacking or dropping 0-days - they’re designed to improve the state of the art. The “great archive” is going to be a text archive summary of the talks, so…

sssd and the sudo alerts

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 17:02:03 +1300

So… I kept getting a message like this every. single. time. I. used. sudo.

Subject: *** SECURITY information for server.domain.example.com ***
Message: server.domain.example.com : Oct 19 14:17:50 : yaleman : problem with defaults entries ; TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/yaleman ; USER=root ;

Doing some searching, it turns out it’s some issue with local accounts and an interaction between sudo and sssd where defaults aren’t being presented to sssd from FreeIPA/LDAP. It’s more a warning than a bug, but it’s freaking annoying.

Cleaning Up CrowdStrike Linux Files

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 15:35:11 +1000

Sometimes on Linux hosts, CrowdStrike has a bit of a weird issue with filling up /opt/CrowdStrike with old versions. The fix they gave us was… a bit special, so I came up with my own.

sudo find /opt/CrowdStrike -type f -name "KernelModuleArchive*" -not -wholename "$(readlink -f /opt/CrowdStrike/KernelModuleArchive)" -exec rm "{}" \;
sudo find /opt/CrowdStrike -type f -name "falcond*" -not -wholename "$(readlink -f /opt/CrowdStrike/falcond)" -exec rm "{}" \;
sudo find /opt/CrowdStrike -type f -name "falconctl*" -not -wholename "$(readlink -f /opt/CrowdStrike/falconctl)" -exec rm "{}" \;
sudo find /opt/CrowdStrike -type f -name "falcon-sensor*" -not -wholename "$(readlink -f /opt/CrowdStrike/falcon-sensor)" -exec rm "{}" \;

For each of the different file types it makes, there’s a “versioned” file, such as falcon-sensor7303 which is symlinked as /opt/CrowdStrike/falcon-sensor. When the “real” files update to new versions, they don’t clean themselves up. The above four lines looks for the “bad” files and filters out the existing “current” file using readlink to identify the canonical destination of the symlink.

Ninebot Kickscooter MAX Beeping

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 15:10:04 +1000

Turns out, reading the manual in full is handy. If you’re wondering why your Segway Ninebot Kickscooter MAX is beeping constantly, it’s because you have to activate it.

Open the app, connect via Bluetooth and then click the little gear icon. Click “Activate” and then hit yes. It should make one more long beep and shut up after that.

They also limit the speed on the device until you’ve activated it, which makes sense, I guess?

Controlling my hot water

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 08:45:35 +1000

Yesterday I had a solar system and storage battery installed into my house. As part of that, inspired by Jon Oxer’s great SuperHouse series, I had the electrician install some high current relays for me to control the hot water system.

My plan has two intended control options:

with an automated timer.
directly with my own code and controller.

The Timer

K3 is a Finder “Digital Astro Time Switch” with NFC connection support (12.81.8.230.0000).

Google Comic About Machine Learning

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 11:38:12 +1000

This Comic from the Google Comic Factory is a great “starter” introduction to machine learning, its applications and methods. Well worth a read!

Blocking DoH With BIND RPZs

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 14:27:08 +1000

Xavier Mertens’ new post on the ISC Blog about blocking DNS over HTTPS with BIND RPZ was posted today, and it provides some really useful and actionable information on how to do it. BIND RPZs are a very useful tool for whole-of-network security actions.

And before you reach for your angry typing keyboard, yes - DoH is a great idea - until you want to be able to take the skills and tools of your corporate security team to secure them and respond to threats and incidents. :)

Retroactively Setting a Whole S3 Bucket to Public

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 16:16:00 +1000

I uploaded a bunch of files to an s3 bucket, then needed to update the permissions.

aws s3 ls --profile <profile> --recursive s3://<bucket> | awk '{print $NF}' \
| xargs -I{} -n1 aws s3api put-object-acl --profile <profile> --acl public-read --bucket <bucket> --key {}

There’s two replacements in the above code you need to make:

bucket - the name of the bucket
profile - the profile configured in ~/.aws/credentials

There’s a better explanation here, in the AWS support documentation

ESP32 Micropython and the Memory Address

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 16:44:00 +1000

I was writing MicroPython to a new ESP32 board I got, and it was acting weird… looping the following over and over:

rst:0x10 (RTCWDT_RTC_RESET),boot:0x13 (SPI_FAST_FLASH_BOOT)
flash read err, 1000
ets_main.c 371
ets Jun 8 2016 00:22:57

Turns out, if I’d read the documentation instead of just doing the same thing I’d been doing on the ESP8266’s, I’d have known I need to write it starting at 0x1000 instead of 0x0000.

crontab, ufw and the missing path

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 10:18:18 +1000

I’ve got a server with a web site which sits behind Cloudflare, so I have a daily script in root’s cron that grabs the current list of Cloudflare IPs and updates the ufw config so only Cloudflare can get to apache2. It’s a wordpress site so I’m a little scared of idiots doing idiot things.

Ever since I ran it, for some reason it throws an error ERROR: problem running sysctl when it runs ufw status verbose. It’s always worked when I run it manually, and doesn’t seem to cause issues - especially since it’s only a final check step. The errors have been bugging me and I’ve got a few seconds at PyConAU2019 so I thought I’d do some more searching.

Pastebin Grabbing Badness

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 06:51:05 +1000

While doing some threat hunting I found a server reaching out to pastebin (this was over an hour):

src_ip=<ip> url=hxxp://pastebin[.]com/raw/<snip> count=34

It wasn’t a long running process, but it certainly happened a lot. The paste content was 127.0.0.1:80, which looked like a typical CNC control message. netstat wasn’t doing it, so lsof to the rescue!

I ran this on the server:

sudo watch -n1 lsof -n -i:80 -i:8080 -r1 -sTCP:^LISTEN | grep -v <ip>:http | tee -a ~/pastebin-find.txt

Here’s what the options mean:

F5 LDAP Fix for V14 Upgrade

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 08 May 2019 13:36:15 +1000

Have you upgraded to v14 and Active Directory/LDAP auth to the appliance admin stopped working?

Try running this:

tmsh modify auth ldap system-auth check-roles-group enabled
save sys config

Seems that there was a change in how group enumeration happens, and this fix sorts it. You don’t need to reboot or anything, it just works.

Logstash and Filebeat Templates

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 22:14:41 +1000

A pretty cool and easy to follow article on configuring filebeat to monitor your Ubuntu/CentOS boxes from Burnham Forensics is pretty cool.

Though, I do have to question any article from a security professional that includes the following line:

Elevate to sudo if not done so already: sudo su

… let alone in an article about logging! :)

Dystopia Daily Rundown

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 07:28:43 +1000

While job seeking I’ve been reading the LinkedIn Daily Rundown; I’m not normally one for business news, but it tends to be a good quick thing to catch up on. Today’s instalment was particularly dystopian.

Like your job? Sadly it could be automated sooner than you think, according to a new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report.

Not surprising, really - there’s a lot of process work and drivers out there.

Banksy and Authenticity

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 07:52:53 +1000

A great writeup on how Bansky handles authentication of his artworks.

So Banksy created a not-for-profit company, Pest Control, to sell and authenticate his works. The process is fiendishly clever, as Will Ellsworth-Jones writes in his book ‘Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall’:

Now, for £65 you can get your Banksy print authenticated. And just to keep the whole thing as jokey as possible, the authentication certificate has stapled to it half a ‘Di faced tenner’, a £10 note faked by Banksy with Lady Diana’s face on it. The tenner has a handwritten ID number on it which can be matched to the number on the other half of the of the note held by Pest Control.

PlaidCTF - Can You Guess Me

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 09:27:47 +1000

A friend asked me for help with this one. I hadn’t planned on doing the Plaid CTF but I’m easily dragged into a neat programming challenge.

can you guess me

Misc (100 pts)

Here’s the source to a guessing game: here

You can access the server at nc canyouguessme.pwni.ng 12349

Nothing ridiculously simple here, the solution’s obviously in the code… here’s the code that was provided:

#! /usr/bin/env python3

from sys import exit
from secret import secret_value_for_password, flag, exec

print(r"")
print(r"")
print(r" ____ __ __ ____ __ __ ")
print(r" / ___|__ _ _ _\ \ / /__ _ _ / ___|_ _ ___ ___ ___| \/ | ___ ")
print(r"| | / _` | '_ \ V / _ \| | | | | _| | | |/ _ \/ __/ __| |\/| |/ _ \ ")
print(r"| |__| (_| | | | | | (_) | |_| | |_| | |_| | __/\__ \__ \ | | | __/ ")
print(r" \____\__,_|_| |_|_|\___/ \__,_|\____|\__,_|\___||___/___/_| |_|\___| ")
print(r" ")
print(r"")
print(r"")

try:
 val = 0
 inp = input("Input value: ")
 count_digits = len(set(inp))
 if count_digits <= 10: # Make sure it is a number
 val = eval(inp)
 else:
 raise

 if val == secret_value_for_password:
 print(flag)
 else:
 print("Nope. Better luck next time.")
except:
 print("Nope. No hacking.")
 exit(1)

Pretty simple so far, it’s got a few imports, allows you to type something in, does a bit of a check and if you do things right, it’ll show you the flag.

Crikeycon 2019 CTF - 1000 Qways to DieR

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:33:49 +1000

This was the challenge:

The flag is contained in the following attached file. You know how QR codes work right? Flag is in format “word”. (So no flag bit on this one) Challenge by Garry.

Attached was a 1.2MB, 20,000 line file which looked like this:

I’ve been around a while and the =’s at the end of the lines made me think of base64, so I copied it out into CyberChef and got my first indication I was on the right path:

Velociraptor and Open Source Threat Hunting

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 21:21:15 +1000

Velociraptor is a cool name for a dinosaur, let alone a software package. I did a course today with one of the developers, and it looks like a great FOSS solution to EDR and threat hunting.

First, download the package from the releases page. It’s a very small, self contained file.

Here’s my notes from the day.

To configure the client

rem make the install dir
mkdir "c:\Program Files\Velociraptor\"
rem make the config file
velociraptor.exe --config velo_client.yaml config client > velo_client.yaml
rem connect the client
velociraptor.exe --config velo_client.yaml client -v

To run the server

Virtualbox Host Key Commands

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 11:19:06 +1000

I couldn’t find an easy list when I went looking for these, so I made a list.

Key Combination	Command
Host + R	Reset
Host + Q	Close VM
Host + S	Settings
Host + T	Snapshot
Host + N	Session Information
Host + P	Pause
Host + H	ACPI Shutdown

View Window

Key Combination	Command
Host + F	Fullscreen
Host + L	Seamless mode
Host + C	Scaled mode
Host + A	Adjust Window Size
Host + E	Take Screenshot

Keyboard

Key Combination	Command
Host + End	Send Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Host + Backspace	Send Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Whois for Stackstorm

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 21:51:59 +1000

I’ve been playing around with stackstorm for a little while now, and wanted to get back into it after a bit of distraction on other things. The idea of automating a lot of my daily repetetive tasks really appeals to me, so I started work on another module today.

The end result of today’s head-desking was st2-whois, a pack that does basic whois calls and saves me from having to find the website that works just right for it, or open a shell from a box with the right access.

Facebook and Security

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 08:11:19 +1000

This article on Naked Security is a little bit calmer than some of the other coverage I’ve seen. If I was doing physical/staff security for a large organisation with a global platform I’d totally be using any intel sources I could find to help improve my results. This has to be the least creepy thing they do with thier data.

What’s unique about Facebook’s approach to BOLOs is that it doesn’t just disseminate a list of names to security staff. Facebook also mines its platform for threatening posts. Sometimes, Facebook goes so far as to use its apps to discern the whereabouts of people whom it finds threatening, to determine whether they pose a credible threat.

On Blogging

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 12:11:45 +1000

I really like this idea from a longer post about the ethics of blogging by Brett Terpstra

I sometimes wish that job résumés and Tinder profiles required an appendix of all of the comments a person has left on other’s work in the last year. You can learn a lot about a person from how they approach offering criticism when it’s not face to face.

Anonymity’s a mess, I’m thankful I seem to live on a nicer part of the internet most of the time, more through lack of exposure.

TheHive and Elasticsearch Initial Errors

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 07:02:29 +1000

I was trying to install TheHive and ran into some issues with configuration.

When trying to log in for the first time, I was getting “Elasticsearch cluster is not available” as a little red popup on the login screen.

When checking the log /opt/thehive/logs/application.log I found the following line:

2019-01-28 21:22:34,494 [WARN] from org.elasticsearch.client.transport.TransportClientNodesService in main - node {#transport#-1}{1eyCBCV1Rs-oVwFIHuQ7cw}{127.0.0.1}{127.0.0.1:9300} not part of the cluster Cluster [Cluster], ignoring...

This means the cluster name doesn’t match between TheHive and elasticsearch - mainly it is probably not set in elasticsearch - because that’s the default on install. The following two lines need to have matching outputs:

Robert A. Caro and Lyndon Johnson's Story

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 17:33:27 +1000

This fascinating story of a life-long journey to explore the story of President Lyndon Johnson’s life was amazing read. I don’t have any real interest in American politics, but I do love great writers, and Robert A. Caro is definitely one of them.

He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.”

Bug-O Notation

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 08:43:31 +1000

This article by Dan Abramov about Bug-O Notation is a great one.

The Big-O describes how much an algorithm slows down as the inputs grow. The Bug-O describes how much an API slows you down as your codebase grows.

Without explicitly calling it out, he describes using simple Finite State Machine concepts that allow for explicit, identifiable state positions rather than nested calls and race conditions. It’s a great way of thinking about things - if you know where you are, you can explicitly reset the UI and rebuild it with much less effort.

M5Stack Flow flashing on Linux

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 22:02:22 +1000

This post has been updated - I found some errors which don’t brick devices, but cause issues with wifi. Don’t use old versions of esptool!

This is a pretty sparse example but it got me working on my Ubuntu machine.

Install esptool from pip - don’t use the one from apt, as of this writing it’s v2.1, where pip has v2.6. The command is pip install esptool
Download the M5Flow MacOS version from http://flow.m5stack.com/- M5Burner_MacOS.zip in my example.
Grab the firmware directory from the zip file and move it to Documents (for example):

cd $(mktemp -d)
unzip ~/Downloads/M5Burner_MacOS.zip 'M5Burner_MacOS.app/Contents/Resources/firmware/M5Flow/*
mv M5Burner_MacOS.app/Contents/Resources/firmware/M5Flow/ ~/Documents

This’ll give you the firmware folder with a bunch of version in it, eg M5Flow/v1.1.1-en
cd ~/Documents/M5Flow/v1.1.1-en
Plug the M5Stack in, and then run ./flash.sh
This’ll reboot the device a few times until it’s in bootloader/flashing mode, then upload the firmware.
Once it’s done, tap the power button to reboot into the new firmware.

Below is the output when it can’t identify the device and is going to do it wrong. The important part is the “unknown” in Chip is ESP32D0WDQ6 (revision (unknown 0xa)).

Citrix SSL Trust Error 61 on Linux

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 11:21:05 +1000

Trying to log into the Citrix Xenapp Storefront at work today, it looks like they’ve got a new certificate.

This is a pretty easy fix, search for the certificate name and download it, then put it in the right place.

For me, on my Debian machine, it’s /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts.

I didn’t have to do anything else, it just worked at that point - start the client again and back to work.

VMware Horizon/View on Ubuntu and Firefox

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 13:29:12 +1000

I’ve been running Linux on my main laptop for a while now, first Debian (Kali) and now Ubuntu 18.04.1. Since Firefox updated to their “Quantum” rebuild, I haven’t been able to use my work’s VMWare View environment, which is a bit annoying. There was an issue I reported here on the VMWare forums with handling the vmware-view:// URI for some reason.

Since a workmate had recently replaced his Mac with a Ubuntu laptop, I offered him lunch to try his hand at working it out. Thankfully, food is a good motivator for some ;)

Leadership Mode Activate

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:40:47 +1000

A great article from Allen Pike on newly becoming a leader and considering your ability to be “on the tools”

Okay wait, you may say. That’s cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I’m pretty good at it, and if I’m leading a team, will I still get to do it? Will I still get to perform the work that got me to where I am today?

The short answer is: Yes, you can! If it’s important to you to keep doing some “individual contributor” work as a manager, you can make that happen.

Forged and Filed

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 21:38:21 +1000

This is pure hand-tooled metalwork porn.

More of his work at SethGould.com.

Opsec, Who Needs It?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:54:54 +1000

This article from Sophos’ Naked Security shows some incredible failures of opsec “because it just kept getting used.”

Unfortunately for the US and its agents, it didn’t take long to find the moles. That’s due in large part to what one former official called an “elementary system” of internet-based communications – one that was never meant to stand up to sophisticated counterintelligence efforts such as those of China or Iran, let alone one that should have been entrusted with the extremely sensitive communications between the CIA and its sources.

Speeding Up BeautifulSoup With Large XML Files

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 12:58:00 +1000

A while back I built a small web app to parse one of our system configuration files because the application’s interface doesn’t have a search function (yeah, it’s that bad…). It worked OK, but over time slowed down as the XML file grew to 2.5MB and ~10k lines. The slow part was definitely BeautifulSoup’s parsing step, but it took a little poking to work out why. At this stage it was taking over 20 seconds to handle the file.

Iceland, Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 23:20:05 +0000

The first planned stop for the day was Seljalandsfoss. It was fun to scramble over the rocks and we only got a little wet.

It was annoying to get a shot of these steps without some soggy tourist ass in the way, but here’s me doing my best. They were surprisingly grippy, given they were worn smooth and not flat in the slightest.

Standing behind the falls was truly spectacular. The amount of water coming over them even at this time of year when there’s no snow melt is incredible, and it was impossibly fresh tasting out of the air.

Huawei Config Files

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 23:16:36 +0000

Huawei configuration file decryption turns out to be quite easy. It’s just XML in AES-CBC

Setting	Value
Key	3E4F5612EF64305955D543B0AE350880
IV	8049E91025A6B54876C3B4868090D3FC
Mode	CBC

CyberChef is super easy for this

Dump the file in, get XML back out!

To encrypt ready for usage, just reverse the step.

Or if you’re stupidly lazy, click here

Tested on

B593s-22

References

Eurotrip, the beginning

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 07:30:40 +0100

A long time in planning, it’s finally here - EuroTrip 2018!

The rough explanation is 37 days away, nearly two weeks in Iceland, then the rest doing a lap of Eastern Europe. Being from Australia, we can’t just do a merry jaunt to Europe, hence the extended plans.

The flights were… as to be expected. Brisbane to London via Singapore, with a six hour stopover. I sleep on my stomach typically, so I just don’t sleep on flights. Not helpful when you’re in transit for two days! :) The lovely Premier Inn Heathrow Terminal 4 was welcome place to lay our heads for 24 hours or so until the flight to Iceland.

Getting HEAD

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 16:28:29 +1000

Crass, I know, but it’s part of my charm. We run load balancers for our proxies and we need to monitor they’re working, so we make requests through them out to the internet. I was doing some checking one day on “top utilization by user” and found that the monitoring account had been… rather hungry.

Turns out, we were doing a full GET request to two news sites, for every time a proxy appeared in a load balancing pool, from each of the load balancers.

DNS Caching

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 09:35:33 +1000

I really love watching the statistics as one makes a change for the better, and collecting the visualistaions is a bit of a hobby for me.

This is the graph of active connections on one of our edge appliances. It carries all client internet traffic and also load balances DNS resolution for clients. It was an incredible drop in traffic - over half the active connections on the appliance - and the response time went from ~150ms to ~1ms for repeat requests.

Technical Debt

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:59:15 +1000

The human body is a perfect example of unresolved technical debt leading to issues.

I have a problem where if I eat too quick, my food gets stuck in a spot in the bottom of my throat near my voicebox.

Because I’m a giant, it doesn’t choke me straight up - it just makes it really hard to breathe and I can kinda manage it until I get a drink.

Popper's Paradox

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 07:37:55 +1000

Popper’s paradox:

The paradox of tolerance was described by Karl Popper in 1945. The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.

I learned this one as part of a post about Alex Jones on Daring Fireball. It’s never been more relevant in my lifetime than now. With the cheeto-coloured American president and his ever-more-brave band of harpies causing just … tragedy across the globe.

OpenSSL CA Trust Weirdness

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 18:35:57 +1000

I’ve been having problems since I installed my own build of OpenSSL - I wanted to be able to use SSL2/3 for testing and some weird ciphers, and the build on Ubuntu wasn’t playing nice. wget and ansible have been giving me grief about SSL trust, and I finally got annoyed enough to sort it out.

I knew wget --ca-certificate=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt https://yaleman.org worked, so it wasn’t the certificate store itself.

Searching the internet for “wget ssl trust” or “openssl ca trust” is just a waste of time - you might as well search for “cat pictures”.

Splunk search head peering authentication issues

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 07:46:14 +1000

I was running up a new set of clustered search heads the other day and ran into some issues with one of the nodes talking to the indexer which stored the data.

Unable to distribute to peer named INDEXER.example.com at uri=INDEXER.example.com:8089 using the uri-scheme=https because peer has status="Down".

I proved that I could telnet from the search head to the index server on 8089 and could connect successfully, also searches at the same time from other nodes work fine, so it wasn’t actually a connectivity issue. 🤔

This is why

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 25 Aug 2018 15:53:02 +1000

… we should all support funding community broadcast organisations.

Ubuntu 18 and Docker DNS

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 21:24:32 +1000

So I’ve reinstalled linux on my laptop and am running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS - Kali was OK, but there was a lot of cruft and one of the more “desktop” distributions seemed more inviting. No, not Arch.

I ran into an issue today however, with DNS resolution failing in my docker containers because of how systemd messes with /etc/resolv.conf. It sets a 127.0.0.53 address, which is systemd-resolved, screwing with docker’s init scripts.

James Mickens Does IT Comedy

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 19:15:21 +1000

He really is engaging, made me laugh like crazy.

Some People Have Birthday Cakes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:48:26 +1000

I don’t really like them.

But I did like this. All by myself.

Simple Communication for Complex Stories

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 20:13:46 +1000

The pieces don’t win the game, the players do.

SSHing to My Kindle

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 23:09:02 +1000

I know I’m so far behind the game on this one, but I found an instructable that mentioned jailbreaking one’s kindle… and one thing led to another.

This is me SSHing into my Kindle 3, the model first released in 2010. So much for reading stuff on it tonight instead of messing around on my computer. Thankfully, jailbreaking it doesn’t stop me from doing that either :)

Some notes…

School Camp Valentines

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 19:54:15 +1000

My mum and dad were cleaning out some stuff and in the boxes of my junk I found this… a weird shared valentine’s day card from a school camp I went to.

(Click to zoom in)

All I can remember of that camp was the following:

rope courses which were altogether too easy
an overzealous fake basketball dunk on some guttering that mysteriously fell off a few minutes later… :)
a very strange end-of-camp talent show
tents, but no shenanigans (well, on my part… it seems I missed out on poker)

A lot of these people have been lost to the mists of time, but it was entertaining to read.

BBC and the Orchestra Takes on Ibiza Hits

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 21:45:49 +1000

Get this in your ear holes.

In 2015, DJ Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra (under director Jules Buckley) collaborated on a performance of a bunch of Ibiza club hits from the likes of Moby, Fatboy Slim, Orbital, Brainbug, and Daft Punk.

Meatballs and Sauce

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:47:45 +1000

After some inspiration from the guys on the Accidental Tech Podcast the other day, I had to make some meatballs and sauce for myself!

I cruised a few different sites looking for a good recipe and most of them were something along the lines of “beef, with enough egg to bind them, and flavours, so I went with what looked good on the shelf.

It definitely worked out well, the smoky paprika was a freaking tasty addition to the meatballs, and the combination of ingredients suffused the house with a delightfully rich aroma, perfect for a “chilly” winter night in Brisbane.

Kurt Vonnegut to the People of 2088 AD

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 20:46:30 +1000

Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to the people of 2088 is, as you’d expect, incredibly well written.

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 18:11:41 +1000

This open letter from Robin Williams’ wife to the neurology community about the story behind her husband’s death is truly shocking. Not because it’s full of the usual hollywood sordid trash, but because of the love she obviously feels and harrowing experience they went through together.

I am writing to share a story with you, specifically for you. My hope is that it will help you understand your patients along with their spouses and caregivers a little more. And as for the research you do, perhaps this will add a few more faces behind the why you do what you do. I am sure there are already so many.

WhatsApp Has to Respond to Modern Day Lynchings

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 08:58:30 +1000

It was only the most recent event in a fake-news crisis that’s seized India, which in recent months has seen dozens of mob lynchings sparked by rumors that have spread virally on social media. According to Business-Standard, over the past 18 months, there have been 33 people killed and at least 99 injured in 69 reported lynchings.

This article on Sophos’ Naked Security Blog shows we still have a long way to go as a society. When large groups of people blindly accept information without any validation, and KILL others, wow.

Airpods and Live Listen

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 20:12:15 +1000

As someone who’s had significant hearing damage from a variety of things throughout my life, the upcoming feature “Live Listen” brings hope for affordable, accessible aids in the future.

Last month, it was reported that Apple would add Live Listen, a feature that allows people to hear conversations in noisy settings, to AirPods later this year. The feature has been around since 2014. It uses the iPhone as a mic and connects to Apple-certified hearing aids to amplify hearing. When the next version of Apple’s key mobile software, iOS 12, is released, AirPod users will have access to the feature, though it’s recommended that those who require hearing aids still use them and not simply rely on AirPods for clarity and amplification.

Problem Reports

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 20:04:10 +1000

You’ve come to this page because you’ve reported a problem, for which you want a diagnosis and a remedy, but have not answered one or more of the questions in the standard litany.

Any problem report must provide

a description of your actions,

a description of the specific symptoms, and

a description of why those symptoms are adverse.

A perfect page to send people to.

Children are monsters to robots

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 10:27:00 +1000

I love this article in IEEE spectrum about a new robot behaviour that people had to design.

..they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people. When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person.

Nanette

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 23:49:17 +1000

Nanette, By Hannah Gadsby.

Sit down, shut up and watch it until the end. I don’t care what you think, but you have to watch it.

I found her accent and her performance style grating and hard to watch.

That’s my problem, and if you feel it too, deal with it.

Watch it until the end.

Emoji Ants Rated by an Entomolgist

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 15:50:34 +1000

This tumblr post, where an entomologist rates emoji ants, really made my day.

I’m not even using hyperbole. It’s so lovely and an example of the innocent whimsy we all need more of in our lives.

emojidex

This ant… makes me sad. All of her legs are broken. The MS Paint art style and gradient abuse convey distress. She has a duck beak. Despite this, her expression suggests perseverance and determined cheerfulness. I want this ant to have a better life. I am rooting for her. 3/10

Put down the chocolate covered banana...

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:21:42 +1000

This is just so perfect, and a great explanation of what I regularly struggle with…

Someone will ask me a series of really strange questions, which leads me to ask “So.. what are you actually trying to achieve?”

Put down the chocolate-covered banana and step away from the European currency systems.

What you are asking for makes no sense.

All that you are going to receive by way of responses are bodges that attempt to do the nonsensical task that you have set, from people who are either making wild guesses as to what you are actually trying to achieve, or who don’t understand enough about the tool that you have chosen to know that what you are asking makes no sense. In both cases, that isn’t going to help you.

Superiority

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 18:08:46 +1000

The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleet’s. We were defeated by one thing only - by the inferior science of our enemies. I repeat - by the inferior science of our enemies.

Superiority, by Arthur C. Clarke. What a spectacularly subtle reminder about technology and its proponents.

Rands Information Practices

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:11:26 +1000

You will have a strong negative and opinionated reaction to at least one or more of these bullets. Your strong negative and opinionated reactions are a clear sign you care about how you spend your time, so keep reading even if you’re mad.

Rands provides some fantastic tips for saving yourself from yourself. One day I’ll get down to under 100 browser tabs. One day.

Kubrick on 2001's Ending

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 20:56:22 +1000

Kottke’s summary of Kubrick’s commentary around 2001’s ending puts it better than I could myself, understandably. I’ve only seen the film twice, and I don’t think I’ve ever spent enough time thinking about it - but it really does deserve everything people feel about it.

It’s weird, it’s fantastic, it’s epic and the pacing is glacial - but it’s amazing. You should watch it before reading the article, and I’d love to know what people think about the summary if they have.

You Can't Do What Apple Does

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 11:56:34 +1000

What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. How about when they wanted to laser drill holes in MacBook Pros for the sleep light but only one company made a machine that could drill those 20 µm holes in aluminum? It bought the company that made the machines and took all the inventory. And that time when they needed batteries to fit into a tiny machined housing but no manufacturer was willing to make batteries so thin? Apple made their own battery cells. From scratch.

Hitler's rise, it's Trump Time

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 14:03:28 +1000

It’s amazing to me that we’re looking to guidance from the survivors of the Nazis, so soon after as well.

NY Book Review looks a few books from the past, and I’m just gobsmacked by the horrors that we’re seeing in “first world” countries of late. I just can’t process it.

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

House (hous)

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 10:40:18 +1000

n. pl. hous·es (hou′zĭz, -sĭz)

A place to store all one’s unfinished projects.

Aquamation and fools

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 10:38:45 +1000

More from the “I don’t want to do it, so I’ll ruin it for those that do” camp.

“Aquamation,” a greener form of body disposal, is gaining acceptance in America. But some powerful groups are fighting to stop it.

… When their aquamation legalization bill came to the floor of the state House of Representatives, however, it was derailed by a gruesome speech by a lawmaker who also happened to be a casket-maker.

Unnecessary Things

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:57:52 +1000

I love removing unnecessary things from the data centre… old hardware, bad configurations and so forth, but today’s was pretty good. It was a patch that … just shouldn’t have been.

At one end, an F5. The DB9 failover port to be exact.

Then a Cisco “blue console cable”, two intermediary infrastructure patch panels…

And then at the other end, the ethernet port of an APC PDU.

Wonders will truly never cease.

Dancing in Movies

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 07:46:41 +1000

Get this into your earballs and eyeholes, it’s a lot of fun. The full list of movies is spectacular.

via kottke

Amazing Mt Fuji Photos

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 23:07:59 +1000

Japan is one of the countries highest on my list for places to visit, and next year I hope to spend some time there - until then I’ll just have to console myself with marvelling at these beautiful photos of Mount Fuji at Dawn

These photos of Japan’s Mount Fuji capture the majesty and quiet beauty of the iconic sight. Shot by Japanese photographer Takashi Nakazawa, these monochromatic scenes capture the quiet, clear hours around the mountain before the sun is fully risen.

Extremely Short Books for Lazy People

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 22:45:31 +1000

Illustrator John Atkinson has been working hard lately to help you save a lot of time. Thanks to his latest creation you can now read ultra-condensed classic books!

John Atkinson’s blog is a true cavalcade of hilarity!

Mister Rogers' "Freddish"

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 20:18:55 +1000

More and more I realise I missed out on the spectactularly wonderful influence of Mister Rogers growing up. Then again, I’m still happy I grew up in the 80’s, before the TV was truly infested with TellyTubbies and Woogie Poogies or whatever shite they’re spraying over the airwaves these days.

Maxwell King, the former director of the Fred Rogers Center and author of the forthcoming book The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, shared an excerpt of the book with The Atlantic about how much attention Rogers paid to how children would hear the language on the show. For instance, he changed the lyrics on Friday’s installment of the “Tomorrow” song he sang at the end of each show to reflect that the show didn’t air on Saturdays.

Flat Earthers and the Internet

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 23:37:49 +1000

Another wonderful summary of a few recent posts and thoughts by Jason Kottke

Another way to put this is that all the people who bought those News of the World-style magazines from the grocery checkout — UFO sightings! Elvis lives! NASA faked the Moon landing! new treatment lets you live 200 years! etc.! — were able to find each other, organize, and mobilize because of the internet. And then they decided to elect one of themselves President.

On Swift

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 07:52:53 +1000

I’m glad I’m not the only one, this article by Dominik Wagner on Swift puts it better than I’ve ever been able to articulate to myself.

Swift actively distracts me in that endeavor by making me answer questions I really don’t want to answer right now. Yes, stuff might be less correct in the meantime, but heck that is what I want during the design phase. Find my concept, sweet spot, iterate, pivot quickly.

Zach on time

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 23:10:19 +1000

Time formats are a fantastic way to find bugs in your code or even your view of the world. Zach Holman has a great post/rant/talk here about time entitled “UTC is enough for everyone… right?.

It turns out humans have had a long, long history of poorly dealing with time, so when you hammer your head against the wall trying to deal with a timezone bug, well, you’re just the last in a long, long line of human beings that are terrible at all this! Congrats. You’re pretty unremarkable.

The Great Bug Hunt

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 18:44:14 +1000

I love good bugs. The stories of bug hunts will do when I’m not finding my own.

Diagnosing and fixing a Bug requires patience, thoughtfulness, and above all a systematic, scientific mindset. We must eliminate variables one by one. Persistently forming hypotheses and testing each one is the name of the game. While the poor engineer assigned to hunt the Bug already knows this, it is our tradition to ease the pain by sharing the story of a legendary Bug Hunt.

pfSense lighttpd access control

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 09:49:28 +1000

In a previous post I configured lighttpd to serve proxy.pac files on my pfSense box. Turns out by doing this, I broke the acme.sh package because I was blocking external access to port 80 (because noone needs my PAC file… or something else I break.)

Add the following line anywhere in /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf:

include "/usr/local/etc/lighttpd/block-notacme.conf"

Edit the file: sudo vi /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/block-notacme.conf

And add the following contents:

$HTTP["url"] !~ "^/\.well-known/acme-challenge/.*" {
 $HTTP["remoteip"] !~ "10\..*" {
 url.access-deny = ("")
 }

Once done, restart the lighttpd service (sudo service lighttpd restart)

Supercells, Wow

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 30 May 2018 16:49:44 +1000

In Photographing the Unbridled Power of a Supercell Storm, AtlasObscura looks at Camille Seaman’s book “The Big Cloud”.

Once they’re in what Seaman calls “chase mode,” there are “no bathroom breaks, there is no stopping for food, no nothing.” At that point, “as things start to actually set up in the storm, our whole objective is to stay with that storm in the right position, which is usually—not always, but usually—the southwest corner of the storm, and follow it safely, so that we can photograph it and see if it produces a tornado.” The goal is to observe and photograph without being in danger. “The worst thing for storm chasers to end up being storm chased.”

The Legionnaire's Vineyard

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 28 May 2018 21:35:16 +1000

Many countries’ veterans struggle to integrate back into civilian life and find purpose outside the military, but the problem is especially acute for legionnaires. Having shed their nationalities and left friends and family behind, foreign-born soldiers often base their identities on the Legion itself. Retirement means losing home, community, and employment all at once … So while the IILE houses wounded veterans, the fields that fill with camo-wearing men picking grapes each harvest address the emotional and financial hardships that former legionnaires face.

America's reaction to weather is costing them

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 25 May 2018 11:04:00 +1000

From a New York Times article on disasters which strike America, their frequency, location and financial impacts.

Only about 4 percent of all hurricanes that make landfall globally hit the United States, said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University who studies the damage caused by hurricanes. Yet 60 percent of worldwide damage from hurricanes happens in the United States.

Dr. Mendelsohn attributed this partly to federal government programs that discourage citizens and local governments from building walls to protect housing near the coast. Only in the United States do relief programs and subsidized insurance make it attractive for people to move toward disaster-prone areas, he said.

Tank

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 25 May 2018 01:14:47 +1000

Tank, a short by Stu Maschwitz created entirely in Adobe After Effects.

The way I made TANK is a little crazy. I made it entirely in Adobe After Effects, with equal parts animation elbow grease and nerdy expressions madness. This video is part behind-the-scenes, part After Effects tutorial, and part therapy session.

Well worth checking out - the video is 80’s gamer porn - but the making of is just incredible.

No headline

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 May 2018 21:23:59 +1000

This was the front page of the New York Daily News, 19th March 2018.

With yesterday’s Texas massace, there have now been more students or teachers killed by guns in U.S. schools than active-duty military deaths in 2018. No headline can do this justice.

Brother Hl-L3850CDW with CUPS

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 May 2018 20:14:35 +1000

Just a quick note - the recommended “Generic PCL 6/PCL XL LF Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.13” settings worked fine for me on Debian/Kali.

The only tweak I had to do was to set the IP address instead of the local hostname - but that was more about our network than CUPS.

If you don't like it, change it

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 18 May 2018 19:01:53 +1000

The first time I saw this ad, I couldn’t look away, nor did I want to. It’s powerful in its message and presentation, and spectacularly well done.

Stems

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 May 2018 09:14:05 +1000

A delightful tale of a stop-motion artist. Well worth your time to check out.

Wil Wheaton on Depression

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 May 2018 16:00:00 +1000

I’ve never found it particularly tough to talk about my ongoing journey through the fun of having a bent brain. The journey itself’s the hard part, and to read another person’s story reminds me that there’s a lot of people out there, and they too have wonderful people to help them.

Hi, I’m Wil Wheaton. I’m 45 years-old, I have a wonderful wife, two adult children who make me proud every day, and a daughter in-law who I love like she’s my own child. I work on the most popular comedy series in the world, I’ve been a New York Times Number One Bestselling Audiobook narrator, I have run out of space in my office for the awards I’ve received for my work, and as a white, heterosexual, cisgender man in America, I live life on the lowest difficulty setting – with the Celebrity cheat enabled.

wpad on pfSense with lighttpd

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 09:33:38 +1000

Setting up proxy auto-configuration on pfSense has a handy documentation page, but sadly the first thing they say is that you have to run the webConfigurator GUI in HTTP mode, which is kind of annoying.

Given the auto-config of nginx (which runs the pfSense GUI) will likely blat any changes I make, I decided to use lighttpd instead.

In short, we’re going to:

install a web server
make a pac file
make it available at a couple of different URLs via that web server
have cake

Here’s how I did it…

pfSense VPN for Road Warriors

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 21:26:45 +1000

This is current for v2.4.1, and is by no means a configuration I’d stand behind as far as being terribly secure for anything you should care about! :) I’ve got a static IP address, so I have a DNS entry that points at my router. If you’ve got a dynamic address, it’d be worth configuring Dynamic DNS to make connecting to your VPN possible.

Here we go… it’s all done in the pfSense webUI of course.

Internode IPv6 configuration for pfSense

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 21:24:55 +1000

After running a mikrotik router for a long time and fighting with the IPv6 configuration, I gave up this week and started using pfSense as a test. Within about half an hour (after figuring out the USB boot option wasn’t possible with my machine) I was up and running better than ever!

WAN interface config

General Configuration

IPv6 Configuration Type: DHCP6

DHCP6 Client Configuration section

Advanced Configuration: not needed
Use IPv4 connectivity as parent interface: enabled
Request only an IPv6 prefix: enabled
DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation size: 56
Send IPv6 prefix hint: enabled
Debug: disabled
Do not wait for a RA: disabled
Do not allow PD/Address release: disabled

LAN Interface Configuration

General Configuration

IPv6 Configuration Type: Track Interface

Because that's how we roll.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 09:42:07 +1000

F5 APM with IPV6 Network ACLs

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 07:58:33 +1000

I ran into an issue while configuring an F5 SSLVPN for IPV6 last night, and googling it didn’t return anything of use.. so here we are again!

This is for the IPV6 LAN Address Space option, under Client Settings in the Network Settings tab under… don’t hold your breath…

Access ›› Connectivity / VPN : Network Access (VPN) : Network Access Lists : (yourprofile)

I know they’re complex, but the configuration’s getting hilariously convoluted to find sometimes.

Blocking WordPress password resets

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:51:41 +1000

Had an issue with people attempting password resets against one of my wordpress instances, when it’s something I’ll literally never require.

Since it’s running on Apache, I decided to use mod_security to implement, blocking and alerting with ease.

SecRule REQUEST_FILENAME "wp-login.php" "id:'400002',chain,deny,log,msg:'Password reset form attempt'"
SecRule ARGS:action "@contains lostpassword"

This is really simple, and nukes the ability for people to reset the password - and easy to remove if someone does have to do it :)

Disbenefits

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 11:51:41 +1000

Noun

As in the opposite of benefit. Because using drawbacks is bad; similarly ‘pros’ and ‘cons’.

Donated by Justin

Misunderestimate

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 10:05:03 +1000

Verb

To precisely understand something, one would assume?

Don’t misunderestimate me, sir!

Donated by Harvey

Conversate

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 08:05:03 +1000

Verb

The act of having a conversation, in the future tense.

We will conversate about this later

Donated by Justin

Planful

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 08:05:03 +1000

Adjective

If you’re planful you’ve made a plan? Maybe?

We should be more planful about this in future.

Donated by Justin

Productionize

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 08:02:33 +1000

Verb

To put something into production, when you know you’re doing something truly lacking in smart.

Found in the notes of a Change Advisory Board meeting, of course!

Unresponsible

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 07:51:41 +1000

Adjective

To be not at fault for something really stupid. Typically used by people out of their depth trying to save their careers.

