tuesday, 20 january 2026
Jobs Phone O2: 0344 809 0202 12002288908 4075 Garage door grub Press e in the grub menu grub> ls grub> set root=(hd0,msdos2) grub> chainload /efi/boot/BOOTx64.EFI grub> boot journalctl sudo journalctl --rotate sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=1h Prelims Chemistry 13:30 to 16:00 postmarketOS sudo apk postmarketos-release-upgrade sudo /usr/sbin/postmarketos-release-upgrade Now running 25.12!

friday, 2 january 2026
labelle Added the 24mm tape that is supported by the Dymo LabelManager PC II diff .local/pipx/venvs/labelle/lib/python3.13/site-packages/labelle/lib/devices/dymo_labeler.py code/labelle/src/labelle/lib/devices/dymo_labeler.py 243c243 SUPPORTED_TAPE_SIZES_MM = (19, 12, 9, 6) Cynthion Needed to update GTK to get packetry to run this was achieved with: sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev This upgraded GTK from 4.8 to 4.18, which allowed packetry to run. My first test device was the Dymo LabelManager PC II plugged into the same Debian laptop that I was running cynthion from. Initially I was not capturing any packets as the capture mode was high speed (480Mbps), but when I switched it to Full (12Mbps) it started capturing. Successfully captured the printer printing a labelle --sample-pattern 256 using the Low (1.5Mbps) speed settings in packetry ./p>

thursday, 1 january 2026
2nd Quarter Century has started… cgit cgit's certificate had expired back in October… Had to edit the firewall config to stop 403 errors. now all is good until it expires again in March 2026. Cynthion Playing with Cynthion on Debian trixie and was getting ModuleNotFoundErrors , this due to upgrading Debian to trixie and was fixed with: pipx reinstall cynthion

friday, 3 october 2025
Dell BIOS update Used rufus to create a FreeDOS usb pendrive, then rebooted the Latitude 7290, using F12 to get to boot options, I had tried F1 but it's F2 on the 7290. From the F12 boot options menu there was a BIOS Flash Update option which found the update exe file on the usb pen drive. The BIOS upgrade went smoothly and the 7290 is now running "1.42.0" from the previous "1.33.0". 2600: The Gamer Club 153 Bath Lane

tuesday, 9 september 2025
Battery Replacment Finally replaced the battery in my Sony SRS-XB12, putting the new battery in was easy replacing some of the screws was harder, but with my new Wera comet My LetsEncrypt cert was expiring tomorrow so I updated it today, and there was a firmware upgrade that I was expecting to blow away, the ssl files, but this update left them in place so updating the server.crt in /etc/kvmd/user/ssl/ was straight forward. Restarting nginx to pick up the new cert: /etc/init.d/S99kvmd-nginx

friday, 11 july 2025
Ender 3 Finally got my Ender 3 flashed with 4.2.7 firmware from Marlin . Initially when I put the firmware on the SD card and turned on nothing happened. Spotted a thread on Reddit where it mentioned that the firmware need to be name firmware.bin. This upgrade has taken far to long. Although first test print failed... Bed leveling works but the Z height is about 5mm to high.

wednesday, 4 june 2025
Dell Latitude 7290 Motherboard upgrade to i7-8650U from i5. The new dmesg shows the update. The motherboard replacement was simple and straight forward, the reason it was not done sooner was I need to order new thermal paste when swapping the motherboards. Ordered NT-H2 Thermal Paste. Might put the i5 motherboard in a 7280 model…

tuesday, 27 may 2025
Creality Ender 3 Pro Finally upgraded the motherboard in my Creality Ender 3 Pro with Creality Motherboad 4.2.7. What a pain: BL Touch was not compatible ordered new BL touch cable might need to fix z sensor back paid for the THD firmware more upgrades over the weekend to try and get it working

