monday, 26 january 2026
Annual Leave LHR —> GLA Departs 18:55 Prelims Physics 09:15 to 11:45 The Psychology of Persuasion Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., the Psychology of Persuasion: finished reading this today, and it has been an interesting read and the power of the six building blocks of influence identified has been interesting. Reciprocation Consistency Social proof Liking Authority Scarcity

friday, 5 december 2025
West End Physio 08:00 2600 18:00 the Geek Rooms RealTalk Realtalk : Installation Kit Luke Iannini involved in developing Realtalk Dell Battery Died The replacement battery was bought in October 2024 and it was swollen and not holding a charge, when removed today. Battery 7290 Realtalk

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

thursday, 12 june 2025
Book VAN MOT Expires 10 July 2025 . GL-RM1 Comet To use acme-client on OpenBSD I created a key doas openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -keyout /etc/ssl/private/comet.key I then set up an alias on httpd for comet in httpd.conf restarted httpd : rcctl restart httpd Then I copied the key and the certificate to the GL-RM1 Comet and put them in the /etc/kvmd/nginx/ssl/ directory, after backing up the orignal server key and certificate file and then reboot the device… Need to work out how to just restart nginx … Now I will need to update the certificate every 90 days, and will need to change the DNS to point at the webserver rather than the internal address.

wednesday, 23 april 2025
TGA Summer Term xdg thunderbird was opening links in chromium which I recently installed on OpenBSD, so I checked prefs.js and handlers.json but no luck so I tried: xdg-mime query default text/html but that didn't show anything obvious, then I tried: xdg-settings check default-web-browser firefox.desktop xdg-settings check default-web-browser chromium-browser.desktop both responded with no but doing: xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop resulted in thunderbird opening links in firefox again! TIL u does undo , but I could not remember redo which was of course Ctrl r !

thursday, 13 february 2025
Code in Place Applied to cip5 , I can check on the 16 April if I have been selected.

wednesday, 2 october 2024
fixing Muppetry As mentioned yesterday I'd been a muppet and blew away the wrong partition, to get the data off I ordered an external NVME caddy, which arrived today so I stuck the NVME in it and plugged it in. doas bioctl -c C -l sd2a softraid0 after getting the password wrong 11 times… heather:fred ~: doas bioctl -c C -l sd2a softraid0 Passphrase: softraid0: CRYPTO volume attached as sd3 heather:fred ~: doas mount /dev/sd3m /mnt/nvme and then I copied all the data!

tuesday, 24 september 2024
Dentist Debian fdisk -l To list disks in Debian, the -l flag lists the partition tables for the specified devices, or if no disks given all that are mentioned in /proc/partitions if it exists.

thursday, 5 september 2024
NanoPi R5S RTFM re-reading the install documentation I realised I needed the u-boot-rockchip.bin to add the install media, so ssh'd into fujo added the u-boot package for the NanoPi R5S which is a RockChip RK3568: pkg_add -v u-boot-rk356x-2024.01p0 So I copied the miniroot76.img to an SD card: doas dd if=miniroot76.img of=/dev/rsd2c bs=1m doas dd if=u-boot-rockchip.bin of=/dev/sd2c seek=64 This produce a booting install of OpenBSD, but my USB to UART dongle - wouldn't let me type so I could not complete the install tonight, and my bus pirate v.4 that I have here doesn't do UART :~(

tuesday, 18 june 2024

wednesday, 22 may 2024
8 years ago… The ifconfig.c patch applied but the ifconfig.8 patch had to update manually - patch

thursday, 17 november 2022
Password Gorilla CSV column headings that can be used: create-time group last-access last-modified last-pass-change lifetime notes password title url user uuid

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, 24 october 2022
curl Downloading binary files from github seemed to need the -i which includes the HTTP response headers, which seemed to conflict with -J (the shortname for --remote-header-name ) for using server-specified Content-Disposition filename and -L for curl to follow the redirect, thus: curl -LJO https://github.com/path/to/bin.bin resulted in a successful file download. Far to much indirection from github…

tuesday, 1 february 2022
curl By default curl checks SSL connections are verified, thus to accept self-signed certificates with curl you need the -k, --insecure option.