Donated by Justin

Sea day

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 23:48:10 +0200

Today was, as the title says, a sea day. We spent the day on a Turkish boat, cruising for a short time around Kaleüçağız. Yep, take notes, there’ll be a test on that one later. It’s a beautiful seaside village with a rather large marina full of tourist and traveller boats.

On the way, we were treated to a spectacular view of Kaş from a lookout a few stories above it. Erkan described it as the place he fell in love with the city, and I certainly understand why. Also, mad props to the best hotel for advertising :)

Status quo and love

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 22:43:22 +0200

If the status quo was the best idea we’d still be nomads scratching in the dirt for grubs. Or we’d still be bacteria.

A piece of paper which was designed on a computer and printed by a giant automated printer, then folded by robots and inserted into an envelope, again, by robots, was sent to your house. A person will have put it in your letter box, and you or your partner would have taken it into your house, a place built by men and women out of parts suffused with centuries of improvement. You can read it today by sunlight or moonlight or by the magic of electricity or even fire. All wonderful things we couldn’t live without that required people to work together and accept new things. That’s how you’re picking up that pen or pencil, to make a mark on that piece of paper, that helps our society decide if we believe in this thing that means so much to so many on both sides of the discussion.

Kaş

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 23:16:08 +0200

Another early morning on the road, having had a terrible night’s sleep due to misbehaving air conditioning in the hotel. I know, privileged much? It’s alright if you know it’s going to be hot, you’ll get a fan or change how you sleep - but alternating between 21 and 30 degrees in the room was no fun at all.

First stop this morning was the Saklikent carpet weaver’s collective. A group brought together with government and other funding to promote the ancient skills of knot-work carpet weaving. They work in wool, silk and cotton to make some truly spectacular pieces of art. One of the pieces I saw today has a knot count of over 440dpi, which is incredible to see in real life.

Fethiye

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 21:48:05 +0200

Today we started heading towards the south-western corner of Turkey and the coastal town of Fethiye. We had a few hours’ drive ahead of us so along the way we heard a few new facts.

Roughly 65% of the Turkish population is under 35, with roughly a quarter of the 80 million residents being in school at any given time. One university entrance exam is held per year, run by the government, and if you miss it or fail it, then your life’s on hold for another year. About 2.5 million people are going for the 250k available university positions, so competition’s tough.

Pamukkale

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 23:23:49 +0200

Today we started our third day in Selçuk with another delicious breakfast of local olives, eggs and other great things. I could really get used to this. An early start was on the cards due to the long transit, so we got our butts in gear and headed up to the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist and Ayasuluk Kalesi.

More crumblies, beautiful views and a warm day. Emphasis on the warm. It’s interesting to try and infer the designs of places based on their remaining ruins, and see how people put things together in the world’s largest incomplete 3d puzzle games.

Troia and the road to Selçuk

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 16 Sep 2017 22:28:23 +1000

Today was scheduled to be a long day of travel, and it definitely lived up to it. Starting in our accommodation, the ANZAC hotel in Çanukkale, we aimed to get to Selçuk by late afternoon, including a stop at the ruins of the city of Troia. Google maps says it’s five and a half hours, but that doesn’t include traffic in Izmir nor the stops along the way.

First full day, Gallipoli

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 22:04:13 +1000

Today was the first full day on the road with the tour group, all of us piling into the van at early o’clock and starting our journey to the monuments of the Gallipoli campaign.

A few things we learnt on the way out, before the scenery started…

Istanbul’s a city of 17 million people and 4 million cars, thankfully we were going in the “outbound” direction this morning so traffic wasn’t terrible. We’re traffic going the other direction, I have a feeling we may still be there. It was surprising to me that it seems that people just hang out on the side of highways, waiting for lifts. There were literally hundreds of people as we left the city, just hanging out, looking like they were ready for work.

The start of the tour

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:13:54 +0200

Realising that breakfast was part of the hotel stay really made my morning. Procuring that which sustains me was a little bit concerning after last night’s adventure, and I really wasn’t looking forward to stumbling out into the street, half asleep looking for food.

We weren’t due to meet up with the tour until 1300 today, so we went back to Gülhane park for a wander and to explore more of the space. What a lovely area - beautiful parkways and even thought it’s clearly all due to be replanted soon - the gardens are lovely. We got our first good look (on foot) of the “new city” across the bay; it’s truly amazing how many people clearly live in this area, the gateway between Europe and Asia.

London to Istanbul

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 22:39:23 +0200

Transit day, our flight was due to leave at 10:15am, so to get there in time we were up before 0600.

Caught the train from Covent Garden to Green Park, transferred to the Victoria line down to London Victoria station. From there it was a rather pleasant journey on the Gatwick Express to the airport.

Victoria station is a bit of a mess, there’s construction around a large section of the outside and GPS doesn’t work so you can’t find where you are until you do half a lap.

Indoors day

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 22:35:33 +1000

Given it was raining before we arose, we chose a few things on the things-to-do list which were generally indoors. The first of these was the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunker complex that was used for most of the second world war to run the show. There’s a lovely self-paced audio tour of the facilities almost exactly as they were, along with an expanded museum area dedicated to Churchill’s life. A truly inspiring man, well worth learning about.

First ~24 hours in London

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 23:32:56 +0000

All the tube!

Heathrow Express to Paddington station, what a lightning run. A lovely transit system that whisks you away from the airport to the city at great speed, depositing you at a central hub of transit. In this case, Paddington station, which allowed us to navigate our way through the myriad tunnels, all alike, to London Victoria Station via the tube.

We found the location of our first night’s stay after doing a lap and a half of Victoria station (I had forgotten that Google Maps works offline on my phone :)) The Holly House Hotel is an adorable converted walk-up with 26 cosy rooms. Ours had two double beds and a king single along with an ensuite, which for 50 quid a night was amazingly good value. The four floors of stairs was a test of my knee joints which I would have rapidly failed had we stayed much longer. The included continental breakfast made the start of the day much easier as well.

Long haul sucks balls

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 11:45:47 +0000

I’m travelling with AuntyMary to London for nearly a week, then heading to Turkey for the balance of a month. This’d be a lot easier if it weren’t for a few niggling issues:

I live in Australia, so it’s taking us at least 25 hours and change to get there.
I’m a freakishly tall biped with a busted knee.
I can’t afford business class flights.

The first flight was pretty good, a 3/3/3 layout Boeing 777 with a spare seat between us for stretching out. The second flight’s been a little squishy, packed into a 3/4/3 layout Airbus A380, completely filled to the gills. It’s a lovely quiet plane, something I couldn’t say for the 777, and well fitted out for all and sundry. It’s just not made for giants with shoulders that hang over the arm rests and poke people in the ears. :(

Leaving for Europe

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 22:33:51 +1000

Not much to talk about in this post as you’d imagine, I’m still sitting in the airport waiting to leave.

On our final itinerary check a couple of days ago, we realised that somehow I’d completely messed up the time zones of the flights about four months ago, booking one less night of accommodation than we actually need! Bookings.com to the rescue, and we have found a “cosy” little place near London Victoria Station which is cheap, if nothing else :)

Scheduled backups on Checkpoint VSX

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:47:11 +1000

Editing backups isn’t possible on VSX clusters, which is ridiculous, and checking their full config isn’t possible from any of the GUIs, so it’s shell time.

SSH to the appliance you’re trying to deal with, and run show configuration backup-scheduled from clish. This’ll show you both the specific backup configuration and the schedule as well.

Here’s an example of a backup that SCPs to a remote host, twice a week at 0130.

JScape MFT Management Cert

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 15:12:16 +1000

Just for future reference, to update the management certificate…

You’ll need to upload the cert/key as a PKCS12 file, with a password. Given it’s a single password per file, put the same thing in both the fields.
To find the “alias” run keytool -list -storetype pkcs12 -keystore <filename> and look for the line ending with PrivateKeyEntry
You have to edit manager-web.cfg in the installation directory to reflect the new key name, the field is https.key and the value is the key name you gave it when uploading.
Once you’ve done that, restart the JSCAPE MFT Server service.

Go find some cute puppy pictures to look at, you’ll need them to feel better about yourself. :)

Japanese-flavoured adventuring

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 22:45:04 +1000

Sunday, rest day. A day to find peaceful ways to explore culture and ourselves. Thus, we had everyone over for bacon and eggs with all the trimmings. :)

The National Library of Australia has an exhibition entitled “Melodrama in Meiji Japan” all about the last years of the original use of traditional woodcuts, through the eyes of a collection curated by a UNSW professor over many years, recently donated to the LIbrary.

Another day, more raids

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 08:45:04 +1000

Yesterday we didn’t have any particular plans, just to meet up with people and do all the things, then go to a few get-togethers at night.

We pottered around for the morning and found carb-heavy fuel at Hungry Jack’s to start the day (me being hangry helps nobody!). Meeting up with the Canberra Pokémon crew, we did two Articuno raids and one Lugia. I only caught the Lugia, and it wasn’t particularly special - but who’s to complain I guess? :)

Transit day to CBR

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 08:45:04 +1000

Transit day, going to CBR for a weekend of hanging out with friends. For the first time ever it was cheap enough to make going to Sydney first, then to Canberra worth it (or so we thought).

The first flight wasn’t too bad, somehow QANTAS ignored our seat allocations and split us up, probably due to the fact that we were listed as two independent travellers, not a pair. One day, airline booking systems will make sense - and be usable - their website shows a clear mess of technical debt.

Reducing mdadm Mirror Drive Count

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:00:02 +1000

“Grow” the array down to two devices:

$ sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --raid-devices=2 --backup-file /tmp/mdadmbackup
raid_disks for /dev/md1 set to 2

Show the new status:

/dev/md1:
 Version : 1.2
 Creation Time : Fri Sep 16 22:38:10 2011
 Raid Level : raid1
 Array Size : 1953510841 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
 Used Dev Size : 1953510841 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
 Raid Devices : 2
 Total Devices : 2
 Persistence : Superblock is persistent

 Update Time : Tue Jul 4 18:27:02 2017
 State : clean 
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
 Spare Devices : 0

 Name : microserver:1 (local to host microserver)
 UUID : e19da472:04736a59:6c1e25ec:c4a60ebe
 Events : 20513

 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
 3 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1
 2 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1

References:

Yahoo 'Via' header redirect loop

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 18:45:04 +1000

At work we run proxies for filtering malicious traffic and restricting access to unsavoury content - be it pornography or other things outside policy. For a while now we have had an issue where certain Yahoo-run systems will send continual 301 redirects until the browser gives up with an error.

It’s been really annoying to troubleshoot, as it wasn’t quite clear what would trigger it. The normal things like SSL inspection or broken cookies weren’t the cause, and it didn’t seem to be routing or anything else like that. The main time we had seen it was when a user with an iPad tried to access the Yahoo weather app and it wouldn’t work.

DIY bed head

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 18:45:13 +1000

I bought an IKEA bed without a head when I first moved in nearly four years ago, and I finally got around to dealing with it this past weekend. The general idea was to have something that kept my head away from the wall when it was cold, and not look too ugly. Simple, right?

I started by grabbing some material from Spotlight, the local “big box” fabric store. Padding wasn’t cheap, so a cheap(ish) camping mat from BCF was purchased, and some 2.4m lengths of “non structural pine” as well. These were the cheapest part of the whole thing at $2.88 each. I already had the uprights from a previous job, being some nice-ish 2x4" pine.

Auckland, Part One

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 21:27:57 +1000

RMB had been on her amazing South America trip for a few months and I wanted to see some shows in the Pop Up Globe where my friend Chantelle’s been doing some incredible work. These two things came together at the same time, so I toddled off to Auckland for a few days, then onto the cruise ship to come home via Sydney.

What a start to the trip! I misread my flight time and barely scraped into check-in by a few minutes, thankfully I’m paranoid about getting there early and had built in lee-way. Between leaving home and landing in Auckland, my iPhone decided to do a weird battery thing so I ended up with ~10% battery upon landing. That was even after plugging it in to charge through the whole flight - the weird in-seat charger kept turning it on, which didn’t help. Customs and baggage collection was a breeze, and then I tried to buy a SIM for my 3G hotspot, but tried two different company’s offerings before giving up.

Learning pillow

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 07:03:22 +1000

Recently I was playing with date formatting in python and wrote a little script which takes a json object full of upcoming dates, then shows a count down.

Running this in the terminal is easy, but I wanted a simple way to see the information without having to do that. I could have written a macOS app to add to the UI at some point, but swift is still a mess and I’m not going to go learn ObjectiveC just for this one. I had used PIL (more specifically pillow, the working rewrite) in the past through some other work, but figured it would be handy to learn it.

Make Blue Great Again

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 19:10:18 +1000

I get it, I really do. Red team engagements are amazing and they’re a great way to identify problems in our environments. They’re really cool to talk about to your CEO buddies, and while you pay the bill you get to imagine a crack military-style force attacking your perimeter and attempting to breach your defences. They’re the cool thing that every security guy wants to do, because Blue’s the boring one, right?

Docker Networking Issue

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:16:53 +1000

So I kept having issues with connectivity in the docker system I run on my laptop. Couldn’t get it to pull images, build or whatever I needed to do.

$ docker build .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 13.61 MB
Step 1/9 : FROM ubuntu:latest
Get https://registry-1.docker.io/v2/: dial tcp: lookup registry-1.docker.io on 192.168.88.1:53: read udp 10.0.2.15:60485->192.168.88.1:53: i/o timeout

Turns out my docker machine was a bit special - probably because I hop between different networks fairly regularly.

ASA certificates and OpenSSL

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 21:05:04 +1000

While messing with a Cisco ASA, I needed to pull a certificate out of the config. While trying to parse it with openssl, it wasn’t pleased with the PKCS12 format file it claims to have exported:

139708630054816:error:0D0680A8:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_CHECK_TLEN:\
 wrong tag:tasn_dec.c:1319:
139708630054816:error:0D07803A:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_ITEM_EX_D2I:\
 nested asn1 error:tasn_dec.c:381:Type=PKCS12

Even windows wouldn’t have a bar of it, which is unsurprising. Its certificate handling’s for shit anyway. I found the answer is here on StackOverflow (of course): OpenSSL cannot convert PKCS12 exported from Cisco ASA 55xx .

Are You Secure?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 06:46:16 +1000

I was commenting on the seeming madness and complexity of our work firewall design recently:

We just drew a network diagram on the wall of just our firewalls, 12’ wide, 6’ tall… at the end, I jumped up and yelled “THE ARISTOCRATS”. Seemed required.

And someone asked “are you secure?”. Now, I could go with what we tell management - that we’re as secure as budgets allow - or a variety of other answers. This time, full objective honesty seemed to rule.

Filename wrangling fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 22:34:04 +1000

I learnt some new things today about how to deal with filenames in bash.

$ touch foo
$ ls foo*
foo
$ mv foo{,z}
$ ls foo*
fooz

Alternatively…

$ touch foo[1,2,3]
$ ls foo*
foo1 foo2 foo3
$ find . -name "foo*" -exec mv {}{,old} \;
$ ls foo*
foo1old	foo2old	foo3old

Silliness, I know. But handy when you want to rename a bunch of things, or just rename one without messing it up.

Loopback swap files

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 09:24:49 +1000

Setting up a loopback swap file is something I do fairly commonly on my virtual servers - RAM costs extra money - whereas SSD storage is common and included! Repartitioning’s too much messing around on DigitalOcean, so I set up a loopback file and it just works.

Here’s the commands to make a 2GB file (change count for different sizes):

yaleman@server:~# sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap.img bs=1024 count=2097152
2097152+0 records in
2097152+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 9.69851 s, 221 MB/s
yaleman@server:~# sudo chmod 0600 /swap.img
yaleman@server:~# sudo mkswap /swap.img
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2097148 KiB
no label, UUID=a78f6315-aba5-4d88-bb67-211f1a0c5e56

Edit the filesystem table:

CAPSMAN info dump

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 13:34:23 +1000

I was asked by a friend to give a quick rundown on Mikrotik CAPSMAN configuration, so I dumped the config and added some notes. :)

Packages

I’m currently running v6.38 but was running about v6.2 only a week or so ago - make sure you have the “wireless” package enabled. Older RouterOS versions required the capsman-v2 package, which is now deprecated.

 > /sys package print
 Flags: X - disabled
 # NAME VERSION
 0 routeros-mipsbe 6.38
 1 system 				6.38
 2 ipv6 				6.38
 3 wireless 6.38

If there was an X, enable it (in this example /sys package enable 3) - remember you’ll need to reboot after enabling a package.

Domain LDAP listening check

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:38:39 +1000

A quick command for checking if your Active Directory servers are all listening on LDAP. Guess who had an issue with that today? :)

dig +short domainname.internal | xargs -I{} /usr/sbin/hping3 -p 389 -q -c 1 {} 2>&1 | egrep "(transmitted|hping)"

You’ll need hping3 - it’s installable from apt-get on Debian, can’t comment about any other distributions.

A quick explanation for each part:

dig +short domainname.internal - pull the IPs of the hosts in the domain entry - they’ll be your domain controllers
sudo is required because hping uses raw sockets
xargs runs the next command on each input line
hping3 -p 389 - connect on TCP to the LDAP port
2>&1 - redirect STDERR to STDOUT to make it more easily filtered
egrep - filter only the required lines

This’ll hit each server once and show an output like:

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 13:46:15 +1000

Santa’s here with presents!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 12:46:06 +1000

![White wookie](/2016/12/2016-12-24-Star Wars.jpg) Today we have a white Wookie with a very sweet bowcaster.

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:46:15 +1000

Santa’s sleigh

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:46:06 +1000

![Santa’s sleigh](/2016/12/2016-12-23-Star Wars.jpg) Santa’s hover-sleigh, ready to deliver presents to everyone

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:46:15 +1000

Today we have a cute puppy and his toys

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:46:06 +1000

![Imperial shuttle](/2016/12/2016-12-22-Star Wars.jpg) An Imperial Shuttle!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:46:15 +1000

A lovely tree to put yesterday’s presents under.

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![Stormtrooper](/2016/12/2016-12-21-Star Wars.jpg) A Stormtrooper ready for action and adventure

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 17:46:15 +1000

Some presents for the kids and adults alike!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![speeder bike](/2016/12/2016-12-20-Star Wars.jpg) A speeder bike

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![Luke Skywalker](/2016/12/2016-12-19-Star Wars.jpg) Luke Skywalker, wielding his classic weapon

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 07:46:15 +1000

Today we have an oven with cookies to share

Bacon and Banana

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:26:48 +1000

Recently a friend who lives in the UK posted a fascinating pair of pictures.

Being from Queensland I’ve always grown up with fresh delicious bananas being available during summer - and most of the rest of the year, to be honest. Having the idea of banana and bacon in a trifle brought to my attention was a revelation, to say the least!

From a Daily Mail post on the topic

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:46:15 +1000

Today’s minifig is a fire fighting ranger with a cake!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:46:06 +1000

![desert base](/2016/12/2016-12-18-Star Wars.jpg) A tiny little desert base

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

Today I think we have an xmas bar providing us drinks!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-17-Star Wars.jpg) It’s a GoNK droid, full of power for party time!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A neat little jet, ready to take you on an adventure!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-16-Star Wars.jpg) A protocol droid, ready to translate

Traffic Infringement Malspam

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:50:20 +1000

This appeared in my email today:

From: 		Avis Vanhise <evduefortini@o2.pl>
Subject: 	TRAFFIC INFRINGMENT NOTICE
Message:
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
This is automatically generated message, please do not reply.

ou have been issued with a traffic infrigement:

Reason: negligent driving
Infringement No: 886658188
Date of issue: 11/10/2016 
Amount due: $ 221 AUD

This fine will be sent to you by mail to your adress, but you can check it now, please click here 

https://traffic-law/notification/

This fine must be paid within the statutory period of up to 12.18.2016.

No, I didn’t fail to copy it, they misspelled “you” and “address”. The wording’s got the usual eastern-european mangling of phrasing, and it was neat that it identified that I’m Australian, sending me a fine in AUD. They used two different date-display formats, dots and slashes, but both dates seem to be in US date format, MM/DD/YYYY which is another tell.

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

An xmas themed storefront, selling you some goodies

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-15-Star Wars.jpg) A CR90 Corvette, possibly Tantive IV.

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A cute green helicopter, ready for action

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-14-Star Wars.jpg) A rebel fighter

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A park ranger looking to help out!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-13-Star Wars.jpg) A trade federation droid, ready for battle

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

An old-style street lamp with a pretty wreath

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A sparse, but well lit xmas tree :)

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-11-Star Wars.jpg) An Armoured Assault Tank from the Trade Federation

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

Today it’s a young lady, ready to play on the ice!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-10-Star Wars.jpg) A tiny ship, ready for action!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

An ice hockey net

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-09-Star Wars.jpg) A rebel snow-trooper

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A minifig ready to play ice hockey!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 17:46:06 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-08-Star Wars.jpg) An imperial satellite dish, transmitting data to the troops

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A beautiful wreath on a snow covered display.

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-07-Star Wars.jpg) A cute little snowball launcher!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A snow plow for yesterday’s snowmobile

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-06-Star Wars.jpg) An Imperial Cold Assault snowtrooper, ready for action in the cold!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A snowmobile, ready for every emergency!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-05-Star Wars.jpg)

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A fireman ready to organise people and save the day!

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-04-Star Wars.jpg) An imperial death star trooper ready for action!

This week's web travels

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 14:13:32 +1000

This week’s been particularly good for finding things worth sharing, so I thought I’d put them up here.

Penn & Teller Burn a Flag in the White House Penn & Teller stir up controvery on the West Wing when they burn a flag in the White House. Great show, great episode.
This fast-food-loving, organics-hating Ivy League prof will trick you into eating better His #1 tip: It’s not about the food — it’s about your surroundings. This is a wonderful article on the psychology of food and food service. How to get thin without dieting, save money when you run a buffet, or make kids eat more vegetables all by themselves. :)

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

Who’s up for Kareoke?

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-03-Star Wars.jpg) A tiny little fighter, ready for action!

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

A metal-rockin’ firefightin’ lady.

(One day the printing on these boxes will be coloured right!)

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-02-Star Wars.jpg)

2016 City Advent Calendar Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:46:14 +1000

2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:46:05 +1000

![](/2016/12/2016-12-01-Star Wars.jpg)

Advent Calendars Ahoy

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:02:31 +1000

Welcome to another year of advent calendars, again I’ll be running through the LEGO City and LEGO Star Wars calendars, one day at a time.

Finally approved for my crossbow license

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 10:12:41 +1000

133 days since I submitted my application, 126 since I submitted the “additional” paperwork they required - which they already had - I finally have an email stating my crossbow license has been approved.

I did the Category M (crossbows) safety course on the 2nd of July, got the certificate of attainment on the 7th and submitted it on that night. I’d really love to know what took so long, but given that any question to Queensland Police Weapons Licensing end in ridiculous hand-wringing and misinformation, I’m just over it.

2016-08-14 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 22:45:08 +1000

Last week’s sniffles turned into a full-blown face-crippling sinus infection come Monday morning. This being so close to my holiday, I was less than impressed, and I missed two days of finalising things at work. Thankfully, the high-dose antibiotics seem to have worked within twenty-four hours or so, taking it down to merely a sniffle after a week.

Rimfire ten-pin on Thursday was a bit of a shambles, I ended up taking myself off the line after succumbing to a light-headed woozy feeling. Nothing dangerous, just tired and not enough sugar by that point in the day. Still did OK, considering.

2016-08-07 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 14:49:46 +1000

Ten days until my birthday, three years and a day since I bought my car. Honestly, the car thing is way more interesting to me. I’m having a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch with my puppy, because I’m snuffly and don’t want to do any more house work.

What have I been up to? I finally played with app deployment on Splunk this week - it’s a great tool to have - but just like a lot of these things could be used too much, or in the wrong ways. So far I’m keeping it simple… so far.

Thin Green Line: Redux

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 13:48:38 +1000

About fifteen months ago, I posted a vague thing about my net worth and how I had been graphing it, and the results I had seen.

Time for a new update! This month I paid off my car after three years, which should help the line’s angle a little - though with my recent spending spree I might have to be careful. :)

A while back I split the graph to show the “without superannuation” part of the information out, since that was something I had identified as causing some strangeness in the data. It’s a little clearer now how much of my net worth is “liquid” - for various values of liquid - and what’s going towards my future security..

2016-07-31 Week in review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:33:59 +1000

Another week that’s flown past without me realising it… I’m not really sure what’s happened to be completely honest :)

Saturday night was a whole lot of BBQ thanks to MrK, with all manner of dead animal presented to us, having been tended to and smoked throughout the day. Quite lovely.

Today (Sunday) I cut the last large section off the rather dead paperbark tree in my backyard. I’ve only been concerned about it for nearly three years, probably a good time to sort it out. There’s extensive borer-insect damage throughout, so whatever I don’t burn in short order will have to go to the tip. Can’t risk them going off and finding other things to eat! The full-sized chainsaw’s blade was terribly dull, even after I’d had a go at sharpening it, but a hand saw finished the required job, and the tiny-but-mighty chainsaw on a stick did the needful to take down the higher branches with surprising finesse.

2016-07-24 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 19:00:30 +1000

A big week! Tuesday was pay day and with it the final payment on my car! Three years in, I love it more than ever and we have travelled over fifty two thousand kilometers together. Paying it off frees up a large chunk of my budget, which will be a lovely change!

Pokemon Go has been a interesting game to get into. I’ve only ever had a sideways glance at the universe, being too money-poor to own a GameBoy when I was younger, and time-poor since I have had the cash to play otherwise. The exploration of the local areas around work and home has been fun - I’ve walked down Kedron Brook for the first time in the seven and a half years of working for my current employer! The infrastructure behind the game, let alone the code of the UI itself is a shambles, but they’re making great strides to keep it all running and us engaged. An unsurprising response to the game has been from the various facets of social media, with the lovers and haters having plenty to work with.

2016-07-17 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 23:41:52 +1000

I finally watched Battle Royale on Monday night via Netflix after hearing so much about it for so long. It definitely lived up to expectations. Absurd, violent, poignant, and impossible in western cinema but perfectly produced by eastern. I loved it, for everything that it is.

Just Cause, a story of Florida’s habit of treating black people like shit, and its long-term effects. A stellar cast including Sean Connery playing an amazing role as the out-of-town lawyer while Laurence Fishburne defends “his” town from the outsider. I saw Scarlett Johnson in the credits but didn’t spot her until the final act, wow I’m old. A fantastic mid-90’s thriller with some great twists and turns :)

2016-07-10 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 23:18:27 +1000

Thursday night I received the statement of Attainment for my Category M (Miscellaneous: Crossbows) license! Now the countdown begins, I put my application in as soon as I could, but Qld Weapons Licensing are notoriously slow.

Friday morning they called me to confirm that my paperwork had been received and that I needed to supply something else (that I already knew about). It was nice to see they were fast on that, and that they could confirm everything else seemed OK.

Drillpower

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:59:42 +1000

Over time I’ve somehow ended up with three different disgustingly cheap portable drills which the batteries inevitably died in. Rather than spend a couple of hundred bucks on a new setup that will be incompatible with next year’s batteries, I decided to repack one of the existing battery packs.

Nickel-Cadmium batteries are icky, and I wanted the option to be able to use the batteries in other things, so I decided that I would buy some Lithium Ion batteries. After playing around with available voltages, I found that the 14.4V GMC drill I had would work OK with four 3.7V batteries. Yes, I know it’s overdriving it a bit, but I’m fairly sure it will not mind. If it does, then I’ll upload the video when it catches fire.

2016-07-03 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:44:15 +1000

I had a fantastic day on Saturday with nine fellow SCA members at the SSAA Belmont doing our Category M (and for the others, their A/B) safety course. This course will allow me to apply for my Crossbow license and start working towards doing some re-enactment of being a period-appropriate Arbalist :D

It was a great day, Warwick from QLDFT is a very engaging and knowledgeable teacher, and we all learnt a lot. I helped run the class through the practical assessment of the A/B course to save time, given I’m a range officer and experienced shooter. The end of the day was the best, being able to have a couple of shots with his [Barnett Recruit Recurve](http://www.barnettcrossbows.com/crossbows/recruit-recurve0 bow at a target. The Leupold scope was lovely to use as well :)

Lifeline bookfest, or how I bought too many books

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:15:49 +1000

I’ve been to the Lifeline Bookfest before, but never walked out with so many books. Turning up on the last day, I didn’t really expect much left, but there were still giant crates of books not on display! I’m not sure what they’ll do with them… maybe compost? :S

I looked around for a park near BCEC for a while, then gave up and parked underneath. Normally I’d park under the State Library, which is a couple of blocks away and cheaper having a flat rate for entry. I’m very glad I didn’t, since I ended up making two runs to the car to drop books off :)

2016-06-26 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 11:30:32 +1000

Another week of sickness, most annoyingly. I’m on the mend now, but it’s been a quiet one.

I went to see two movies this week, Finding Dory and The Wilderpeople. Finding Dory is the tug-the-heartstrings-until-they-tear sequel to the hilarious and similarly emotional Finding Nemo. Pixar’s storytelling and hidden-adult humour skills go from strength to strength, and it’s another great example of their work. I’d highly recommend going to see it :)

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a fantastic example of what makes Kiwi humour great. Kooky, full of hilarious jokes and Sam Neill at his best. There’s something special about the way the comedy’s done, and the story’s great. I’m going to try and see more movies by Taika Waititi now I’ve seen this hilarious romp through the New Zealand bush :)

2016-06-19 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 23:13:43 +1000

This week’s been quite quiet, since I’m suffering from a sinus infection, bleh.

Today I spent a few hours replacing the ropes on the poles for my tent, finally getting most of that task done. The only thing left is to make some heavy aglets for the ends of the ropes and replace/glue on the tail caps on the poles.

RMB’s ropes need to be done as well, hoping to get that done tomorrow, another day off sick.

2016-06-12 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 10:30:39 +1000

Tuesday was the Azure Discovery day at Microsoft’s offices in the CBD. I probably should have read the full briefing on what it was, expecting a technical coverage of new features and a rundown on some inner workings, but it was more a management/marketing run through of every little thing they do, which I could have discovered via the website. The presenter seemed to be a niche product engineer who didn’t quite have the overarching knowledge everyone expected, and there were many management types asking newbie questions which would have been covered if they’d have waited ten minutes..

2016-06-05 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 23:11:36 +1000

I finally gave up on making some saw horses and bought some Rhino-brand ones from Bunnings. For $32 each, the metal frame and replaceable wooden cross bar is a good little package. They pull apart easily for storage so that’s perfect for my workshop.

My Kreg R3 kit turned up - I’ve got a few projects on the horizon where I want to try using pocket holes - I was going to build saw horses based on this video but decided against it. 😃

2016-05-29 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 29 May 2016 20:04:29 +1000

I Attended AusCERT. Much longer write-up in the link.

Stayed in the Mantra Circle on Caville. An interesting twin-towers residential facility, we had a three bedroom apartment on the 36th floor. Lovely facility, great room, full kitchen etc. Pity about the lack of provided internet connectivity - maybe in another ten years, given the NBN timing?

The wiring for the TV was horrible, and this was after I’d cleaned it up a little to get my own HDMI cable in :)

AusCERT 2016 notes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 29 May 2016 19:21:32 +1000

Here’s a whole mess of notes I made as part of my week at AusCERT 2016. It’s my first conference, and I didn’t know what to expect, but it was an overall good experience. Tuesday I couldn’t get into any of the tutorials, so I ended up working. Sigh :(

Monday

I got into the Monday tutorial “Cyber Incident Handling” run by AusCERT’s General Manager, Thomas King. A day-long summary of the NIST guide and the ASD ISM along with some discussion about incidents. More high-level and aimed at managers than I was expecting, but worth going to.

Mikrotik wireless and LIFX bulbs

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 27 May 2016 18:46:04 +1000

I’ve been fighting with the configuration of my LIFX bulbs since I changed from using my trusty AirPort Express “puck” access point to the RBwAP2nD that I purchased a month or so ago. The bulbs I had are the original Kickstarter release models which I bought because I’m a terrible toy-hound.

Turns out I’d hit two problems, one being that certain bulbs running their 2.1 firmware just don’t like changing the SSID they’re associated with, and the second being that client-to-client forwarding wasn’t enabled correctly on the new AP. I could test the former by starting up the old AP and they’d connect straight up, the latter seemed intermittent. I could Communicate between a RaspberryPi and my laptop, but couldn’t ping the bulbs.

Shearwater CTF: Law

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 May 2016 20:11:20 +1000

Another challenge, another post - this time it’s all about the text. It said the flag was somewhere in a file, this time a .docx file. I assumed it would be something tricky as the file format’s essentially a .zip file full of metadata and content files. I wasted a good five minutes messing around in the file, extracting it and poking through the XML files.

It seems it was even easier than that - once I opened it in Apple’s Pages. The capitals out of place all over the file lead me to the solution quick smart - the American “misspelling” of behaviour helped even more. :)

Shearwater CTF: myfirst_math

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 May 2016 19:28:58 +1000

This one took a little bit of network trickery, connecting to a remote server and responding to requests quickly, else your connection gets dropped.

The first attempt was to do it manually, thinking it was just a few simple ones. I rapidly realised it was going to ask many questions of me - 125 to be exact. Thankfully it was the same five questions. The question “what is the substitution” really threw me, because it’s supposed to be a math challenge, and I tried a whole load of things before I realised it was just letting me through anyway.

Shearwater CTF: Adults Only

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 May 2016 17:29:19 +1000

The first challenge in the AusCERT 2016 Shearwater CTF I tried was a fairly simple one, it said that the programming language was adults only and that the flag was in a file they offered for download. The contents were:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.>++++.-----------.++++++.++++++++++++++++++++.---------------------------------------------------------.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.<-------.>>+++++++++++++++++.++++++++++.-----.<<+.>>++++++.<<-.>------------------.<+++++++++.<++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.>---------.>>-.<-----------------.<++.>+++++++++++++++.<<+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.++++.

It happens that due to my rather scattered experience I’d seen this rather hilarious language before, called brainfuck.

I found an online brainfuck interpreter and pasted it in, getting the flag.

Automating things

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 May 2016 17:38:56 +1000

I’ve got some homegrown OSX Automator services for tracking packages in Australia Post or DHL. For an online shopping addict it’s helpful to just select the tracking number, right click, select the shipping service and head off to the site.

Recently I’ve been trying out the Safari Technology Preview and had changed my default browser. It seems that the original implementation of my services used AppleScript to directly call Safari instead of the default system browser. It was time to update the scripts!

2016-05-22 Week in review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 May 2016 23:01:39 +1000

I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure I actually achieved anything this week.

Bleh.

Windows 10 updates

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 May 2016 11:07:13 +1000

I’ve been fighting with an issue for a while where every time I restarted my Windows 10 machine, it would go through a ridiculous loop of trying to install an update, then failing, then trying to do it again. From what I can tell it’s KB3156387 that’s failing, and it’s a common one for most people. It’s a fairly large update, which brings Windows 10 Build 10240.16854 to users’ machines.

I found some information in the microsoft answers forums that led me to this failing service. (Example information’s not mine, but it’s valid)

2016-05-15 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 May 2016 21:16:27 +1000

Made a bottom for the Octobag
Wired the tow bar plug
Built some more shelves for my workshop
Cut some melamine and MDF for Aunty Mary - who in response, cleaned my whole house and bought me a lotto ticket. Luckiest. Guy. Ever.
Attended Chantelle’s patterning for dresses class at RMB’s house - learnt a lot about speed-patterning clothes.

Tow bar update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 May 2016 10:05:27 +1000

One of the things left over from the Tow Bar install was the wiring for the trailer. All that was required was to find a place to run the wire through the body, make sure it seals and find a place to mount the socket.

It’s a simple 7-pin flat plug, but the plug’s way too wide for going through any sensibly-sized hole, and the other end of the harness looked too compled for me to remove the pins to push it through a bung. I decided to un-wire the plug, feed it through the bung then re-wire it. Fairly simple:

2016-05-08 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 May 2016 21:32:59 +1000

Converted yaleman.org to Hugo
Ordered my 7’x5’ trailer
Made myself a simple notebook holder

Plenty of work in that first one, I’m super excited about the second. 😀

Leather notebook holder

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 May 2016 11:21:14 +1000

I fairly regularly carry a Field Notes notebook around, because I’m a terrible scatterbrain. Unfortunately, living in my pockets leads to their rather quick ruin, so I needed to find a way to make them last a little longer.

$14 worth of leather from the local leather shop and a few minutes work was all it took. I wasn’t looking for anything particularly fancy - I found an offcut which was just the right size and made some folds.

Moving to hugo

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 May 2016 22:37:29 +1000

This blog has been running for eleven years today - first on Mambo CMS - then transitioning to Wordpress in September 2005.

It’s time for another move, this time to Hugo. Written in go, stored in Markdown syntax and generating static HTML it fits my needs well. I don’t need a crazy CMS, I just need something I can post content with and use as few server (and mental) resources as possible.

Wordpress has been great. It’s very simple to use, and provides incredibly powerful publishing tools, but at a cost. The security implications of running a hyper-extensible PHP-powered site are pretty terrifying at times, and the server resources required for keeping a relatively small site running keep going up and up. I host all my own sites, with a locked down server running on a VM somewhere in cloudspace. The less I have to do with securing that the better, so a static site’s perfect.

2013 Pulsar Tow Bar

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of times a year I need a car with a tow bar, for things like the two-weeks-away medieval festival I go to, or taking things to the dump. Hiring a vehicle for these things would work out to be a thousand dollars a year or so, which isn’t viable.

Since owning the Pulsar I’ve wanted a tow bar on it, and after a fairly tight pack for festival this year I was determined to get one to be able to tow a trailer. I like the look of my slightly-racier-than-stock turbocharged ST-S model, and didn’t want a big honking cut out of the bumper like I’ve seen on some others. After shopping around a lot, I couldn’t find enough information on what this model required, as Hayman Reese (the main manufacturer really left in Australia) and some others said their kits were “All models”. A local company refused to even bring one in as they would be stuck with it if I didn’t want the required modifications.

2016-04-30 Week in Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Wednesday/Thursday

Bought a tow bar for my Pulsar
delivered in 24 hours flat
missing a part of the loom, was delivered in 2 hours!
installed the wiring without incident - ignored the hole-cutting instruction, routed the wire sensibly.
learnt to run a tap through painted holes
screwed up a high tensile (ish) bolt, fixed it with a file

Thursday

Learn to double check Google Maps’s public transport instructions. Ended up in stones corner instead of Windsor. Ugh.
Got my car serviced. They washed it (great!) but also made it smell like cigarettes (ugh!)

Friday

Started fitting tow bar, got bumper bar off, cut hole in rear panel of chassis rail, holes don’t QUITE line up. 🙁

Saturday

Finished installing the tow bar!
Got confirmation that expanding the holes is fine, did so.
Cut second hole with my angle grinder - done in under a minute - compared to an hour of careful messing around with the dremel the first time.
Bolted it all together rather easily, carefully cut the lower part of the bar. The supplied dimensions were a little excitable, but would have done.
Was a great feeling to do it myself 🙂

Work

Found out I’m going to AusCERT 2016 😀

It’s been a long time baby…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

… but for the first time in nearly a decade, I don’t know of any broken links on this site. Woo!

2016-04-24 Week in review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Creations

Created https://travelling.boryssnorc.com using Hugo
Created https://sca.yaleman.org using Hugo
Completed transfer of https://threegoldbees.com to Hugo
Started work on the Octobag
Mostly completed the Camp Wardrobe (part 1, part 2)

Stuff

Bought some ridiculously cheap shelves and put them in the sewing room and the office. I wouldn’t recommend the 4x2 clever cube shelves from Bunnings unless you despise whoever’s going to use them, or you only need them for ridiculously light things. I’m going to nail/glue some pre-painted particle board to the back of these in a few months, just because I’m expecting them to warp.
Bought a Ryobi shop vacuum, finally
Set up the sewing room
Sewing machine
Bought some lovely scissors
Helped Mary remove some stumps from her yard on Sunday. Wow my back hurts, I woke up 1am Monday with arms that were on a special kind of fire.
Went to IKEA for a work light, bought a step ladder. It may sound ridiculous, me (6’9" tall) owning a step ladder, but they’re super-useful for at-roof-level-need-to-be-stable things.

People

Went to the Buffalo Bar for Rachel’s birthday. Amazing food, great drink, lovely atmosphere until the band turned up. My ears still hurt.

Work

Can’t think of anything in particular I achieved this week (that I can write about).

OSPF configuration on Mikrotik with EoIP

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have two routers connected over the internet by an EoIP tunnel. It’s a fairly simple network design, but I wanted to learn how to configure Mikrotik’s OSPF implementation between the two sites.

<th>

Router 2

<td>

Network: 10.1.0.0/16 EoIP interface IP: 192.168.0.2/24

Quick and simple SSH things.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Add these things to ~/.ssh/config and you’ll get magic powers.

Put your keys in ~/.ssh/ and name them by the hostname you ssh to, and you’ll automagically add them to your config without having to edit it each time. Change the directory to whatever, if you’re picky.

Login to your splunk boxes as bob, and your web servers on port 2280 as bob_web. Wildcards are great, and you can use “Host *” for everything.