wednesday, 19 february 2025
TeX Live TeX Live for Open BSD is a usefull resource for building TeX Live directly, rather than using ports. biber Downloaded the binaries, moved them to /usr/local/bin/ made them executable chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/biber* and then had the following error: ERROR - Error: Found biblatex control file version 3.10, expected version 4.0. This means that your biber (4.0) and biblatex (3.19) versions are incompatible. I realised that I had used the new TeX Live 2025 biber and not 2024… and the 2024 binaries were no longer available… So pkg_delete the texlive packages, then updated so that I could install gpgme , then awesome was broken :~( Remove lines starting with a comma sed '/^,/d' filename

wednesday, 9 october 2024
ImageMagick montage a-{dog,lamb,rabbit,cat,horse}.jpg -tile 5x1 -geometry +0+0 out.jpg ZFSBootMenu Look into installing ZFS on NanoPi using ZFSBootMenu and Debian or Alpine on return from holiday .

wednesday, 2 october 2024

sunday, 26 may 2024
Edinburgh Marathon Pete ran the Edinburgh Marathon today! X395 Upgraded to a new battery. Had an issues with boot stalling… resolved by booting into bsd.rd doing upgrade and using fsck to clean all partitions.

thursday, 29 february 2024
Leap Year Beej's Guides Network Programming C Programming PostmarketOS: 23.12 Trying to upgrade to the latest release and was getting failing with temporary error messages, turns out Virgin Media was not providing DNS , this was resolved by adding 9.9.9.9 to resolv.conf . c PostmarketOS PinePhone

friday, 23 february 2024
QMK pip3 install --user qmk pkg_add -v dfu-util dfu-programmer pkg_add -v avr-gcc avrdude pkg_add -vz arm-none-eabi-gcc export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin /home/fred/.local/bin/qmk setup The above setup produced the following warning: ⚠ Unsupported OS detected: openbsd-7.4-amd64-64bit-elf /home/fred/.local/bin/qmk compile -kb sofle/keyhive -km default Resulted in avr/pgmspace.h not being found.

sunday, 31 december 2023
base64 encoded pkg_add -vz base64 cat b64img | base64 -d > picture.jpg Need to add base64 before decoding and converting to an image… was it worth it…

monday, 11 december 2023

monday, 16 october 2023
OpenBSD 7.4 Released Today Upgrade bmx, and php82_fpm was failing to start with a bus error: Dwarf Error: wrong version in compilation unit header (is 4, should be 2) [in module /usr/libexec/ld.so] This gave me the hint that the upgrade had not gone smoothly. The issue was fixed by running bsd.rd on the console and ensuring that the upgrade did not install the xshare, xfont or xserv sets, which had caused a disk full error. bmx was thus successfully upgraded 7.4 ! OpenBSD 7.4

sunday, 2 july 2023
BMX National: Gosport PinePhone Upgraded to v23.06 of PostmarketOS. upgrade.sh was failing in apk section, but when run with doas su upgrade was successful.

monday, 5 june 2023
convert Creating thumbnails with convert : convert inpic.jpg -thumbnail 200x outpic.png

monday, 31 october 2022
ID3 Tags Tag Removal Strip Tags PineTime Noticed new update to Red Nectarine InfiniTime so I updated my PineTime using itd which took a bit of time to download the correct file from github, and then flashed it to my PineTime: itctl fw upg --archive pinetime-mcuboot-app-dfu-1.11.0.zip The firmware then needed to be validated in the Settings of InfiniTime. I need to upload the new resources to make use of the new watch faces… Factors Factors is a quantity that when multiplied by another factor gives the enitre quantity. TIL that to get decimal places from bc you need to start it either with -l the artbitrary precision math library, or set scale=n where n is the number of decimal places: bc scale=4 1/16 .0625 InfiniTime factors