friday, 9 april 2021
xfreerdp [09:48:27:861] [31207:6b956040] [ERROR][com.freerdp.core.transport] - transport_ssl_cb: ACCESS DENIED [09:48:27:861] [31207:6b956040] [ERROR][com.freerdp.core] - transport_ssl_cb:freerdp_set_last_error_ex ERRCONNECT_AUTHENTICATION_FAILED [0x00020009] [09:48:27:861] [31207:6b956040] [ERROR][com.freerdp.core.transport] - BIO_read returned an error: error:1404C419:SSL routines:ST_OK:tlsv1 alert access denied Had the above errors when running xfreerdp from a shell script, but no errors from the CLI , the problem was that from a script the username and password need to be quoted. rdp

friday, 12 march 2021
... monkeytype: typing test iED typing ...

friday, 31 july 2020
ADS-B Signed up to adsbexchange and feed - it's a bit lonely up here :~) Need to think about building my own map of flights... Default Web for ADS-B edited dump1090.h and set: #define HTMLPATH "/var/www/public_html" and copied the files from clone directory to public_html. On running the code I found that it used out of date google api's. So ADS-B exchange github : playing with their code next... raspberry pi ads-b

thursday, 30 july 2020
ADS-B Today I turned one of my Raspberry Pi's into ADS-B station. Using dump1090 from https://github.com/joergsteinkamp/dump1090 - this was the third fork of dump1090 that I tried, but this one built correctly on the Raspberry Pi. raspberry pi ads-b

monday, 15 june 2020
Immersive Labs Using curl and xxd when doing Immersive Labs on file bypass. curl command was: curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" \ -H "Content-Type: plain/text" \ -F "fileToUpload=@shell.php" \ http://10.102.6.149/upload.php Tried using 0x0d : '\r' and 0x0a : '\n' in file names but it did work against the target. Using xxd to inject jpeg magic numbers worked for uploading the php file - the target wouldn't then execute them… Also had fun playing with GET parameters in the previous labs , with URL's like: http://10.102.5.149/?post= LINK curl xxd

sunday, 18 august 2019
Wishaw Wood Pump Track: Kids Race 34 kids racing BMX around the pump track - some with times to have got themselves a place in the 32nd's knockouts. Some ideas to keep kids occupied between races: Small Ramps - Jump competition Limbo Pole - Limbo competition SocialTrack

tuesday, 29 january 2019

tuesday, 1 january 2019
hoc Started "hour of c" ( hoc ) today. Tried to resolve why ex1-13 was core dumping when test file was piped into the compiled program. hoc

monday, 3 september 2018
Active Reading Some notes on active reading from the OU as part of their skills for study. DevOps Undertook the DevOps Fundamentals: Tools, Technologies, and Infrastructures course on Skillport via my ACM membership, it was an interesting introduction to DevOps and made some valuable points and indentified some good tools. devops cpd

friday, 4 may 2018
Canaryfy Interseting ideas from Thinkst Applied Research : canaryfy , a utility that alerts you to resources being accessed. NanoPi A64 NanoPi : another Arm64 system. security rpi

sunday, 10 september 2017

wednesday, 14 june 2017
bpython Wanted to run bpython against python3.6, and 2.7 - the easiest approach was: pkg_add -vz py3-pip followed by a pip3.6 install bpython this replaced the bpython binary in userlocal so I copied it to bpython3 and then editted it: #!/usr/local/bin/python3.6

wednesday, 14 september 2016
Rain 100ml: emptied at 18:59 rain

monday, 13 june 2016

tuesday, 3 november 2015
qemu Setting up networking in qemu using doas as per the instructions in the pkg_readme. Was getting Permission denied messages due to my doas.conf missing: permit :wheel qemu

saturday, 4 april 2015
Python Binary Clock Created a binary clock widget, code is in a gist . Was getting AttributeError: object has no attribute 'strftime' errors, initially, this turn out to be name space collision errors - I had initially named the file time.py . Colour Time Binary Updated colourtime.js to create a btime function, which uses the javascript toString(2) [1] Number.prototype.toString() : The toString() method returns a string representing the specified Number object. to convert the time to binary for the binary clock:   code js python