Homework Help: Time Passing

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was asked to help with some math homework tonight, and the question was as follows:

Between 1pm and 2pm the minute hand will cross the hour hand, at what time will they cross?

Working it out

Temperature time, and a prototyping timesaver.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Another week, more parts have arrived for the coffee machine!

To save messing around with soldering and cutting more weird little cables I got myself an eBay knockoff of a RaspberryPi Prototyping Board, which exposes most of the pins I need as screw terminals. Once I get to the more permanent stage I can solder things to the included field.

After not receiving the MAX31855 breakout I tried for before xmas, I bought a MAX31865 breakout board from PlayingWithFusion.com. A neat, tiny little board which should get me some fine resolution temperature sensing!

Servicing a Miele Large Turbobrush STB 205-3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a new vacuum cleaner recently - the Miele Complete C3 Cat&Dog. A great unit, with a charcoal filter to save me from puppy smells when vacuuming. It also comes with a “Large Turbobrush”, model STB 205-3 which is quite handy for picking up fur. Today I thoughtlessly sucked up the control cord and half the runs-along-the-bottom cord for my vertical blinds (the dogs trashed them months ago).

Inhaled the cordage

I got 90% of the cord out of the brush wheel, but some of it had been sucked into the part that actually provides the power to the brush. I tried jiggling things back and forth, but nothing would budge. Time to disassemble!

Define the problem

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fairly sure I could respond to 80% of my incident reports with a summarised version of this, and it’s what I waste most of my time on.

The main problem with most people’s troubleshooting is that they don’t start by actually clarifying what’s wrong. Who, What, Where and When generally gives you a lot of information on how to find the Why.

A delay :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Well that’s a pity. I had ordered a MAX31855 SPI thermocouple interface to capture temperatures on the coffee machine, and after waiting a month the sender’s just given me a refund because it didn’t get delivered. 🙁

Back to the drawing board - on a high note this means I might be able to get a MAX31865, which handles four wire PT100(0) sensors, which I have been told are much more reliable.

Coffee machine shenanigans

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a Rancilio Silvia for a bit over a year now, and it’s been great to make coffee while also saving money and reducing the amount of plastic I was dumping into the bin. One of the popular modifications to them is to install a PID controller to make the heater control more even, and because I’m always up for a challenge I wanted to make my own.

That, and I leave it on often enough that I’m grumpy with myself, as repeated most eloquently by a friend:

Pay day Haiku

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Money trickles in, which I have already spent. It flies away now.

Removing Razer Synapse on OSX

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A quick one, since there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to nuke this software…

Find the Razer processes: yaleman$ ps aux | grep -i rz yaleman 689 0.7 0.4 2828488 70516 ?? S 9:40am 0:00.96 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzUpdater.app/Contents/MacOS/RzUpdater yaleman 469 0.0 0.3 2778036 58432 ?? S 9:39am 0:00.81 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzDeviceEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/RzDeviceEngine
Because it’s pesky software that won’t die, first remove the software: yaleman$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Razer

Taco Bell Programming

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A great concept, Taco Bell Programming. Take simple, known elements and mix to get what you need.

Here’s a concrete example: suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ.

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Santa Claus, come to deliver presents!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Santa-3PO, here to deliver presents to everyone!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A cute little space shuttle

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Santa’s speeder sleigh!

Codesimplicity – Two is too many

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Essentially, I know exactly how generic my code needs to be by noticing that I’m tempted to cut and paste some code, and then instead of cutting and pasting it, designing a generic solution that meets just those two specific needs. I do this as soon as I’m tempted to have two implementations of something.

A great way of looking at code reuse and when to make generics.

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure what he’s up to, but it looks curious!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

R2-D2’s dressed up to party!

Hello to my visitor(s) from Belarus!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Someone searched for:

Which is “Lego Star Wars Calendar” in Belarusian and ended up here. I learned a new thing today, perusing my referrer logs 🙂

I also learned that WordPress doesn’t work in unicode. Blergh. Images it is!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A young lady with a cupcake and a phone

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t have a white xmas without a snowman!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A campfire with marshmallows

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A v-150 Planet Defender Ion Cannon from Hoth

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A probe droid

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A weapons rack, ready to go

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A fuzzy puppy friend, come to play!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The fearsome AT-AT, in micro-scale!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A police snowmobile, for our friend from yesterday!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A rebel snow trooper, ready for action on Hoth

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A policeman to keep us safe

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A micro-scale A-Wing Fighter

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A cute little carriage to go with yesterday’s engine!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A blaster defence turret

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A tiny train to deliver presents!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Millennium Falcon!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Presents for everyone!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It looks like hard work, mining dollars for the man!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A micro-scale Star Destroyer!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Imperial weapons rack

It’s no wonder the stormtroopers are such bad shots, if they store their weapons like this!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

An IG series assassin droid

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A tree to celebrate around

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A stormtrooper ready for action!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A chair for Santa to sit on

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A forest catapult

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A lamp post with mistletoe

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A fuzzy Ewok buddy!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ready for work, but looking forward to the holidays…

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A tiny forest hideaway :)

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A tiny plane!

I really do love microscale planes, there’s still so much possibility for detail, and this one’s ready to deliver xmas cheer to everyone!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A micro scale snow plow

I’m not sure how much use that’ll be for me, given the closest snow’s a world away - maybe later in the year! 🙂

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A microscale Sandcrawler

A Sandcrawler, ready to transport gifts to all our Jawa friends!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A rack full of gear, ready for adventure!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A place to rest your drink

And our friend from Day 2 of the 2015 City Advent Calendar has come to share the fun!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A sneaky little Jawa friend!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Any icy place for some pie!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A droid tank

PacketBomb – Understanding Throughput and TCP Windows

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Another great post from PacketBomb Understanding Throughput and TCP Windows. I’m learning more than I should from this site, and it’s reminding me of things I should have checked when troubleshooting things in the past 😉

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Rugged up for the winter, our friend’s ready to go!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a couple of these every year, and this one’s on day 2 - I’m not even sure what this is? Happy to discuss in the comments below! 🙂

Netflix on quick Linux performance analysis

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Another great article from the Netflix Blog - Linux performance analysis in 60s

In 60 seconds you can get a high level idea of system resource usage and running processes by running the following ten commands. Look for errors and saturation metrics, as they are both easy to interpret, and then resource utilization. Saturation is where a resource has more load than it can handle, and can be exposed either as the length of a request queue, or time spent waiting.

Lego City Advent Calendar 2015 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Some cute little remote control cars!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2015 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jabba’s Sail Barge

A micro-set of Jabba’s Sail Barge - really named the Khetanna.

Blocking Netflix IPv6 on Internode using a Mikrotik

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Update 9/3/2016: It seems this triggers the VPN-detection mechanism on Netflix’ services, blocking access to all streaming. Thankfully it seems Internode has worked out how to make Netflix content unmetered on IPV6, so it’s no longer required!

Currently access to Netflix via Internode is unmetered, but not if you’re using their IPv6 connectivity. I’ve got a Mikrotik router and wanted to see if I could force it down to IPv4 without disabling connectivity for my desktop machine (which I use mainly for Netflix). It seems just blocking one range (currently) is enough:

Carb kits here, and that pesky screw is out

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The carb rebuild kits arrived yesterday, with all the associated bits and bobs I need to fix most everything on them. I previous mentioned that they included the floats, but they don’t, which hopefully won’t prove to be an issue. The floats look to be in good condition and I’ve seen mention of repairing any pinprick holes with epoxy, which should serve to get the bike on the road at least initially.

Another day, another grumpy screw

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sick as a dog right now with a sinus infection, but I can’t help try and do something useful on the bike 🙂 The carb rebuilt kits haven’t arrived yet; they still have to come apart and I need to identify what work they need before I can do anything.

They’re already off the bike so I thought I’d take the bottom off to get to the floats and valves. The screws on the fuel bowls are partially obstructed by the bracket which holds the throttle linkage. Four screws, three came out easy. Left hand one of the two in this shot is the grumpy one. 🙁 I’m going to have a go at making it a slot-head screw, and if that doesn’t work it’s time for another application of mister easy-out.

DNS and Censorship

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Computers on the internet have IP addresses, and web sites are stored on some of those computers. The Domain Name System - DNS for short - is the way that your computer translates Domain Names (yaleman.org, google.com) into IP addresses. The simplest analogy I can think of is a community-based assistance service which matches people and their street addresses.

A very contrived example:

**Adam **wanted the street address for **Betty **in Cardiff.
He looks in his local address book, and it’s not there.
He calls his directory assistance service who don’t have Betty’s address, so they call someone else on his behalf.
The “someone else” is one of fourteen international switch boards who direct requests to other local directory services.
It directs Adam‘s service to the service for Cardiff.
The Cardiff service provides Betty‘s address - 123 Fourth Avenue.
Adam visits Betty for tea. Great success!

Replace directory assistance with DNS server, address with IP address, Adam for your PC and Betty with your favourite web site and you get the idea of where we’re going with this.

My first easy-out

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since the front brakes only worked enough to stop you rolling backwards on a slight incline, I figured I had to at least bleed the brakes. To do that, I needed to take the top off the brake fluid reservoir and flush the fluid out.

One of the screws came out nicely after the usual ‘crack’ of breaking the mechanical lock. The other one, not so much. I used a perfectly sized phillips head screwdriver, which promptly made a mess of the steel of the screw. It was like twisting in butter, sadly.

I was cleaning the garage…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

… and found some injectors I was going to use on another project a decade ago.

I wonder…

It’s fate, really!

Quick update on carb removal

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick video I took of draining the fuel tanks on the Virago last night. More and more I realise that it was a great idea! 🙂

Along with the fuel pump and igniter controls, so far I’ve found some curious Mitsubishi electronics on this bike. The “BOOST SENSOR” is the most curious - it’s actually just a vacuum-activated switch used to change the timing based on engine load.

Carbs out!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

After much muttering and wondering what I was doing wrong, I figured it out.

There’s some info on the Virago Tech Forums (registration probably required) also reproduced here because ugh. Here’s how to remove the carburetor on a Virago XV1100.

Remove the seat
Remove the right pod and its air cleaner hose
Remove the left pod and the vacuum line to the (AIS) at the 4 way junction and let it hang down.
Raise the fuel tank and loosen the upper intake hose clamp for the front carb
Loosen the lower intake hose clamp and remove the intake hose.
Remove the throttle cables
Loosen the upper and lower intake hose clamps and remove the intake hose.
Remove the fuel lines from the carbs
Remove the choke cable
Remove the vacuum lines from the carb holders.
Loosen the clamp on the rear carb holder and remove the bolt
Spread open the carb holder clamp for access to the lower carb holder bolt; loosen but do not remove the lower bolt.
Loosen the carb holder clamp bolt on the front carb and remove the bolt
Spread open the carb holder clamp for access to the lower carb holder bolt, loosen but do not remove the lower bolt.
Now, reach over the bike backbone and grab the carbs and twist clockwise and remove the carbs from the carb holders. If the carbs have not been recently removed, this will take some effort.
From the right side of the bike, slide the carbs back toward the rear wheel. This will give you access to the upper carb holder bolt from the left side of the bike.
Loosen the upper carb holder bolt on the front cylinder just enough to slide the carb holder out.
From the right side of the bike, remove the lower carb holder bolt and slide the carb holder out and set it aside. There is enough room to remove it. Don’t remove the bolts - the carb holder should slide off as it’s got a notch in that end.
From the left side of the bike, slide the carb forward enough to gain access to the top bolt on the rear carb holder from the right side of the bike.
Loosen it just enough to allow the carb holder to slide out.
From the left side of the bike, remove the lower carb holder bolt and slide the carb holder out.
From the left side of the bike, gently maneuver the carbs past the two top carb holder bolts and they will slide right out. You may need to screw one of the top carb holder bolts in a couple of turns to allow the carbs to pass.

This guy’s got the right idea with grinding down his 10mm wrench - I’ll definitely be doing it for the reinstall process. If you try to use the open end of the spanner you’ll likely round down the bolt heads - ask me how I know? 🙁 Luckily a load of G96 loosened up the bolt enough to save my bacon. I’m also going to try that socket wrench idea, that’s fantastic.

Quick update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing much to report today, I started disconnecting the wiring to individually test things, as mentioned in a previous post.

I’m fairly sure there was a meeting involved between a load of people to design this… From the battery to somewhere deeper in the loom is this strange arrangement of connectors and a fuse. I’m going to replace the whole thing with an inline fuse holder and a new plug.

Must have been a meeting

First Blood!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Petrol’s a nasty thing, and carburettors are normally full of it. Until it evaporates - in which case they’re full of nasty ex-petrol-goo. The carbs on the project bike are made of aluminium alloy and they’ve been in the weather by the looks of it, so they’re coated in a lot of nasty white corrosion on the outside. The throttle’s jammed and I’m hoping that’s just a wasp nest or the aforementioned white crap. This is even before I’ve gotten them off the bike!

A new project appears! The cruiser.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Pottering around on the internet as I do, and RMB hit me up about a friend giving away a cruiser. I figure free things are good, and free motorbikes are better! We arranged a time and place and after a few calls around, I snaffled a motorcycle trailer for $73.

Here’s the bike! It’s a Virago XV1100, from 1997 maybe? 🙂

Yamaha XV1100

Incapsula SSL Error 29

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When you get error 29 while trying to access a site ‘protected’ by Incapsula, check the SSL settings for the site. It’ll generally be because the site “has not got SSL” - log a support ticket and they’ll fix whatever they’ve broken.

Quick and dirty phone charger

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to make a quick battery charger just for giggles, the basic requirements were “allows me to plug in a USB cable to charge my phone” - which is fairly easy to accomplish going by all the crazy devices you can buy on the market currently.

I found an eight-pack of C cell batteries at the local Kmart for $5 and I had a few other parts lying around, so I had a go in ten minutes or less.

SSL a little more S now

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I work in computer security lately, so I figure I should probably ensure that my site is vaguely secure 🙂 The Qualys SSL test for yaleman.org was showing a ‘B’ grade because of a few things.

Firstly it wasn’t presenting the full SSL CA chain, so I fixed that. Previously I was only presenting the certificate, with the client having to have the root CA.

Downloaded the ca bundle files from the details Comodo provided me.
Made the bundle file (their support page helped)

cat *.crt &gt; yaleman.org.cabundle

Uploaded the file to the server
Reconfigured Apache as per the config from Comodo by adding this line to the virtualhost SSL configuration (replace $filename with the file location)

_SSLCertificateChainFile $filename_

Confirmed the config by running apachectl -t, then restarted apache
Reran the Qualys test and that showed up OK.

The next step was to remove the SSL methods vulnerable to POODLE and FREAK

The thin green line

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s taken a lot of changes, along with a hell of a lot of growing up to finally stabilize that line, and I’m feeling a lot more relaxed for having done it.

Before the graph started, I had a car crash that left me with permanent whiplash damage, changed jobs, moved houses a bunch of times and spent a lot of money on distracting myself from all of it. I ate terribly, exercised only sparingly and didn’t have a plan other than buy all the things!

I don’t care about your falsehoods.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

So, I posted this on Facebook a while back (I started writing this in June 2013):

I wonder if the increase in childhood obesity has a weak correlation with the programs to reduce bullying?

Originally it was based on a stupid line on an episode of 8 out of 10 cats, a crazy comedy show with Jimmy Carr and a bunch of other comedians. It got me thinking about how there’s strange correlations between so many things and it’s surprising where the data shows how things are linked.

Zettlekasten

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a strange word, and like many fascinating words it’s German. Zettlekasten basically means “index card” and refers to a system of organising your thoughts onto cards.

The modern equivalent for us techie folk would be something like a wiki, which would allow for more efficient searching and linking between concepts. It’s a fascinating idea and something I’m going to play with.

The article has a lot more explanation than I can add, and it’s well worth a read.

IPtables logging firewall blocks

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Basically we’ll set up another chain for it to be forwarded to, filter the packets to move them to the chain, then a logging command created to log if packets end up in that chain.

Enabling logging

We’ll need to know where to put the filter for the redirection:

$ sudo iptables -L --line-numbers
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
num target prot opt source destination
[snip]
10 DROP all -- anywhere anywhere

In this example, use line 9 on the second command.

New universal forwarder won’t connect to another forwarder

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Error on the sender end’s ($SPLUNK_HOME/var/log/splunk/splunkd.log)

02-18-2015 12:32:06.160 +1000 ERROR TcpOutputFd - Read error. Connection reset by peer

Error on the receive end’s ($SPLUNK_HOME/var/log/splunk/splunkd.log)

02-18-2015 12:31:14.423 +1000 ERROR TcpInputProc - Error encountered for connection from src=senderip:47960. error:140760FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:unknown protocol

I checked the certificate to make sure the common name is right:

sudo openssl x509 -text -noout -in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth/mycerts/sender.pem | grep Subj
Subject: C=AU, ST=Queensland, L=Brisbane, O=sender, OU=Company, CN=sender.example.com/emailAddress=foo@bar.com

/opt/splunkforwarder/etc$ sudo grep -i sender * -R

etc/system/local/server.conf:serverName = sender
etc/system/local/inputs.conf:host = sender
etc/system/local/outputs.conf:sslCertPath = $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth/mycerts/sender.pem

So, the common name on the certificate is different to the name presented by the server. I reissued the cert for the new server name, restart, still no no good.

Troubleshooting Ironport HTTPS Certificate Issues

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

SSL is great, except when you’re trying to audit access or filter things, let alone simple troubleshooting. Long story short, we run a Man In The Middle style system where our proxies are the HTTPS clients and they have an SSL certificate which all of our clients trust.

This relies on the proxies trusting the certificate chain, and these chains need to be updated periodically. Here’s an example of how to fix it when it goes wrong.

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is most definitely my favourite set of this year’s advent calendar! I hope you enjoyed the journey, I’ll be putting up a list of all the posts soon.

Have a merry Christmas!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Confluence draft-createpage.action on new page

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After I was making changes to my Confluence instance to enable SSL yesterday I was trying to document my work on our wiki.

When creating a page I’d click “Create” then select the template and set the title. Next, clicking create to start the new page action would start a download of a file called “draft-createpage.action”

One of the steps of configuring SSL is to set the new base URL to include the HTTPS port. I’d done that, including the new port but hadn’t changed the http to https. Making that change fixed the problem instantly! 🙂

Confluence, SSL and a Windows CA

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This documentation takes into account the extra steps required for installing a certificate and chain issued by a Windows CA when configuring Atlassian Confluence for SSL/HTTPS. This is basically a replacement for Step #1 in the aforementioned link.

In this example “$Confluence$>” is the Confluence install directory. I keep the .keystore file in this directory for my own tracking purposes.

Create the CSR on the Confluence server $Confluence$>jre\bin\keytool -certreq -keyalg RSA -alias tomcat -file certreq.csr -keystore .keystore

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A dark side fireplace

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Boot into the GUI after changing default user in raspbian

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As usual, when I go looking for something and it takes a while to find, I like to document it here as well. I found some information in this thread “Boot into the GUI after changing default user{.question-hyperlink}” in the Raspberry Pi StackExchange, but I had to modify it quite a lot (including the original post) to reflect the full changes required.

You can manually modify the raspi-config script as follows. Let’s presume we’re using the username “bob”.

Fixed a friend’s laptop today

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Toshiba T130, wireless decided not to play any more. I first thought it was the terrible Toshiba software which for some reason is used to enable and disable the hardware devices themselves. I guess it’s from ~2009 when wireless devices like Bluetooth and 802.11N took a lot of power, but really? Why not just utilise the OS?

I found there was a couple of possible issues with it.

Hardware

The issue we were having with this laptop was that the wireless adaptor was periodically not showing up, then it disappeared entirely (even after reboots, and a variety of things)

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A turkey dinner!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This has to be my favourite set of the calendar so far this year, an Imperial Speeder bike with a sack full of presents!

An imperial speeder bike, Christmas Edition!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday we had the snowmobile, today we’ve got the trailer, perfect for carrying presents across the snow!

A trailer for the snowmobile

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A friendly police officer ready for duty

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A snowmobile

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The perfect complement to yesterday’s snow speeder, a pilot to help win the war against the Empire!

A rebel pilot!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A cannon emplacement

Miss Silvia – my first!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So, as of 13/12/14, I’ve finally bought myself a coffee machine.

For $380 plus the cost of driving down to the Gold Coast, I scored a near-perfect example of the Rancilio Silvia. The only important thing missing (which I didn’t notice, in my excitement) was the tamper, but that’s easily sorted. 🙂

I’ve wanted one of these for a very long time - the simplicity and quality of the whole design just grabbed me from the get-go - and it didn’t hurt that the Silvia’s a well-respected piece of kit.

On Splunk crashing every 18 minutes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every 18 minutes, give or take ten seconds the Splunk heavy forwarder we run was spontaneously crashing. There had been no change in traffic or other conditions that we knew about on the ESX host the server runs on.

The operating system is Debian 7.2 x86_64, installed from the netinst ISO with a very minimally modified install, and the logs weren’t showing the OOM errors I’d been fighting with previously - 2Gb of memory for Splunk is never enough.

Using fail2ban to mitigate Apache POST flooding

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every so often a bot has a go at my poor little Linode, triggering a notification about CPU/memory/IO usage and I have to come up with a way of defending it. Today’s notification was about high CPU usage, as usual.

I toddled off to my handy (free) splunk instance and saw that this time it was an attack against my wordpress instance’s login page. I could see there were lots of 302 responses to POST requests, so it was an easy case for fail2ban to handle - something I’ve used before with great success.

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A dog, his bowl and some bones

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A SnowSpeeder, ready to cause trouble to the Empire!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A bobsled, ready for fun!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Who’s to say if he’s naughty or nice? Maybe he’s here to share the wealth during the holiday season!

Because I got myself all confused, this was originally posted as day 12. Apologies!

A man with a bag of jewels

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A young Luke Skywalker ready for adventure!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A remote control car!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The X-34 Landspeeder‘s probably the first one we see in the series and was made famous to us by Luke Skywalker’s owning one 🙂

Edit: Somehow I originally posted this as day 11, because I got up early and rushed. Apologies!

An X-34 Landspeeder

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An imperial pilot, ready for action!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A snowball catapult!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A wagon full of bread

Because really, who doesn’t love a wagon full of food for the holiday season? 🙂

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Jedi scout fighter

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A young girl off to the ice rink

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Snowtroopers are ready to go!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A cute little window scene :)

This one was a little curious to work out what it was supposed to look like behind the window - there’s no way to see other than the very tight view you get on the box 🙁

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I really like toys that do things, and this one’s a little special - you can press the grey piece on the side and it’ll shoot! It’s a very simple action too.

Turret

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A treasure chest full of yummy food :)

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A lovely lady with the world’s biggest croissant!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Weapons rack, ready for war!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

xmas is a time for pie and egg nog!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poor guy, doesn’t seem to want to be at the party though…

Festive trooper

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Frosty the snow man!

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A laser turret, ready to defend our forces!

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A B2 Super Battle Droid

This is the second B2 Super Battle Droid we’ve been given, the first one was on Day 21 of the 2012 Star Wars Advent Calendar 🙂

Lego City Advent Calendar 2014 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A young man off to the post office

Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar 2014 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Scripted mass-creation of WordPress posts

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So, the last couple of years I’ve been posting the Advent Calendar set of the day from the LEGO Star Wars and LEGO City box sets. The most mind-numbing part of this was creating the page and tagging it each day, so this year I decided to pre-populate the system with the posts ahead of time.

I leveraged some information on the net and a terrible PHP script, listed below. Whatever you do, I wouldn’t recommend using this on a production system without FIRMLY understanding what’s going on 🙂

proFTPd timing out while requesting LIST

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of locking down our servers we’ve been setting up host-based firewalls on one of our internal FTP servers.

The default thing was to deny access to everything but ICMP and SSH, good start.

Our first command was to only allow a given host access to port 21, FTP:

sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -s 10.1.2.3 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21 -j ACCEPT

This allows the client to connect:

splunk SDK notes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s an annoying one when building a custom splunk search command using the python SDK:

"Error in 'script': Getinfo probe failed for external search command 'testscript'"

This mean you have:

"supports_getinfo = true" set in commands.conf for that particular command
failed to set a docstring for one of the splunk elements within the command.
1. Check your instances of Option and set doc=""
2. Set a docstring for the class itself, but you already did that anyhow, didn’t you? 🙂

Another issue that may occur is this one:

Hairpin NAT on Mikrotik v6.19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So, when you have services available to the world through your external address/hostname, it’s nice to be able to access them via that as well. “Hairpinning” or Hairpin NAT is the term for the NAT redirection required to make this work.

Update 14/3/16: It’s been raised to me that it’s best to use split-DNS for this particular example, but it’s designed to be a simple one for documentation purposes. There’s much better ways of solving the problem, but:

you don’t always control DNS,
the service might be entirely IP-based - like IPsec,
the service might have different internal ports to what’s externally facing (and can’t be reconfigured)

Amongst a whole host of other reasons. Just trust me 😉

On winding a watch…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Blackburn - Julio Cortázar from Cronopios and Famas “The Instruction Manual”

(A Spanish Text)

Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch

Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it’s a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you—they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they don’t know it—they are gifting you with a new, fragile, and precarious piece of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you, it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than the others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they’re giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday.

IE downloading IPSW files as zip?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I had a friend trying to download the IOS 7.1.2 image for his iPhone 4 (which he’d just about bricked installing IOS8 on) and was having a weird issue.

It looks like if the server sends the content-type “application/octet-stream” it’ll try to download it with the extension .zip instead of the original extension. This is because of MIME sniffing, which only reads the first 200 bytes of the file to try and guess - rather than just trusting the server and not being a tool about it.

explorer.exe won’t open – cannot access the …

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Getting an error like this one?

Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

Open the registry editor as a local-administrator level account.
Look for the folder {CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2} which is under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node<wbr>AppID
There should be an entry matching the following:
- Name: RunAs
- Type: String
- Value: Interactive User
Rename this entry to _RunAs so it doesn’t apply any more. This will likely require you to add permissions to the folder giving you full control.

Voila, it should be working - remember to revert your permissions changes, they’re inconsequential.

What Tarot Card Are You?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You got: The Fool

Don’t take this card the wrong way. The Fool is associated with deep thoughts. You think about everything and form opinions based on all of your gathered evidence. You’ve been around the block, and have occasionally played the fool.

Seems entirely true to me.

The Fool

So, this blog was categorized as sex…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

(Un)fortunately my friend Jess reported it to websense and they reclassified it, but hey, I was sexy for a while…

MS SQL Server 2008 and getting access

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Couldn’t get into a 2008 SQL server today, whoops!

No one had the credentials so I had to get myself access. I found an article covering adding yourself via single user mode, but thought I’d add some more details for my own information and to cover missing info on that page.

Shut down any services related to SQL and anything that connects to it. The ones I shut down on the server side were:

Wireshark on OSX Mavericks

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So, Wireshark in Mavericks doesn’t work terribly well. If you install XQuartz and the Wireshark application then try to run it, it’ll just sit silently mocking you in the Dock.

There’s a few steps. First you want to add it to the Applications menu on XQuartz. Run XQuartz and then right click on the icon, select Applications, then Customize

Add a new item, and fill it out as below. This will allow you to run it from the XQuartz menu in future.

Cascade Shark not detecting new card

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So I’m installing a new NIC-CSK-210G in my Cascade Shark 2100. It’d start up fine but the new card wouldn’t detect. The NIC-CSK-4TX-X installed detected fine, but the other one didn’t.

When going to the “Interfaces” screen on the WebUI, I’d get a weird error:

If you waited a few seconds or clicked the “Retry Now” button, it’d log you out and kick you back to the login screen. Ugh.

Forcing F5 to synchronise time via NTP

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has [When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol) configured (System -> Configuration -> Device -> NTP) and that your handy firewall isn’t blocking the traffic (udp/123 folks!).

If that’s all good, and you can see traffic is flowing (you’ve got your firewall syslog flowing into Splunk, yeah?) The next trick is to check if NTP is even running.

Absolute power

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was once on a US military ship, having breakfast in the wardroom (officers lounge) when the Operations Officer (OPS) walks in. This guy was the definition of NOT a morning person; he’s still half asleep, bleary eyed… basically a zombie with a bagel. He sits down across from me to eat his bagel and is just barely conscious. My back is to the outboard side of the ship, and the morning sun is blazing in one of the portholes putting a big bright-ass circle of light right on his barely conscious face. He’s squinting and chewing and basically just remembering how to be alive for today. It’s painful to watch.

What’s listening on my ports in Windows?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it is good to know what is running on your machine - or if something is actually listening when you are trying to connect to that pesky server you thought you had running.

The command you want to run is:

netstat –anop TCP | find “LISTEN”

Ironport MID was too big for scanning by Outbreak Filters

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So I was trying to find out why we got this message in the message tracking logs for an email today…

Ironport MID 42780863 was too big (337410/262144) for scanning by Outbreak Filters

Due to size vs. speed concerns there is a limit to the size of items checked against the Outbreak Filters. I believe the default setting’s 128K, but it can be upped to increase efficacy at the cost of processing power.

portDB – a new little project.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve been maintaining my own little database of ports for my own records of late, just so that when I found something on a network I could go “oh, this is probably what it was. It was just a set of pages added to this blog, but that was fairly unmanageable.

I went looking for an easier way of building something and built portDB. So far it’s fairly simple, as these things should be.

Splunk error in auto-complete box

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I started getting this error on a user’s auto-complete box while trying to search in splunk because we’d failed to give them the correct capabilities.

The capabilities I had to apply were:

get_metadata
get_typeahead
rest_properties_get

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

And here we are, at the end of another year’s LEGO advent calendar. I hope you enjoyed my posts, if you missed any make sure to visit the tag page to see all the entries from this year (and other years) 🙂

Santa Claus!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Santa Fett

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today, the second last day of the 2013 City Advent calendar we have Santa’s Sleigh 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A speeder sleigh today, perfect for Santa’s multi-planetary deliveries 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have a toy excavator for the kiddies to play with 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The LEGO Star Wars code for today is Y12C34 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Tiny train for the kiddies!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So close to the end of the month now, it’s exciting!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have some toy planes for the children to play with! So very cute.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s set is a child ready to cheer on the launch of our wand-carrying space man from earlier in the month!

He’s ready for the launch!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have a scout trooper, ready for anything!

Imperial Trooper

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today, a continuation of the holiday racing theme - a race car for our friend to drive! Make sure to scroll past the first picture to see him in his fine new car 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Puppy Diary, day #13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Another successful day for the resistance!

We successfully escaped today, and firmly believe that our captor is none the wiser.

See our fine work? Is it not fabulous?

His pathetic plastic mesh was no match for the fury of our paws. The ground gave way to our might and we threw aside the giant timber plank in our way!

Once outside we found ourselves confronted by an even stranger sight, a huge monster wielding some sort of portable vegetation destruction device. We barked mightily and it realised that our power was akin to its own, offering the truce which we so truly deserved. Such is the power of our pack, even beings much larger than us fear our wrathful licking.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have some wheels, tyres and a tank for yesterday’s racing minifig. Because you can’t race without tyres!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s set is a nice little weapons rack for the trade federation. Who doesn’t love guns for the holidays? 🙂

Removing old linux kernel packages

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This works on dpkg based systems, so Ubuntu, Debian etc.

Now, don’t do this without knowing exactly what you’re in for. If you don’t know what kernel version you’re running or how to back up everything before you do it, please don’t come here complaining you broke your toys.

This is the final command:

I’d probably recommend running this first:

This will tell you the current kernel version that you’re running.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day the presents go under the tree, or they would if the thief didn’t have other ideas!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have a race mechanic, ready for the holiday racing season!

Ready for some holiday racing!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Puppy Diary Day #10 Our last hope

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

All we can do is try and try and try. Today we waited until our captor was in the compound and distracted by his portable entertainment machine before attempting another escape. This time we tried our final option, the gate wall.

We knew it was a risky move attempting escape through this path, as it had already been secured from an earlier incident. With the recent rains we have discovered that the soil is much softer and there was a lot of debris which made it quite easy to clear our path under the fence.

Splunk Web Interface SSL Certificates – Microsoft AD CA

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, at work we use an Active Directory Certificate Services CA for internal certificates, and I had to the So, at work we use an Active Directory Certificate Services CA for internal certificates, and I had to the boxes at work to use a proper certificate for authentication. Here’s the process (mainly so I can remember it in future!) You’ll need OpenSSL installed on your machine, if it’s windows, grab the Win32 OpenSSL binaries.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I very nearly posted this as the Star Wars set for today, but it’s the City one! Today we have a man in a space suit, ready to celebrate the silly season with his wands 🙂

Space Fairy?

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have one of the OOM-Series Battle Droids of the Trade Federation Droid Army, ready to silence any enemies…

OOM-Series Trade Federation Droid

Taco Spice Mix

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

1 tablespoon chilli powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

Originally from AllRecipes.com - “Taco Seasoning I”

Tacopalooza, slow cooking!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Decided to cook some taco mince… went a bit overboard…

1.5kg of cheap mince
6 small onions
4 chopped tomatoes
2 cans of diced tomatoes
1 can of beans
1 jar of salsa
1/2 mug of EPIC Taco Spice Mix

Brown mince, cook onions, dump some spice on while doing that. Drain fat.

Dump all in the slow cooker, we’ll see what it’s like in the morning.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s nearly half way through the month, so it’s time to put up the tree!

The tree, a place for presents!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s set is a great little BBQ, ready for grilling some sausages at lunch time!

A BBQ for lunch time!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have the All Terrain Tactical Enforcer (AT-TE) - a mighty assault vehicle for the battlefield.

All Terrain Tactical Enforcer (AT-TE)

Puppy Diary Day #6 – Adjustment

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you have to pause and take stock of your situation. After yesterday’s escalation by our captor, we decided to try and make our lives a little more comfortable while we can. The grass in the yard is comfortable enough for me to lie on when there is not another option, but for my poor friend the flat surface is torture.

She explained that in the past she has been able to find comfort in a curved surface such as a chair or a soft pillow, so we continued the excavation of a hole dug for a diversion tactic in the hopes of making do. It seems to have worked, and our captor did not instantly destroy it upon finding it. For a moment I felt he cared for us, but I am sure this cannot be true.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have a lady firefighter ready for work and play - though I’m not sure the jaws of life are a great way of holding a hot dog 🙂

Lady firefighter ready for anything!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Imperial soldier minifig

Puppy diary day #5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Grand Diversion

It was a good plan, possibly even great, but without teamwork great plans mean nothing. I know now that it was my fault, letting the stress of the situation get the better of me, but I’m young and can’t always help myself.

The day was spent working on two fronts - the diversion and our real goal.

First the diversion - a continuation of the dig along the northern boundary - we made sure to make as much mess as possible in the little time we had so that our captor would focus his attention on this. It worked, for when he returned from whatever he does while he abandons us to our thoughts, all he noticed was the dirt and spent some time outside cleaning it up.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s pieces are some food to share with the family over the holiday period!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s set works in concert with a previous set, giving our minifigs somewhere to sit while they share food 🙂

A bench for the family to sit at

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s 2013 Star Wars Advent Calendar code is Y30C03

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A fine imperial ship, ready for battle!

Puppy Diary Day #4 – Saturday

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dark times ahead for the prisoners of the bog. After yesterday’s escape, security patrols have increased exponentially. Our captor has not left us alone for more than a scant few minutes since dawn. He normally leaves us during the day, but I fear he may never do so again.

As happened after my successful breaching of the northern fence, security mesh has been imported from some horrible place; an attempt to limit our ability to escape his foul ghetto once more. While it hasn’t been installed yet, it can only mean trouble and delays for our cause. It will never stop us though, because our paws are mighty and our hearts are strong!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A fine table for the family to share their xmas cheer!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A fine rack of lasguns, perfect for xmas day

Puppy diary day #3 – Success!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today our plans came to fruition. We have spent many hours probing the walls of our ghetto, testing our captor’s designs. A chink was found in the base of the southern wall and we made our move.

Teamwork was essential in this endeavour, with both of us working furiously to widen the gap in the foundations of the wall. Our paws are truly mighty and we made our escape. As is our custom, I documented our escape route in the hope that future prisoners will be helped.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s minifig from the City advent calendar is a ne’er do well with a penchant for scarves and a bit of a coffee problem. Has anyone seen Cornelius?

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s minifig is a rebel from the Battle of Endor, ready to fight with his Ewok allies!

Puppy diary day #1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We have decided that since the gate and fences are secure that the only path for escape is to dig our way out. Since there are two of us, misdirection is being used: three holes were dug this day.

We will escape!

Cuteness duty is still mandatory, and while the pats disgust me, it is the only way to placate our evil captor. Such is my burden. I shall endure.

Puppy diary day #2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The terrible neighbour creatures continue to test the edges of our territory, invading with their slow lumbering walk and strange speech. Our tactic of warning them off while hiding behind the available terrain is working for now, so we will continue to use it until a better method is discovered. Our escape plans should allow us to invade their territory quite soon.

The weather was wonderful today, with a storm in the afternoon making our scent much stronger; this will help against the neighbours in the future. Only slight progress was achieved on one section of an existing hole. Our attempts to dig new holes were hampered by the soft ground, only small progress was made; hopefully it will be better tomorrow.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A winter-tastic tool rack.

I’m not sure what the handcuffs are for, but with the slightly menacing snow man and this one, we’re in for an exciting holiday period!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Snow man with his carrot

At first glance he’s just a snowman, but with the way he’s holding that carrot, and the top hat… I’m not sure he’s friendly! Be careful!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Y’know, I think I’m getting too old to keep up with wherever these ships are coming from!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a tiny puppy!

Who doesn’t love a tiny puppy 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What a funny little droid. Hopefully it hovers 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A cute little fireplace!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

No code today, just a little brown starship for exploring the galaxy 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2013 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2013 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nine.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I did nine knee-push-ups in a row this morning.

Doesn’t sound like many, until you realise I couldn’t do one to start with without taking a breather.

My upper body strength sucks, but I’ve been doing a Beginner Bodyweight workout for a few weeks every second day (or so, depending on what else I did) and I’m already noticing stark improvements. I wake up at about 5am most mornings (thanks, tiny puppy) then I get my ass down stairs and do some workouts, or some weeding.

Stop Ubuntu from asking for tzdata setup on upgrade

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every time I was running apt-get update I’d be asked to select the Area and Town/Zone my timezone was in, as part of the dpkg-reconfigure tzdata step.

If you run the command debconf-set-selections you can configure debconf’s internal database to store the defaults for the future.

The «EOF allows you to keep adding information until EOF is entered by itself on a line. This’ll set a few things - make sure you know which area and zone you want to use (you’ll have seen it when you get asked by tzdata).

Simple Cisco port forwarding

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the recipe for port forwarding on a cisco device - this is tested on a Cisco 877, but should work on any of the 800 series, 837, 887 etc etc. Anything that does NAT…

So if I wanted to send TCP traffic to port 125 on my router’s external adsl interface from the internet, and it show up on port 25 of the internal ip 10.0.0.2, I’d do:

Cisco 877 DSL Noise Margin Tweak

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On the Cisco 877 there is no default way to to fine tune the SNR margin if you are having stability issues.

There’s a diagnostics tweak which can be enabled to allow modification of the noise margin buffer. Be aware that making this change will instantly drop the connection.

Go into configuration mode and type the following, replacing x with a value between negative three and positive three (-3 -> 3)

Installing a new toilet roll holder

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s our victim for the day, a busted old toilet roll holder, held together with tape.

Remove tape, fall apart. This is why we’re replacing you, faded old piece of junk! One obvious screw (stripped thread, of course) to remove…

And it looks like we’re finding some sediment-layer-type history here… why bother removing something when you can paint over it?

Acknowledging events in Cascade Profiler via the command line

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

To check how many events have not been acknowledged via the command line, there’s an SQL query that can be run. You’ll need to login as the mazu user to your profiler and run the command.

psql mazu postgres -c “query goes here”

The field we’re looking for is called ack and is in either of the events tables. The current events are events.current_summary and completed ones are events.old_summary.

To get the number of open, un-acknowledged events, the command is as follows:

Cascade Shark filter weirdness…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Attempting to capture everything except (things on 172.0.0.0/8 and anything using port 1500).

The first part works, I don’t see any traffic on 172.0.0.0/8, but we’re still seeing port tcp/1500 traffic.

The device is a Cascade Shark 2100-series appliance running 10.0.6.

Facebook picture issue fixed :D

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, recently I’ve been having issues with pictures loading on Facebook. Basically everything else works, but random images just fail to load.

I was messing around with it this morning and noticed that chrome was stuck on “Resolving address…”

Popping open a terminal window, I tried to see if it was a DNS issue.

Well, that’s just weird. My DNS server’s running locally… oh wait. A few weeks ago, I’d been messing with host-based firewalls on some of my machines just as a learning exercise. Logging into the DNS server, I showed the firewall rules:

2013 LEGO Advent Calendars Available!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Now, I’m going to try to avoid ranting TOO much, but seriously LEGO, $29 for City or $39 for Star Wars in the US with $8 shipping, or $49 each with $30 shipping for Australians? What the hell?

With that over, the 2013 Advent Calendars have been released. Here’s the pictures I have so far of the LEGO City set, number #60024.