monday, 29 august 2022
TIL convert convert -gravity option takes North, East, West, South, Center as well as NorthWest, NorthEast, SouthWest and SouthEast. convert in.jpg -filter spline -resize 100x100^ \    -gravity North -unsharp 0x1 -extent 100x100 out.jpg -unsharp 0x1 improves the image sharpness, and -extent determines the final size of the image. convert -geometry 1024x in.jpg out.jpg Resizing using -geometry convert -density 150 -font Ubuntu -fill "rgba(255,0,0,0.25)" -gravity Center -pointsize 80 -draw "rotate -45 text 0,0 'Uploaded by me'" in.jpg out.jpg and some watermarking. Imagemagick convert

saturday, 2 july 2022
PostmarketOS Trying sxmo on my Pine Phone. O2 & Lebara APN O2 & Lebara APN Settings APN mobile.o2.co.uk uk.lebara.mobi Username o2web wap Password password wap MMS Port: 8799 Terminal cheat sheet SXMO: tips and tricks postmarketOS PinePhone Upgrade postmarketOS sxmo Pine Phone

tuesday, 17 may 2022
Joy.js Nutshell Beta Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Upgrade Upgrade kept failling, partially resolved by: tmux new -s upgrade sudo apt update sudo apt dist-update With some sudo dpkg --configure -a interspered. Lost Gnome - put the package dependancy's are on future ones which are not in the repo atm

friday, 21 january 2022
pwnagotchi Was connecting pizeropg and used ioreg -p IOUSB to discover which device to attach to, but the output was fred@macbook ~ % ioreg -p IOUSB|grep -i Gadget +-o RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget@14200000 <class AppleUSBDevice, id 0x1000018d5, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (1 ms), retain 13> the USB was acting as an ethernet gadget, rather than a serial device. InfiniTime: Fuzzy Kiwi Upgrading InfiniTime to Fuzzy Kiwi (1.8.0) using nRF Connect , had to delete the previous zip file for the dfu . pwnagotchi pinetime

wednesday, 2 june 2021
octeon Upgrading my EdgeRouter Lite running OpenBSD - once the install has finished need to copy bsd to the msdos partition. octeon

tuesday, 6 april 2021
ffmpeg ffprobe video.mp4 Provides information about a video. ffmpeg -framerate 0.2 -i image.jpg \ -vf scale=1280:1024,setsar=1:1 -vf fps=10 \ -crf 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4 Make a video from an image. ffmpeg -f lavfi -i anullsrc -framerate 0.2 -i image.jpg \ -vf scale=1280:1024,setsar=1:1 -vf fps=10 \ -crf 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest output.mp4 Make a video from an image, with a silent soundtrack. ffmpeg

saturday, 27 march 2021
Ender 3 Pro Upgrade to BLtouch - nightmare...I thought that a BL touch would make printing easier by allowing my /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avrdude -C./avrdude.conf -vvvv -p atmega1284p -c arduino -P /dev/cu.usbserial-1410 -b115200 -U flash:w:./firmware.hex Marlin 1.1.9 3d printing

sunday, 21 march 2021
Wordpress Upgrading to Wordpress 5.7 broke stripe payments. Fix: a location block in httpd.conf: location "/brokenpath*" { block return 301 "/index.php$REQUEST_URI" } wordpress OpenBSD

friday, 12 march 2021

saturday, 30 january 2021
tomu Trying to upgrade the firmware on a tomu and was getting the following error from dfu-util : DFU suffix version 100 Opening DFU capable USB device... ID 1209:70b1 Run-time device DFU version 0101 Claiming USB DFU Interface... Setting Alternate Setting #0 ... dfu-util: Cannot set alternate interface This was solved using the following flags: dfu-util -D toboot-boosted.dfu -d 1209:70b1 -p 2-3 in particular the path flag -p 2-3 . tomu dfu-util

sunday, 26 july 2020
Pump Track World Qualifier: Skelf postponed due to COVID, upgraded my 3D printer…

wednesday, 10 june 2020
Crypto Cryptography as a programmer is an excellent introduction to cryptopgraphy, libsodium and a cheat sheet . libsodium

sunday, 17 may 2020

wednesday, 26 february 2020
Biscuit Box - PG Cert 13:00 Leonardo Suite JW608

friday, 20 september 2019
... amp; Automation 09:00 - 09:30 PGT DMEM Registration - DMEM Studio ...