wednesday, 12 november 2014
CLI commands Show the most commonly used terminal commands blog post, and also a bad words post. ack ack is a search tool written in Perl. A cheeky OpenBSD user complained that it was out of date : it was a fairly trivial update so I replied with a diff cvs diff -uN * > ack2.14.diff and Stuart sensibly and politely replied with a better approach :~) So Nigel provided a correct diff and I tested it on i386, amd64 and sparc64. Ag Is another searching tool - time to give it a shot. [1] here

monday, 1 september 2014
nginx Running nginx with php-fpm on my development machine - needed to change security.limit_extensions to remove access denied issues. nginx

monday, 2 june 2014
Heartbleed goes Wireless with Cupid Cupid code NO_PUBKEY Hit this W: GPG error: http://ftp.us.debian.org testing Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F error twice today - once on my ReadyNAS and once on my Lenovo S10-3… one solution to the issue, or SecureApt documentation goes into more depth. debian

tuesday, 18 march 2014
Hack #1 Getting the most of the default shell: although the hack is written for FreeBSD's tcsh. The sections History and Auto-completion Editing and Navigating the Command Line apply to the default ksh shell found in OpenBSD . The last two sections need some investigation to work out how to achieve a similar result in ksh. Learning from Your Command History Silencing Auto-complete history By default the ksh shell found in OpenBSD doesn't set HISTFILE, thus history is lost on log out - which is useful security measure - as history files can record all sorts of useful information :~) [1] grep your history file for your password :~/ Added HISTFILE=~/.sh_history to my .kshrc file. I had tried HISTFILE=~/.history.$( tty | sed 's;.*/;;') which created files like -rw------- 1 fred staff 71 Mar 18 15:33 .history.ttyp8 but I decided this would create to many history files.

wednesday, 5 march 2014
sparc Trying to get a sparc machine going - discovered my SS5 was failing with a cache failure. The SS5 was running OpenBSD 3.7 when it died.

friday, 28 february 2014
OpenSCAD Built Eigen3 (and tested : see code below ) - using openbsd-wip - but the dependancies where not being found (then I realised the check-dependancies script relied on bash not sh…) but it was still not finding eigen3 and it couldn't find qt4 and wanted a newer version of bison! Fixed the eigen3 issue the script was over writing the path! [earlier] Change order or eigen discovery. Eigen3 Test port:fred ~/code/eigen> g++ -I /usr/local/include/eigen3/ first.cpp -o first port:fred ~/code/eigen> ./first 3 -1 5 1.5 ports

sunday, 16 february 2014
Kippo Was looking for an app to set what passwords were being tried in the brute force attacks on SSH and I came across the Kippo project. Installed it and give it ago. ssh python

wednesday, 26 june 2013
gitolite Setting up a new gitolite server notes: created user git with home directory of /var/git gitolite/install script has a cp -a * $to this needed to be changed to cp -R * $to gitolite admin used a new key Created a new empty repository but it was giving: No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing. when pushing to this new repository, this was fixed with: git push origin master git

thursday, 16 may 2013
chroot curl OpenBSD I couldn't work out why my Pushover script was not working in the default chrooted apache on OpenBSD - using: sudo ktrace -di httpd -X and then looking through the ktrace.out file with kdump I came across: 14523 httpd NAMI "/etc/ssl/cert.pem" 14523 httpd RET open -1 errno 2 No such file or directory and once I had copied /etc/ssl/cert.pem into the chroot - all was good! curl chroot OpenBSD

saturday, 25 february 2012
Maurice André Maurice André french Trumpeter died today.

thursday, 21 july 2011
Muppetry Updated my Thinkpad X41 Laptop to OpenBSD 5.0-beta, used sysmerge to update /etc and then when I tried to start X it failed with: (EE) No devices detected. Fatal server error: no screens found This was due to OpenBSD not allowing X to access the memory and was fixed by uncommenting the sysctl.conf 'machdep.allowaperture=' setting, and was the first line in the Xorg.0.log file: (WW) checkDevMem: failed to open /dev/xf86 and /dev/mem (Operation not permitted) Check that you have set 'machdep.allowaperture=1' in /etc/sysctl.conf and reboot your machine refer to xf86(4) for details

tuesday, 19 july 2011
Diffs Use diff -up which gives a unified diff with context. or cvs diff: cvs diff -up -r<version> filename.c diff

tuesday, 11 may 2010
Applied ICT Exam