And for good measure, the 2013 Star Wars Advent Calendar is set #75023.

Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) syntax

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Qualifiers

The expression consists of one or more primitives. Primitives usually consist of an id (name or number) preceded by one or more qualifiers. There are three different kinds of qualifier:

type qualifiers say what kind of thing the id name or number refers to.

Possible types are host, net , port and portrange.

E.g., “host foo”, “net 128.3”, “port 20”, “portrange 6000-6008”.

If there is no type qualifier, host is assumed.

logstash tutorial weirdness

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So i’m running through the logstash simple tutorial and the first example throws this error:

I checked the stdout output plugin documentation and found that debug_format only accepts “ruby” or “dots” not “json”. You’d think they’d have sorted this… but no.

The configuration file you’re supposed to make is this:

But this is the working one:

Changing the logos on Cascade Profiler

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s quite easy, change the images located in the following directory:

The one you normally see in the top left is “logo_rvbd_profiler.png” - 106x50px in size. Replacing the image with another PNG will replace it just fine in the interface. If you make something bigger, it can occasionally mangle the page, so be careful 🙂

My Mission Statement

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I attended an eQ Events Personal Success Intensive course on 24/08/13. One of the parts of the course was to define my personal mission statement. Here it is, in its current incarnation. I’ll change it as it changes over time.

The Purpose of my life is to experience Freedom and Wisdom. My mission to accomplish this is through sharing my thirst for knowledge, experience and understanding of the systems of the world to enrich and improve everything around me.

Disabling weird new tabs in GMail’s new interface.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Click on the gear-icon in the top right to get the menu:
Click “Configure Inbox”
Untick all the things.
Click Save.

Et Voila!

Completely deleting services from Riverbed Cascade Profiler

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When you delete services from Riverbed Cascade they’ll sit in the list when running reports and so forth - which can be seriously painful over time. There’s a way to clear it out though!

ssh to the profiler as the “mazu” user
The following command will show you all deleted service policies: policycleaner –get-policies
To clean the DB of these policies policycleaner –purge-policies

Twenty four hours

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, it has been twenty four hours since I started using an iPhone as my primary phone. I have used them before to help friends, and have seen many many articles about them in the press, but haven’t actually strayed from the way of the droid.

I set myself the challenge to use an iPhone for a month so that I could genuinely understand the obsession (or justify my dislike) for the IOS platform in general. I have become increasingly unhappy with the android ecosystem, from the poor performance of the original Samsung galaxy s, to the issues on launch from the HTC one X. That doesn’t take into account the constant camera issues with the latter and … Other stuff.

Replacement motherboard = no network?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Linux udev is great but if you forget about it, it’s a pain. When you replace a motherboard/network card in a machine, you just expect the primary network device to be eth0 again, but with udev it’s not going to do it.

Ubuntu uses a file at this location to store the udev rules for network cards:

example of what’s in there:

Remove all the rules in the file, reboot and it should sort you out… there’s more complex ways of dealing with it, but I like hitting things with hammers. 🙂

And this is why we don’t use telnet

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately for us, our wireshark appliance is so inundated with traffic it can’t capture all the packets, but we’ve got enough here to brute force the password pretty quickly…

HP DC7900 ‘error during MEBx execution’ error fix

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When you get one of the following errors on boot for a DC series computer (including DC7800, DC7900, DC8100, DC8200

2231-ME error during MEBx execution
2232-AMT error during MEBx execution
2233-HECI error during MEBx execution

Their suggested fix is the following:

That seemed a bit stupid, replace the motherboard? Surely there’s another way. Rebooting it doesn’t normally fix much, but there’s a few things I read that seem to fix it.

Small cars for tall people – state of the nation July 2013

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My PRIMARY method for adding a vehicle to my “to buy” list is based on whether I can sit upright with good posture and still see out of the windscreen. I don’t care if I have to slide the seat all the way back and down, if I can sit upright and see, it’s on my list. If the only vehicle I could buy on the market cost $50k and was bright pink - I’d have a good look around the second hand market, then buy that pink money pit.

ICND2 at Dimension Data Learning Services Brisbane

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I knew I had to chronicle my week of Cisco somehow, and this is probably the best way to do it 🙂

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

ADSL Slow? Here’s a quick help rant.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, someone posted about their ADSL speed on Facebook, then asked me about how they can make things better. Meanwhile I got in a bit of an argument with a guy who runs one of those back yard computer shops because he said wireless would make a ~5mbit ADSL connection slower, and copied and pasted generic garbage from Bigpond’s help pages to back his point up. Ugh.

Scanned!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m running through our deployment of Riverbed Cascade at the moment and was checking traffic to an external host, noticed that it had gotten a hit from researchscan010.eecs.umich.edu on port 80. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if it was responding (having research in the name) and it did!

Cute 🙂

My first SCA Fighting Bruises

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I got authorized on the weekend, having some test bouts against Niall and Liadan, the crown prince and princess (and my good friends). It was an honour to fight them, and get clubbed like a baby harp seal. 🙂

Now I just have to learn to let the armour take the hit instead of my flesh 🙂

HTC One X Volume “stuck down”

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Driving to work this morning I tried to set my phone to make noise, since it’s on silent when I sleep. I unlocked it, pressed the volume up button, and it stayed stuck on silent. I could drag the volume slider up, but it’d instantly flip back to silent again.

Tapping the little speaker icon to set it to vibrate worked, which was odd. I thought the button was broken/stuck on, but it wasn’t showing the volume setting all the time, so.. meh?

Don’t laugh…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Of course I won’t laugh ,” said the Nurse to the patient , “I’m a professional. In over twenty years I’ve never laughed at a patient.”

“Okay then,” said Bob, and he proceeded to drop his trousers, revealing the smallest adult male organ the Nurse had ever seen in her life.

In length and width it was almost identical to a AAA battery.

Unable to control herself, the Nurse tried to stop a giggle, but it just came out.

Statseeker + VMWare ESX = Time Stopped

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that if you’re running a host that’s running ESX 5.0, there’s a bug with FreeBSD VM’s which causes the internal timer to just freeze. It’s fixed by a patch released for ESX version 5.0, or upgrading to 5.1.

This came up with a FreeBSD 8.3 guest running our Statseeker instance where the time just up and locked, then refused to go forward. A reboot would fix it, then it would lock up again at some arbitrary point in the future.

OpenVPN gateway inside Mikrotik router

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I set up an OpenVPN endpoint at home so I can connect to my home network and access resources relatively securely and easily. Originally this post was me beating my head against the table to get it right, but I finally did before I hit publish, so I could post it as a success!

Quick design specs:

My internal network is 10.0.0.0/24
The internal gateway is a Mikrotik RB750G on 10.0.0.1
The VPN gateway IP is 10.8.0.1, and the same machine has 10.0.0.2 on the internal network.
The VPN client(s) get assigned an IP in the range 10.8.0.0/24
Authentication’s done by certificates

The “pretty” view of the network is as follows:

Spam of the year

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This was posted as a spam comment on one of my posts today, and was so spectacular I couldn’t help but post it up. Putting it as text would have just helped the crazy monkey become more legitimate, so here it is in an image form, for your perusal. 🙂

The old woman and the gunslinger

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

An old woman prospector shuffled into town leading a tired old mule. the old woman headed straight for the only saloon to clear her parched throat.

She walked up and tied her old mule to the hitch rail. as she stood there, brushing some of the dust from her face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The young gunslinger looked at the old woman and laughed, saying “hey old woman, have you ever danced”

SCA Double Camping Bed Design Mk1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, ugly horrible metal bedframes suck. I needed to come up with a new design for a double-mattress supporting bed frame and here’s my first idea.

The Bed frame completed, in situ.

It comes in a few parts, two top pieces and two side pieces. There’s a minimum of parts to hold it together, with hard wood the frame should lock together with just friction and be all fine. I’m still working out ideas for the legs, but here’s my current thinking.

Family tree of Vincent van Gogh

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

His dizzy aunt - Verti Gogh
The brother who ate prunes- Gotta Gogh
The brother who worked at a convenience store - Stop N Gogh
The grandfather from Yugoslavia - U Gogh
His magician uncle - Where-diddy Gogh
His Mexican cousin - A Mee Gogh
The Mexican cousin’s American half-brother - Gring Gogh
The nephew who drove a stage coach - Wells-far Gogh
The constipated uncle - Can’t Gogh
The ballroom dancing aunt - Tang Gogh
The bird lover uncle - Flamin Gogh
An aunt who taught positive thinking - Way-to-Gogh
The little bouncy nephew - Poe Gogh
A sister who loved disco - Go Gogh
And his niece who travels the country in an RV - Winnie Bay Gogh

I saw you smiling . . .. there ya Gogh

Retired Green Beret Shoots Intruder, Stands Court Martial

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

BREVARD, Jan. 19, 2008 

Retired Army Green Beret Smokey Taylor got his court martial this weekend and came away feeling good about it.

Taylor, at age 80 the oldest member of Chapter XXXIII of the Special Forces

Association, was on trial by his peers under the charge of “failing to use a weapon of sufficient caliber” in the shooting of an intruder at his home in Knoxville, TN, in December.

Quick solution for pausing network hogs on tethered OSX devices

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As an Australian, we can’t get away from mobile data caps. It seems to be a bit of a recent issue with some people on the mainland too 🙂 Here’s a quick script I wrote to stop myself forgetting about things a while back.

Add this to your crontab (crontab -e from the terminal):

And put the following into a file (call it whatever you like, but the file path above must match it. Once you’ve made the file make sure to enable the execute bit by typing “chmod +x [filename]” in the terminal.

ISC DHCPd with IPv6 “subnet_number():inet.c:53: Addr/mask length mismatch.”

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re getting an error along the lines of this in your syslog while trying to start a DHCPv6 server, you’ve probably got IPv4 ranges in your config file. It seems if it’s in IPv6 mode it can’t deal with IPv4 information being in the config file. :S

So, rip the IPv4 information out of your /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf file and you should be good to go.

Disable Facebook Notification Sounds

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook being noisy recently? It started for me too, but this is how to fix it.

Try going to this link: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications&view
If that doesn’t work, click on the little gear/settings icon in the top right, then account settings. Once that loads, click on “Notifications” on the left. You should see a screen like this:

Un-tick the box that says “Play a sound when each new notification is received” and click “Save Changes”. You should see a screen similar to this:

Recipe for a cheap DIY photography light box

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ingredients:

1x 57lt white plastic storage crate
3x $6.90 lamps
3x 20w fluro lights (get cool white if you can)
1m cheap white satin dress material

Method

Remove stickers from crate, cut thumb
Flail wildly and cut a big hole in the side of the crate with inappropriate tools
Lay the white material smoothly along the base and up the back of the box
Assemble the lamps
Put one lamp on top, one each side all pointing inside
Shoot, adjusting settings to taste.

Werribee Open Range Zoo Part 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

They had a baby Zebra on site - only a couple of months old. He didn’t really understand the whole running thing - quite derpy in fact 🙂

Cute baby Zebra

Hippos!

This is what you mainly see of the hippos.

It took a bit of lucky timing to get a good photo of the Hippos, they spent 95% of the time underwater.

Werribee Open Range Zoo Open Vehicle Adventure Pt 3 – Giraffes!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Giraffes! Tall, nervous and spotty. The only creature humans keep in captivity that lasts LESS time than in the wild. Something about how nervous they are in general.

I’m fairly sure this one’s called Ajali. Either way, he seemed really inquisitive when we arrived. As you can see, he even had a lick of the antenna. The guide said that every time they have a hire vehicle in the enclosure - when one of theirs breaks down - the giraffes will steal (or try to) the antenna in short order 🙂

Coffee plus laptop equals bad.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Hp pavilion dv1000

s/n CNF5480L21

p/n PY869PA#ABG

keyboard p/n 367778-001 $140ish

Thank you for contacting HP Chat. If you need further assistance, please visit our website or contact us again via Chat or E-mail.

yaleman : The keyboard is damaged and I require details to replace it. Part number, price and or a contact company to purchase one.

[An agent will be with you shortly.]

[You are now chatting with Rangan .]

Exit code -2147467259 “Failed to execute script”

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Program: SCCM Client Center

Attempting: Show Execution History Button

Error: Exit code -2147467259 “Failed to execute script” next to the package name

Things to check:

The machine is probably running Windows 7 Enterprise - check your package structure to ensure it works properly

Finding membership of multiple SCOM 2007 Collections and subselects

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

all computers at a particular site (CollectionID ANN00086)
which had particular software packages

SCOM 2007 reporting seemed to be the way to go, so after a few iterations I came up with this friendly behemoth.

Now let’s break it down…

These are fairly normal, we’re looking for the system name and collection name.

My Frank Shaving Brush Died :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Werribee Open Range Zoo Open Vehicle Adventure Pt 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

While I was in Melbourne I went to the Werribee Open Range Zoo. One of the tours they offer is the Open Vehicle Adventure, where you get an hour or so in the back of an off road vehicle with close access to many of their amazing animals 🙂

Once we got loaded up in the vehicle, we got the usual safety tips along the lines of “don’t leave, don’t reach out, don’t touch things, we’ll be fine!” And then off we went. The first pen’s about an acre in size, with few fences other than to keep main groups of animals apart.

Werribee Open Range Zoo Open Vehicle Adventure Pt 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you started here, try part one!

Zebra

Next up were the Rhinos, which the guide described as just like big puppies, who like to come and say hello to new visitors. Thankfully this guy didn’t decide to come and play, because a tonne and a half of snuggly puppy makes for quite a dented truck.

Rhino Male

Girls birthday night

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Having three family birthdays in as many weeks is ok when you’re in school and a family dinner is pizza, but these days it’s a restaurant affair. So, we’ve merged it into one and tonight was 2013’s event. Singaporean place in Runcorn, wasn’t bad… spicy Kung Pow Chicken was great 😀

You’d be excused for thinking that it was Elliot’s birthday, but with his cuteness, the close quarters and my limited shooting range he gets the lion’s share of the attention as usual 🙂 <3 my new 50d 😀

52 Lists Week 3 : Favourite Childhood TV Shows

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m terribly behind on the 52Lists thing, so I’m playing catch-up. 🙂 Favourite childhood shows is an interesting one, especially since everyone’s got a different temporal availability of shows 🙂

Captain Planet
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Pingu
Gumby
Sesame Street
Cartoon connection
Recovery (ABC Weekend morning show)
Daria
Grogs
Dinosaurs
Banana Man
Duck Tales
Totally Wild
He man
Power Rangers

deviantart | HTPstock

Changing an IP in a config file with sed

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

While updating the configs on a bunch of our Cascade Shark appliances I had to do it via SSH (yay for someone stuffing the RADIUS configurations!)

sed’s neat, but of course anything with regex can make you angry. Once I’d tested it a bunch of different ways I went with this. The cat’s are for my own checking – I copy and paste the terminal into a big “log of my brainfarts” when doing stuff at 5am.

52 Lists Week 2 : Jobs I Have Had

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I think this covers most things… not in order. I have to say that Incident and Problem Manager would have been the best - making sure what gets broken is fixed again - were I not hobnailed by a mad management team. 🙁

Brochure Delivery
Service Station Attendant
Pizza Shop (Maker/Manager x2 - Eagle Boys and Pizza Capers)
Pizza Hut call centre
Mobile Phone Customer Care (and manager)
Wireless/3g Internet Customer Care
Graphic Design / IT Whipping Boy / Web Manager / Secretary - all in one of course.
Computer Retail Screwdriver Monkey
Database Mangler
Web Coding
Web Server Manager
Network Operations Centre script-monkey
Computer Service Centre agent
ICT Incident and Problem Manager
Small Business IT Whipping Boy
Spammer
Paging and Directory Services Call Centre

Online shopping can save you money…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

… especially when you don’t have to walk past the cabinet offering Canon 50D bodies for $399.

My long suffering 350D has given me some hilariously reliable service and has some great bumps and scratches on it, but seeing that price today really sold me on upgrading it. I did actually walk away, going away for exactly two and a half hours before rushing back to secure a shiny new-ish toy.

My (new) precious… marks around the flash are just finger-dust.

52 Lists Week 1 : Suburbs (or Towns) I Have Lived In

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the list:

Mareeba
Murgon
Culburra Beach
Yerongpilly
Carina
Springwood
Burleigh Waters
Burleigh Heads
Mt Gravatt
Clayfield

Not a huge list, but a list nonetheless 😀

Strange road indeed…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was driving to the Werribee Open Plains Zoo and I saw this sign. It was at the entrance to a farm, and the road looked fairly long, so .. yeah. Legit I suppose.

A little further down the road, there was this. That’s definitely not a 30k road, unless you do a few laps!

Now that’s just silly. I blame the fact that I was lost and slightly high on excitement from surviving shopping in Werribee (is it as stabby as it seems?) but this definitely isn’t 10 km long.

E388 error in vim on OSX

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It seems when I’m working too quickly and swapping between Chrome and vim I’ve hit Cmd+R and done something horrible. I get a “E388: couldn’t find definition” error when trying to use the (mainly) left arrow key to move around.

A quick fix was found on a twitter post about the issue, and all you need to do is type:

Then hit enter. It’ll probably prompt you to hit enter again after a bit of screen-flashy.

Cycling and swimming, oh my. Ramblings.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Blah blah journal incoming.

So I figured that driving to the pool was a silly idea, it’s only about 7km according to Google maps! Then again, there’s the whole “I haven’t ridden my bike since before I was sick” thing. Suffice to say, braving Old Cleveland road at 4pm wasn’t the most fun idea… especially with the amount of storm debris that was laying around. It seems that most of that 7km is uphill on the way to the pool, ugh.

Linode swapper/0 Page allocation failure issue

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Enabling Riverbed Cascade Shark Profiler Export via SSH

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was attempting to reconfigure one of our Shark devices this morning and couldn’t use the web interface - RADIUS authentication had been half-configured, setting it to lock things down but with no way to allow me to reconfigure things (even with the admin account) After a little swearing I realised I could SSH into the Shark and reconfigure it that way.

It’s a fairly standard Fedora 10 build, with the Pilot software installed in /opt/local/pilot

Pattern based rename of files with spaced names

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My amnesiac 350d lost its date as usual and I accidentally set the date to 2012 instead of 2013, making the EXIF data and filenames all wrong when importing them through Dropbox’s file import.

Rather than going through and doing it one by one I figured scripting it would work. One-liners were breaking bash’s ability to play nice so I had to make a little file, and here it is.

Basically:

Shit or get off the pot

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

That’s what they say, just do it or get out. In this case the editor. I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to be writing, but I’ve said to myself that I’m going to write more so I should actually do it once in a while.

Cabin fever, I guess you could call it - I’ve been sick for over two weeks now. Went to work for half a day the friday before last, it’s now two Sunday’s later. I feel a bit better now, but that’s how I felt that Friday morning. The wind’s going absolutely mental outside, some was-cyclone is hovering around and causing all sorts of crazy posts on FaceBook.

On communicating your intentions

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Just like in many situations throughout life, communication is the key. If you’re intending to do anything at all in a carpark, it’s generally best to indicate your intentions. A tonne and a half of steel and squish isn’t something you want to surprise someone with!

Flailing your arms, yelling, honking and flashing your lights are sure-fire ways of communicating poorly. Yelling’s only going to make your passengers cringe, unless you’re right next to each other and everyone has their windows down. The other, more visual methods are alright for attracting attention, but other than that you’re generally just adding confusion.

Doxycline and Septrim, the source of vampires?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I tend to look up the medication doctors give me, mainly so I know what I’m taking and what its interactions are.

I got sick about a week ago, and the doctor prescribed me Doxycycline.

I checked it out and started with “Wow, it’s even used for preventing Malaria!” Then again, it cures the plague, anthrax, the clap, pneumonia and a whole bunch of other horrible things.

I’ve been given this for something I thought I picked up at the pool? Holy shit!

Small Films, Big Hits

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s amazing what small film-making houses can come up with these days. I can honestly say after finding ShortOfTheWeek I’m utterly addicted. They’re these tiny slices of amazing ideas that just drag you in and if they’re good (I haven’t seen one yet that wasn’t) they’ll leave you wanting for more. It’s almost like getting blue-balled over and over again.

I tripped into it after checking out a post on io9 about 9 Amazing Short Films That Will One Day Be Feature Films. Honestly, if you’re into any kind of science fiction and don’t spend half an hour checking out every video in that post, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

c’est la fin

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.

Dearest creature in creation,

Study English pronunciation.

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy,

Why I hate our monitoring team…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Urgh, I hate our monitoring team some days. I was off sick for four days and come back to this in one of our generic accounts. I’ve got filtering set up, but for various reasons I can’t delete them permanently, just bin ’em.

17,306 Deleted Items. WHY?

To those that run monitoring systems, please listen to the people you’re sending things to - when they say they don’t need to get notified on EVERYTHING - they probably mean it.

Salmon Risotto

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Modified from a Salmon Risotto recipe on food.com.

Ingredients:

250 g salmon, skinned and cut in to 1cm cubes
250 g arborio/risotto rice
500 ml chicken stock (hot, ready to use)
125 ml white wine
1 tbsp. oil
1 tbsp. butter
1 large onion, finely chopped
1/4 tsp. dill, finely chopped
3–5 sun-dried tomato pieces, finely diced
parmesan cheese to taste, grated

Directions:

In a risotto pot heat the oil and butter, then add the onion and cook for 4 minutes, until soft.
Add the rice and stir for 2 minutes or until the rice is transparent.
Stir in a ladleful of the hot stock, and a little wine. When all the liquid is absorbed, add a further ladleful of stock and wine. Continue adding the stock and wine, until the rice is cooked and has a creamy consistency.
Add the salmon, dill, sundried tomatoes and parmesan. Stir until salmon is poached.

Season with parmesan and serve.

The Parking Fairy

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Fairies are a common theme in many cultures, they come in infinite shapes and sizes. They delight in bringing good will or bad times to people for many reasons - and sometimes no reason at all!

Many small children are taught to believe in the Tooth Fairy, that wonderful little pixie that trades calcium deposits for change. Invoked by leaving a tooth under your pillow or beside your bed when you sleep, you’ll wake to a gift and the removal of the bad seed that lived in your mouth.

You should burn for what you’ve done…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I hope it hurts, you should burn for what you’ve done…

Hell of a thing to say to someone.

Least of which a stranger.

I’ve made some thoughtless remarks in the past, some hateful ones, and some very well thought out insults - but this one was a surprise!

I was on the receiving end, hopping from heel to heel behind my car on a ridiculously hot day while trying to put some things in the boot. Not quite hearing her at first, it took me a second; then it registered - she’d actually said that to me. It took another second or so for me to figure out my perceived crime.

When Torture Isn’t Terrifying?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was reading an article about Obama’s new security heads and noticed an interesting comment where it mentions senator John McCain being a Vietnam POW:

Republican Senator John McCain, whose experience as a POW in Vietnam has made him a strong critic of the use of torture even while he supports all other conservative national security positions…

I wonder what will happen when the last of the American soldiers from the largely personnel-based wars - WW2, Vietnam, Korea - dies and those fears fade away?

Old Man’s War – John Scalzi

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was watching the latest episode of the Sword and Laser book club when they did their kickoff for the January 2013 book club. I’d been meaning to see if I can follow along with it, because while I have many books to read, it’s been hard for me to get around to actually committing to reading them.

They reminded me in the show that it was in the book Humble Bundle which I took part in and promptly forgot about 🙂 So I pulled it from data storage and had a look, being instantly sucked into the story.

We, the Data Nazis

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Workmate: How many ADSL things are broken?

Me: Only seven today!

Workmate: Hooray!

Me: It’s my achievement of the week!

Now if only I gave a f*ck about any of the rest.

Then they’d dance in glorious floods of bandwidth…

… where floods are tiny trickles meted out by us, the data Nazis.

Workmate: You so crazy

Me: I make sense to me!

Yep, I get really bored with daily reports.

Crosswalk Chicken

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Do not look up, for eye contact is the last thing you want. The possibility that you (the walker), and they (the driver) have noticed each other is be discounted at all costs. Thus the battle of courage begins - who will stop first - who indeed, will yield the hallowed stripy ground? This is played by many in the carpark, and lost by few - though invariably it’s inattention on one party’s side rather than true courage that leads to injuries.

Life of Pi

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to spoil this from the start: GO SEE THIS FILM NOW.

Directed by Ang Lee, based on a book by Yann Martel, I went to see it tonight with RMB. Words to describe this experience are hard to find.

There has (and will continue to be) many, many things written analysing the amazing story told by both of these works, and I don’t feel the need to add my terribly uninformed opinion to the flow.

Motorcycle Parking – Car drivers

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Take note, if you park your four-wheeled contrivance in a motorcycle parking bay, you’re probably asking to be keyed. Bike parking spots are limited at the best of times, normally ten or so in a facility of thousands for cars - and yet car drivers complain when a “bike takes up a whole park”.

Well, you have people like this to blame…

How not to park your car - unless you hate your paint.

What could possibly be less exciting?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that I’m being followed by a fantasy account, woo! Why do they do this? Are they trying to scrape more importance by changing their following:followers ratio, or does this strange Canadian posing as a Mad American think I have something to contribute? 🙂

A buttefly flaps its wings…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure how much sense it’ll make to anyone else, but this was a hilarious (to me) train of thought when a moth caused me to trip in the bathroom, grab the shower wall and steady myself.

Bored pondering turned to hyperbole, wondering how far that turn of events could have taken. Grab the shower curtain, slip on a mis-placed bottle, take out the toilet cistern and flood the house? Fall through the thin gyprock wall and take out the power to the house, causing a fire and burning down the street? It’s the thing of children’s fiction, amazing campfire stories or timeless mythology.

PHP for dealing with IP Address searching

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, we’ve got a home-grown device/IP/network management system at work. Backend’s Postgres/PHP, front end is horrible and hilariously ugly. It works, mostly. Since I’m the only one with any skills in the space, it falls to me to find ways to Make Things Better.

Today’s fun was making the search box a little less horrible - searching for devices in in a subnet wasn’t easy unless you wanted to find the subnet’s location, then drill down from there.

The road to Tough Mudder

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So, the xmas period is over, with the requisite gorging oneself on food and drink. I don’t have a set of scales so I can’t punish myself with the thought of weight gain - good!

Walked over 10km yesterday, it took about two hours, exactly what google maps said it should (seeing as I spend half the time stopping to SMS people, :))). I took my 5kg red ball with me, certainly is a good way to work the wrists and hands, I was sore as crap by midnight.

SW-Motech ALURACK on my 2004 Suzuki SV650s

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick couple of photos of the installation of the aforementioned rack. I got it from RMB for xmas 🙂

I’ve been looking for a low profile way of carrying things on my bike, and this was the least offensive looking option. Givi’s rack looks like someone gave the apprentice a pipe bender and said have at it. 🙁

It’s a rather simple affair, with a couple of spacers sit where the original rear handle bar mounted, a couple more into the helmet hooks and bob’s your aunty. They sell adaptor modules to take all the major brands of top boxes, but at this stage I just like that I’ve got a flat, solid place to tie stuff to 😀

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure no one will mind that I’m a little later with this post - it’s only one year and one day late 🙂

Santa and a fire place

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Santa and his modern sleigh

Technology helps all of us - why would Santa not take advantage of motorised methods for delivering presents - giving the reindeer a much-needed night off 🙂 This is the third snowmobile set I’ve gotten from the Advent Calendars so far - I’m really starting to get a collection 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 24

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sith Santa :)

This one should come as no surprise to anyone - it takes up 1/4 of the front of the box 🙂 It’s definitely a nicely designed interpretation though, with a cool little cape and a fuzzy hat 🙂

This won’t be the last post for the LEGO Advent Calendars for 2012, I’m going to do some overview shots and a “list of the codes” post just in case. These will come after christmas as I’m sure tomorrow will be busy for all of us.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dog with bones

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Presents for everyone!

Presents are what they’ve made this time of year into, so let’s have some!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Gear rack with extinguisher and axe

Just what the firefighters need - gear to help them fight fires! This extends the wall found in other days of the 2012 calendar.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Skater boy

The gray hat might be a beanie, but I’d like to think it was a skate helmet, perfect for the little boy to use the skateboard found in day 7 of the 2011 calendar.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 23

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a snow-droid!

Today’s set is really cool - took me a few seconds to work out what it actually was, but it’s a snow-droid! Complete with top hat, coal eyes and carrot gauges 🙂

The LEGO Star Wars code for day 23 is 9494.

Only one day to go!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Police Snowmobile

A different colour scheme snowmobile to the one on day 20 - with the tow point again and you can imagine some cool chase scenes with this one 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Firefighter’s Trailer

This is a great little trailer that hooks onto the bike from Day 11 and slides along the snow 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 22

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sith Infiltrator - I’ll admit I found this on Fruitless Pursuits

‘ Post :)

LEGO City 2011 Advent Calendar Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Cargo sled

This is an additional set to go with yesterday’s snowmobile - it hooks on and carries presents to all the girls and boys 🙂

LEGO City 2012 Advent Calendar Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Traffic cones

Another cute set for the last run to the end 😀

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A super-cool snowmobile :D

This has to be one of my favourite sets from the 2011 Advent Calendar so far - it’s a bright orange/dark grey snowmobile, ready for fun and something completely different 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Wheelbarrow for cleaning up snow :)

It’s the little details that make LEGO so great - the things for minifigs to do - or the text on the tyres of the wheelbarrow. Enjoy!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 20

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a LEGO fan, what IS this? 🙂

Thanks to Thiji, it’s a Belbullab-22 Starfighter! A highly modified version was famously piloted by General Grievous

More and more I realise I’m a fan of LEGO and classic Star Wars, not the more modern stuff - any ideas as to what this one is? 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 21

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

B2 Super Battle Droid

With my limited photographic equipment it was rather a challenge to get this even half working today 🙂 I might have another go later when I’m not so sleepy 🙁

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Safe with Gold

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Fireman with a cup of drink

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 19

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Trade Federation AAT
Sheathipede-class transport Shuttle

I’m not sure I got the name right, but it looks to be the closest thing I could find 🙂

Update: It’s a Sheathipede-class transport Shuttle

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9525

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A robber and his crowbar

I think there’s a hidden message here - if you have bad dental hygiene, it’s a life of crime for you! Brush your teeth kids!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the dog and a fire hydrant :)

Ever since I saw the documentary (which I can’t find now :( ) on how the LEGO dog was designed, along with all the other bricks I’ve wanted to buy every set with him in it. I’m not a dog person, but it’s a cool little part 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Seraph Class urban landspeeder

The code for day 17 is 9526.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 18

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Rebel snow fighter

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9498

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The body of the police cruiser

Continuing on from yesterday’s police cruiser chassis, today’s kit was the body 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Police car lights and windscreen

Day 17’s kit is another step towards finishing the police cruiser. The chassis we got on day 15, and the body on day 16. It’s quite nice looking, though very different to the police cars you see in the LEGO City range.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first minifig I’ve got with the half-size non-movable legs. Kinda different 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

2012 Snowball launcher

This snowball launcher isn’t quite minifig scale - unless they’re going to jump on that red launcher platform!

It’s also quite different to 2011’s snowball launcher on Day 2, which was more suited to minifigs and their fun 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 16

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Please feel free to tell me which one this is 😀

Update: It’s the Nubian Royal Starship Thanks Tom!

A late post for me today, having a lazy Sunday 🙂

The LEGO Star Wars code for day 16 is 9496.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The beginnings of a patrol car?

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Breathing Equipment Rack

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 15

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Imperial Snowtrooper

An intimidating enemy indeed 🙂

Today’s code is 9495

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A forensics desk with real working magnifying glass :D

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A bin on fire..

And ya’ll know, this is why we can’t have nice things 🙁

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 14

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A minifig scale weapon rack

Complete with blaster rifle, normal size blaster and a light saber

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9676

Tough Mudder Brisbane 2013. 245 days and counting.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Tough Mudder. Going by the stories, it really does live up to its name. 20km course, insane obstacles, lots of crazy people.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve got 245 days to go from thirty-year-old rapidly-expanding-everything geek to someone that can survive this event. Did I mention it’s on my birthday next year?

Happy birthday me!

Today was my first “official” exercise attempt, going for a power walk until I got bored with it. I’d say “until it hurt” but that lasted until about 200 meters, the first time I tried to jog. Suffice to say, my ankles and shins said no to that in short order. So I kept walking, at what one would call a brisk pace. I tried a few times to jog, but ~120kg and historically terrible joints don’t go well.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Police guy :)L

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A command centre desk for controlling a fire scene

I’ve seen more of these in real life than I’d ever thought to want to, and this is a cute representation of a much-needed resource when the fire’s raging.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 13

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

GNK Power Droid

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9491.

This is a cute little droid which provides much-needed power to units around it 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another part of the police station wall

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another section of police station wall

Now I’m not creative enough to normally criticize any decisions that LEGO has made, but this is a little disappointing. I was shocked that people would pay out on the MTT in this year’s Star Wars set - but now I understand. I feels odd to have a whole big thing coming together day by day, and was a little bit of a let-down after being given little sets that are fun while standing alone…

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Fireman’s ATV

I think it’s cute that they’ve crossed the days, probably wanting us to use the wheels from yesterday to make this baby roll 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A lady firefighter ready for duty!

I love the hair on this minifig - it flows over her shoulders and sits just nicely. 🙂 I have to say it’s nice that they made a woman firefighter too.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After my friend Jess mentioned that I’d found myself a 2011 Advent Calendar and had been posting it up thinking it was a 2012 one, I had to scrabble to find the right one (justifying LEGO 101: Temporal Accuracy!) So… I’m playing catch up and here’s day 3.

A shout-out has to go to ToysEtc, their shipping process must be great because they got my calendar to me in under 24 hours. They also tend to have some good sales on, so they’re worth checking out 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 11

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

P-Tower Laser Cannon

By the coloration I thought it was an Empire weapon, but it seems that it was used in the Battle of Hoth by the Rebels 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 12

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry for the photos today, I really need to improve my photography situation, and I was in a rush 🙂 Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll have built a little “studio” to make the photos a big cleaner 🙂

Rebel Snow Fighter

The LEGO Star Wars code for day 12 is 9497.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Teach a man to fish… and he’ll never go hungry.

A cute one for today, a fish on the end of a little rubber whip/rod and a fire to cook it on.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The AT-AT was always one of my favourite “bad guy” vehicles, with its loping walk and huge firepower. It just seems so adorable now in micro scale, like a little puppy 🙂

The terrifying AT-AT

Today’s LEGO Star Wars game code is 9489.

Camp Chef HWD5 On-demand Hot Water – First Looks

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I started camping with a group of my friends from the SCA. The SCA is a large group of medieval re-enactors, and while we stay in big tents and don’t have electricity, we still have running water, toilets and some of the other niceties of life 🙂

We had a couple of Coleman On-Demand Portable Water Heater systems, but they were finicky, dropping out regularly and requiring small expensive LPG canisters and constant refilling of their water bottle because they couldn’t be connected to mains water. Their $400 cost wasn’t particularly inviting either if we wanted to scale up.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

All rugged up and ready to chop :)

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 10

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Logistics is as important as the firemen themselves - without them they’d never get anywhere 🙂

Spare wheels/tyres for the firetruck

Find the 2012 LEGO City Advent Calendar on Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The mechanic, ready for work :)

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Imperial trooper ready for anything :)

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9516

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A park bench and coffee cups

A perfect place for a police man and friends to chill out and caffeinate 🙂

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Winter fireman’s ready room, with Skis!

It’s the simple little sets that bring so much detail to the LEGO universe - skis and poles with a little rack for them to be stored on when not in use 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 8

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Can anyone tell me what this is? (Update: thanks to my readers, I’ve found it’s a Vulture Droid)

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t seen a LEGO skateboard before, so this is super cute 🙂

A skateboard and some presents :)

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A micro scale fire truck and police car?

Find the 2012 LEGO City Advent Calendar on Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I feel this is a great example of how flexible you can be in a couple of directions/dimensions with LEGO. The way it goes together is great 😀

Naboo Starfighter

Today’s LEGO Star Wars code is 9675

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Oh Christmas Tree!

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

OOM-Series Battle Droid

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

The code for today is 9500

Unsub from all the things!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I posted this earlier today and got in the unsubscribing equivalent of a wiki-loop…

Today I unsubscribed from this EPIC list of sites. All I had to do was go through my email trash folder and click on a few links after all 🙂

AliExpress
Animi Causa Boutique
Apple (seperate to iTunes?)
Arbor Networks
Big Day Out
Book Depository
Brews Brothers
Brownells
CatchOfTheDay (again)
Co-Op Bookshop
DealExtreme
Driza-Bone
EachBuyer
Easy-Forex
EB World
Fishpond
Flightaware
GE Creditline
Gelaskins
GetGames
HobbyKing
iTunes
Instructables
J!nx
JB Hifi
Kickstarter
Little Bird Electronics
Lulu
Mac App Store
Menulog
Minidisc.com.au
Newrelic
NinjaKiwi
NIOA
Noodle Box
OffTheGrid
OZBargain
Peters of Kensington
Pizza Hut
Pureman
Queensland Holidays
Quest Software
Quirky
RACQ
RealVNC
Reddit Gifts
RS Components
Ruger
Sony Connect
Spotify
StudentVIP
Sugarsync
Texas Instruments
The Mens Shop
Thinkgeek
Ticketek
TomTom
ToysEtc
Urban Outfitters
Vistaprint
Warcom
Wargaming / World of Tanks

I stayed on these lists only because they’re actually useful.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another wall to the jail!

This matches up with yesterday’s set to make a little jail!

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com

Update: It seems I’ve found myself a 2011 calendar, but have been doing it in 2012, go me!

LEGO City Advent Calendar Day 5 – Bonus Pictures!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I thought since the sets were coming along, and we’d built the jail with parts from Day 4 and Day 5, it would be nice to grab some extra pictures!

LEGO City Bonus Photo Day 5 - Police Man

LEGO City Bonus Photo Day 5 - Jail

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Jail Cell

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Update: It seems I’ve found myself a 2011 calendar, but have been doing it in 2012, go me!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Stairs and a fairy wand

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 4

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s a special one for me - I’ve wanted one of the large Star Destroyer sets since I first saw them, but this is so cwute! 😀

Microscale Star Destroyer!

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Trade Federation MTT

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Buying a Rifle or Shotgun in Queensland

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You should receive a letter showing your updated list of firearms ownership in a few weeks.

FAQ

It’s been a long time and I haven’t heard! If it’s been a month since you submitted paperwork, call weapons licensing on 07 3015 7777. Ask simply if they have received your paperwork and if they have a case number yet.
**What storage is required for these firearms?

** According to my interpretation of the Weapons Regulations (1996) Section 60 (Queensland), for Cat A/B weapons: * You are required to store your firearms unloaded in a locked container with the bolt removed or the action open. * The container must be rigid and made of solid steel or timber. * If it weighs less than 150kg, it must be securely fixed to the floor or frame of the structure it is in. * The locking mechanism must be a sturdy combination/padlock or other keyed lock. * This storage does not need to be at your primary place of residence - for example I have all my firearms stored at my friend’s house, where there is sufficient storage which meets the above requirements. * Handguns/Cat H are different, basically only metal and needs to be bolted to the frame regardless of weight.

Getting your Category A/B Licence in Queensland

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You will need a genuine reason to obtain a Category A & B Firearms Licence. If you become a Member of S.S.A.A. you can then list your genuine reason as Sports & Target Shooting and Recreation & Hunting, as they are an approved body prescribed under the law. Join the club by either filling out the paperwork online or visiting an SSAA range. There are many other organisations available which can give you eligibility, but that’s outside the scope of this article.

Once you’ve started the process, it’s time to buy your firearm! You can start the process before your licence is issued.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Police Man with Handcuffs

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Update: It seems I’ve found myself a 2011 calendar, but have been doing it in 2012, go me!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe a Gungan snowball thrower?

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A chainsaw and tree, perfect for fire prevention :)

The simple ones are the best, and I love anything involving more chainsaws 🙂

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A Gungan - maybe not Jar Jar Binks? :)

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Robber with a Snowball

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Update: It seems I’ve found myself a 2011 calendar, but have been doing it in 2012, go me!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2011 Day 2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Snowball Launcher!

Find Lego City Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Update: It seems I’ve found myself a 2011 calendar, but have been doing it in 2012, go me!

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2012 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a fireman!

Find the 2012 LEGO City Advent Calendar on Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2012 Day 1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Gungan Sub from the new Episodes

Find Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars On Amazon.com - please buy through this link and help support me documenting more LEGO!

Rebuilding AU / BA / BF Central Locking Actuators

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ford Falcons and their associated other models in the AU, BA and BF range share a central locking system that has an actuator that has a little bit of a flaw. If you hit the lock/unlock button when it’s already in the state you’re asking for, this can happen:

Once that happens, your car’s insecure, just making a weird grunting noise when you hit the button to lock it.

First things first, take the door trim off and undo the bolts that surround the lock latch on the end of the door.

Using RANCID/clogin to run commands on multiple devices

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As the next step to my previous post about filtering files using egrep, I had to apply a configuration change to a number of devices on our network.