wednesday, 18 september 2019
... core update GIL Python GIL . PG python GIL ...

saturday, 24 august 2019

friday, 26 july 2019
TAP Came across the TAP as a result of an email to ports@ about pgTAP is a suite of database functions for testing PostgreSQL. pgTAP TAP

thursday, 23 may 2019
Lottery VANL Community Hub, 11 Kenilworth Avenue, Wishaw, ML2 7LP Bugs OpenBugBounty reported the following three issues, against http://crowsons.com, the first reported was: photo.php?pic=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=x%20onError=prompt(1)%3Eback_tick.jpg&name=Back%20Tick&rp= And then this was reported: /photo.php?pic=%22%3C!--%3E%3CSvg%20OnLoad=confirm(1)%3C!-- And a third one posting data against /pc/timetables.php XSS bugs

friday, 26 april 2019
Upgrading to OpenBSD 6.5 using the package sysclean to clean up systems for size constrained upgrades. 6.5 openbsd

sunday, 17 march 2019

wednesday, 16 january 2019
base64 to image cat b64img | base64 -d > picture.jpg where b64img is a file containing the base64 encoded data. base64

friday, 30 march 2018
OpenWrt TIL that OpenWrt has merge with the LEDE and so I upgrade my Nano Station M5 (xm) to 17.01.4 using the ubnt-nano-m-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin file. Nano Station OpenWrt

tuesday, 13 june 2017

thursday, 18 may 2017
Net4501 Was updating my Net4501 and was getting: No Boot device available, enter monitor. and realised my comBios was 1.28 so I updated it: > download Start sending file using XMODEM/CRC protocol. CC~XLocal file? b4501_133.bin cu: b4501_133.bin: sending block 1 (attempt 1) … cu: b4501_133.bin: completed 97 blocks File downloaded succesfully, size 608 Blocks. > flashupdate Updating BIOS Flash ,,,,,,,,,,,,..,,,,.. Done. This fixed the No Boot device and then I set up about upgrading to OpenBSD 6.1. cu

thursday, 2 february 2017
Soekris Net4501 Garbage on console until I remember that the baud was 19200. Upagrade comBios to 1.33 using cu ~X and the comBios download command, oh and upgraded the Net4501 to OpenBSD 6.0. But forgot to create boot.conf: stty com0 19200 set tty com0 luckily it works from the boot prompt. Black History Month 7 Pioneers in ComputerScience Ursula K. Le Guin Rightly calling a "alternative fact" a lie... http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/02/ursula_leguin_on_fiction_vs_al.html cu cs

thursday, 12 january 2017
OpenWrt Upgraded nano and stubwrt to Chaos Calmer 15.05.1 Using: openwrt-15.05.1-ar71xx-generic-ubnt-nano-m-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin Smooth upgrade - but needed to connect the web interface to the wired network port. OpenWrt

tuesday, 16 august 2016
Keeping Ubuntu Clean sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get autoremove Following some /boot has 0 bytes free messages… apt linux

wednesday, 29 june 2016
Fred's FTB Rebuilt Peter's old FTB , the frame was resprayed from Grey to Black, Macneil bars, Pete's old haro wheel and Sinz forks. 175mm Cranks. TODO: build new wheels, change seat, upgrade brakes. bmx

thursday, 7 april 2016
Server Offline Today Did you notice? Box was upgraded to 5.9 from 5.7. Moved httpd server to nginx.