Rather than logging in manually to 1400 devices, I found that the clogin command can login to a device and run a couple of commands.

You can do it in a single line on the CLI, but I’d prefer to script things so they’re documentable and repeatable.

I don’t always miss having cats…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

monit error “alert handler failed…”

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you get a message like this in your monit log files:

alert handler failed, retry scheduled for next cycle

It’s not immediately obvious what’s causing it. Check the line before, it’s probably what you’re looking for.

In my case I was getting this error

Sendmail error: 553 5.1.7 monit@microserver… address incomplete

Which is actually from the mailserver I’d setup in the monitrc file. Make sure you’ve got your settings right, and don’t just look at the one line 🙂

Ubuntu 11.10 no grub timeout

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a bug in the file /etc/grub.d/00_header which means the timeout’s set to -1 for some reason instead of a positive number. This means that it doesn’t ever timeout.

I’m sure there’s a valid reason why update-grub is doing this to us, but .. meh. An easy fix is to find the following code in the aforementioned file:

make_timeout ()

{

cat « EOF

if [ “${recordfail}” = 1 ]; then

Distributed social networks…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is stolen unabashedly from here. I love these “form rejection letters” which come in so many different versions 🙂

Your post describes a

( ) protocol ( ) github repo ( ) manifesto ( ) kickstarter

for a distributed social network.

Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

One or more of the following flaws may apply to your particular idea.

( ) You think “if you build it, they will come”

Crumpton Oaks Farmhouse Dry Apple Cider Tasting Notes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Comes in a four pack of 500ml cans for $14 from BWS.
Plastic ring packaging, is saddening considering the impact it tends to have.
Mention of sweetners in the can in this review and on the labelling - no artificial ones - but it tastes like it’s packed with it.
Contains sulphites - beware!
Not refined at all, sharp, artificial aftertaste, overly fizzy.
For the price, there are many better options. Quantity isn’t everything!

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend it, given the recent availability of much better drinks 🙂

Finding a file without a particular line in it

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m starting to use the wonderful package RANCID for grabbing our configs and backing them up. I was looking for a simple way of finding files that didn’t have a particular line in them.

In this example I’ll be looking for things that don’t have “logging 10.0.0.5” in them. The logging command sends syslog on Cisco routers to a remote device. This isn’t actually our syslog or search server, but I’m probably better off not posting those details 🙂

Toys ‘r Us’ Lovely Fail-Page

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is what I was greeted with when Toys ‘R Us’ site failed during ClickFrenzy, nicely done!

I think this sums today up well…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Was cruising our AntiVirus management console when I found this machine name. It spoke to me…

Xerox DocuCentre-II C4300 Windows 7 Drivers

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Somehow Google fails to find this link, so I’m storing it here for myself more than anything else.

It’s on the Fuji Xerox Japan website, but it’s in english and the drivers work.

Link here to Xerox DocuCentre-II C4300 Windows 7 Drivers

Deleting old IIS Log Files

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was looking for an easy way to create a task to delete log files based on date for one of our IIS servers. The server gets thousands of hits an hour because of an information dashboard which is hosted on it. The logs aren’t important because they’re all internal and if it’s less than 7 days old we don’t care anyhow.

Based on information in the Technet forums, I ran the following command:

Windows 7 Enterprise – Explorer not loading under RunAs command

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This will stop the mechanism that launches explorer.exe from always launching it as the current interactive user - which can cause all sorts of weird issues.

Run the registry editor as administrator and edit the below key:

HK_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID{CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2}\RunAs

to

HK_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID{CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2}_RunAs

You will likely have to take ownership of that registry key before you can modify it, as by default, only TrustedInstaller can modify it.

Right click on the folder,
click permissions.
Click on “advanced” and then the owner tab.
Click your name/something you have security access to and tick the “Replace all child objects…” box.
Click apply and then you should be good to go.

This might need a reboot or two. If you get a box like the below and you work with me, you’re in the wrong OU. Other people - group policy might be broken.

Power monitoring sneak peek

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m playing with a CurrentCost energy monitor and am dumping the data into an RRD file. Here’s some sample graphs.

GWIP Fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday we had an issue with one of our 100 megabit connections to the outside world, which runs most of our WAN traffic. I’m posting this to try and convince ya’ll on the interwebs to double-check my thinking.

So, here’s the timeline:

Approximately 1305 outbound usable bandwidth from our active GWIP link dropped to an average of ~20Mbit/second. The maximum outbound packet rate sat on approximately 5000 packets/second. Inbound data was not affected.
Investigations started at approximately 1330, it was originally believed that power brownouts which affected many sites in the SEQ region at approximately 1215-1220 could have been affecting services.
At approximately 1415pm a job was logged with The Vendor.
The job was escalated within The Vendor to Tier2 at approximately 1500, and I spoke with some Vendor reps about the escalation approximately ten minutes later.
As of approximately 1515, packet rates started to rise and outbound bandwidth started to increase.
I spoke with their tech at approximately 16:15; he advised that during the impact to services we were over-utilizing the link.
The Vendor claims that due to the fact that their systems show 5 minute averages and ours 1 minute, this explains the 80Mbit/second disparity in traffic displayed on our respective systems.

Other facts:

MySQL Queries and learning a little more…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while I actually get to remember enough to help someone - with something I’m actually interested in - not often, but just sometimes. 🙂 Generally I do as much learning as helping along the way.

Someone asked about a slow MySQL query on #sage-au tonight. They had been asked to look into a small e-commerce site that’s been having issues for a few years, slow page loads and the like.

Blocking Hotlinking to images and files in WordPress with a self-hosted block image.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s fairly common to find how-to’s that show you how to use .htaccess to block hotlinked images, but it seems a lot of them show you to redirect to an outside file. Not sure why that’s a good idea, or not mentioned, but meh.

Now, the important rules are in the second and last lines. The last line redirects any hotlinked images (which don’t come from your sites’ domains. The second line un-blocks the redirect protection for only that image.

Crime City Game for Android – Lost my game?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you think your save game in Crime City has gone missing, do the following…

Reset your phone
Wait for the USB media check to stop (and close all other apps)
Load the game

If that doesn’t work

Go into task manager,
Kill all running non-system apps, including backup/sync programs etc.
Try again

If it can’t access storage (such as when startup is happening) it’ll flip out and not be able to get/save to the cached files it needs to. I dare say this probably happens with Modern War by Gree.

Evil bastard spider

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I present to you my evil nemesis, the spider with the evil eye.

This thing had so much heft that while walking along the floor you could hear his feet go tickticktick etc. Scary as hell.

Scarier still, there was a bright red reflection visible to the naked eye from one of his eyes. Maybe he’s actually a terminator?

I think this chatlog sums it up, really:

21:56 yaleman: ffs

Ruger Charger in Nordic Components AR-22 Stock

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is how it looks currently, with a chinese-copy EOTech and some Magpul MBUS’ front and rear. The hand grip is an airsoft 4″ long one, which looks much less out of place than the alternatives, which are 7″ or so, and would cover the barrel.

It shoots incredibly well, seeing as it weighs a couple of KG’s (exact weight to come) and it’s only shooting 22LR 🙂

This is not the error you were looking for…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It seems when I was messing around with our printer a few months back, I may have changed an error message or two for the fun of it.

Somehow, it took over three months for the message to actually be noticed - a workmate came to me asking what I’d done to the printer - I wonder why he came straight to me? 🙁

Fritz!Box 7390 VPN With OSX Client

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to bigkahuna on the Fritzbox forums (edit 30/4/16: now defunct) I found a working configuration to get OSX clients connecting to a Fritz!Box 7390 router’s VPN.

Before you start

Setup a dynamic hostname of some sort, this makes it so you don’t have to keep working out what IP you connect to. Dyndns.org is a good supplier. Configuring that is outside the scope of this article, but from my experience it’s been just a case of enter the details and it works.

Samsung 931B’s Resurrected!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, RMB’s had a pair of the beautiful Samsung 931B’s for a few years now. They’ve been quite reliable until recently, when one started flickering on and off.

This actually had been happening for a month or two, and if you turned it off then back on again all would be good. Eventually this turned into just plain not working - acting like someone was just tapping power all the time. As this started, the other one started flicking on and off periodically.

Yay! Borderlands 2!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Squeeee! It’s preloading!

How to make your own brand

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a cool video from Pro Rancher about making your own brand. Can’t say I’ve got a use for one, or the tools to weld one up, but I want one!

Suck eggs! Well, yolks.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I got linked to this video the other day and I can officially say that my brain just crawled out my ear. The video’s a very very simple way of seperating eggs, something I’m sure some protein-sucking egg-yolk hating friends of mine will love!

If you want to know how not to do AJAX…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Check out http://www.sccm-tools.com/ in Google Chrome. I’m not quite sure how it works just yet, but it’s certainly spectacular. Every second or so, it grabs a gradually larger and larger request in a runaway fashion.

I have a feeling it has something to do with storing the state of the page or something in its source, but wow. After three minutes, it’s doing 60KB/s.

Want to know how I found this? I left it open for a few MONTHS on my work PC and showed up as an incredibly huge user of bandwidth. Whoops!

New Ruger Revolver Announced – the Single-9

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A media release from Ruger on a new revolver they’re adding to their lineup:

Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. is proud to announce the Ruger® Single-Nine™, a nine-shot, single-action revolver chambered in .22 Winchester Magnum.

The Single-Nine™ features a nine-shot cylinder and is constructed from durable satin-finished stainless steel. With a 6.5-inch barrel and smooth, hardwood, “Gunfighter” grips, the Single-Nine™ is well-balanced and points easily. Williams™ fiber optic sights, click-adjustable for both windage and elevation, provide a crisp sight picture that is enhanced with front and rear fiber optic inserts.

Brad builds Angelina her own Shooting Range

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Love is…

Brad Pitt spent nearly USD $400k to build a shooting range/armoury for Angelina Jolie, at the couple’s Miraval estate in southern France, according to The Sun.

A source said: “Brad had a lot to live up with his wedding gift considering Angelina exchanged vials of blood with her ex-husband Billy-Bob Thornton.

“And by letting Angelina de-stress at the range, he’s less likely to get earache indoors. There’s a lot to be said for that when you have six kids.”

Form 4473 overlay – interesting idea

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In Queensland we have the PTA, and in America they’ve got the Form 4473. Both do similar things - keep a record of firearms transactions. The American National Shooting Sports Foundation has produced an overlay for this form, which makes it easier for people to complete the form correctly.

They’ve just released a new version of the overlay which suits the newly updated version of the form 4473 in the United States.

I wonder if this is something that could be useful for Queensland firearms dealers? I suppose there aren’t that many, so they’ll be proficient in helping people complete their Form 28’s. Something to think about anyhow.

LockKill – a novel way to secure a lock

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a property owner or landlord who needs to disable a lock without having to contact a locksmith, I’d say LockKill would be a fantastic solution to the problem.

With a simple design which covers the two main locking mechanisms on the market, it secures itself into the lock by working with the mechanisms that are our normal pin-and-tumbler locking systems. Once in there, it’s almost impossible to remove without professional tools (or destructive measures) and there’s even a small section cut out of the bow of the key which allows for instant and clean removal of the key head.

I love purchase suggestions

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A great one from Fishpond. I’ve only ever bought one of the science books from them, and I was a little puzzled by one of their suggestions.

Laser Pointers for Queensland Firearms Users

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Taken from the information page here on the Qld Police site.

As of 2 April 2012, laser pointers with a power output of greater than 1 milliwatt (1mw) will be restricted items requiring reasonable excuse for lawful possession thereof.

‘Reasonable excuse’ for possession of a laser pointer includes: Firearms Licence holders.

“The person holds a licence that authorises possession of a firearm in relation to which the laser pointer may be used, and the laser pointer has a power output of less than 10 milliwatts.” (10mw)

Upcoming changes to Qld Weapons Licence Cards

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

According to this article on WLB’s news page, they’re changing the format of new licences. It’s nice to see they’re putting some security features into the card.

Previously I think you could probably have printed them out on any ID card printer, making it much easier to make illicit purchases of ammunition and other goods.

Additional features will include:

Clear core centre panel depicting the licence number and category of weapons
Raised embossed date of birth of the licensee at the bottom of the licensee’s photograph
Expiry Date of the licence on the rear of the card in extra large font

Updating SCOM 2007 R2 Agent Certificates

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re attempting to monitor servers that aren’t on the same domain as your Root Management Server you need certificate-based authentication to allow communication between hosts.

There are plenty of articles on how to setup a Certification Authority, we’re running a standard Windows 2008 setup.

Here’s our Standard Operations Procedure for replacing certificates on agents.

Login with MSTSC to the server requiring the new certificate
- NOTE: When you login, if you’re given a temporary profile it won’t work.
Open https://[your root ca]/certsrv/ in a web browser
Click on continue if you get a https certificate error
Go to internet options -> Security -> click on trusted sites
Click on Sites
It should have https://[your root ca] in the Add this website to the zone field
Click Add
Click Close
On the web page click Download a CA Certificate, certificate chain or CRL
You’ll probably get another https signing error, ignore it.
Ensure:
- CA Certificate has the entry with Current highlighted
- Encoding method is DER.
Click Download a CA Certificate
Save the Root CA Certificate somewhere and double click on it to open the key file.
Ensure the details look right for your Root CA and click Install certificate on the general page
Click Next
Select Place all certificates in the following store and click browse
Select Trusted Root Certification Authorities and click OK, then next and Finish.
It’ll warn you about an un-validated certificate, click yes.
The root CA trust certificate is installed
In the browser click Home in the top right
Click Request a certificate
Click Advanced certificate request
Click Create and submit a request to this CA
Fill in the fields as below Name = FQDN of client Type = Other OID = 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1,1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.2 Create new Key Set CSP = Microsoft Enhanced Cryptographic Provider v1.0 Key usage = Both Key Size = 1024 Automatic key container name Mark keys as exportable = tick Request format = CMC Hash = sha1 Friendly name = FQDN of client (must match first field)
Click submit
It may confirm that you wish to request a new certificate, click yes.
You’ll be issued a request ID.
Login to the certificate server and open Certificate Authority from Administrative Tools
Expand the tree and find Pending Requests
There should be a request matching the ID you were given in the previous steps, right click on it and click All Tasks -> Issue
Go back to your remote connection to the agent
Click Home on the Certificate Services screen
Click View the status of a pending certificate request
Click the blue link – it should only show you yours
Click Install this certificate
Click yes to install it
On the Agent run mmc.exe
Click File -> Add/Remove Snap In
Add Certificates and select theMy user accountoption.`
Add another Certificates but this time select Computer account then Local computer
Click OK
Expand the two trees like this:
Under Certificates – Current user -> Personal -> Certificates you’ll find the client certificate.
Drag that to the matching folder under Certificates (Local Computer)
Under Certificates – Current user -> Trusted Root Certification Authority you’ll find the root CA certificate. It should have the same name as the Root CA hostname.
Right click on the certificate you imported previously and click copy.
Ensure the expiration date of the one you’re working on has the correct expiration date – it should be 02/08/2027. (If it’s expired, hello future!)
Go into the matching Trusted Root Certification Authorities folder under Certificates (Local Computer) and right click->paste the cert into there.
Go to Certificates (Local Computer) -> Personal -> Certificates and on the certificate you just dragged in there, then Right click -> All Tasks -> Export
Click next, select Yes export the private key and click next
The export file format should be PKCS #12 (.PFX), don’t tick anything in the boxes.
Click next
Enter a simple password you’ll remember and click next.
Save the file somewhere you can navigate easily to via command prompt.
Click next then Finish
Open a command prompt as administrator (right click on it and click run as administrator)
Navigate to where you put the key
Run MOMCertImport.exe [keyfile], substituting [keyfile] for the filename that you just exported.
- 32-bit servers, run it from the SupportTools\i386 folder
- 64-bit servers, run it from the SupportTools\AMD64 folder
It’ll ask for the password, type it in and press the enter key. After a few seconds (it won’t show that it’s doing anything) it will have completed. *After a few minutes check the event log on the client for events with ID 20053, this will show that it’s working. The logs are in the Operations Manager listings.
Other than deleting any files on the file system you’ve created (the key files are insecure and shouldn’t be left lying around) check in the SCOM Console to ensure monitoring is working and you’re all done.

Australian Gun Stores

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Queensland

Cleaver Firearms
Gun World Australia
Potter Target Firearms
Rebel Gun Works
~~Pine Rivers Gunshop~~
~~Queensland Shooters Supplies~~
~~Queensland Gun Exchange~~ (Shut down 2024)

NSW

Victoria

Hermanns Sporting Guns

South Australia

~~GFJ Custom Firearms~~ gone as of April 2024

Western Australia

Accessories

PBA Imports - moved to shooting.com.au as of April 2024.
~~Guns N Gear~~ (Gone as of April 2024)

Projectiles

HRBC

Gun Classifieds

~~BuyAGun.com.au~~ (Gone as of April 2024)

HTC One X Flickering Fix available on Optus

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I posted recently about the fact that HTC had released a software update that they believed would fix the flickering issues that most HTC One X owners are experiencing. The update’s been available in Europe for a while, but Oceanic users have been waiting for it to be released OTA.

I woke this morning to an exciting sight (living by myself, I’m easy to please):

Flowfold Tarjetero Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had my I’ve had my for a few months now, and I’m loving it. It’s been through some seriously wet days on my motorbike, dumped into the sink for fun and generally bashed around. When I replaced my oversized Oakley wallet with the billfold, I dumped quite a lot of extra membership/loyalty cards into a pocket on my bag. I’ve been looking for a simple card holder since then - who wants things floating around in your bag - and recently I found my first test subject.

Plinky prompts from the week of 05/11 to 05/17

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Thursday, May 17, 2012

What are your favorite foods to throw on the grill?

Well, since I have a BBQ instead of a grill, maybe Steaks? I’m quite partial to well-cooked Salmon, but haven’t done that yet.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

What was the last live performance you saw?

I’m fairly sure it was the very last Powderfinger concert at the Riverstage, it was quite amazing.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

1895 8th grade final exam

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another meme from my friend Barry…

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895…

Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

5 pearls of Scottish wisdom to remember

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another silly meme from my mate Barry.

Money cannot buy happiness but…somehow, it’s more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes Benz than it is on a bicycle…
Forgive your enemy, but remember the bastard’s name.
Help a man when he is in trouble & he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.
Alcohol does not solve any problem, but then neither does milk.

HTC Claims One X Flickering Issue Fixed

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

… confirming that 1.29.xxx.11 will recalibrate the screen over the course of a few days …

HTC believes that through their testing of the new update they’ve found a fix for the screen flickering issues that HTC One X owners have been experiencing as mentioned in my previous posts.

I hope this is true, and I’m still waiting on Optus to release the version, but many UK and European users should have it available as an Over The Air update. Luckily my (replacement) handset isn’t suffering the screen flickering issue yet, but I’m eagerly awaiting the promised update.

Second HTC One X flickering as well

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My first replacement device has started flickering, only five days after getting it - as I knew it probably would.

It’s currently running the latest software available OTA on Optus - 1.28.980.10. As mentioned here there’s a newer version which has the capability of (hopefully) fixing the flickering issue permanently.

I can’t decide on whether to take the phone back again, all they’ll do is eventually replace it. The fact that there’s a dead red pixel in the top of the screen makes me want to take it back… why can’t they just make this stuff work?

EDC May 2012

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

13″ Macbook
Chrome Metropolis
Microsoft mouse (cheap and unkillable)
2x Apple Power Supplies
Glasses
2m Network Cable
Medical Supplies in a Voodoo Tactical EMT pouch (Prescription and OTC painkillers and other meds, zipties, eye wash, splinter rippers )
Chrome pouch (holds Canon IXUS115HS point ‘n shoot)
Loyalty and ID cards for shooting/other sports
Zebra & Pilot pen, postits
USB->RS232 cable
USB-A -> mini-usb cable
Minidisplayport->HDMI cable
Fisherman’s friends (nom)
USB Flash drive(s) - at least two and some velcro cable tie
iPod classic 120gb
Flowfold Black Pearl billfold
HTC One X
Chrome utility pouch - for cables
APC RS232->2.5mm Serial cables
Apple usb cable
Samsung USB->MicroUSB cable
APC Rack key
Leatherman wave
LED Lenser V6
Wenger NewRanger 63
Riverbed orange screwdriver ‘o doom
Gerber “why do you carry that?!?!!” knife a friend brought back from the sandy place

I’m 6'9″ tall and carry a lot, but it looks like a little bag on me and I use it most every day. Am working on perfecting it by shrinking number/size/weight of tools, while keeping the quality and utility of them high. Also, I’m hard on my stuff 🙂

My Personal Great Porn Experiment

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I love TED.com’s videos as they tend to be either inspiring or incredibly informative, or both. I was sent a link to a video called “The Great Porn Experiment” which speaks about the effects of porn, more specifically sourced from high speed Internet connections. Have a watch:

In the video there’s mention of Reddit’s NoFap subred, where a large group of users are banding together to support each other (no 12-step plan yet!) to kick the habit. Doubly inspired, I decided to run with it. I suffer from a fairly shitty case of depression and have experienced most of the symptoms listed in the TED video. Addiction would be the word for it, I can identify with the symptoms from my various research. I’d be ashamed, but if sharing this helps a few more people, then so be it.

HTC One X Second handset

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another day, another update. I’ve received my first replacement phone (yes, I get the feeling it won’t be the only one I have in this two year contract), but as yet the software update I mention here is not forthcoming on the Optus network.

It’s only been about 30 hours and there’s no flickering as yet. There seems to be a single stuck-on red pixel in the “top” of the screen which comes and goes, hopefully it’s just some weirdness. The warranty conditions mention it has to be at least three pixels before they’ll do anything about it.

Plinky questions of the week

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Do you support same-sex marriage?

I don’t see why not - to me it’s just a mutual acknowledgement of their relationship, and also has a legal framework behind it for dealing with things like death of a partner and things like that. Also, it reduces the welfare burden for countries with it, because two lesbians with children in a house would be able to each claim single mothers’ allowances.

Update to the HTC One X Screen Flickering issue…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, there’s some new information coming out where they’re trying to fix the issue by dynamically adjusting the voltages fed to the screen…

there are now 2 OTA updates carrying the version 1.29.xxx

1.29.401.7 - released last week to Europe and today in the UK for unlocked handsets and the new update release today

1.29.401.11 - release today in Europe

This is one that apparently fixes the screen flicker problems.

It can take a number of days to bed in as the software monitors the voltage and adjusts itself to reduce the flicker over time. The new 1.29.401.11 update probably won’t release in the UK for a few days yet, I think it was about 6-7 days for the .7 release to become available (unless you’re rooted and like flashing ROM’s)

A small setback.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’ve had my HTC One X less than five days now, and I’ve already had to return it. The screen flickering issue that’s heavily documented on XDA-Developers has gotten too annoying and I need to start documenting my displeasure with HTC and Optus.

Basically there’s an issue with certain colour types/images where there will be a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) flickering of the brightness on that section of the screen. At times it looks like the drivers for the graphics hardware don’t seem to support an opacity overlay (it’ll happen on dimmed screens/gradients) but others it’s just on sprite graphics so I’m not sure.

Realizations

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’ve come to a few realisations this week:

There’s too much stuff in my life
There’s too many hobbies in my life
I need to cut these down
I am just not meant to ride a motorcycle in my current understanding of this
I seem to be an alright shot, when it comes to Thursday Bowling Pin R/F shoots.

I bought myself a new phone today, a HTC One X. Nice phone, a little bigger than I’m used to, but this come with some bonuses to readability etc. Optus again, $60 contract, $9.95 for 1GB of extra data blah blah. Free 3G Home Zone thingy, which I’m not sure there’s much use for - if I have internet I have wifi, hence data. Maybe if I ever move to an area with crap mobile coverage it’ll be handy.

First go with a DE Razor

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I got my Lord L6 razor today, and couldn’t wait to try it out. It’s my first non-cartridge razor, bought cheaply on /r/Wicked_Edge‘s good opinion among others.

I don’t have my shaving brush yet, the only missing active piece from my kit - I need to get/make a stand for my brush & razor in good time. I did my usual dodgy trick, improvisation, and just rubbed the Palmolive shave stick roughly on my face in the shower and gave it a good smoosh around to get a light lather up.

I think the internet’s telling me something

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was just reading an article by Jeff Atwood about how “Your App is just a Collection of Tiny Details“, all about how the automated cat feeders he’d bought five years ago had been updated, and how they’d been improved.

As I was closing that article, a popup appeared from GMail advising me of a new email. I dutifully followed its demand to open the email, and was presented with this.

Thanks Pureman!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I got onto the idea of Double-Edged blade shaving by cruising Reddit and ending up on /r/wicked_edge. Leisureguy‘s blog led me to Pureman to buy some things. I checked out some other shops but they didn’t have the range or prices for what I wanted. The fact that Pure Man is Australian (let alone, Brisbane-based, where I am!) is quite handy 🙂

I ordered the below:

Proraso Aloe and Green Tea Shaving Soap
Col. Conk Bay Rum Shave Soap
Taylor of Old Bond Street Alum Block
Gillette 7 O’Clock Super Platinum Blades
Astra Superior Platinum Blades

When it all arrived, the box was kind of large, and had all these extra things in it! I couldn’t remember ordering them, but it seems they were free samples! 🙂

Programming instructions for HPM D817/2 or 817/2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

HPM has taken down the manual for these handy battery-backed timer devices, so I’ve recreated the documentation I could find here. We use them at work for a variety of power control situations, including turning off banks of 46″ LCD TV’s overnight, so they can handle a fair amount of power.

Catalogue number is either D817/2 or 817/2

Time Display

To change from 12-hour display to 24-hour display, or vice versa, press the CLOCK button and hold it until the LCD display changes.

Seriously?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, while trying to get to the Right People ™ to fix one of our remote 3G IPWAN services, somehow I got through to a consumer-grade accounts person. The Telstra IVR is a horrible mess of “Uh, I’ll mash buttons until someone answers”.

After a few minutes of trying to convey the point, he decided to try and transfer me to a Bigpond 3G helpdesk person. Terrible idea, since they wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to deal with my Cisco 881G router, nor access to our service details.

Sketches today

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Going for a real “Evil Mad Scientist” shtick today. I have been pondering some simple DIY projects for making my little living space a little better, and decided that drawing them up might be handy to visualise/work on ideas.

The first one’s a bit of a storage cabinet/shelf to sit over the toilet cistern, which normally wasted space full of dust.

Basically there’s two “legs” which hold toilet paper rolls on hinged roll-holders like you’d normally see in people’s toilets, but covered by a bit of a door so they’re out of the way. On top of the legs are a shelf or two for putting things away. While drawing this up I scribbled a few ideas down for how the toilet roll holders would work, and as I thought of the implementation steps the idea morphed into something significantly easier. (from a weird elevator-pulley idea to just a hinge)

Diablo 3

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I pre-ordered it! Digital downloads make things so easy.. and paypal even more so 🙂

A dollar is all I need…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sigh, I really should get a dollar every time “reboot it” fixes things.

2010 Curious Kiwi Pinot Noir

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I decided that since I’m approaching 30 years old, I should be able to order a bottle of wine and have a vague understanding of what I’ll get when it arrives.

My first choice was to go with Guzman y Gomez burritos - a 2010 Curious Kiwi Pinot Noir. RMB said either a Pinot Noir or a Rose, and I knew I didn’t want something as light and fruity as the Rose for my spicy dinner.

Lanterns and lighting and baskets oh my.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be image-heavy and explanation light because I’m lazy. I went looking for lantern/lighting ideas and hit up IKEA / Spotlight / Anaconda / Freedom today.

For the put-your-feasting-gear-in-a-basket idea, I present IKEA’s sole solution to the problem, the BRANAS basket:

Branas-Basket

The small one’s about $7, the big one’s $10, and unless you’re using just bowls you’ll need the big one. They come in White, Black and Birch, and all the signs I see mention “Last chance to buy” so they might be disappearing soon. Bugger.

Flowfold Billfold Wallet Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was cruising WalletsWeLove the other day after being introduced to it by a friend. Wallets and bags are very similar, and I seem to be obsessed with finding the perfect one for any given application I can dream up.

The perfect wallet for me is incredibly thin, ideally it would take up no more space than the items it holds, but still have a relatively simple billfold shape. I don’t like money clips (they’re ungainly) and can’t see the point of having more than one space for bills, let alone all that extra material and bulk for a trifold.

PsExec No Process on the Pipe Error

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was getting an error trying to run a remote command on a Windows XP machine on our domain today:

“Error communicating with PsExec service on [hostname]: No process is on the other end of the pipe.”

As usual, google came to the rescue but it took a lot of forum scanning to find a result. The quick fix is to do this:

 pslist \\[hostname]

You should find a process called PSEXESVC, if you pskill it, then you should be able to use PsExec again.

RunAs error 1327

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had a workmate with issues using privilege escalation this morning, he kept getting an error like this:

RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run - cmd

1327: Logon failure: user account restriction. Possible reasons are blank passwords not allowed, logon hour restrictions, or a policy restriction has been enforced.

After googling around a bit, most of the responses were about group policy or other restrictions causing issues, but it was actually much simpler!

update-apt-xapian using excessive resources

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had an issue with some of my Ubuntu VM’s lately destroying the available resources on my ESXi box. The hard drives were going crazy due to a combination of normal disk access and also memory paging into swap file.

Running top showed a process “update-apt-xapi” which was top of the charts for memory and cpu usage.

I googled around a bit, and found that the update-apt-xapian-index process is Ubuntu’s way of updating the synaptic indexing. Considering this is a cli-only vm where I use puppet to manage the packaging, it’s useless. Also, there’s many many many posts on the web about this package going mental on low-resource machines.

Maths square puzzle

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, I’m going to admit this one had me working for a few minutes with a pencil. RMB’s young son had gone to his dad for help with some maths homework, and they’d blasted through it with ease except for one question, which they eventually came to me with before calling shenanigans on the whole thing and proclaiming it broken:

O O O
O O
O O O

In the circles above, take the numbers one through eight and arrange them so that each side of the square adds up to fifteen.

DHCPINFORM requests from Windows clients

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had an issue where there every 100 seconds or so, I was seeing something similar to this showing in my ISC dhcp server logs:

Mar 16 23:50:06 dnsbox dhcpd: DHCPINFORM from 10.0.0.20 via eth0
Mar 16 23:50:06 dnsbox dhcpd: DHCPACK to 10.0.0.20 (00:19:d1:9f:aa:e6) via eth0

This was for every windows client on the network, luckily I’ve only got two or three at any given time 🙂

It took me a while to figure out, but it seems it’s actually Windows doing its automatic proxy auto-discovery (WPAD). If the DHCP server doesn’t respond with a “valid” response, it just keeps asking.

Killing processes in OSX while tethered via WiFi

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When I’m at work I tether my laptop to my mobile phone. Only having 1.5GB of data per month to use, this can get eaten up quickly with Dropbox and or SugarSync working, not to mention other things that use the data.

Dropbox has a manual “pause” button, but SugarSync doesn’t. Since I’ve changed it’s even harder to remember that things are syncing, so I looked for a way to kill it while I’m tethered.

Stupid Surveys

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, seriously Logitech. I installed your terrible software to try and make my mouse buttons mappable, and that didn’t go so well. Why can’t I just set it to a key, or a key combo without having to learn your weird macro functions? Your old software was good, now… not so much.

And after I reboot, I get asked about a survey. I say no, because I don’t want to fill it out. Then you bug me again? How is this good interface design? I’ve got two dead mice from you (a G5, and now an Anywhere MX which drifts all over the place) and you’re bugging me about a survey?

My First Open Source Project

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Every day I make use of literally hundreds of interlinked projects which come under the banner of open source or free software.

I started writing this article on a phone powered by Android, in the Epistle editor, in the markdown format. The router I’m connected to is based on Linux, and I will post this onto my blog powered by WordPress. My house has at least twenty virtual machines running Ubuntu, on an ESXi host, providing a range of internal and quasi-external services with 99% of them being free software solutions. About the only software I pay for is games, operating systems and things that Atlassian sells (I’m falling more in love with them all the time!)

Removing Pesky Sidebar Places in OSX

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had an issue with the sidebar of my OSX Finder window in Snow Leopard. Even though the old folders were there (and later removed) some shortcuts I had created wouldn’t go away.

Command-clicking and trying to remove it wouldn’t work, and dragging it away wouldn’t either. I finally got annoyed by them being there, so I started googling around a bit.

I found this discussion on the official Apple Support Community which led me to Command-Click and Dragging the items into the trash.

HP DC7800 with NVS300 on Windows 7

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you install an NVS300 supplied by HP it’ll disable the onboard SoundMAX hardware because there’s a sound device built into the video card.

I tried a lot of things, including nVidia’s downloadable drivers, HP’s drivers and a few other options but eventually found it was a BIOS setting issue.

Go into the BIOS (F10 on startup)
Scroll across to Advanced
Select PCI Devices
Once you’re in there, you’ll see the following:
The trick is to press the Page Down key and you’ll get to see the second set of PCI Devices:

Latin Macrons in Word 2003

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, you’re wanting to type some Latin notes quickly, but you’re sick of using the numeric keypad or you’re unable to because your laptop hates you. Here’s a good way to work around it, by having buttons to insert the text into the current point you are at in the document!

Right click and Save-As on this link to download the file - this is all the magic code to make this work.
Open Word 2003.
From the main screen, press the key combination Alt-F11.
Ensure you’re working on the Normal template, by double-clicking on Normal then Microsoft Word Objects then ThisDocument.
Right click on the Normal title and click Import File…
Select the file and click Open.
This should import the file into a Module called Module1 or similar, double click on Modules then double click on the newly created module item.
To rename it so we know what we’re dealing with, go down to the module properties (which should be in the bottom left) and click next to (Name).
Delete what’s in the box and rename it to Macrons.
Hit enter and it’ll update the name.
Click on the Save icon in the top of the window to confirm the changes to the Normal template.
Close the Microsoft Visual Basic window and you’ll be back in Word
Click on View -> Toolbars -> Customize…
Go to the Toolbars tab and create a new toolbar by clicking on New… and giving it a name. Ensure you’ve set Make toolbar available to: to Normal.dot.
Change to the Commands tab.
Scroll down in the left hand window and find Macros then click on it.

For each of the Commands in the right hand side which start with Normal.Macrons.:

Mass Effect 1 Crashing on Vista

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re like me and got excited after finally reading up on the Mass Effect Universe, you’ll likely have bought it cheap on Steam

I had a problem initially where it would crash on startup. I googled around a lot, and found not much. I tried:

Verified the Game Cache Files
Turned on Windows XP compatibility mode for any .exe I could find
Tried all the different settings I could find while running MassEffectConfig.exe

I’m sure I tried a few other things, but none of it worked. As soon as I would run the game from Steam, the MassEffectLauncher.exe or MassEffect.exe it would crash straight away.

BBQ Gamer Grub Review

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

May I present… Gamer grub. I wasn’t sure what to expect when buying a packet from MilSims.. and I’m glad I didn’t set my expectations too high!

From the back of the pack:

15 browser tabs, 11 apps, voice chat and two games running. We couldn’t find a snack that could keep up… so, we made our own. Gamer Grub (R) is a delicious performance snack packed with essential vitamins and neurotransmitters to keep you focused and quick. Just ‘Tear N Tilt’ into a pack of Gamer Grub (R) to multi-task and game… no greasy fingers.

It’s on now!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So.. I’ve always said that I would buy myself a banjo, and someone called me on that today. Ten minutes later, I’ve found a low-bid auction on eBay and now I’m counting down the days 🙂

127 Hours

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I finally got to see the movie 127 Hours. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, but movie-time at home’s been scarce and convincing RMB to watch it with me even harder. After finishing the first season of Revenge - hopefully there will be a second - we were completely out of things to watch, so I just hit go on the first thing in the “Incoming” list.

Minecraft 64-bit on OSX Snow Leopard

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, 1.2’s a little slower for some reason and I wanted some speed. I did a little googling around and found a few ways to enable x86_64 capabilities with the OSX Minecraft client.

Minecraft’s JavaApplicationStub needs to be replaced, so back it up then link the new one in by running the following commands from [Terminal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(Mac_OS_X):

cp /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub.orig
ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/`

Add 64-bit to the application’s capabilities by running the following command:

FTP to localhost and iptables firewall

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had an issue recently where I needed to allow FTP access to a server, as WordPress is a lot happier if you can allow it to (S)FTP to the account to do things. I didn’t want to allow it to clients outside the server, so I had to muck around with the iptables-based firewall I have. To work out what rules I had setup on startup, I checked out the script I have setup on startup on my linux host.

Adding a new node to Puppet

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A quick way to add a new node to a Puppet-managed system is as follows… (I run Ubuntu, but this should work on most systems)

On the new node, run this:

sudo puppetd --test --waitforcert 5

On the puppet server, run this (in a separate window, without closing the previous command):

sudo puppetca --list

It should show the hostname of the new node you’re trying to add, if you find it run the following:

Out of the mouths of … people you thought were smart.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll just leave this one here. I guess even people you think are smart can have dopey days 🙂

Revenge, sweet!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m always one for a good story, especially if it’s full of twists and turns. I’m always one for a good story, especially if it’s full of twists and turns. is perfect in many ways. Full of beautiful people, a young woman scorned, and true to its name - vengeance for the past. Well worth a look 🙂

Enabling markdown syntax for .md files in MacVim

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Find where you installed it, in my case it was as below because I installed it with Homebrew:

/usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-64/MacVim.app

Edit this file:

/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime/filetype.vim

Remove “.md” from the lines below:

Modula 2
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.m2,*.DEF,*.MOD,*.md,*.mi setf modula2

Search for the following:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.markdown,*.mdown,*.mkd,*.mkdn,README.md setf markdown

Add the below near the end of line, directly after “README.md”

*.md

Restart MacVim and you’ll be good to go.

Ranty MacRant

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You really have to worry when reading a site called MacStories, and of all the posts in the last three or four days, there’s only two posts which aren’t about iP(a/o)ds.

Where’s the mac? I’m not a terrible Apple fanboi, but I do like OSX, and my Classic iPod. I’m not entirely sold on the iPod shuffle that I got given, but it’s little and free, so I’ll use it for running. But when I go to a site called MAC STORIES, give me stories about macs. You suck site, die.

Thanks, Google!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Shopping trip for my health!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’ve decided to do some exercise, and this time I might actually go ahead with it. This jogging thing isn’t terrible, and I’ve got a goal. The Old Cleveland -> Creek -> Stanley loop is my current one, and being able to do it at a slow jog without having to stop is the aim.

I bought a pair of shoes, Mizuno Wave Inspire 8’s, in a size 15. Quite comfy actually. I went for a jog, and when I had them done up too tight I got the terrible foot pain issues I’ve had in the past.

Keyboard issues on Macbook (and Pro) with Ubuntu and VMWare Fusion

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, it seems if you’re running a recent Ubuntu install (l/m/n/o initials) and you use Easy Install on VMWare Fusion you’ll have issues with keymaps. Up and down arrow, and a few other keys might play up too.

There’s a simple trick, run this from the console as an admin (sudo if you please):

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

When it asks what kind of keyboard you have, hit “m” to select Macbook then hit enter. Keep hitting enter (or letter keys to select options, multiple taps on the same letter will scroll) and you’ll get your way through.

Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion – Getting it working when you have Dual Screens

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Oblivion does not like two displays when it auto-detects and configures video settings on the initial game run.

Go to My Documents - My Games - Oblivion and delete the file named Oblivion
Disable the display that the game is not running off (In windows, not the monitors power button)
Run Oblivion and it shouldn’t crash (for this specific problem)
Exit Oblivion and turn on the second display.

When you load Oblivion again, it should start fine whether you have one or multiple displays active. It seems to be an issue with the way it detects multiple screens - I’ve seen mention that they try to use both screens in a weird multi-monitor see-everything mode.

Meme from Avitable.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Continued from here. Stolen’s probably not the best word, since it’s supposed to be filled out by other really really bored people. So here goes…

Out with the old, in with the new.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So.. hi.

Fuck explaining why I haven’t posted for a long time, just post it yale.

OK. So I went to the Powderfinger Sunsets Tour concert on 05/09/10 at the Brisbane Riverstage. It was amazing. It was emotional, I cried, I got soaked with rain, and I had a lot of fun seeing a band that I’d always enjoyed and I never thought I’d have a chance to see again - seeing as they are doing their farewell tour.

Office 2003 installation is corrupted argrh

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Fixed because I installed this — http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=96a4413c-5261-4f69-83d0-932c430abd14

ZOMG HIGGS

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of the guys at work referred to the large hadron collider as “the big kaleidoscope” today and thus the large hardon kaleidoscope meme was born.

And it is going downhill from there…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of my earliest fault reports from this morning…

Description: user’s outlook wasn’t synchronising because user refused to follow instructions in error message and sync errors repeated every 20 seconds

Impact: no new mail and deleted items getting loaded up with sync errors

Cause: user didn’t read error messages and follow instructions

Sigh.

Update: Not five minutes after I posted the first one…

user’s mailbox is way over its limit - advised to clear it up and will stop getting messages saying it’s full. user claims to have received email saying his account would be closed - but had deleted it and cleared it (and only it) from the deleted items. over 50MB of other stuff in deleted items however. advised if gets message like this to NOT delete it before calling us.

Mo-tard?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I thought the idea of a motard would be great, and reading the description on Yamaha’s website makes it sound awesome! (See the end for a copy of the page)

I have it on loan for a day or so while the 2000 model ZZR-250 RMB is buying is in for a roadworthy. The bike is an excellent height for me - nearly too high in fact for me to comfortably stand on it in traffic. Considering I’m 6'9" tall, that is quite an effort!

The riding position is very comfortable, with my arms bent at about 90 degrees and my back nearly straight. Under acceleration I have the urge to lean forward lest I be thrown from the bike because of the way the suspension shifts.

The handling takes a bit of getting used to, going from my normal heavy old ZZR-600 to what is effectively a trail bike which weighs half as much. It is very manoeuvrable due to the light weight, trailbike suspension and very wide handlebars.

I have not had a chance to really test the handling due to the fact I only have it for a short time - not to mention throwing a loaner bike around in peak hour highway traffic while it is raining probably should be avoided. The general feeling that I get of the bike is that it is well settled and useful on the road, tight tracks or on fire trails where sticky mud and traction are not an issue.

The engine is very different to what I have ridden with before. The smooth carby-fed inline four cylinder ZZR-600, the thumping SV-650’s V-Twin and the ZZR-250’s wheezy but rev-happy two cylinder inline engine all have different characteristics, but they are still sports bikes at the core. The XTX’s engine, with its single piston and small useful rev range is a totally different beast. It definitely lives up to the “thumper” moniker such engines receive, roaring during acceleration and sounding like a burbling Harley-Davidson when you back off.

Without a tachometer on the bike it is hard to tell what you are doing at any point in time, but the feeling through the seat is that if you fail to choose the right gear you are heading for rattly-stallsville on the low end and it runs out of puff on the top end. There is a relatively tight range in the middle that it is quite happy to cruise in and pull away from under normal riding conditions.

The controls are easy to find and use as one would expect, all the switches and buttons are in the normal places and easy to feel for when you are first on the bike. The gearbox is reassuringly smooth and accurate, never leaving one to question whether it went into the gear I wanted. The levers aren’t adjustable, which makes me think that riders with smaller hands could be left over-reaching ont hsi bike. Clutch actuation is smooth and light which is nice.

The brakes I am still deciding about. The front sports a big single 320mm disc with four Brembo aluminium pistons doing the grabbing, and the rear has a not-too-shabby 245mm rear single disc. There is no question that if I was to grab the brakes that the bike would stop quickly, but under road use it seems to require more than the usual two-finger grab to pull the bike up. I’m not sure if this is another case of the motard-road bike comparison but it makes me feel a little nervous grabbing so hard on the lever to pull myself up.

Obviously after an hour or so on the bike in traffic it’s never going to be the most exhaustive of reviews, but it certainly is an interesting bike. Easy to ride and a good height, with a complete minimum of features leaves the bike in the normal motard position. Good for those that haven’t got a ute and want to ride their bike to the trail or for a fun bike which covers a lot of simple bases.

For me though, I’m going to be happy to be back on the dedicated sports bikes 😉

ANZ’s new logo

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

ANZ has a new logo. What the hell? Do they want to give me a hug? Is it something to do with anime? Or is it just some weird stylised crap that makes no sense.

I think it is the last one, personally. ANZ, please fire your graphic designers, they are making too much money and spending it on crack again.

Da Vinci Code, again.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have read it before, and listened to it now in audio book form - Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is entertaining and if any of it is true (even just the facts that tie the story together) then it’s educational as well! I quite like the flow of the story, and the way that it introduces people to the idea of symbolism and questioning some of the central themes of religion.

Getting closer to the dream…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We are getting closer to what I have dreamed and written of before - a universal information access device that allows people to learn from wherever and whenever they are. The WikiReader is a portable, low power device which has a full copy of Wikipedia that you can carry with you and access from anywhere.

It was designed by the team that brought the OpenMoko to the world, the first true open source mobile phone. I will be interested to see what happens with the developer’s side of things - hopefully they will allow open access to the software of the device so that it can be hacked and used for other things as well. Maybe this is the cheap ebook reader I have been looking for?

Carl Sagan and Marijuana?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A truly honest view from an enlightened person on a drug that many think is the root of all evil. Please do not take this as me encouraging its use (as I am not a big fan), but I am fascinated by how he looks at the use of mind-altering drugs.

I think this pretty much explains my views on some drugs:

…there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words…

The idea of R which he introduces late in the piece is an interesting one - and especially for those that do not have experience or knowledge of drugs. The time between taking a dose and experiencing the effects is an important thing which many people fail to understand and which can cause no end of trouble. How many times have you heard of someone taking a dose of a drug and then when they thought it was not working, taking another dose or something else before the first dose hits? How many times was this potentially (or actually) catastrophic?

If this was the first piece of education provided to people at a young age with respect to recreational or mind-altering drugs I would be quite happy. It does not promote drugs, nor does it have the normal religious or societal warnings imposed on it. The next thing I would hope for would be an honest discussion on the physiological affects, but how would we get honest discussion on drugs going in society anyway?

I like that forty years ago one of the most intelligent and inspiring people of the time was hoping for the legality “of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Command line network drive quickies

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The most common way to connect a drive to a network path in Windows is this command:

net use X: \\SERVER\Share

Where:

X: is the drive letter you wish to map the share to,
\SERVER\Share is the UNC path to the share.

Assuming you have permissions to map drives and to access that share, it will map the drive and tell you that it mapped successfully.

If you want quick access and do not want to map a network drive, you can access a UNC Path directly from the Command Prompt using pushd.

School bans cycling and walking to school, what next?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Saratoga Springs school district prohibits kids from biking to school, but a mom and her son defied the law. A state trooper was there to greet them.”

I’m completely and utterly gobsmacked at the nanny-state behaviour that’s happening more and more in today’s society. If a kid wants to ride or walk to school along a designated bike path with their parent supervising them no less, when does is it become the school’s choice to ban them from doing so?

More pay troubles

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I should have known better than to have trusted all those in the chain that my contract paperwork had to go through in order to go from a temporary employee to the comfort of a permanent role. Of course once I had made the assumption that all would go well, it did not. Instead of attaching my paperwork along with some others, it lay forgotten in the digital wasteland that is an Executive Assistant’s computer and did not reach the appropriate people to get me paid.

Motorcycle Shenanigans

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I attended a wonderful wedding recently in the Bunya Mountains between two friends of mine, and it was lovely. The ride to and from there was less than fun, however.

I can handle:

A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to live up to their name.

What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home. 🙁

Empire

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook version of Orson Scott Card’s novel “Empire”. It’s quite an impressive novel, bringing together action, science fiction, politics and some modern philosophy.

It explores the idea of a red-state vs. blue-state American civil war brought about by manipulating the media and the people through some interesting psychological ploys.

As stated by the author himself, it wasn’t entirely his idea - having been approached by the Chair Entertainment Group, an American video game producer - and offered the chance to develop the game’s storyline as well as a novel to set the series into action. This is not to say that it’s not an incredibly well thought-out story, with rich character development and the just the right amount of workout for your imagination.

Eats shoots and leaves…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

From here on news.com.au

The 18-year-old youth was 17 and on a learner’s permit when he stole a Holden Rodeo ute at a party at Cheltenham in Melbourne’s southeast, the Moorabbin Kingston Leader reports.

Wait, was he eighteen or seventeen? Gah, you guys suck.

Repeat after me…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dear User,

Repeat after me: The address bar’s history is NOT your bookmark folder!

Thanks,

yale.

Good Idea / Bad Idea

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Good idea: Walking for fitness to lose weight.

Bad idea: Walking to Sushi Train.

Good idea: Not wearing shoes as it’s better for your feet.

Bad idea: Not wearing shoes as I twist my feet when I walk and developed two nice fat blisters last night. 🙁

Catcher in the.. what?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Um, what? It was a nice story about a couple of days in the life of a kid in the big city who discovers some things about himself, but I’m still wondering where the last chapter or so is.

Sigh. On to the next book - $1 Million for Life, by Ashley Ormond.

Religion 101: The Final Exam

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As much as I’m not one to post religious things on my blog, I had to post this awesome final exam for your religion… here’s a taste:

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we always look to the Bible as a guide. In this example, your teenage son has returned home from the prom intoxicated. The Bible’s instruction is:
1. Sit him down for a heart to heart talk
2. Enroll him in AA
3. Take away his driving privilege for one month
4. Smash his head in with rocks
In this example, your son-in-law, returned from his honeymoon, has just told you he suspects your daughter was not a virgin on their wedding night. Wishing to abide by God’s holy rules as laid out in the Bible, you should:
1. Ask him if he was a virgin before you do anything
2. Advise him to forgive her
3. Talk to your daughter
4. Go find those rocks

When variable substitution goes wrong…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Boy I love spam some days, it’s just … weird 🙂 We had this one forwarded to us to block, I wonder if it’ll break something in our wonderfully crap filtering system.

-----Original Message-----
From: Julius Vailes [mailto:Julius-assolato@leeegs.demon.nl]
Sent: Monday, 11 May 2009 10:06 AM
To: [deleted]
Subject: $WordFile{click.txt}

$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}
$WordFile{click.txt} $WordFile{click.txt}

Apple-brie soup at Bistro du Soleil in Playa del Rey – Los Angeles Times

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Apple-brie soup at Bistro du Soleil in Playa del Rey - Los Angeles Times

Looks like tasty-tasty unhealthy creamy soup indeed 😀

Thomas Cook Boots

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

New boots for my trip to the snow 🙂 Got them for $69.95 - I can’t remember the last time I got shoes so cheap, I love having size fifteen feet 🙁

Found them at DFO up the back hidden in a pile of “seconds” in the corner - nothing wrong with them, just they were old stock!

You are an INTP

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Thinker

You are analytical and logical - and on a quest to learn everything you can.
Smart and complex, you always love a new intellectual challenge.
Your biggest pet peeve is people who slow you down with trivial chit chat.
A quiet maverick, you tend to ignore rules and authority whenever you feel like it.
In love, you are an easy person to fall for. But you’re not an easy person to stay in love with.
Although you are quite flexible, you often come off as aloof or argumentative.
At work, you are both a logical and creative thinker. You are great at solving problems.
You would make an excellent mathematician, programmer, or professor.
How you see yourself: Creative, fair, and tough-minded.
When other people don’t get you, they see you as: arrogant, cold, and robotic.

Yup, that’s me.

I’m a JEDI

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As I was leaving the carpark tonight on my bike I was going down the ramp as the carpark chicky was going up to leave… you could see the “oh fuck, cmon” on her face which is fair enough. She said something about not having change, and knew there was no way I was going to pay five times the bike rate, so … I said “you didn’t see me.”

I’m a mouse furry!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m GIR!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Your result for what Invader Zim character are you?… You are Gir (88% Gir)

You enjoy the simple things in life, may tend to be random at times and over hyper, but that is why many adore you (or why many don’t want to be around you).

Miscommunication…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s perfectly normal to hear “man bikini cafe” when someone says “lamborghini cafe” right? Oh bother.

What kind of fae are you?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What type of Fae are you?

Cirque du Soleil Dralion

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just don’t know how to explain how amazing tonight was. Robyn sent me a link to a random Japanese “popping” dance video and somehow I ended up at a link to Cirque du Soliel’s latest Australian tour - Dralion.

It took a few seconds to realise that I had about a week until the show finished, and that I could actually afford to go this time. Every other time they’ve been in Brisbane the planets haven’t been in the right position for me to have the spending money to be in the right place with a ticket in hand to see one of their shows. This year, it was RMB’s birthday AND I could afford it.

Find the last five IP’s I logged in as

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, to find the last five IP’s a user called “user” has logged in as, do this from .. well, a commandline.

last -i | grep user | head -n 5

Last shows the last (lots) of users that logged in,
The -i shows IP’s,
Use grep to filter by the word “user” and
Head shows the top five.

Yay, all done.

Rainbows n’ shit.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Your rainbow is strongly shaded green and red.What is says about you: You are an intelligent person. You appreciate energetic people. Those around you admire your fresh outlook and vitality. You get bored easily and want friends who will keep up with you.

I don’t really know why I do these things, I know me already.

Too many mind.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just had one of the best rides in the wet since my first night on the bike. I basically said to myself “shut the fuck up and ride” and did so. I loosened my typical vice-tight grip on the bars, tightened up my knees like one should on the bike and just rode it smooth. Remembering to think less about the fact that I had a bit of water on my visor and just watching the road was a good thing too.

The things you find.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

On Mon Aug 25, 2003 ******** wrote:

“Hello, I am a ‘generously proportioned’ male (375 pounds) with a less than generous penile length (4 inches erect). I seek a vendor of quality inflatable sheep who can give away free samples as I am unemployed. Best regards.”

Found in my message history as I went to say something to a friend. 🙂

EPS Files on Gimp

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, I love running GIMP, it’s good fun. Easy once you learn it, lightish on resources and best of all it’s free. The PortableApps.com edition has been getting some loving from me of late - who can complain when it brings your settings along easily! 😀

I tried opening an eps file the other day and ran into a problem - GhostScript isn’t installed as standard.

After installing the 64-bit version for windows from here, there was only one more thing to do. Google-fu got me to a german-language page (translation here) that showed me most of how to fix it. Below is a sample default.env file to show the Gimp where to go 😉 The file has to be %GIMPFOLDER%\App\gimp\lib\gimp\2.0\environ\default.env and has to have all the extra newlines according to the original page (and it worked after I did that, don’t ask.

Update on the job market.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Probably should refer to the previous post about the job market. Probably shouldn’t point out that I’m wondering why I can’t seem to get a job. Who’s putting the kybosh on me?

I’ve got too much experience for a low level job, and not enough for high level? Great. And I’m working in a casual job so I can’t really afford to study. Yay.

The job market shits me

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You heard it here. It shits me. It seems that with my weird and wonderful assortment of experience and skills that I don’t actually fit into any box they have, so I can’t get a job and I’m stuck in pizzaVille.

Fuck.

I’m going to start applying for slightly-less-smelling-like-garlic shitkicker jobs, prodding more people at random and hoping for the best. This hasn’t worked so far, but others are saying to keep doing it, so on with the poking.

JCal Pro All day problem fix.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that on the “upcoming events” module of JCal Pro it shows “(All Day)” if you’ve got an all day item. It’s ugly and I was asked how to remove it. Here’s how to do it:

Edit modules/mod_jcalpro_latest.php

Comment out this line:

$returnstring .= ( $EXTCAL_CONFIG['show_times'] ) ? ' (' . $start_time . ( ($EXTCAL_CONFIG['show_times'] == 3 || $no_end_specified) ? '' : ' - ' . $end_time ) . ')' : '';

Replace it with:

Birthday tankbags ahoy!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been considering storage solutions for on my bike - ventura racks and bags and so forth. As a small, portable solution I’ve been looking at a magnetic tank bag as they’re removable and relatively cheap (not to mention easy to get, since they’re not model-specific) and allow me to use my gps and or see my phone while riding.

I went down to Springwood Suzuki and was reccommended the Oxford brand, and I agreed - purchasing one of these. Well, borysSNORC did anyway 😀

I love tech support

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s my current fun with a certain unnamed hosting provider. Feel free to traceroute this site’s domain name if you want to know which one.

me: “please do this specific thing to twenty domains.”

them: “ok, like this?”

me: “no, do it how I asked!”

them: “oh dear, we need someone smarter… I’ll send the request somewhere else”

[ 24 hours goes past ]

me: “hello?”

them: “sorry, ok, done”

me: “but you didn’t do it, and I had to create a new ticket to ask you to do it again, properly!”

Rjays Edge boots, a week later.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick post - these boots are super-comfy! I’ve had them for just over a week now and have worn them every day, including a full day of riding on the 13th (which I really should post about)

Suffice to say: they’re worn in, they fit nicely, they aren’t great for walking long distances in and they hold in all the right places for a well made boot. I’m going to have to watch the big velcro section to make sure it doesn’t fill up with fuzz - but other than that it’s all looking good 🙂

My first two-wheeled lube job

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m going down the route of trying to make motorcycling the cheapest I can. I’m planning on doing as much repair and maintenance as I can, so that includes things like adjustments of controls, and oil & filter replacements 🙂

A couple of days ago I adjusted the throttle free-play, something that’d been plaguing me since I got the bike. It had about 1/8th of a turn of play :S

I bought boots!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Being 6'9″ tall with size fifteen-ish shoes makes it interesting to buy shoes at the best of times. It’s basically “what have you got? I’ll take it!” for dress shoes and joggers it’s “what do you have that’s not a basketball shoe? I’ll take it!”

Searching for motorcycle gear’s been a challenge, because it’s specialised and they don’t sell that much. I’ve found three pairs of boots that fit, and only two that fit comfortably without plans to take them to a bootmaker. Both of them are made by RJays and the ones I bought todays are their “Edge” model in a UK size 48.

My Nebo Cherry Got Popped

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, my bike’s in the shop and I have a morning off from work. A friend offers me a ride of his spare bike, and the opportunity to be led through the twisties heading up to the Maiala Rainforest Teahouse at Mount Nebo/Glorious. Who could say no? Not me!

I’ll admit it, I was shitting myself. On someone else’s much lighter and more responsive bike, tooling through the hills and trying to not look like a complete grandma - which I failed at, but am cool with that) 🙂

WordPress security tip

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You can prevent people from looking inside your directories by creating a file in there called .htaccess and adding the following line:

Options -Indexes

This is a good way of doing this, since it then tells the web browser “You’re not allowed in here” rather than having to create blank files to hide your directories 🙂

Missing categories problem with WordPress 2.6

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, loads of people are having issues with this as per a search or two on the WordPress forums, and I found myself in the same boat. Check it out - I found a fix 🙂

I inserted the wp_categories table from my backups and then ran the sql query I found here:

UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy, wp_categories 
SET description = cat_name 
WHERE term_id = cat_ID;

UPDATE wp_terms, wp_categories 
SET name = cat_name, slug = category_nicename 
WHERE term_id = cat_ID;

My baby’s in the hospital :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, my motorbike’s in for repairs. The girl that hit it at work decided that insurance (or telling her dad) wasn’t the way to go and has agreed to pay in cash. I dropped it off to Silver Star yesterday, the first time I’ve let anyone else touch it… can’t wait to get it back sans rattles 🙂

My bike got nudged :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I knew it would happen, but I was hoping it wouldn’t happen soon… My bike got reversed into tonight by some silly little blonde girl in a Rav4.

It got knocked over onto its left side, scractching the clutch cover, the bar end and muffler. It seems that she’d run straight into the right hand indicator, smashing that and scratching the fairings around it.

The worst part of it all - it looks like the bolt that holds most of the right hand fairing on has snapped out of the mounting in the frame (the mount failed, not the bolt - worse) so that’s going to be a right pain in the ass to fix :S

Under pressure

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I figured I should have checked the tyre pressures on the way home from purchasing the bike, but as usual with these sorts of things I was a lazy dick. I checked ’em today with a cheapass digital tyre pressure gauge I bought from Supercheap Auto and found they were at about half of what they were supposed to be - 22 / 27 front/back instead of 36 / 41!

Things I Did Last Night

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Pretty awesome site this one - very simple and very succinct. 🙂

http://www.thingsididlastnight.com/

Ride course idea

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thinking I might hit up this route one day soon - maybe even Saturday if I don’t get completely wasted by working a Friday night with this stupid ass cold. Hopefully the weather will warm up a tad, or at least leave the rain out of it so I can jam on some thermals and enjoy the ride instead of losing feeling in my legs again 🙁

View Larger Map

Proud parent…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sa-weeeeeeeeet. I collected my bike today, paying my money and getting the bike. You know how it works.

Everything went relatively smoothly except for the light rain starting just as we left to go do it. Riding back was a fun experience, finding out on the fly how the bike rode and where all the controls were 😛

I took it out for a ride tonight (yay rain) and I think it needs a damn good tune but otherwise seems sound. Time and inspections by mates will tell 😉

I got my motorbike licence!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I completed my Q-RIDE course with TeamMoto yesterday. So much fun, and because I started it before the 1st of July 2008, I got to get my full open bike license in a three day (one day every two weeks, due to work/etc) couse 🙂

As shown above, I look like a clown and have an R class Queensland license - allowing for an unrestricted engine sized motorbike 🙂

The Dante’s Inferno Test

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level | Score

Purgatory | Very Low

Level 1 - Limbo | Very Low

Level 2 | Very High

Level 3 | Moderate

Level 4 | Very High

Level 5 | Very High

Level 6 - The City of Dis | Very High

Level 7 | Very High

Level 8- the Malebolge | Very High

My Personality

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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 26
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 7
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Google’s there for a reason

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I looked up how to microwave rice on google. What the fuck else is the internet there for?

Porn? OK

Movies? OK

Information on useful things in life? Heaven forbid!

Oh, and while I’m admitting my sins, last year I looked up how to tie a tie on youtube, something that was never taught to me.

Hedgehogs are not weapons!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon…” the suspect was arrested “for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog.”

NZ man ‘used hedgehog as weapon'

A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported.

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

ugh. can’t sleep. poo.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Potatoes

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

An old man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his potato garden but it was very hard work as the ground was hard. His only son Fred, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Fred,

I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my potato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over I know you would dig the plot for me.

Ringworm and Radiation

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Copying this here in case the original gets deleted. Interesting article… fucking americans.

Ringworm and Radiation

By Barry Chamish August 19, 2004

On August 14, at 9 PM, Israel’s Channel Ten television screened a documentary film which exposes the ugliest secret of Israel’s Labor party founders: the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of nearly all Sephardi youths of a generation.

“The Ringworm Children” (translated in Hebrew as “100,000 Rays”), directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, recently won the prize for “best documentary” at the Haifa International film festival, and in the past year has made the rounds of Jewish and Israeli film festivals around the world. But it had yet to come to Israeli television screens. The subject is the mass irradiation of hundreds of thousands of young Israeli immigrants from Middle Eastern countries — Sephardim, as they are called today. The story goes like this:

Playing DVD’s on Ubuntu Feisty

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never really gotten DVD’s to work reliably in Linux. Ubuntu‘s a great distribution and it’s got a lot of things working beautifully straight off, but as usual I couldn’t get DVD’s to play with Totem. I found Quickstart on the Ubuntu Forums and a lot of people had said it worked fine, as usual with most of the fixes. It didn’t work for me (installed a few other cool things for me though) so I played around a bit, determined to watch Sneakers now that the sound was working 🙂

Ubuntu feisty volume too quiet?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just in case someone else comes looking for the solution to this problem like I did tonight 🙂 I found this link by googling a little.

Here’s the solution if you don’t like clicking…

Try adding this to your /etc/modprobe.d/options (or alsa-base) file:

options snd-hda-intel model=XXX

Replace XXX with one of the quoted values in the list below (remove the quotes)

unexpected indeed…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

borysSNORC: *yelp*ooh! penis… unexpected penis…

me: *giggles*

The Raven, in limerick form?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There once was a girl named Lenore

And a bird and a bust and a door

And a guy with depression

And a whole lot of questions

And the bird always says “Nevermore.”

The OKCupid Sexual Hell Test

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Your Score: HELL LEVEL 3

Raw score: 95%

There’s a special place in Hell for you: the basement penthouse. You scored the nastiest possible score on the Sexual Hell Test. You have no sexual restraint whatsoever. You’ll take pleasure however you can get it, and my guess is you get it a lot. If for some reason you don’t right now, you will soon, as people in your category only tend to spiral down ever deeper into the abyss of carnality and delicious sin. Congratulations.

Sound with Pidgin on the EEE PC

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was trying to get sound working on an EEE PC in Pidgin, and had to do a bit of googling before I found it… here’s the solution (taken from the EEEuser forums)

Press Ctrl+P to go to Preferences

Then select Sounds tab

In the sound method section, select “Command”

Type “aplay -q %s” (without the quotes) as the command.

Christmas lights and pizzas…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, it’s a blight on the neighbourhood, it’s a massive power use for shinyness and pride, not to mention nothing to do with the real “spirit of christmas” and then someone came up with the idea of driving around to see the bloody things!

I drive pizzas to your house. Please understand if you’re doing about 10km/h on the major feeder roads around your area, driving like a complete idiot and stopping every ten meters, it’s going to take longer for someone to get their pizza. Tomorrow night it might be you!

I wondered why I get called a small god…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Small God from Turkey

A photo that a good friend of mine took while in a museum in Turkey earlier this year 🙂

I would have thought it’d be higher (:

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

You scored as Switch

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Do you have an inclination for BDSM?

created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Switch

(((Note: This quiz is not totally comprehensive because of the length such a quiz would be. I kept it sex-based because I felt that psychological profiles and motivations were too complicated and vary too greatly among people that practice BDSM.)))You know what you want but it has nothing to do with your own role in the bedroom. You have the ability to be flexible in that area which can be useful for exploring you sexuality with your partner.

Your Score: Der Kommandant

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Achtung! You are 15% brainwashworthy, 54% antitolerant, and 52% blindly patriotic

Opportunistic, patriotic to a fault, and not so fond of people who aren’t just like you, you are like a Nazi General. Back in Germany in the 1940’s, you would have been at the top of the asshole list. Not for Nazism, necessarily, but for your own sick, twisted values. Then, out of superior intelligence (relative to other Nazis, that is), you would’ve climbed to the top.

Kickin’ youngin’ ass.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’d beat their asses down. (And the rest of them too)Â 30

Ouch, a quality scam indeed…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Originally from The Register and stolen from here.

… Thousands of emails were sent to Spanish Internet users `thanking’ them for buying £350 worth of equipment from a fictional computer company. Their credit card would be debited the amount in two days, the email continued, but if they wished to query the purchase they need only call a free phone number, provided. When the hordes of panicking Spaniards called what was in fact a high-toll number charging £1 a minute, they were greeted with a recorded message telling them to wait until a representative was available.Of course, no one ever picked up the phone and the clock kept ticking for as long as the caller could stand…

Office jobs shit me, especially at christmas.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Gold wrapping paper, a ruler and green foil tape, that’s the implements I used to wrap this present. It’s over-engineered and under-trimmed. I’m so obviously the only straight guy in my office. and one of the four males out of thirty people.

Secret santa my ass.

SSH Reverse DNS Lookup Disable

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This isn’t the most interesting of posts, but a good “note to self” for future reference. If not disabled, SSHD will try to do a slow reverse lookup of the IP address of the client causing for an unnecessary delay during authentication. I often run into trouble with this when creating a new install of Linux or FreeBSD.

To disable it, in the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config add the line below:

UseDNS no

The internet allows for everything.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Taken from here and copied just in case it disappears.

“Very Complicated Request, Please Kindly Read!!! - m4mw - 35”

If you are groggy or stoned please do not read this, I need your complete and sober attention, for my request is uniquely detailed. I am a man, 35, white, black hair with brown eyes.

Okay, first what I am looking for is a woman primary, but secondary it could be a woman and her man, but the man will have to remain behind the black curtain and only watch through the cut out eyeholes. The black curtain is inside the apartment that I reside in. This apartment is a fashionable studio in the hot part of town, and all my neighbors are graphic artists.

This site is not entirely all about quotes.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A linguistics professor was lecturing the class. “In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.”

“However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

Immediately, a voice from the back of the room piped up: “Yeah….. right….”

But there sure are quite a few 🙂

God and his fan club…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand

Aah, bash, how we adore you for spouting so much truth.

Email to our pay-for-time IT support.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In Excel the Edit Find facility is malfunctioning. Sometimes it finds the word being looked for and sometimes not. Could you please see if there is anything you can do to fix this issue for us?

Ok, I can see that it’s just user error, but this is what happens on my day off. Ugh.

Choices…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I bought new ram today.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Stupidfilter to save the intarwebs?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Stupidfilter‘s a project to create a bayesian filter to solve the spam and idiocy that’s becoming a serious problem with the internet these days. I’d love to see the general intelligence and maturity of the internet grow through projects like this, filtering people and things that are a waste of time.

I’m helping!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Refactormycode is yet another Web2.0 site, this time for people to post code snippets and ask for help with making them better. I’ve been trawling through the rather infrequent posts of late and found something to help with!

Warm fuzzy feeling: [Check]

Weirded out that I helped with JavaScript: [CheckCheckCheckCheck]

The blackberry is only half full.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear workmates,

When I provide you with numerous solutions, do not say “that’s not what I want to do” because there’s only so many ways I can stop your Blackberry’s email inbox filling up.

Ta,

yale.

I like smart videos.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Koichiro Tsujikawa’s dreamy music video to Cornelius’s “Fit Song” spends its entire time in the confines of a house, where CGI brings everyday items to a strange sort of life.

I found this on an animation site called Frames Per Second - check out the vid, then the site - very cool 🙂

Not your life story

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear conference presenters,

When we ask for a short (six-line maximum) biography/intro for our published forum program, please send us LESS than six lines on an average page. Sending us a page and a half does not make us put it all in - and we’ll send it right back.

Thanks,

James.

Wal mart fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I pulled this from rec.humor.funny.

After Mr. and Mrs. Fenton retired, Mrs. Fenton insisted her husband accompany her on her trips to Wal-Mart.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fenton was like most men-he found shopping boring and preferred to get in and get out. Equally unfortunately, Mrs. Fenton was like most women-she loved to browse.

One day Mrs. Fenton received the following letter from her local Wal-Mart.

aaahh.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

That’s a fuckload of ducks!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-09/10/content_6695875.htm

Tens of thousands of rubber ducks take part in the last Great Singapore Duck Race in Singapore Sept. 9, 2007. The race with 85,000 rubber ducks, which raises funds for seven charities in Singapore, will be the last one down the Singapore River before it is turned into a reservoir as part of the Marina barrage project.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

The Ocular Penetration Restricition Act of 2007

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Normally I’m not one for following the movements and machinations of the American political system, but this time I just had to share this video with everyone. U.S. Representative Benjamin Sinclair (R-Ohio) has a plan to reduce skull fucking levels in America by 5 to 7%. Here’s the video of his presentation of the “Ocular penetration restriction act of 2007“.

Oh, and kids… it’s not safe for work.

Want to reincarnate? Only if China says so…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate…

Coders shit me.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

They shit me to tears, and these are just some of the simple reasons I’ve got today…

Things like including a couple of megabytes of unnecessary CSS/js code inline in their pages, when it could be dumped out to an easily-cacheable and elegantly-handled seperate file.
Including the same javascript code on EVERY page.
Huge font/span/div tags including style declarations that are obviously generated as part of a function to provide formatting for table rows that should be setup with a simple CSS class.

Urgh.

Dear Worker Bees…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Great quote from one of our remote doctors…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“Extreme weather, low pressure (90km wind gusts) makes flying in and out interesting.”

This from a guy that’s just flown into a tiny country town in a light plane? Love it.

Nell’s first experiences with the Primer.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Neal Stephenson, you’re an amazing man. Now, the question is - why don’t we have a device like this already? (hint, if this hasn’t already been looked at, I’ve got dibs on an implementation idea!)

The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person - though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like siow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings.__Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple. Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a raven would come to visit them…

Why I shouldn’t trust salespeople.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I really should know better than to trust sales people, I keep getting messed around, but I go back for more. 🙁 This was a conversation I had with one of the reps at The Planet tonight.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…

You have been connected to Brian J.

Brian J: Hello, how may I help you?

Customer: Hi, I was just wondering what the different backup solutions offered with the dedicated servers actually were

Customer: you list network backup or discsync, what’s the difference?

Brian J: Disksync is automated and much more user friendly.

Brian J: You can set it up to automatically run as frequent as you prefer.

Brian J: NAS is space in a seperate storage array you would have to copy and send the data to when you would like to save.

Customer: so the network backup is nas space allocated to us, disksync uses an automated agent?

Brian J: Correct

Customer: and what does disksync require on the server, a username/password setup on ftp or ssh?

Brian J: Neither its a GUI agent installed on the user console

Customer: I’m a little lost

Brian J: Using a simple GUI interface, you can manage all aspects of your backup and recovery including data retention periods, backup schedules, and data restoration.

Customer: yes, but how does it access the server assuming I’m going to change firewall rules and services running on the server I intend to setup?

Customer: (I’m looking at a bare bsd/centos box)

Brian J: The firewall rules would have no effect on Discsync

Customer: how does it access the server?

Customer: assuming it doesn’t traverse the network (which you seem to be implying by saying the firewall rules will not effect it)

Brian J: Through the agent console installed on the box

Customer: never mind, found the information

Customer: you’re incorrect by the way - firewall rules would actually cause problems if they weren’t correct

Customer: refer to your company’s faq on http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=83882

Customer: goodbye.

Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

Worker Bees

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Birthday wish list.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I want an ipod for my birthday!

Nothing else interests me that people can afford, except for some little stuff… just band together, buy me a black 30gb ipod and allow me to inscribe something interesting on the back and I’ll be happy.

The end.

Yes, I’m really really sure.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Sir,

If I tell you to click continue, you don’t need to confirm with me twice to make sure I’m completely sure. Please just click the damn button.

Thanks,

James.

You are a duplicate and whiny snowflake.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear customer,

When told to call back if the drivers don’t install, don’t wait six days and then call us. When you’re told that it’ll take a few days for us to send you a modem, don’t start whining and tell me that it’s urgent and you need one straight away - you’re no more special than the many other people that have these faults every day.

James.

Please whinge less.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear sir,

Arguing with me over the fact that I am required to send a technician to fix your ADSL will get you nowhere. When you continue to argue and I tell you that the other option is that I could just close the case and not send a tech, don’t whinge more.

Thanks,

James

Really, monkeys can do it.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Sir,

You have admitted that you don’t know anything about computers. Based on the fact that I do know a lot about computers, please trust me and attempt to answer my carefully worded and relatively easy questions. Things like “what colour is the button in the bottom left of your screen that says start on it” or “what colour is the box in your hand” can be answered by most monkeys after a small amount of training, so you should be able to do it after a couple of goes.

Today’s quotes…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“I installed the Bigpond before I installed the Mcaffee so it can’t possibly be blocking it!”

“…”

“… right?”

“What comes up when you open Internet Explorer?”

“2003e, the Authentication host was unreachable.”

“… what does the blue bar across the top say?”

“Bigpond Cable Login Client ver..”

“… Is that Internet Explorer? No. It’s not. Can you open Internet Explorer for me please?”

Dear customers,

If you are 70 years old, don’t know anything about computers and are too blind to read things on the front of your modem, please get a friend to come and help you when you have issues.

Rats rats rats!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes. That is cyberpunk.

- Bruce Sterling

you what?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

caller: “I’m not a bigpond customer, but I was looking through my outlook settings and was wondering if you did microsoft exchange server accounts?”

… where do people come up with this shit?

Random blogmeme!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Comment with a random useless fact about yourself, and I’ll:

Tell you why I friended you.
Associate you with a song/film/tv show.
Tell a random fact about you.
Tell a first memory about you.
Associate you with a character/pairing.
Ask something I’ve always wanted to know about you.
Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.

In return please spread this disease in your blog. Or not.

I sold a photo!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I got myself a stall at the Pyree Markets on Sunday, and framed some of my photos to try and sell some. I’d priced them rather low just in an attempt to try and sell them - only making about $10 off each one ($30 for a framed 8×10″ print isn’t bad people, cmon!)

As you may have guessed, I sold one! Right at the end of the day, after quite a few people walking past and looking at things then just wandering off, a guy walked up and bought a 6×8″ print of my Huskisson photo. It’d cost me about $8 to make, and he paid $15 - bastard asked if there was any discount for cash, geez - so it was on its way.

Washing day, new beginnings for all.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ahh, washing day - that day when I realise that all my clothes are too stinky to wear any more times and it’s time to make them clean. That day has come for me, so I must do battle with the posessed washing machine of doom. It’s noisy, it makes the lights flicker because of the dodgy wiring in this house, and the knob thing on it’s busted so you don’t always know where in the cycle you’re starting it!

I went sailing!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m sitting in the gallery yesterday and my uncle calls me up.

Him: You’re going sailing tomorrow!

Me: I am?

Him: Yeah, a mate’s got a boat and he’s going out - I can’t go but said you would, that alright?

Me: [stunned but curious] Sure!

So, we went sailling. Pretty cool in fact, learnt how much there really is to manage to get a boat to do what you want. It’s a 31ft race boat, I’m not good with the terminology, but I helped out a bit and we ended up winning a friendly race across Jarvis Bay 🙂

Road trip, day three

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, another one just as I typed it 🙂

GPS odometer: 1355+change

Today was a relatively short day travel-wise, since I started in Goulburn and was heading for canberra - roughly 100km of driving. Nothing terribly exciting to report as far as the travel went, the Federal Highway is pretty boring. I went past Lake George which is rather empty at the moment, so it looks like a giant flat plain.

Road trip, day two

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This is basically as I typed it on the night, I’m too freakin’ lazy to reword it or remove the tiredness.

Arrived in goulbourn as of 11:30pm trip odometer is 1246km

God damn that was a long day, but it really seems like it flew past. Starting in Kempsey I travelled south (as is to be expected).

Stopped in the supa cheap in newcastle to try and find a sydney/surrounds UBD or similar, and got totally distracted by an intermittent squeaking noise emenating from the engine bay. I seem to be running on crazy at the moment, because it took me until Belmont to stop somewhere to find a long screwdriver to try and sound it out on the engine - all I could hear was that it was coming from somewhere at the “front” of the engine (not the gearbox end, since it’s a FWD car) and it changed when the RPM of the engine changed. I decided that I couldn’t work it out, so I sent an SMS to Darren to ask for help and he said it was probably the timing belt and to spray some CRC/WD40 on it to test it. I finally found a servo on the way out of Belmont and grabbed some - spraying some into the timing cover and onto the timing chain seemed to fix it, so I stopped in an Auto Pro at Gosford at 5:36pm to get some silicone spray as directed. Spraying that liberally in the timing case cover while the engine was running seems to have fixed the problem for now - the belt had probably dried out a bit, hence the squeak. I think it could have been aggravated by the timing case cover gasket being rather messed up, hanging out in places and the cover itself being cracked.

Road trip, day one

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that’s day one’s travel done. By the time I’d packed the car and ran some errands it was about 11am before I left - being unable to stop hugging my cat Charlie probably didn’t help either :'(

I’m following the M1 down the east coast because it’s the easiest route and seems to be the most direct anyway There’s also plenty of towns and places to stop if I need to, which is a comfort considering the condition of the car that I’m driving.

I bought a laptop!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, I bought myself a laptop. For a very long time I thought I’d buy a macbook, having some of the best features and build quality out there, but while Mum and Dad were looking for a rice cooker today they toddled over to the electronics section of Harvey Norman and got talking to the computer guy there. Toshiba have just released a new version of their A100 series laptops, with new pricing and so forth.

Trust No Goblin and HUGE adventures!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Trust No Goblin, an interesting name for a doof, and Mt. Pikapene was the place it was held. I’m going to make this short, because I’m a bit over the whole adventure, but there’s plenty of photoblogging to be done of course 🙂

This is a huge post, and even though I hate the LJ “cuts” this one probably deserves it for low bandwidth people and so forth…

Friday I did a bunch of shopping, getting some kickass gloves for the three boys (Brian, Mitchell and I) and a new tent for myself. I’m really ecstatic with the tent I bought - an OZTrail Star Lite (2006 Edition) which is designed for hiking. It weighs about 2kg’s, takes about ten minutes to setup and is big enough for two people to sleep in comfortably 🙂 For $100 it well and truly satisfies all my needs for doofing and the (hopefully) upcoming super road trip o’ doom.

Firetwirling at the River Stage

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It was a little bit wet on Wednesday night, so we couldn’t firetwirl in the Botanic Gardens. Instead we moved just a little bit to the River Stage on the end of Gardens Point. Here’s some photos from the night…

poi

Staff Halos

Throwing Fire

Bob’s off to the RAAF

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sad to see him go, but it’s something he wants to do and I’m happy to see him achieve his goal. Tuesday morning I got up at 6am to get ready and take Bob off to his enlistment ceremony in at the Defence Force Recruitment centre in the city. We picked up some last minute things (pyjamas, passport photos) and then into the city to drop him off.

He had to be there by 10am, but as usual with anything to do with the armed forces, there was a lot of waiting going on. First there was the wait to get his final medical completed, then there was a bit more waiting until the initial induction and briefing was done, and then a short wait for the ceremony.

Weekend adventures

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The Candyman

If that weekend wasn’t an adventure, I don’t know what was. As usual, I seem to have extended the bounds of human awake-ness by staying up over 48 hours with only the occasional microsleep when I wasn’t busy enough to distract myself. I got up at about 6pm Friday night and didn’t actually fall asleep again until about eight thirty on Sunday night. Hooray! 🙂

The return of the MSN random.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just as I was wondering what I was going to do at work tonight, Mogley decided to inspire me with his/her/it’s intellectual statements!