monday, 22 february 2016
Ubuntu Prompt appeared stuck at: [ OK ] Starting LSB: AppArmor initialzation This was resolved with a Ctrl-C which allowed the boot to continue. Once booted a sudo dpkg --configure -a and sudo apt-get update resolved the upgrade. dcrowson@alfresco-sf3:~$ uname -a; lsb_release -a Linux alfresco-sf3 4.4.0-6-generic #21-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 16 20:32:27 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (development branch) Release: 16.04 Codename: xenial When installing software as part of the installation, services are added to start those applications on boot. To disable this use update-rc.d usb ethernet adpaters Had two network adapters as shown, they both had the same mac address 00:e0:4c:53:44:58 so of course networking was borked… upgrade ubuntu linux ethernet

friday, 19 february 2016
Ubuntu Development Testing To test a development versions of ubuntu you need the -d : do-release-upgrade -d neovim Built neovim on OpenBSD . gmake followed by doas gmake install after following the OpenBSD -current insturctions. Then used nvim to edit this entry :~) linux ubuntu neovim vim

wednesday, 7 october 2015
... arrived :~) pic.twitter.com/vb7wPGhBPF — Fred Crowson (@fcbsd ...

tuesday, 9 june 2015

thursday, 14 may 2015
Snap! Snap! formerly BYOB is a drag and drop programming language. It is an extended reimplementation of Scratch - using Javascript and running in your browser. Its good to see an implementation that isn't dependant on a close source implementation. VPS Upgraded my VPS at Mythic Beasts to 5.7 using bsd.rd - simple smooth upgrade - also restarted the VPS to allow KVM to pick up the anti- VENOM fix. snap vps

friday, 10 april 2015
LCD Used the layout from adafruit , to set up my LCD with a potentiomiter, to control brighest. The upgrade to arduino-1.6.3 is proving problematic for me… arduino

wednesday, 1 april 2015
... .00,T,,M,0.00,N,0.00,K,N*32 $GPGGA,001045.799,,,,,0,0,,,M,,M,,*4F ...

monday, 30 march 2015
convert I need to convert images to A4 paper size after some searching the resize or scaling gave some useful hints, allowing for conversion from jpg to pdf: convert input.jpg -colorspace sRGB -adaptive-resize 595x842^\> -gravity center -extent 595x842 output.pdf The output was not as sharp as I would have hoped for - so need some more testing. runes Need to test UTF-8 check out the UTF-8-demo.txt Mobile Phones My HTC Google Ion is back in service following an accident with water… Following the hint at Andriod: change google account : Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications Click on Google Apps Click "Clear Data" Stop using tail -f(mostly) Stop using tail -f(mostly) : an interesting article on using less +F as an alternative. mobile

thursday, 12 march 2015

thursday, 5 march 2015

tuesday, 4 november 2014
Standing Desk Still needs some work - the monitor is not quite at the right height, and the depth is a bit shallower than ideal. $22 standing desk is also a nice solution to the problem.   Libretto 70CT Decided to upgrade to OpenBSD 3.0 diy bsd OpenBSD puters

sunday, 2 november 2014
Upgraded Upgraded my VPS server on Mythic Beasts to OpenBSD 5.5. To access the vnc console I had to add the following rule to my pf.conf on firewall pass in on ! lo0 proto tcp to $vncmythic port 6001 due to the default pf.conf blocking connections to X on port 6000:6010. As always the upgrade went smoothly, all done in 15 mins including sysmerge and port_add -vu ! NCC Winter Series Round 1 Manchester Indoor. Sun Fire V100 Both Sun Fire's have the same LOM : lom>show version LOM version: v3.11 LOM checksum: 6a9d LOM firmware part# 258-7871-17 Microcontroller: H8/3437S LOM firmware build Dec 3 2001 16:33:10 Configuration rev. v1.4 iPXE Open Source network boot firmware.

tuesday, 28 october 2014
MacMini Upgrade the memory from 2Gb to 8Gb - but it was still really slow with Maverick - so re-installed Snow Leopard It was officially maxed out - but somewhere along the line Apple admitted that it could be upgrade to 8Gb. OS X: Keyboard Shortcuts OpenBSD 5.6 pre-orders arriving Retro Fitting an Ikea Table memory diy

monday, 2 june 2014
... code NO_PUBKEY Hit this W: GPG error: http://ftp.us.debian.org ...

wednesday, 14 may 2014
0̸MQ Time to read 0̸MQ The Guide . IdeaPad Playing Up Messed up an upgrade - so ended up pulling the disk to install OpenBSD: mq install

thursday, 1 may 2014
BMX Planning Application asciinema The misc/asciinema was resubmitted to ports@ and successfully test on OpenBSD amd64, i386 and macppc: I also successful tested pip installation: sudo pip install --upgrade asciinema

friday, 28 march 2014
Mythic Beasts Set up a VPS using OpenBSD - the cd image was OpenBSD 5.2 so had to upgrade twice to get it to 5.4 - also changed network device from e1000 to virtio (vio0 supported out of the box on >= 5.3). Excellent service! vps

wednesday, 12 march 2014
Samsung Galaxy S3 Following the upgrade to my Samsung S3, I kept getting: Network disabled because Internet connection is slow error messages when connecting to my wireless network, this was resolved by going to the Advanced tab in Wi-Fi and unchecking Auto network switch.

wednesday, 29 january 2014
Cardboard Helmet Abus Kranium Performance Helmet as discussed in this BBC news article on Paper Helmets . Velorution can be found here . CD to mp3 Using Nick Holland's old post: Using and Creating MP3s with OpenBSD as a starting point for developing a script to rip my OpenBSD Songs 4.1 to 5.1 CD that turned up yesterday. Atom Added Jetway JNC9MGL-525 dmesg database - need to test upgrade to 5.5.

friday, 24 january 2014
Gitolite Finally set up a gitolite server for my dev stuff. git git push worked when I had set git config remote.origin.url to be _git@git rather than user@git. pkg_add tests pkg_add tests : the pkg* tools have gone through a large change so upgrading from 5.4 to 5.5: pkg_info -mq > list -m only show packages tagged as manual installations -q be 'quiet', just dump raw info. pkg_delete * Then update to 5.5 and then install new packages: pkg_add -z -l list -l file install from raw output of pkg_info(1) -z fuzzy package addition: pkg_add will do its best to match package names.

wednesday, 22 january 2014
Yii PHP Yii is PHP framework … need to add this to the list :~) Firewall Upgraded my firewall box from the Soekris Net4501 to a Jetway.

tuesday, 22 october 2013
Mac OS X - Maverick Apple have release OS X 10.9 Maverick - and it is a maverick release - free to upgrade. So I've upgraded my Mac Mini. 5 Minute Lesson Plan The 5 Minute Lesson Plan

friday, 24 may 2013
Inkscape Useful forum post about converting jpg to svg

wednesday, 8 may 2013
Squeeze to Wheezy Upgraded my Debian box to Wheezy create an aptcache in home [ 1 ] apt-get dist-upgrade Foot Notes /var/ directory did not have enough space for the archives, so created a symlink from /var/apt/cache to /home/aptcache

sunday, 24 february 2013
Upgrade to 5.3-beta Had a kernel panic in 5.2-current on Sparc64 - so upgraded to 5.3 for testing. But had a second kernel panic that seemed to damage rc.subr, causing "rc_cmd: not found" errors and also the tail section of netstart, causing route errors as the route command was not finishing correctly. Sun V100 serial RJ45 I'm planning on making some special RJ45 cables to connect my V100 over the serial RJ45 ports for LOM so the following page should be useful: http://www.sunhelp.org/unix-serial-port-resources/serial-pinouts/

thursday, 6 january 2011
Moodle 2.0 On OpenBSD To get Moodle 2.0 working on OpenBSD I need to get php5 Zip, hopefully tomorrow I will get a chance to try the advice from Tech Debug Blog and see if that allows moodle upgrade to proceed… moodle

wednesday, 23 june 2010
... zf configure db-adapter 'adapter=PDO_PGSQL&host=localhost&dbname=cas ...

tuesday, 16 june 2009
Cease and Desist online Found a link to Chilling effects which deals with web based cease and desist orders. Word Search Generator Came across an excellent site on my pgce called www.armoredpenguin.com that generated PDF word searches. wordsearch ict