OLPC

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The One Laptop Per Child project is something that I think is a seriously cool idea. The idea is to come up with a sub-$100US laptop for use by poverty stricken countries as educational tools. Local-mesh wireless setups, low power processor, flash memory so there’s no moving parts, some of them will be designed to be crank-powered so they don’t need local power infrastructure - hell, I wouldn’t mind paying a semi-normal retail price for one or two for my own use if it’s going to get me one of them and help the education of some kids 🙂 They’re being based on a free operating system as well - Fedora Core 5 is the current development environment, which is seriously cool!

w32.Hoots – Orly? Yarly.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Symantec’s info on w32.Hoots. When internet fads get WAY out of hand, this is what happens. The virus sends print jobs to a bunch of different hard-coded printer addresses with a picture of the ORLY owl! It seems to have been designed to spam someone in particular’s network, but it’s funny nonetheless.

Brisbane in the morning

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s two of my “keepers” from the morning of 08/06/06. I was finishing work at 5am that morning, so I took my camera to work and went across to the story bridge and up to Kangaroo Point to take some sunrise photos. Pity it was a bit overcast as usual lately.

Nvidia Dual monitors on Ubuntu Dapper

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This was a separate page on the site, now it’s just a blog post. Here it is:

Ok, so there’s a bit of a dearth of real information on real topics on the Internet, and I try to fix that where I can, here’s how to get (at the moment anyway) dual monitors working in Ubuntu Dapper on an Nvidia video card.

Getting access to the packages

Ubuntu plays nice as far as non-open-source programs and so forth goes, so you’re going to have to activate the Multiverse and Universe repositories in Synaptic.

Getting XMMS working with MP3’s on SUSE 10.1

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Download the files from rpm.pbone.net - there’s other places, but there are multiple mirrors on pbone. The files are linked as part of the console commands.

Install the XMMS libraries lib-mad from the external sources…

From a console:

rpm -i mad-0.15.1B-32.1.i586.rpm
rpm -i xmms-lib-1.2.10-103.pm.1.i586.rpm

Or browse to where you downloaded them and use the package manager from your desktop environment. KDE allows you to right click on the .rpm file and open an install program.

New PC bits, woes, wonder!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m really an AMD fan at heart - who wouldn’t be - they are cheap, fast and these days they are stable as well. Intel‘s been behind in most desktop chip related matters since they released the Pentium 4, with its long pipeline and surface-of-the-sun temperatures.

I’ve been using a P4 based system as my linux desktop because in 2004 when I set it up, the support for NForce2 chipset related gubbins wasn’t that good, and there wasn’t a high performance/quality motherboard with anything else for AMD processors. It was an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe WiFi Edition, with a couple of SATA controllers, onboard raid, fast chip and four memory slots - a great board all round. The 2.8Ghz “C” chip that was in it was a good speed for the money, and it’d worked well as my desktop workhorse since I bought it, but lately I’d been feeling the need for speed.

Ohnoes, my brain hurts.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I got linked to a cool little game that’ll break your mind - Check out 3D Logic on Newgrounds here. So far I’ve gotten to level 28 (the last level) and I’m determined to finish it before I finish work 🙂

Pity you can’t save the game or get a generated password to go back to where you were up to in the game. 🙁

MSN Randoms

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Boy do I love randoms, how they amuse me.

When wildlife… runs and hides?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, that sounds lame, but it’s appropriate. I was driving to work on Monday night, got to the end of my street and saw a small shape on the other side of the road. My brain said “Echidna” and then my eyes caught up and agreed, so I slowed down just in case it was - I didn’t want to run it over. Just as I’d slowed all the way down the crazy thing ran and hid under the middle of my car!

Simple binary search algorithm broken?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I seems that Google labs have found that nearly all established simple binary search algorithms are broken. Sometimes being bigger IS better 🙂

Woo, Mono.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I decided that it’s time for me to grow up and learn a compiled language, so I had a look around - there were the main ones - C, C++, Java or C# - I was talking to a friend and he said to look at C# because it’s so kickass. Cross compatibility, easy RAD, lots of resources - why not? It’s everything Java was supposed to be, but didn’t end up being 🙂

SUSE 10.1 on a low-spec machine

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My laptop’s definitely not what you’d class as a high-performance machine by any modern standards. It’s got a celeron 400 processor, 128MB of ram and a 6gb hdd. This doesn’t leave much room for an operating system with all the bells and whistles - Windows XP is definitely off the list - I’ve been running Windows 2000 Professional on it for the past six months so I could do things like simple graphics editing of my photographs on the run, and coding in my spare time at work.

I’m a Little Rascal!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar hey hey hey hey!

A funny little song, and it applies to me! I was out in the carpark stretching my legs and getting some fresh air via my cigarette and found a shiny cold dollar on the ground - score! 🙂

New Linux ATI Drivers – wow!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I bought a new hard drive - finally getting a half-decent speed SATA drive, upgrading from my quartet of 80gb IDE drives. I had a few woes trying to tie it all in, so I ended up reinstalling my PC. At first I stuck with Gentoo, then got sick of trying to work out its annoying bugs and went to SUSE.

As I tend to have a load of windows open at the one time, and I like to see them all at once having dual monitors is a must for me. The ATI 9600 card I have supports this, being dual head, and I’d had it running (kinda) on Gentoo just before I went through the reinstall process.

Mount Beerwah Excursion

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 30 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was an amazing long weekend for me. I was working my usual overnight shift on Friday night and decided that I wanted to climb a mountain. Years and years ago my family and I (well, mum, my little sister and I; the other two are wussies) climbed Mount Beerwah, so that was a good start. Looking on the web I found the Glass House Mountains and Surrounds page on the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency (now National Parks, Sport and Recreation) website. There’s a few pages there with maps and so forth - we ended up relying on this map in PDF form to get us there.

Amazing things to do with pineapple (NSFW)

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s been a long time since this site’s had naughty pictures on it, but I had to post this… I always make references to what I’m going to do to people with a pineapple, but I think this takes the cake 😉

Updates on the job front

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, so much for us losing our jobs at the end of August, as of a couple of days ago that’s changed to 30th of June. Damnit. That means I’m a month and a bit short of my employment anniversary, missing out on two week’s redundancy payout; not to mention a bunch of wages in the meantime. I’m hoping that I get one of the collections positions they’ve offered - there’s 15 going and they said they would prioritise by tenure and our KPI’s - which tends to help me 🙂

Suse 10.0 MP3 Support

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 14 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so Novell in their infinite wisdom decided to remove MP3 support from SuSE around v10.0. It’s a bit hard to find concrete information on how to get some sort of mp3 support in SuSE, so here it is:

Install XMMS
Download the XMMS mpg123 rpm from this page.
Install it:

\#rpm -ivh xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-13.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:xmms-mpg123 ########################################### [100%]

Run XMMS and enjoy!

I don’t know how to get mp3 working in a lot of the other programs, I’ll try and work that out later. There’s a short article here in DesktopLinux.com on Hacking OpenSuSE - getting mp3 and dvd support in SuSE.

Changes on the job front.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 09 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I work for a call center outsourcing company on a contract doing customer care for a mobile company. The company’s been around for a while, and now it’s shutting down because their parent company Hutchison decided that 3g is a better bet (it is) and CDMA isn’t the way to go anymore.

I’d have to agree with them - most of the customers on the network were there because they got the cheapest service they could find, and it worked for them - most of the time. The phones sucked, the network sucked more, and while it was more profitable than 3g before they decided that the end was near, maintaining an old network isn’t a good business plan. The ability to focus your capital and human resources on a newer product tends to be the smart idea in business.

Shiny shoes and a haircut :)

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’ve finally gone to a hairdressers’ for the first time in about twelve months or so - not to get my hair cut short of course, just a clean-up trim and do something different. I’ll post more later, bit lazy and sneaky to mention too much 🙂

I’ve needed a new pair of shoes for a while, the 10 hole Dr. Martens I’ve been wearing for nearly 18 months are looking a little worse for wear. It seems that Australian importers don’t bring them in anymore, so I had a choice - 14 hole size 14’s that probably wouldn’t be too comfortable (not a good thing) - or a pair of 8 hole size 15’s which will be nice once they are worn in. I went with the 8 holes, setting me back $189, not bad for another 18 months or so wear, I hope 🙂

Starting my poi journey

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a doofer, and one of the best non-music entertainment aspects of a doof is people with poi/firesticks/etc - it’s also pretty good exercise since you’re always moving 🙂

Bob bought a set of the Ultimate Performance Poi from Home of Poi the other day, so I inherited his old glowstick poi and have decided to start learning the art.

As anyone that knows me would realise, my coordination sucks. This makes getting some of even the beginner things like even getting them spinning a bit weird to start with, but I think I’m improving even after just being shown the proper technique and practising for an hour or so today. I think I’m going to have to buy myself a proper set of poi, since the glow stick ones just aren’t balanced right - they are dog chains with glow sticks on the end, and the ends are lighter than the chains, which borks them up.

Engine stuff is finished… I hope.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Basically all we have to do now is put the tailshaft in and hope for the best - there’s a few little things to do on that side, like get a PCV valve and an oil catch can, and find one of the bolts for the rocker cover to make it seal up properly. I know the clutch that’s in there is a bit bodgy, so that might cause a little bit of a problem, but that’s relatively easily fixed.

I missed Poop For Peace day

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Today, humanity stands on the brink. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Darfur, Chad, Nepal… across the world, violence and anger overwhelm any progress towards peace and liberty. We are a divided species, basing our hatreds on even the most arbitrary classifications, unable to move past our quarrels to embrace common humanity. Since difference is all we can see, suffering is all we can expect.

That’s why you should go poop right now.

My Firefox porn tab problems fixed?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Email Battles has an article on a new change to Firefox’s JavaScript Garbage Collection. Aparrently there’s a hard limit of 4MB for some JS engine operations so that people using loads of tabs with pages full of JS will kill things. Sounds like what happens every time I go porn browsing or researching something - after a while it’ll just chug up, take loads of resources and I’ll have to either wait a day or two for it to un-fuck itself, or I’ll kill it and lose all my tabs.

Got my Gemini running yesterday!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, after 10 months, I’ve got an engine that runs! Over the last few days we’ve done a lot of work, getting the fuel system in, cooling system completed and all sorts of wiring done up. It took a lot of playing around, but it got together in the end.

It felt so great just to put the key in the ignition, turn it, and have something happen! We got oil pressure rather quickly - after we filled up the oil filter. 🙂 Next was confirming fuel flow and so on, and it mostly worked pretty well first go, just a bit of air in the lines and so forth. We had the inlet/outlet backwards on the carby first go, since we didn’t know which one was which - the wonders of using old hardware that doesn’t have a manual 🙂

The amazing Internet.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, I was going through my web stats because I was bored today, and what did I find? More people trying to access something I uploaded (as far as I can tell) about this time in 2003. I posted the Playboy Photoshoot of the Brazilian Womens’ Soccer Team, and took it down about three or four months’ later, because I redesigned the site or something. I keep seeing people try to access it in my stats, so I thought I’d try and find it (which I did, in an age-old backup of my site) and upload it to see how many more people will access it in the future. The only thing I’ll change is an addition of a link back to the main page, so hopefully someone will come to my site for more than the boobies.

Woo, that was close

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Mental note - when you’re supposed to start at 11pm, don’t get out of bed at 10:35 - especially when you live what is normally a twenty-five minute drive to work - it sucks. I got there with a minute to spare, and I’d showered, brushed my teeth, shifted the pimpmobile out of the way to get to the camry, picked up my lunch and gotten dressed except for my shoes (one of which I put on while on the highway, the other while sitting at the last red light before work. Go me!

Got my Google Analytics Code

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Woo, I’d completely forgotten about this project they started a while back. Basically it’s just another stats tracker, but Google-Stylin’ which means they’ll actually have something pretty to show me.

I’ll see how it goes, with my zero-pageviews-a-day site 🙂

ADSL’s Working!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hooray, I finally got my ADSL connected this morning, and I’m already loving it. Pity it got connected JUST before I had to leave for work, but oh well, it’s all working perfectly 🙂

ADSL Line Filter Testing

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a comparision of my line stats between the two filters I’ve tried…

<td>
 Downstream
</td>

<td>
 Upstream
</td>

<td>
 6.5 dB
</td>

<td>
 13 dB
</td>

<td>
 47.5 dB
</td>

<td>
 25.0 dB
</td>

<td>
 7.0 dB
</td>

<td>
 12 dB
</td>

<td>
 47.0 dB
</td>

<td>
 24.5 dB
</td>

Westnet Email

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

An email I got from Westnet last night after asking what’s going on 🙁

Hi James,

The order seems to be stalled in the wholesalers system. I have

forwarded this email to our provisioning department to follow this up

for you. They will contact you as soon as they have an answer for you.

Thank you for advising us of the delay and we apologise for any

inconvenience.

Regards,

Ashley

ADSL :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Telstra and Westnet,

Please get my ADSL working soon, I’ve been waiting since the 17th.

Thanks,

yale.

Loan down to seven thousand!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hooray, this is officially the lowest my personal loan’s been since it started. It’s down to seven grand. Only $7000! It goes quicker as it gets lower too, since there’s less interest to pay, and more of the money that goes into the account actually pays off the principal. *dances*

Remembering the rest of my debt sucks though 🙁

Intake manifold fits!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So I finally had enough of a day off to work on the gemini again, and I got the intake manifold to fit. I cut off the heater-hose pipe that I don’t need any more, and this stupid little threaded nodule thingy that I also don’t need, so now it doesn’t foul on the brake lines. I also spent about an hour with a file taking small amounts off the thermostat housing so it doesn’t foul on the rocker cover anymore. End result, the intake manifold fits…

On the second day…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On the second day, the Yale created … ok, I’ll stop now. If you’re starting here, I suggest part one, or part two 🙂

Callala Beach, Huskinsson, Vincentia, The Jervis Bay Reserve, Green Patch - all really nice places, there’s probably a few photos, none that I’m happy enough with to put up though!

In the Jervis Bay reserve there’s a place called Murray’s Boat Ramp, with a little seabreak with places for people to fish off - the water there was absolutely beautiful and clear.

Culburra – First day part two.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part - the first part is here

Continuing on from Stanwell Park and its beautiful sea bridge, we stopped so I could get a shot of the CoalCliff Arts Centre - Quite a nice building in the middle of nowhere.

Clifton School of Arts

Quite a few small towns later, we got to Kiama with its seaside Blowhole - such a ghostly vision I captured in burst mode.. I quite like it!

Back to reality.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Waiting to Check In

I’m home, and wow - where do I start? I was up at 0130 on the Thursday when we got on the plane and flew to Sydney to start our holiday. It was a rather hot night that night, probably nature’s way of telling us to get out of Brisbane and enjoy the weather down south.

I had to sit around the airport for a while - my flight was half an hour after my parents’ I decided to get out my camera and see what I could shoot - I’m not completely happy with it, but this is the one photo that came out well.

Pondering.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Thick white ropes,

Draped over my fingers,

Is this my life until death,

Or is it the death of my life?

I bought a 350D!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’ve been into photography for a while - never really done anything with it, just loved framing shots, taking random things, playing with what comes out etc etc. So I decided that rather than play with the point n’ shoot POS that I have, I’d get a camera that’s going to let me learn how to do it properly.

After reading a lot of reviews. I went to Ted’s Camera Store and bought myself a Canon 350D with the 18-55 lens kit. I bought it in black, since the silver one looks faggy.

Hooray for leave!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, today I start another bunch of annual leave - off work until Monday. Today’s a day of shopping and stuff to get ready (can’t seem to find all those socks and boxers I’m sure I own) and go to bed early so I can get to the airport for the 5am flight tomorrow morning. Mum, Dad and I are flying to sydney, arriving at about 8/8:30am, grabbing breakfast and driving three hours south to Culburra.

Rasterbation!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, I’m a goon now, so watch out for me in the forums 😉

I got bored, so I put a favourite photo of mine through the Rasterbator. The PDF it produced is here. was here but I lost it 🙁

My feet hate me

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like they are crawling slowly back up my legs, killing everything as they go. My shoes are pretty much completely worn out, and with how much I wear them and walk around in them all day, my feet hurt like nothing on earth, my ankles are shagged, and now the muscles in my calves are starting to hurt. It’s happened before, when I was in high school, and I was walking too much in shite shoes. Hopefully I’ll get my ass in gear tomorrow and go buy some nice rockports or something. In the meantime, it’s painkillers ahoy!

Ghost in the machine, or something less mythical?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so in my Corporate Mercenary rant, I wrote about a handset that makes phantom calls. There’s lots of explanations for it, could be bad programming, could be someone with remote access to the handset or the network (authorised or not), all sorts of things. But what is the explanation for all these examples, over quite a few years?

Intake manifold update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, another knowledgeable person has posted on my “help me” thread on the Gemini forums. Seems that I might be able to completely avoid using one of the coolant chambers on the manifold - the one designed to provide heating for the runners, and feeds to heat the throttle body - which I don’t need anyway. Means I can just run a pipe from the bottom of the thermostat housing through to the heater, and that’s that. The coolant temp sender isn’t changed, and if I do need a coolant feed for a turbo or something down the track, then I can open up that chamber again and spend the money to modify it to allow for the heater pipes *shrugs*

I’m a Corporate Mercenary®

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to get it out of the way early - I’m a Corporate Mercenary®, and I have no qualms about that. I’m just like a lot of people out there doing things for money which most people with “normal” old style morals wouldn’t do. I have been given a set of rules, and I stick to them. It’s called towing the company line.

“Normals” working in big corporations don’t realise this. They are taking people’s livelyhoods for the sake of their own, thinking that they are just working a job. I work for a major phone company, and there are so many cases where something happens, and it’s nearly always the customer’s responsibility to deal with the results.

Intake manifold weirdness and the fuel pump is in!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so previously I’d been able to put the manifold on the head and see how the engine goes together. I haven’t actually tried to make it fit since we bolted the gearbox in. Stupid me, I went to test fit things yesterday, and realised that all was not well.

The intake manifold that everyone’s said to use through the different EFI threads on the forums and so forth, doesn’t fit. In saying that, it doesn’t fit without a bunch of modification. Ugh.

JB Raid, day off style.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I got bored and needed something to do tonight, so I went to JB and wandered around for a while. Bought myself a copy of Reservior Dogs Collector’s Edition, on the recommendation of my good friend Mitchell, and a copy of 28 Days Later, a movie I’ve loved for a while. Cost me less than thirty bucks, so that was cool.

Begging for workshop space…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I live on Brisbane’s South Side, and my project car’s in a mate’s garage in Clayfield - making it a bit hard to find a decent amount of time to work on it on my days off - it takes about an hour to get up there and back, not to mention fuel prices :S

So, if anyone has/knows someone with either a spare single garage/shed (lock up) or some sort of workshop with space to work on a car that they would be willing to let me use (and possibly pay for) for a month or two until I can at least get it going I’d love to hear from you. As per the topic title it has to be on the southside, and preferably close to springwood.

Barrett XM109 – great for tanks and … home defence?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This may well be the coolest gun EVER! The Barrett XM109 25MM Payload Rifle. This thing is a man-portable 25mm anti-tank … semiauto rifle. You could theoretically shoot thirty rounds a minute with this thing, if you could get around the fact that your shoulder would be somewhere near your ass, and reloading the pair of five shot clips three times in that minute. Bastards Inc. has a bit more info (and some hilarious comments from the users) on the gun.

Terrible sellers… sigh.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t be bothered whinging too much about it now, but this fuckwit “oldholdensneverdie” who I assume is the store for American Autos took ages to fulfill my order. The “Buy It Now” was clicked and submitted on 20/12/05, I’d sent payment by the next day, including shipping. I sent a message to the seller when that was done, including the payment details. Not hearing anything by the I sent a message asking for when the item was sent, and asking for the tracking number.

Fuel pump arrived!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finally I got my replacement fuel pump! I’ll do the full rant about the problems when I get home tonight… but yay! 😀

Boredom

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m super bored… how are you all? It’s raining. Again. I’m sure that my car’s probably full of water again, and I’m just killing time until I can get my ass in gear to get ready for work. At least I’m floor manager today, that means I don’t have to do much unless it gets hellishly busy. I should go find a book to read, I’m recompiling EVERYTHING on my gentoo desktop machine so that hopefully some of the weirdness will go away.

Sydney tickets booked!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so my Uncle is quite a good photographer, has come out with some amazing shots at times, and is sick of building boats and navigating them all over the place. So he’s come to the conclusion that opening his own studio to exhibit and sell his photos is the way he’ll go in the future, and that’s happening on the first weekend in February. This is a seriously cool thing to me, and I, along with my parents are going to go down to Culburra - an aparrently sleepy little town on the coast near Nowra in New South Wales.

dev-php/php-4.4.0-r4 failing to compile :(

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t work out why it’s not compiling - there’s no posts anywhere online that I can find that tell me how to fix it… how am I cross compiling?

checking for sys/utsname.h... yes
checking for sys/ipc.h... yes
checking for dlfcn.h... yes
checking for fopencookie... yes
configure: error: can not run test program while cross compiling

!!! Please attach the config.log to your bug report:
!!! /storage/portage-tmp/portage/php-4.4.0-r4/work/php-4.4.0/config.log

!!! ERROR: dev-php/php-4.4.0-r4 failed.
!!! Function econf, Line 495, Exitcode 0
!!! econf failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message.

Stinking hot, new dress policy

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s officially too damn hot, and today marks the start of the new dress policy at work. I guess we’ll see how it all goes. I’m sure the operations manager at work’s going to avoid the place like the plague, since it’s going to start a few fights over interpretations of the new rules and what’s right/wrong.

Personally, they can go f*#k themselves. I don’t mind buying new clothes, but telling us the week before christmas that we have to have all new work clothes by the fourth of January is just moronic. I’m going to keep wearing what I’ve been wearing (sometimes fitting in the policy, sometimes not) until I can afford to change.

Stupid domain issues.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I think I worked out why I was having stupid email issues - somehow I’d forgotten that the namehost I was using was pointing to the wrong IP - since I’d been using two different DNS hosting providers because of a problem with one in the past.

Yay for random posts and stupid fixes.

Upgraded to WordPress V2.0

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was fun - not that you’d notice much. The backend’s a lot different, a bit easier to use and so forth. I’m going to have to edit my theme again, and play with a few things, but overall it’s not bad.

More gemini work today.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I did a bunch of work on the gem today - wired up a couple of the sensors, worked out what I needed to do to with respect to the others. I ran the preliminary line for the rear fuel pump, and seem to have worked out what I need to do to mount it and so forth. Some of the interior’s back together, making it look a little more respectable.

My brain makes strange poems

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Reading a post on a friend’s LJ about a weird request she got (guess what they asked for?) made this poem pop into my head. Stop it brain! Be normal!

Roses are red,

They are for thee!

Open your mouth,

I’m needing to pee!

Free Product!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, I’ve mentioned it before - I’m a member on pureprofile.com - a market research site where you go and answer questionnaires every so often and they’ll credit your account, or do stuff for you. I’ve been a member for quite a while, and have built up a not-too-bad balance which I might draw out sometime soon.

Recently I was offered to receive “a new product from a soft drink company” and of course, free stuff, why not? So I filled in my details, telling them where to send it, not expecting for it to happen. But it did! Today I received a big black package in the mail, and opening it I found a carton of a new product by Coca-Cola Amatil, “Coke Zero.” Twenty-four 390ml bottles, just for me. Ooh, and I got one of those weird rubber wristband things that says “the zero movement”. Here’s some photos (and one of the PimpMobile post-doofage).

Positronic Photos Uploaded

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the photos that Mitchell took on the weekend we went to Positronic 2005. I love the action shot (below) when he took a photo past me in the drivers seat and somehow got a passing car 🙂

Medium-sized crisis over, legal driving ability returns!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was an annoyingly medium-sized crisis tonight. Drove out of the carpark, got nearly all the way to Lauren’s house, and realised that my headlights weren’t working. The dash lights worked fine, the parkers worked fine (‘cept for the one with the busted bulb) but no headlights. Odd!

So, as I was leaving Lauren’s I decided that I would like to keep my license, and that having no headlights probably wouldn’t help that cause. So it was out with the multimeter, checked the fuses, checked the wiring, all the usual gubbins. One of the fuses had blown, but replacing that didn’t resolve the issue. I checked that the lights were still fine, no blown globes - something that would suck royally, since they are sealed beams and sort of expensive. Basically, no voltage was getting to the lights themselves. Poo!

Figgered it out, scums.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I couldn’t find my carter fuel pump… thought I’d put it somewhere strange in my room, or in the workshop somewhere. Today I looked through my room, and Bob and I went through EVERYTHING in the workshop and couldn’t find it. Thinking that I had put it somewhere perilous and it’d fallen into the depths of a crap-o-lanche, I decided to clean my room tonight.

So, on went my merry day, getting more bits for the gemini, and doing lots of stuff - working out the standard wiring loom and what we can probably take out, making and installing a new positive wire, negative wire etc. Installed all the fuses and stuff, then plugged the positive onto the battery, and it lit up! Hooray! *dances*

Camry Radiator Madness

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, I stopped in Mooloolooba where my parents were staying for their Christmas holidays, and while I was talking to Dad he mentioned that he’d blown up the radiator on the Camry. It’s about 15 years old, and it’s a cheap japanese car, so these things are bound to happen.

The top tank had split along one of the parts near the filler cap, so to fix it there would have to be a new end tank welded on, and we were quoted $170 for that. Then there was the other option of buying a whole new radiator for $240 - only another $70 more. The fins on the old radiator were flaking off, and there was some nasty corrosion around some of the tubes, so for the difference it wasn’t worth having to replace the radiator in six months when the fins started busting holes in the tubes.

Elf-Tastic

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Pimpmobile Power Shenanigans

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, ages back when the car got broken into, whoever did it must have had a go at the key part of the ignition, the pins got all messed up and it didn’t work properly. I replaced it with a rather dodgy switch and button on the end of a wire run that I had lying around, and most of the time when I indicated, or used too much power the stereo would turn off, the lights would dim and stupid stuff would happen. This got rather annoying, and eventually I worked out that the cause of it was the long wire run itself was causing too much voltage drop in the system itself.

Project Gemini Update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so since I have this week off, I’m working on the Gemini since it’s such a priority to get it on the road at the moment. Today Bob and I went to a wrecker and found a nice bosch throttle position sensor - three wire, good mounting and D-shaft actuation - the one that Repco had for ~$100 or so. That didn’t come with the plug and wires, nor any idea of how things worked with each other. So, that was free - all I paid for was a bunch of sweat and an energy drink after wandering around in the wreckers for half an hour or so - damn it was hot today.

Digg rawks.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

TechSpot has written a Decent Firefox Tweak Guide, which I found on Digg

Another thing on there is a story about Maxis releasing Sim City Classic for free as a java game you can play online. Pity it doesn’t work in Firefox on my Gentoo install, else I might play it a bit more.

Update: unfortunately the Sim City link went offline, which is sad 🙁

Welcome to the Fatherland!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Police checking ID’s and papers to get into an area of Sydney. What next? Having to carry your official fatherland documentation to state your intended destination, and having to ask your local kommandant to get permission to go somewhere other than work and home?

Update: News.com.au links fail eventually, had to unlink. It was an article about police cordoning off a whole suburb … because they can.

Positronic 2005

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Oh wow, that was an amazing weekend. Friday morning we drove around and bought camping gear (nothing like planning ahead, is there?) then some clothes and were supposed to meet Bob at Mitchell’s house around 2-ish. At two I called Bob to find out where he was, and if he’d picked up Seb and Skitzo, but alas Seb was going to drive up by himself, and the directions he’d gotten to meet Skitzo were completely wrong.

Fan action, and not my loving wenches.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, summer’s here again, and with it comes the crazy temperatures on the blacktop. It’s bad enough sitting in traffic in winter in the van - the temps slowly creep up then, with the engine-mounted fan barely pulling enough air through the radiator to keep it from boiling over. This year it’s even hotter even earlier than last year, so driving to work along the highway with massive amounts of air pushing through the front of the van is enough to make the temp gauge climb.

The gearbox, finally.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I dropped the gearbox on my head a couple of weeks back - I probably shouldn’t have tried to lift it in with brute force, and after actually getting it in yesterday I realised there was no way I would have got it in my myself. We lifted it in the first time, and after only about twenty minutes we had it up on a jack and the input shaft was in the clutch.

Bought a DVD burner

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I finally gave in and bought a DVD burner. I don’t really need one, since the only reason I’ll really burn DVD’s is to give stuff to other people, or the once-in-a-year-maybe burn a video to DVD to watch on the television. I was bored, and needed a new toy, so I thought for $79 it wouldn’t be a bad upgrade to the linux machine. It’s a black-faced Pioneer DVR-110D, and it seems to only burn at 2x in K3b but I think that’s a settings issue.

Megasquirt-II Processor action

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, the MegaSquirt is pretty cool, but the MegaSquirt v2.2 PCB with a MegaSquirt-II processor is just plain sweet! I got bored one night and since it’d make dual fuel maps and a bunch of other things that I want to use a lot easier, I decided to order one. That was the twelfth of November, and after not even three weeks, I’ve got it! Hooray!

And now, to add some actual content to this post, here’s some pictures 🙂

Bored police!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Geez, I think last night makes about six times in twelve months I’ve been picked up in the PimpMobile. Driving out of Lauren’s house last night, down the hill towards the t-intersection at the bottom, a police car drives past. I stop at the bottom, making sure to look around because the van runs like crap when it’s cold, and that corner’s a bit hard to see past.

Looking to where the police car went, I notice that it’s stopped across the road and down a bit - funnily enough, half out in the road, and across a laneway - nice and illegal, officers. I move on, making my merry way home. Looking in the rearview mirror, I notice - not surprised at all - that they have done a quick U-turn and are buried up my tail.

I’m a marketing whore!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Pureprofile‘s another one of those marketing companies where they send you something every so often when you fit their profile, and they give you cash or something else as a bonus for doing the survey. I’ve been a member for a while now, and fill out about one or two a month. Recently I was contacted regarding a program they are running for Australia Post to test how the mail system works and so forth. They send me a few things, and on certain days, I put them into the post box at the local post office. Easy!

Beautiful weekend.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, it’s the end of the school year, and all the little school leavers are going off to party and so forth - my sister being one of them. I needed a weekend away, and my good mate Brian was going with them (as one of my sister’s friends is his girlfriend) so I decided to tag along.

The eleven of them are staying in a house down at South Golden Beach (I think I have the name right) - a little village community on the NSW North Coast that has a total population in the really small range. There’s some really beautiful beach, a couple of hundred houses, and that’s about it. Ocean Shores has a small corner store come post office come bottle shop, and we stocked up there on Saturday afternoon, and that was it.

Restarted my linux box

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, there’s a bit of a milestone, I finally restarted my linux desktop machine. There was something going a bit odd with Nautilus and Gnome lately, so I thought I would just kill X for a little while, then go back in and all would be fine. Oh no, after so long it decided that things weren’t all hunky-dory, and that the X server would lock the console display and not let me do anything.

Aww, isn’t she beautiful!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so maybe I’m biased, but my sister looked absolutely beautiful tonight going to her year twelve formal. It was so great to see her smiling, she seemed to be truly happy for once, and looked like SHE thought she was beautiful, instead of just the rest of the world for once.

Anyway, enough of my gushing, there’s a gallery full of pictures to see!

Gallery was removed - lost the images somehow :S

I’ve made a TIO complaint!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, I can’t remember if I’ve said about it here, but I’ve been having problems with one of my ISP’s - they are shitheads. We sent them a cheque, they cashed it on 02/09/05 and are still trying to track the payment so they can remove the debt from their account. We contacted them on 12/09/05 to clear it up, and they sent me to a debt collector at the end of September. Finally I’ve had enough, so I told them early last week that they had until Friday to resolve it and contact me, else I would contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - basically the government oversight committee on telecommunications. I called them this morning, three days AFTER when I said I would contact the TIO, they screwed me around for a while and said that they were still chasing the payment.

Relay cable soldered up

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve been going on about it for a little while - the fact that I had to either buy or make a cable to run from the megasquirt ECU to the Relay/breakout box. I was hoping to buy a cable from the states, since it would have included all the wiring I needed, shielded runs for the required wires, and save a lot of time. Since the two different companies in the states I’ve attempted to contact won’t reply to my emails, and there’s noone else to buy one from, I decided to take on the task of making my own.

Blown Away.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m completely and utterly blown away after last night! I’ve been a fan of The Cat Empire ever since they started releasing tracks - their first album has been one of my favourites of all time. An amazingly energy-filled performance that lasted for two hours, and had the whole crowd screaming for more.

Every song they played was amazing, never the same as the “album version” - which is a great thing - with lots of improvisation, solos, and playing between the band members. With nine members on the stage, and two guests last night, it’s certainly a performance well worth seeing if they are in your area. Words can’t describe how fun it was!

I’m worth lots!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

More than kiki’s aparrently!

It’s not even summer yet.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

“Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city…”_

One of my favourite songs of all time, just cruisy music coming from the time of the Vietnam war, it was the first thing that came to mind when I went for a smoke break today. It’s getting to that time of year that you’re wishing that air conditioned pants were an option for popular fashion. Summer last year was a soaking wet humidity fest, and this year it’s already working on showing us how bad it can be.

Coding Styles

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There are a variety of styles of programming, just like doing anything in this life. You can plan down to the nth degree, making sure that from the start, you know all the possible outcomes of each step in the program. This is how mission-critical programmers work, such as people designing software for NASA or anything that’s life-threatening. You can start a step back, with an algorithm, adding code and testing it as you go, and generally making things work, not knowing every possible outcome, but for generalities the code will work. Recent articles and past experience using their products have shown that this is how many major software developers, including Microsoft work. Then again, you could just throw code at an idea until you get something working, which will break often, requiring constant rewrites until it’s usable.

Desk.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Desk. That object in front of, many of us perform our daily worship of the gods of capitalism. We work, we study, we relax. The desks I have available to me on my overnight shifts are small, barely room for my work needs and nothing more. Somehow I squeeze my laptop on there, allowing me to keep myself occupied and awake. If it were any smaller, there would not be room for many normal people to sit, while keeping useful storage space in the drawer below. Me, I’m over two meters tall, so any semblence of comfort, let alone ergonomics is destroyed by both my size and the desk’s lack of. Attempting to sit with my legs under the desk would require either dropping my seat to the lowest height setting, or me constantly knocking my knees on the fittings underneath.

PHP5 – a whole new ball park.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

As you may have read in my previous post, I’ve installed PHP5 on my laptop. It’s running windows, but don’t hold that against it - it’s still running Apache as the httpd. I’ve heard some good things and some bad things about the latest incarnation of the PHP scripting language - most of the bad things are the fact that they’ve changed the language so much that many people are going to have to entirely re-write their applications. This is a problem, but hopefully only a relatively short-term one - except for the fact that it’s still VERY hard to find any hosting companies that supply servers with PHP5 installed and usable, since most people are still looking for good old PHP4 servers.

phpSQLiteAdmin falls down

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, there goes that idea. I was going to start work on something like a mini phpMyAdmin for SQLite, but it doesn’t support quite a few things that a project like this would require. I don’t know if it’s possible to pull the information from the database engine itself, but things like table lists and so forth aren’t part of the function list like in the MySQL functions available through PHP. What a pity â€“ some of those functions are really quite powerful, though generally only useful for administration tools.

Trumpet and Drum

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

A busker playing the trumpet, offers to let a passer-by his drum. The man, accepts, beating the drum to his own tune, a melody that while out of synch with the trumpet player, seems to fit. The soulful tunes of the trumpet echo throughout the mall, and the slap of hand on drum bounces from the walls. I wander past, the drummer dances, the trumpet player continues his tune, and people watch as they pass.

Bored!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yahoo! I’m officially bored out of my skull. I’ve read pretty much all the interesting parts (and the rest) of the PHP manual that I’ve got on my laptop, I’ve played a bunch of games of Pinball, Minesweeper and Solitaire (I know I’ll only get frustrated with FreeCell) and I’ve done little coding projects on everything I can think of, other than just throwing data in and out of SQLite. I know I could probably start on the solitaire game I’ve been telling myself I would code up for a while, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered right now 🙂

LiveJournal FOAF XML Parser

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This was originally page on this site, but I’ve since decided to just make it a post. Here goes:

This is a class for PHP5 that allows you to load up a FOAF (friend of a friend) file from livejournal.com and display information from that file.

Simple usage:

require( "xml-foaf-class.php" );
$foaf = new Foaf;
$foaf-&gt;do_processing( "filename" );

echo $foaf-&gt;nick;</pre>

Download the source here: xml-foaf-1.0.zip

I wrote a FOAF parser for PHP5

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well at least I did something useful with my first of a week of overnight shifts, and that was to do some programming. Clairey’s been talking about trying to setup a page to process the Livejournal FOAF (friend of a friend) XML feed, but not getting anywhere with it. I’ve done XML stuff before, and I thought I would help her out, and as usual, with the times that I decide to help someone out with coding something, it turned into a mini-project.

Shopping!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’m working the night shift this week, 10pm - 6am Tuesday through Saturday. I’ve been wondering what it’d be like to work a week straight of overnights, and I was muttering about it on Saturday night because I’m sick of being a service coach. Monday morning comes around, and I get a call from my supervisor at work - would I like to do a week of overnights? Sure, that’d be fine, says me.

Charlie is a sexy manslut.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The Theatre

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I went to the theatre the other night, to see a play based on Terry Pratchett’s novel Interesting Times. I found out about the play through my good friend Denise, as her housemate was playing the part of Twoflower. It was performed in a small theatre called the Brisbane Arts Theatre, on Petrie terrace. A small theatre that has been open on-and-off for thirty years or so, going by what my father remembers, there was enough seating for perhaps one hundred people, and for the final show, there was about 2/3 of the seats filled.

Boo, these things suck

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

But I’m a sucker, and I’m smart!

Your birth on the 17th day of the month suggests that you are very lucky financially, because this date indicates a solid business sense.

Although you are probably very honest and ethical, this birthday enables you to be shrewd and successful in the world of business and commercial enterprise.

Punks and uni, k5 style.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know what to say other than read this story on k5. It’s pretty cool, about someone doing a really cool course in uni, and having some fun along the way.

Boy I love Kuro5hin at times - it makes the.funny = 1;

(Update 30/4/16 - “this story” used to link to http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/25/6750/9089 but k5’s gone and the Internet Archive was blocked from accessing it. Sad.)

Why not to have other people’s accounts under your name.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Mother. Giver of life, feeder of mouths, lender of money, and it seems… serial late-payer of bills. I have a dialup connection through iHug (now owned by iiNet which I used to use before we got our cable connection through Bigpond. I kept it going after we got cable, since mum’s laptop isn’t allowed on our network. Spyware, large downloads and viruses are inherent with little sisters and stupid users. She uses that connection to get on the net.

You could swear it was high school again.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, as usual, another “goddamn, there’s some stupid people in the world” post. But instead, it’s not the customers, it’s an agent! One, in particular. Ok, so when someone can’t do their job in one company, has terrible people and communication skills - and that company is your client, the obvious thing to do would be to hire that person when the client shuts down the department. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Didn’t think so.

Fuel pumps and steering components

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I got my low pressure fuel pump today, a carter gold. Boy it’s heavy! And big! It came with a mounting bracket, and all the possible hardware it’ll need to set it up, which is nice… even little waterproof cap-clips for the power lines… seriously nice!

Here’s some pics:

People on the internet suck!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, someone in #overclockers asks if anyone knows about commodores, which I know a little bit about, so I offer to try and answer a question if it’s a simple one… and then it gets weird!

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Mon Oct 24 23:39:33 2005
[Moyley] Sorta
[Moyley] Want to know about the speedo drive
[yaleman] what about it?
[Moyley] apparently mines leakin
[yaleman] that's seriously bad, I'd say
[Moyley] is it simple to fix.
[Moyley] i presume its just a little gasket sealie thingo
from the back of the tranny
[yaleman] manual or auto?
[Moyley] auto
[Moyley] simple to change?
[yaleman] I'd probably say not...
[Moyley] fuck u.
[yaleman] excuse me?
[Moyley] i dont wanna know shit like that.
[Moyley] tell me good news like its really easy to dix
[Moyley] fix
[yaleman] ok, so you're going to stop talking to me now.
[Moyley] when we dump the tranny oil and change it
[Moyley] no 😛
**** ENDING LOGGING AT Mon Oct 24 23:43:07 2005

Uh, what the FUCK? Someone asks for help, I offer some help, and they insult me! Why do I even bother!

Picture of my bash mark.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m trying to get a better picture of it - I wish I could have found my camera yesterday - but I’ve tried FOUR sets of rechargeable batteries, and gotten three whole photos out of it. Poo. Anyway, back to whatever I was doing before.

bashmark

Reading.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m reading Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg at the moment, it’s super cool. I read Silicon Snake Oil every year or so, whenever I find it in my bookshelf - Stoll is a great writer in my opinion.

Something Positive

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Comedy Gold. I have nothing more to say. Except click this.

Cars are dangerous. Yes I’m a tard.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’ll start with what I got done yesterday. One two syllable word comes to mind.

Fuckall.

Ok, so it was raining, which meant I couldn’t go to the wreckers to search for parts to suit the gemini build up. That was fine, rain = mud = unable to walk around wreckers. So instead, I went to Bob’s house and talked to him for a while, the usual planning and talking shit session ensued. I had gotten up early to go to the wreckers and get stuff done, and as usual had fucked around and wasted time all over the place.

Poker, Parties, Too Much Work

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that seemed to be the longest possible way to have a four day period. I had Friday and Saturday off, due to work Sunday - so I worked with that, planning on doing some work on the Gemini, play poker with the boys, go to a house party, then work Sunday and keep going as normal, getting a normal amount of sleep.

The best plans always go wrong, damn that guy Murphy.

Space elevators discussed

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

An interview with Dr. Bradley Edwards, a big proponent and really smart guy on space elevators. I really hope that I see the development of these in my lifetime, and the jump in technology and innovation that’ll come with them to benefit society. The world will be an amazing place when you can spend a couple of days in transit and end up in space!

Injection and ignition

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I got my fuel pressure and oil pressure gauges yesterday, from Lee’s Spare Parts & Performance - a great little place down on Kingston road, near me. I ended up just buying two oil pressure gauges, since that’s all they had, and they were cheap - they are the same gauges anyway, just with different labels 🙂 They are Speco brand 2″ white face gauges, nice and small, and easily readable. They ended up being $59.95 each, which was a steal since they are electrical, and include the sender and all mounting hardware.

Wallace and Gromit Studio Warehouse burns down

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that royally sucks, all their history is destroyed 🙁 These guys make some seriously cool animated shows and feature films, incorporating good english humor and hilarious visuals.

Found from a slashdot article here.

Overnight ramblings.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Oh well, so that failed, there’s no wireless access points that I can see from where I sit at this desk overnight. I’m at work, starting at eleven PM. It’ll probably be so boring that I’ll just jot down notes and rambling whenever I think of something.

23:00 The overnight. It’s a really boring shift from what I’ve heard, only about one call an hour when things on the network are running fine, or completely crazy if they are not. Let’s hope that it all goes well, I’ll just put up a recorded message begging people not to talk to me if it goes awry.

George Romero rocks!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

(Update 30/4/15 there WAS a ) Great review of John Romero’s “Dead” series of movies on K5.

But the site’s gone and they refused the Internet Archive’s services. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/25/6750/9089

Getjessacorset

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

My funny friend Jessica’s a bit of a goth. Well, a fair bit of a goth. She’s also just out of high school, so she’s funny and cute and stuff. Get her a corset. I’ll probably donate. Maybe. You better too!

path_dps.m4 giving you Gentoo hell?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Finally I found something told me how to fix my problems with the STUPID compilation issues of late. Delete the file path_dps.m4 from your filesystem!

This page tells you to run this command:

rm /usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4

Delete the file, and no more stupid compilation issues. Hooray! Here’s the gentoo bug report if you want more information.

Learning to play texas holdem

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been invited to a poker game in a week and a bit, so I decided to learn how to play Texas Holdem Poker. Mitchell’s playing on holdempoker.com at the moment, and the interface seems nice, so I decided to log on and have a go. It’s an interesting game, based on the fact that you get two “hole” cards which are your own, and then there’s five cards that gradually come out on the table, once they are all out, then you make your hand. I had a look at the holdempoker.com tutorial, and some other tutorials at about.com. They’ve got some basic info on how the game works, some tips on the strategy while playing holdem, and a page on what hands beat what in poker rules.

Funky first-aid.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Duct Tape Bandaids! That’s entirely cool!

Bali bombings affect friends at home too..

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well it seems that one of my friends, the amazing Wiz from #overclockers may be on call to support the staff in the local hospitals in NT taking care of some of the victims of the most recent Bali bombing. Wow. My thoughts are with you dude, good luck and I wish you’d get a weekend off for once.

Another lame attempt at expressing my feelings, brought to you by ricetek.net.

More gemini updates

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The exhaust is in today, and I’ve started some of the wiring. The fuel pump run to the back of the car is done, and so is the battery wiring to the relay box. There’s a short run from the relay case to the fuel pump that’s going in the front of the car, just so I know where things are going. The O2 sensor should work out nicely, the controller for it will sit next to the battery under the wiper motor etc. There’s not much more wiring I can do until I get more sensors, and it seems that the short loom I got with the first injection manifold had the wrong connectors for the injectors I have. It’s got two that’ll suit, but one of them doesn’t have a circlip to hold onto the lugs on the injectors, and the other one’s looks like it’s a little warped from heat or something. That means I’ll have to get onto bosch to find some part numbers of connectors so I can just buy them.

Image gallery added

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, I’ve found myself an image gallery that seems to be relatively easy to use. It’s just a simple thing that scans the directories that I tell it to, and makes up an image gallery from them. It doesn’t make the thumbnails automagically, or anything like that, it just displays the images in a way that’s easy to see - I got it from LazyBoy and it’s called the “Lazy Gallery Plugin”

FatMan is hawt!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yes he is.

First engine in the gemini

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It sounds a bit weird, but yes - the first engine is in the gemini. As I I’ve mentioned before, I bought a second engine for the gemini on the cheap, and that’s the first one going in so I can set up the EFI and all the other things I’m putting onto the good engine. This means that when it doesn’t start first go, and everything’s slightly out of whack, it doesn’t cause problems on the engine and do horrible things to it.

Linux Standard Base – only for slow machines?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Starting my day with my normal dose of slash, I found this article calling for the end of the Linux Standard Base. Basically, I’d have to agree with the article it linked to, posted on Ulrich Drepper’s LJ. From what I’ve seen, the LSB is based around stupid standards and testing software that blatantly sucks, and it seems that anyone that passes it is using software that they’ve had to modify to run on a) slower uniprocessor machines b) a distribution that isn’t binary compatible to the shipped verision.

Sylpheed 2.0 report.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I installed Sylpheed, and I played with it. I run my own web/mail server, so I just leave whatever mail I receive on the server so that I can get it whenever I want it by IMAP. My local client already knows what it’s downloaded, so it’s not like I have to download the full 30+ megabytes of email every time. Sylpheed quite quickly downloaded the 4000+ messages that were on the server, and didn’t have a single problem displaying every single header in the inbox when it was done. Filtering messages was processed blisteringly fast and without error - other mail clients sometimes have issues with my filters - and making filters was easy. Navigating between folders was fast, quite frankly I can’t get over how fast this client is, it’s great!

Wow, the stupidity.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’m a supervisor at work - that means, when I’m doing the supervisor thing, that I have to look out for the people on the floor, take calls that are too long, talk to idiots that think a supervisor’s going to fix their life etc. So I wander over to check on a call that had been going too long, and Lauren’s crying. Ok, so this is different, it takes a fair bit to shake her, so this guy has to be a complete ass. He guy had basically been insulting her, the company, everyone he could think of for ten straight minutes, and being a general pain because he felt like taking his lack of humanity out on someone else.

Final Fantasy Advent Children

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’ve just finished watching Final Fantasy advent children. First thing - I think it has the thinnest plot in a movie that I’ve seen in a long time. Wow, bad guy gets something he wants, bad stuff happens, then the good guy beats him up and everything goes well! I’m glad this wasn’t actually publicised too much in the media, since it wasn’t much more than a lame fan service. With no development of characters and no explanation of what was going on other than “well, there was this company, and they did some bad stuff, but nature got them back, and screwed over humanity.” After that, if you hadn’t played the game all the way through and knew what had gone on, you were lost. I was, and I had sat through my friends playing it a few times. As far as I can tell, it’s basically an hour and a half of cut scenes taken from what could have been Final Fantasy 7.2, since it was basically x years after FF7, and a bunch of stuff happened! The best part was the fight between Cloud (the good guy) and Sephiroth (guess what, the bad guy!), with the cool-ass 80’s rock backing track, lots of destruction and stuff blowing up. The modelling was great, the voices I couldn’t tell, since they weren’t in English (I’m sure it would have ruined it had they been in english)

How not to get high on NO2

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This article (news.com.au) is a good example of how not to do NO2 (nos, bulbs, nangs, name it what you will, it’s Nitrous Oxide) Seems the kids had a one meter long bottle of it in the boot of their excel (maybe it’s a good reason why not to drive such a pussbox) and it seems that all but one of the four people in the car died. The police say they don’t know if it leaked or if it was them that opened the valve, but geez - you seriously know about it if you’re affected by the gas - they should have known better and stopped. STUPID PEOPLE DIE!

Vino! You wonderful thing!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I setup a Gnome desktop machine based on Gentoo on my dad’s spare laptop a couple of months back, to see if the centrino-based pile o’ junk would work properly, and it did. (for the most part) One of the things that was included in the Gnome install was Vino, a program that helps with setting up remote desktop sharing of the desktop in use. I never knew what the program’s name was, and I couldn’t work out how to get it working on my two-year-old install of Gentoo, and I didn’t want to go to all the effort of reinstalling Gnome just to hope that the program would be installed at the same time. I was cruising newsforge as I do when I’m at work, and I found out what it’s called! Hooray!

Sylpheed 2.0 released, time to check it out.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been prodded a few times into looking at Sylpheed - and now this review of the new release on linux.com may have pushed me over to the dark side. It’s a mail client that’s designed using the GTK+ libs, which is good for me - I’m a (nearly) card-carrying Gnome Junkie. I last looked at Sylpheed about 12 months ago, and when I did, it was ugly! I think it was using the original GTK libraries, which makes for some good speed (apparrently, I’ve never seen it) and it was pretty clunky. Looking at the screenshots from the site, and the information in the review, I’ve decided to see how it goes, replacing Evolution as my mail client. I’ve been using Evolution for quite a while now, ever since converting from Windows as my main desktop OS, where I was using Thunderbird (and before that, Outlook 2000) The main reason I’m looking away from Evolution is the fact that it seems to get slower and slower every time I want to use it - and the only explanation I can come to for that is its use of the file-per-folder mbox format for mail storage - and I have folders with thousands of pieces of mail in them at any time. There’s other reasons too - I don’t need a groupware program, just a mail client, and I’m trying to find something that’s a bit lighter on the memory usage as I’ll probably change from an overpowered desktop machine with pretty good specifications to a laptop with more conservative abilities soon.

Woo, multithreaded Python stuffs.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a great writeup on multithreaded game scripting using a new version of Python called “Stackless.” Stackless has a slightly different approach to normal when dealing with threads, allowing for micro-threads which have what seems to be a single-byte overhead, tiny startup time and great allocation procedures. I’m going to have to look into it further for playing with some things I want to learn about, so I’m sure I’ll probably wax poetic about it on here in future. Nicely written article that brings out some good points about how game programming works too!

Yet Another Linux Blog

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’m bored at work, trolling the sites on the OSDN and found a well written review of a site called Yet Another Linux Blog. I always like to see people reviewing other sites, because it’s definitely a subjective thing. YALB’s an editorial site with content based around (funnily enough) Linux issues and Open Source software and all the different things that go with it. I couldn’t get to the site from work, and now getting home, it seems that I can’t get to it at all. What a bummer. Sounds like it could have been a really cool site, but I think I’ll have to wait until he stops hosting it from his home connection or whatever he’s doing.

Full metal … wow.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I just finished watching the final episode of the Full Metal Alchemist series. One of the main things I’d like to say is wow. Amazingly well thought out throughout the series, a truly high quality anime. The moral of the story (as all real Japanime’s require) is conveyed throughout the story - told straight out with no explanation to start with - but explained as the series progressed. I’d have to agree with Mitchell’s description of it - it’s like crack… well, more addictive than crack, and more giggling/crying/wow factor. Now all I have to do is find a copy of the movie and watch that 🙂

Lanning fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, this is terribly funny - lanning on a 433mhz laptop with a 10mbit network card… boy this is slow. Download speeds max out at about 800k/s, and most things are too big for the hdd to download, but oh well… it’s something to do. Except for the fact that it’s nearly 2am and I need to start work in 13 hours 🙁

Changed to WordPress

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, the Mambo CMS was kinda good, but really clunky unless you’re a big-site developer with a lot of content from different writers and running a big portal (I guess). WordPress is designed for a smaller site or blog, so that’s what I’m running now. The management backend is seriously easy to use, and I worked out how to convert the database from Mambo to WP really quickly. Yay me!

Static electricity king

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

When I’m walking around work, I build up a fair bit of static electricity. It’s something to do with my shoes or my hair or something to do with how amazing I am I guess - but I build up a LOT of charge just walking a few steps. It’s mainly to do with the makeup of the soles of my shoes, since they are doc martens which have a plastic/rubber sole that’s good at building up a charge. Sometimes when I discharge (generally on things like the metal frames of doors and the cubicles) it can make quite a cracking noise, and sometimes even make quite a twitch in the muscles of my hand. It’s quite dangerous at times, hurting people if I accidentally (or intentionally) discharge through some part of their body. Then there’s this guy - the king of static electricity. Wow, I bow down to him.

G180 Work done!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Finally picked up the engine from Bryant on friday, woo hoo! $984.30 later, I’ve got myself a bottom end ready for assembly. I’ll have to get pictures when I’ve got the camera with me at the workshop, exciting times!

Creative PD1100 Webcam Drivers

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I got this webcam AGES ago, and I had it working for a while - because I had installed the drivers off the CD. It’s a stupid cheap little webcam, it looks like they bought the leftover casings from Intel for their original cheap-and-cheerful webcam (I’ve had an Intel cam that looked exactly the same)

The problem is, it seems to be some sort of limited-release product according to this page. If you search for PD1100 anywhere on the Creative web site, all you’ll find is the reference to it on the “list of webcams” page. Downloading the drivers for a similar model doesn’t work, and none of the drivers I could find (admittedly, I didn’t go through EVERY driver for webcams, because this is such a slow process) would work.

Share trading …

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wondering about share trading for a while as an investment opportunity, and I was reading up on it on a few sites, where I found this quote:

Trading is a zero-sum game. For every winner, there is a loser. What’s the difference between winners and losers? Smarts and strategy. For every loser in the NASDAQ implosion there was a winner. Does this mean that there are traders with neither strategy nor smarts actively losing, effectively shifting their funds to the winners, armed with strategy and smarts? Yes, absolutely.

One step closer…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yet another update where nothing really happens. I just got a call from Bryant Engineering updating me on where they were up to with regards to the engine rebuild. The connecting rods are fine, no cracks - though they did have to clean them up a little bit, but nothing major. The crank’s big ends needed to be ground to -0.020" because there was a small radius on one of the journals. Again, nothing major - so that’s wonderful. The block turned out beautifully according to the rep that called me, and if they are saying that, then it must be good. Now all I need to do is wait for them to source bearings and complete the balance, and then I’ll be able to pay for it and pick it up.

Pimping shenanigans

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, I was driving home from work with Mitchell and Lauren in tow - and lo and behold, driving out of the valley, I got pulled up! The only reason they could give me a ticket was the fact that I didn’t indicate while I was sitting in the right hand turning lane, waiting for a green arrow. So I had to blow into the little machine, and establish the fact that yes, while I was at work, and while walking from work to the car, I had not gulped down a large amount of alcohol and then decided to break the law. Not only that, but when they spent a good five minutes sitting in their car playing with each other, they couldn’t find anything in their computers about the fact that I killed all those little old ladies at the old folks’ home. Apparrently his carputer was broken, I still think it was masturbation - either way, there was some wanking going on that wasted my time. Thanks Queensland Police!

Another Engine for the Gemini

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so going by the topic, you’re thinking that either I’ve gone mad, or my hoarding skills have been redirected to another goal. Well, I’m already mad, and a little bit of the second part is coming into play here, but there is method to my madness (no, really! there is!) Basically, I’m spending over two grand on a G180 engine for the gemini - and that’s just the motor, not including fuel system and other stuff.

Pimpmobile Update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, there was a weird smell coming from the van when it was warm, which was nearly a clutch smell, nearly a hot brake smell, and nearly a whole lot of things. The weird thing is, it wasn’t coming from the driver for once, it was the car! Seems that the automatic transmission needed a good service, so that’s what we did last night. Full flush of the auto trans fluid and new filter/gaskets was the order of the night, including checking the settings on the bands. After all that, there’s no more smell, and it seems to run a bit better as well. The reason for the smell is the fact that the auto fluid was frothing (don’t ask me why or how, it’s probably something to do with overused/old fluid) and venting through the top - trimatics have a little vent at the top so they can do that.

Asking Queensland Transport

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m spending all this money on a car that I’m building, and I didn’t check to see if it was actually going to be legal for me to

drive it on the road - good going me. Luckily (as you’ll see if you read below) it seems that the modifications that I’m going to do are fine, as long as I don’t turn it into a big polluting crazy machine. Which is fine - because I’ll be tuning it for best efficiency, which also means best burn/least emissions (normally.) Below is the final response including the other bits I sent/received.

Yay for internet fucktards.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I posted a reply (now reported by the thread owner and deleted by the mods) to a thread on the Overclockers Australia Forums because, quite frankly, the thread the person wrote sucked. The writer is well known for his complete lack of coherency when posting, or chatting on the #overclockers IRC channel.

Birthday present weirdness.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, I’m not a big fan of birthdays, always a bit over all the attention and crap that goes with them. I really had to post something that was written on the two cans of deoderant I got though.

One’s called 38.2 degrees celsius

Immediately prior to knocking on heaven’s door, the average female will experience a dramatic increase of body heat and would notice a temperature reading of 38.2oC if the services of a thermometer could be utilised at this point. A male wearing Lentheric 38.2 however, would maintain coolness throughout.

Boredom strikes again!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, Ok, I have to stop doing people’s homework for them… but this one was a challenge!

/*
** file: Pegs.java
** created: 02/04/05
** author: Craig Lester
*/

import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.lang.Math.*;

public class Pegs {

int matches = 15;
int player = 2;
int remnum;

int board[][] = new int[9][9];

public void setupboard() {
int r = 0;
int c = 0;

for (int n = 0; n &lt; 7; n++) {
for (int m = 0; m &lt; 7; m++) {
board[n][m] = 1;

if (n &lt; 2 && m &lt; 2){
board[n][m] = 0;
}

if (n &lt; 2 && m &gt; 4){
board[n][m] = 0;
}

if (n &gt; 4 && m &lt; 2){
board[n][m] = 0;
}

if (n &gt; 4 && m &gt; 4){
board[n][m] = 0;
}
}
}

}

public void drawboard() {
int r = 0;
int c = 0;

System.out.println(" 0 1 2 3 4 5 6");
for (r = 0; r &lt;7; r++){
System.out.print(r +" ");
for (c = 0; c &lt;7; c++){
switch (board[r][c]){
case 1:
System.out.print(". ");
break;
case 2:
System.out.print("* ");
break;
default:

System.out.print(" ");

}

}
System.out.println();
}

}

public int countspots(){
int count = 0;
for (int r = 0; r &lt;7; r++){
for (int c = 0; c &lt;7; c++){
if (board[r][c] == 1) {
count++;
}
}
}
count--;
return count;

}

public void placepegs() throws IOException {
int maxpegs = countspots();

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(System.in));
Random generator = new Random();
int x = 0;
System.out.println();
System.out.print("Enter number of pegs
to randomly place on Peg Solitare board &gt;&gt; ");
System.out.flush();
x = Integer.parseInt(in.readLine());
if (x &gt; maxpegs){

System.out.println("Pegs amount greater than maximum allowed for this
board, using maximum instead");
x = maxpegs;
}

System.out.println();

//if (x == 0 )

int r = 0;
int c = 0;
while (x &gt; 0){
r = generator.nextInt(7);
c = generator.nextInt(7);
if (board[r][c] == 1){
board[r][c] = 2;
x--;
}

}

}

public void play() throws IOException {
String y[] = new String[7];
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
Random generator = new Random();

y[0] = " ";
// asks for the user to input four moves
for (int r = 1; r &lt; 4; r++){
if (y[r-1] != ""){

System.out.println("Please enter move, seperated by spaces");
y[r] = in.readLine();
}
}

for( int test_loop = 1; test_loop &lt; 4; test_loop++ )
{
System.out.println(y[test_loop]);
}

// iterates thorugh the ... something?+
System.out.println("Testing now...");
for (int s = 1; s &lt; 4; s++)
{
// System.out.println("Testing entry "+s+" now...");
int z[] = new int[5];
if (y[s] != null)
{
//System.out.println("DEBUG " +y[s]);

StringTokenizer ts = new
StringTokenizer(y[s]);
// goes through each token in the string

for( int test_loop = 1; test_loop &lt;= 4;
test_loop++ )
{

z[test_loop] =
Integer.parseInt(ts.nextToken());
}
//System.out.print(z[s]);
}

int Valid = 0;
int x1 = z[1];
int y1 = z[2];
int x2 = z[3];
int y2 = z[4];
int xvec = 1;
int yvec = 1;
if( x1 &gt; x2 )
{
xvec *= -1;
}
if( y1 &gt; y2 )
{
yvec *= -1;
}
System.out.println( "\nTesting movement from "+x1+","+y1+" to "+x2+","+y2 );
// has the start position got a peg in it, and is the move a valid spot?
if( board[x1][y1] == 2 && (
( ( ( x1 &gt;
1 || x1 &lt; 5 ) && ( y1 &lt; 2 || y1 &gt; 4 ) ) || ( y1 &gt; 1
&& y1 &lt; 5 ) ) &&
( ( ( x2 &gt;
1 || x2 &lt; 5 ) && ( y2 &lt; 2 || y2 &gt; 4 ) ) || ( y2 &gt; 1
&& y2 &lt; 5 ) ) ) )
{
// calculate the movement vector
int movex = Math.abs( x1 - x2 );
int movey = Math.abs( y1 - y2 );
// is it moving two spaces?
if( ( movex ==
2 && movey == 0 ) || ( movex == 0 && movey == 2 ) )
{
//System.out.println("movement checked out");
// if the destination is clear
if( board[x2][y2] == 1 )
{

//System.out.println( "destination is clear" );
// if there is a peg to jump over

// this is where it's jumping over

int checkjumpx = x1 + ( Math.abs( movex / 2 )
* xvec );

int checkjumpy = y1 + ( Math.abs( movey / 2 )
* yvec );

//System.out.println( "check spot :
"+checkjumpx+","+checkjumpy);

// check if the spot it's jumping is a peg

if( board[checkjumpx][checkjumpy] == 2 )
{

System.out.println( "Valid"
);
Valid = 1;
}
}
// if the destination has a peg in it
else if( board[x2][y2] == 2 )
{

//System.out.println( "Destination has a peg
in it already" );
}
// if the destination is off board
else
{

//System.out.println( "Destination off board"
);
}
}
// if it's moving too far
else
{
//System.out.println("x movement was: "+movex );
//System.out.println("y movement was: "+movey );
}
}
// if there was no peg to grab in the first place
else
{
//
System.out.println( "no peg at "+x1+" "+y1+" value was "+board[x1][y1]
);

//System.out.println( "invalid move, either peg not there, or out
of bounds" );
}

if (Valid == 0)
{

System.out.println("Invalid");
}

}

}

public void game() {
System.out.println ("Java Pegs Game");
System.out.println ("=============");
System.out.println ();
setupboard();
try {
placepegs();
}
catch (IOException i) {
System.out.println("Erronous Input");
}

drawboard();
try {
play();
}
catch (IOException i) {
System.out.println("Erronous Input");
}
drawboard();

}

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
Pegs tpo = new Pegs();
tpo.game();
}

}

Boredom creates programs!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is what happens when I’m bored - a mate of mine messaged me for a tip on how to write a program for his homework at uni - I ended up writing the whole program as a test for myself in Python.

#!/usr/bin/python
#Craig: Write and test a method that returns the sum of all factors of a given positive integer n, where the factors include 1 but exclude n itself. For example, the sum of the factors of 12 is 16 (1+2+3+4+6 =
16). 

#yaleman:
#first you have to get the factors
#iterative modulo would be the easiest
number_to_factor = 12
sum_of_numbers = 0
debug = 0
for i in range(1,(number_to_factor - 1 )):

 test = number_to_factor % i
 if debug == 1:
 print "i "+i
 print "test "+test
 if test == 0:
 sum_of_numbers += i

print "Sum of factors of "+number_to_factor+" is "+sum_of_numbers

I think I might have to start looking at some of the bounties for stuff in the open source community - I know how to do some of it, and if I don’t, I can learn!

Gah!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is amazing, rather than giving us good service and being good to the people, the Queensland Transport department has started allowing Citibank to put credit card offers in registration renewal letters. Geez, where will it stop? “Driver’s License - brought to you by McDonalds in the interests of safe driving!” or “Here is your speeding fine, red bull would have given you wings!” “Why drink and drive when you can stay at home and have a blockbuster night?

Lots!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so there’s been a lot of changes in the last couple of days in James-world. For one thing, Bryants called me back about the engine - the bores are a little more worn than it was first thought, so I have to use +0.040" pistons - which meant an email to GCP to change my order. They seemed fine with it, saying they would change the order, probably have to charge me, but that was fine.

CarPC Project Started

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’m a geek - I’ve always got to have a lot of geek toys around me, and one of the main things is a computer. I’m building the Gemini, as you all know, and with that is an ECU called a MegaSquirt. Most ECU’s have inbuilt datalogging and storage capabilities, or have the ability to send live data to another system (normally a PC). The MegaSquirt is the second style of unit, logging through the serial interface on a PC. This means that I have to have a PC in the car at all times that I want to datalog - which in my case, is as often as possible, to make sure the car is running correctly and so that I can optimise fuel, spark and eventually boost maps.

Sagely advice from someone’s signature…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

CAPS LOCK IS NOT CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL. TURN IT THE FUCK OFF

Well said, random internet-person.

Piston order update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that there isn’t many pistons to suit the G180Z these days - the engine hasn’t been made for nearly 20 years, which I guess doesn’t help. GCP sent me an email yesterday saying so, and reporting that the Chrome-Moly rings I was looking for are no longer available. That means I’ll just have to deal with stock steel rings, and upgrade the pistons later when I supercharge. Since the engine hasn’t actually cost me that much, I might go to a 4ZE1 or something like that when I supercharge it, giving me a 2.4lt engine with slightly more modern components.

Pistons and gaskets ordered!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, I stopped procrastinating and ordered my pistons and the gasket set today. Buying them from GimmeCarParts.com.au seems to have saved me a bit - Repco wanted to charge me 300+ for the pistons, where the GCP price was $287.82. This includes Chrome-Moly rings, a higher quality ring that’ll give better sealing and compression. Hopefully I should have them by the end of the week or so, then I can take the pistons and the clutch (which I’ll probably buy tomorrow from repco) to Bryant Engineering so they can do the machining.

E-Time and E-Blocks – Benefits and Impacts to Call Center Profitability

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Working in the call center industry, and learning about how to manage calls, customers and the staff that handle them is quite and experience. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that can be used when gauging the success of a call center environment, but when it comes down to it, business is about profit. Cash flow in a call center environment is based around the amount of staff being paid to take calls, and the volume of calls that the center can charge the client for. If the company is paying agents to be ready to take calls when there are no calls to take, that is a wasteful expenditure, and needs to be managed. This is where E-Time and E-Blocks come in.

Gnome 2.12 preview

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Davyd Madeley has completed a preview of Gnome 2.12. I can’t wait for this release to come out - there’s been some great improvements in gnome in the past two versions, but this one looks like it’ll blow them away. A decent-looking pdf viewer including text search and page previews (and integration of it’s services into nautilus) is great to see. Hopefully it’s not just for locking down the menu, but there’s also a Gnome menu editor! I’ve never worked out how to edit menus in Gnome, and it’s something I’ve been looking for since I started using it as a desktop environment. Sure, some people like the default menu layouts, but they drive me nuts!

Floor manager weirdness

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was a new experience tonight - my first night as floor manager. There weren’t too many people on, being a saturday, but there was some fun to be had. There were call queues up the wazoo, and then times when there were no calls at all, I got to give some E-Time (where you can have the rest of the night off - you don’t get paid, but you get to go home) and did some manager-style stuff. New experience and all, means I’ve got another skill.

Engine away to be machined

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, the parts were taken to Bryant Engineering today. Block, crank, flywheel, rods (with old pistons still attached) and the timing cover (with bolts attached) were all dropped off, ready for them to do the work.

Here’s a list of what’s getting done:

Block - hot tanked, crack tested, decked, bored, honed.
Crank - hot tanked, crack tested, ground, polished, balanced.
Rods - crack tested and checked for straightness and shaped, then shot peened and balanced.
Flywheel - machined for flatness and balanced.

I’m going to call them on Monday to see if I can go and check the flywheel for size, to make sure the clutch that I’m planning on buying is the right one - stupid me, I forgot to measure up the flywheel to make sure it’s the right size. I’m going to be sending an email off in the next little while to the guys at gimmecarparts.com.au to see if I can get a price on an ACL rebuild kit, so that when the crank sizing is found, I can order a whole kit and hopefully drop the price a little. That’ll incorporate a full set of gaskets, bearings (big end, rods and cam bearings) and piston assemblies. Assuming the bores aren’t terribly bad, I should be able to get one size over standard and be right, going with chrome moly rings to give a little bit more reliability.

Choosing an engineering company…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Called three places today, all reccommendations from friends and on the hotgemini forums - Bryant Engineering (Brisbane), Donnelly Engineering(Gold coast) and Precise Engine Rebuilds(Gold coast).

I was looking to get the engine bored, hot tanked and crack tested and decked. The crank needs to be ground to the next bearing size, crack tested and cleaned up, the rods checked for cracks, straightness and then resized if need be. After all that was done, I wanted the entire engine balanced as a unit, to make sure I’m not going to have issues on that front.

MegaSquirt First Stage

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I finished the first stage of the build of the megasquirt yesterday - soldering up the main PCB. I’d finished the relay board the day before, but that was only a minor achievement, since it’s basically a big group of connectors. The megasquirt itself seems to be working fine - tests ok on the PC hookup and so forth. I guess the test will be when I actually get the proper stimulator - the one I made ended up being a piece of junk and not work, so I gave up, because it’s only a few days until the person that has the real stim comes back and we can use that to test the ECU properly. I’m rather proud of myself - it’s a rather complex little pcb, with a LOT of parts to solder on, and for it to work seemingly fine first go is quite an achievement for me. Normally complex things that I make/solder/otherwise have a tendency to blow up. More information soon - I’m going to be pulling the crank out of the engine, and taking the block somewhere to be bored out a little so the piston packages can be sourced, the crank reinstalled with new bearings, and then the engine can be put back together. I’m quite excited!

MegaSquirt Modifications

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so there are some modifications that I want to make to my MegaSquirt - it’s pretty cool to start with - but I want injection control and a few other goodies.

The first one I want is “switchable tables” which means I can choose between two boost/fuel/spark maps by flicking a switch. Another option is single or sequential shift lights - either a single “set off when at this rpm” or sequential ones, hitting green at mid-normal rpm, orange/yellow at shift, and red at over-rev. This is all user-selectable and so forth, and I’ll probably hide it somewhere in a modified section of my dash, with a switch to turn it off when I’m not using it. Using the extra outputs, I’ll also be able to setup an automatic switch based on engine parameters for the thermofans I want to use, and possibly some other things.

Apparently…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet is for porn.

Oh, and send some free operator logos on behalf of Mazda!

Megasquirt Arrived!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, I received my package from the United States! Purchasing things over the internet is always a worry, but even more so when it’s ~700USD and you don’t know the people you’re buying from. But never fear, the package arrived! Bought from DIYAutoTune, my two Innovate Motorsports LC-1 Wideband Oxygen sensors, my MegaSquirt Kit and Relay Board kits arrived today, in a big box that had been opened by customs already (stickers saying “ooh, we ruined your fun and had a look inside” included!) I just got home, and pulled all the stuff out - looking at how the pcb’s are laid out, and how everything seems to fit together. I don’t have a soldering iron here or a stimulator (borrowing one off a friend, since it’s basically a while-you’re-building-only sort of thing) so I was just test fitting things that I can (no components, things like the relay board’s big connectors and fuse holders etc) and generally marvelling at what came in the package.

The TF Gemini Project – OMG707

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, the van was annoying me (I drive a 1980 Holden panel van as my daily driver) and I was looking for something to do - I’m notorious for needing “projects” to keep me occupied, as my coding and so forth doesn’t really make me do anything physical. A mate was moving to Perth and his car was most likely going to a wreckers because the engine block had a hole in the side of it. I ended up buying it for a grand total of $300, which isn’t bad for a rolling car that needed a new bottom end in its motor, a new steering arm, and a bit of bodywork. Once that’s all done, it’ll obviously need registration etc, but that’s just part of the fun!

Gemini project update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I guess this is a little backwards, putting an update about a project up before I put information up about the actual project, but that’s what I’m doing. My project is building up a Holden TF Gemini as my new daily driver. It’ll have all sorts of fun things, like EFI, a carputer, and eventually a supercharger on it. There’s plenty more information that I’m going to have to post up, but here’s what I need to say today… The ECU is on its way! I’m using a MegaSquirt bought from DIYAutoTune.com along with a bunch of other things. I’m just about to leave for work, so I’ll put up a proper post with pictures etc tonight when I have more time.

My first fundie spam!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, we in the channel #rice, where some friends and I dwell, have a thing for “fundies.” Fundies are those people that wake us up on weekend mornings, spreading their religious ideals, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They don’t come around to the street (or at least our house) where my parents live, since such events as me removing their bikes from the poles they were chained to (by lifting them over the top of the 7 foot plus tall pole) and moving them down a block or two. This “thing” that we have isn’t a love for fundies, nor a common interest in their ideals - it’s more a “we know you, we hate you, we have to ridicule you at every turn.” This is probably bred from our dislike for religion, and helped along by such fora as Fark and SomethingAwful. The real reason for this post - as you may have guessed from the topic - is the fact that I got my first spam from a fundie today! Click on the “read more” link to continue on this journey of religious self-discovery! 🙂 This is the full text of the email that I received:

Training days…

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s 7:04am, and I’m awake. Training for service coach starts at 9am, and I’ve been awake for an hour or so - hooray for being a crazy insomniac *sigh* I guess I’m excited - I’ve wanted to be something more than just a call center agent for a while, having a bigger part to play in the running of a company, and helping people where I can. It means a lot more responsibility, and dealing with a lot of escalated issues, but I’ve already been doing the correspondence side of things, and the escalated calls - that’s just more people yelling, and more telling them that yes, you did sign that contract, and no, we can’t do anything about it.

I’m now a service coach!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I work in a call center - Orange Mobile customer care. I’m one of those people you yell at when you’re having a bad day, and you can’t accept the fact that sometimes, a mobile phone doesn’t work. They are terribly made little pieces of plastic, and you expect them to work perfectly all the time, and it’s never your fault - or your responsibility - when they break. So now I’ve been in the position of “agent” for a while - being the monkey on the phone - I’m moving up to “service coach” which allows me to talk to the A-grade annoying customers with problems that they won’t accept can be fixed by the mere mortals that are the agents. Service coach is basically supervisor - doing the hard things, making sure the rules are followed etc. It’s a little bit of a payrise, and it’s a lot more responsibility, but it’ll be worth it, and I’ve already been basically doing it for a while now 🙂

Finally the new server!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I finally got myself my own server. The one that I was on was truly slow and well, nothing good can be said about that. I was getting it for free, but the issues we were having with it weren’t even worth the trouble (a friend was paying for it, and it died twice in six months, hdd failure it seems).

So I’m on my own server now (dedicated box, Pentium4 2.4, 512 ram, 80gb hdd) which is nice. It’s a lot faster and more responsive than the old machine, and I’m hopefully going to be able to host a few sites on here with little or no troubles. I’ve already got Ricetek, Rexy’s and Lozza‘s site on here so far. If you’re looking for hosting, just send me an email to yaleman at this domain - it’s super cheap, and I try to help people out with coding and other issue solutions all the time!

Moving files with PHP

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There are two main ways to move files in PHP - either copy the file to the new location, then delete the old one, or rename the file to the new location. There are a few different problems with both ways of doing it, and in this short guide I’ll try to cover as many different advantages and disadvantages of both ways.

Stop-Smoking Update

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’m still surviving so far, the patches give me the incentive and the power not to put more tar in my lungs. I seem to be trying to cough all the tar that’s already in there up at the moment - yay for a hacking cough that hurts like I’m on fire when it happens. I’m nearly through both the week-long packets that I bought, and I went a couple of days without a patch, and I survived fine. I don’t think I could go a day at work without them, it’s a high-stress environment, and I can’t deal with it at the moment without a patch. There was a day that I forgot, and I nearly tore a workmate’s head off after a frustrating call from a customer.

Amp connector issues

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 16 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Seems that the amp that I bought (the Blaupunkt PA2100) is rather unique. The connectors that it has on it aren’t the standard connectors, so it’s probably one from a factory-installed stereo in a prestige car of some sort. Click on the images below to see the amp/connectors on it - if you can work out what they are, please tell me, and if you know where to get them, give me the info!

Patches and Dreams

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 13 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, I really should have listened to the person at the chemist’s counter when I bought the nicotine patches. She made a passing comment about the fact that if you wear them during sleep, it can have some effect on your dreams. They most definitely did - two dreams so far (normally I don’t dream at all unless I’m quite sick) The first one was explainable from dream analysis and recent events, but the one that I had last night was downright weird. I can’t remember any of it (should get up and write them down as soon as I wake) but all I remember is an intense feeling of foreboding when I woke up. I think I’ll leave them off for the next couple of nights, see how they go.

Tip: NDS for J2ME on Gentoo Linux

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Tips for installing the Nokia Developer’s Suite for J2ME™ on Gentoo Linux. I’m trying to do my development in Linux, since I use it as my main desktop machine, and I hate using Windows development tools for some reason. I’m sure there will be other snags - I still have to get it working with Eclipse, and then work out how to program in Java. Yay for my ability to pick up new programming languages as I use them - thanks to the high school teacher that taught the theory of programming rather than just how to do it.

Doing my little bit for free music

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a great article on Links to Free Music that area completely legal. MichaelCrawford is a great poster on one of my favourite “thinking” News/Article/Information sites Kuro5hin.org. His two sites have terribly ugly layouts, but they are very well written from what I’ve seen, and I think you should read the article that I linked to in my first sentence, if not only for the information, but the way that he writes. I admire him as someone that actually puts some effort into his writing, and then gives it away - then there’s the fact that he has some serious mental issues (can’t remember the name, but it’s an amazing story of living through some strange things that happen to people’s brains.)

Phones, programming and IE

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 09 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

As you may have noticed, I’m going rather crazy with my new toy. Rather than sitting at work reading my current novel or something like that, I was rather busily investigating the Nokia Developer’s Forum for information on what I can do with the Series 40 platform and its associated Java goodness. I’m going to try and get Eclipse working later, hopefully it’ll be my IDE of choice, since I’d prefer to code in Linux rather than having to rely on Windows.

More Data Cable Fun

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I finally got the data cable working properly - since it’s a non-genuine part, it works in non-normal ways. Rather than being a USB cable, it detects as a “Nokia 5140 connected through Serial Cable.” Which is why it wasn’t working, because the software that is included with the normal PC Suite doesn’t include serial drivers and so forth.

I’ve been reading things on Nokia’s Discussion Boards with regards to what I can and can’t do with the phone, software updates and things that are to be played with, and it looks like the Series 40 OS is pretty simple, which means I can’t do much with it. I guess I’ll just have to get into programming for the phone in Java and see what I can do 🙂

New Phone Today!

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I bought a new mobile phone today, since I was out of contract with Telstra for the old one… my two years was up, the call rates sucked, and so did the other available services. So their luck ran out when it came to me. Virgin and Vodafone don’t have the coverage that I’m looking for (lots of out-of-city is what I need) so they were off the list to start with.

New Amp Today

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Was driving around with Bob, looking for things for the van, and tools and stuff - he was looking for a home audio amp because he needs tunes at home. We ended up buying a pair of amps from Crime Converters - me a 2×100 Blaupunkt and Bob got a 4×100 of the same brand. Now I’m on the search for the power/signal cables for the amp, because as usual, they don’t use the normal screw in connectors and things like that. It’ll probably cost me more for the wiring than for the amp, but then again, it’s a nice small amp, does 2×100 RMS and have a nice shiny setup for the subs that I’m planning to put into the van. Yay me!

Nicotine Patches

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, herein begins the stopping smoking crusade… The feeling of blood clots are coming back to my arms and legs, making me think that the whole smoking idea is a bit sucky. I’ve bought a patch product called “QuitX Step 1”, which is about 24mg across a 24 hour period - about what I have been smoking recently. They seem to be working - I’ve only got a minimal amount of cravings, mostly from the habit that smoking is, rather than the addiction. Wish me luck! I hope I can do this, since I do like living, and dying from something stupid like this seems like a really bad idea.

Really have to do something useful.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I guess that’s why I setup this site properly for once, I can’t be bothered fighting with the CMS that I made, pretty as it is - I’m sure it’ll be useful for the stuff that I use it for at home. Normally that’s just link tracking and things like that, but really it’s just for boredom’s sake.

Why?

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Fri, 06 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The main reason that I put a lot of this information up on the site is because I’m bored. Also, there’s a lot of information that I don’t believe is being delivered in a way that I learn - so I guess there are a lot of other people that looking for information in the way that I look for it too.

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

3D Designs

Things I’ve made and want to share

Garage Door Opener

yaleman@ricetek.net (James Hodgkinson) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000