IRL.XYZ

campGND 2024

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 12:19:00 +0100

campGND took place this year from the 9th to the 11th August at its usual location. I wasn’t able to make it to EMF in June so I was happy to have the opportunity for some camping.

This year there was a conscious effort to change things up compared to previous years. The biggest difference was that we would not be attempting to run a generator for power, but also we would be watching the noise levels and not having a central sound system for music.

Amateur Radio Emoji

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Many activities, sports, food, and animals all have emojis present in the Unicode standard, but if you want to express amateur radio ideas in the form of an ideogram you will have difficulty.

There is the 📻 emoji which represents a broadcast radio receiver, a 🎙️emoji which represents a studio microphone, and a 📡 emoji which Emojipedia suggests could be used to represent a satellite dish used to communicate with 👽.

Mobile Operating System Consent + F-Droid

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:00:00 +0000

The LineageOS installation on my Fairphone 2 was getting really old and the updater wasn’t functioning, so I decided to switch back to the Fairphone operating system.

I’m really starting to develop some significant aversions to applications collecting consent for things. The “consent overload” on the web triggered by GDPR has certainly affected me. I can entirely see the appeal of a coping strategy of ignoring the text of those boxes and choosing the fastest way to dismiss them but that would slowly eat away at me in the longer term.

Password Manager + TOTP

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I’d like to have a backup method for TOTP. For this, I’m looking at using the pass-otp extension which is available both in OpenBSD packages and Debian.

There appears to be some way of scanning QR codes with your webcam in order to extract the URIs, but I can skip this because I have a Honeywell Voyager 1450g handheld 2D barcode scanner (it is very fancy).

Basic operation looks like:

Adding TOTP seed to an existing password:

pass otp append path/to/password

Getting a TOTP code:

pass otp path/to/password

Displaying a QR code to add a backup device (tested with Authy on iOS):

pass otp uri -q path/to/password

Gopher Card Catalogue

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently started organising my “library”. This includes physical books, electronic books, posters, QSL cards, challenge coins and other interesting artifacts. The process of documentation has helped to remove some of the feeling of clutter, and turned it into something more valuable. In particular, manuals and leaflets that came with appliances and electronics that would usually be thrown in a box and forgotten about can now be found easily by simply searching a list to see if I have it.

Toy Finger Daemon

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

The finger protocol is defined in RFC742. It’s a pretty simple protocol. I’d like to have a more useful output at some point, perhaps including status updates from Mastodon or APRS, but for now I’ve got the hang of reading the request and sending some output with some simple C program.

It uses inetd just like the Gopher server.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

static __dead void
handle_query(char *input, int len)
{
	if (len == 0) {
		printf("Summary:\n\n");
		printf("-USER-\n");
		printf("irl\n");
	} else if (len == 3 && memcmp(input, "irl", 3) == 0) {
		printf("+-----+\n");
		printf("| irl |\n");
		printf("+-----+\n");
		printf("\n");
		printf("  gopher://irl.xyz/1/\n");
		printf("  sip:1388@sip.sdf.org\n");
		printf("  https://iain.learmonth.me/\n");
		printf("  https://hackers.town/@irl/\n");
		printf("  mailto:iain@learmonth.me\n");
	} else {
		printf("Unknown input of %d bytes\n", len);
	}
	exit(0);
}

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	char input[256];
	int i, pos = 0;

	while (pos < 256)
	{
		pos += read(0, &input[pos], 256 - pos);
		for (i = 0; i < pos; i++)
		{
			if (input[i] == '\r' || input[i] == '\n')
				handle_query(input, i);
		}
	}

	printf("Invalid\n");
}

Installing Gophernicus on OpenBSD

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Installing Gophernicus on OpenBSD was actually rather simple. It is packaged so a simple:

doas pkg_add gophernicus

will install the necessary files. According to the pkg-readme the preferred way to run it is through inetd so that’s what I set up. The exact line I added to /etc/inetd.conf was:

gopher stream tcp nowait _gophernicus /usr/local/libexec/in.gophernicus in.gophernicus -h irl.xyz

In the example, the hostname is in double quotes but the quotes ended up appearing in gophermap outputs so I removed them and testing with lynx everything is working now.

OpenBSD Worrying RAID

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 11:50:00 +0000

I wanted to move a couple of USB hard drives from one OpenBSD machine to another. They are configured with softraid(4) as RAID 1 (mirrored). When I plugged the drives into the new machine though, nothing happened with softraid. This was pretty worrying.

Both the drives showed in dmesg output so the issue was specifically to do with softraid. The man page for bioctl(8) talks about -c creating a “new” RAID device which sounded a little too destructive. I asked for help in #openbsd and apparently the language in the man page is misleading. The -d flag has recently been updated to say “detach” rather than “delete” to try to address this.

Multicast IPTV

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 21:35:00 +0000

For almost a decade, I’ve been very slowly making progress on a multicast IPTV system. Recently I’ve made a significant leap forward in this project, and I wanted to write a little on the topic so I’ll have something to look at when I pick this up next. I was aspiring to have a useable system by the end of today, but for a couple of reasons, it wasn’t possible.

Matrix Synapse Certificates

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 09:32:00 +0000

I’ve had a need to set up and run a Matrix homeserver and I wanted to try to set it up for general use as well as just for this project.

The one thing I wanted to do that is a little non-standard is to use the “plain” domain for my user ID while hosting the homeserver on a subdomain. In this case I wanted to use “irl.xyz” as the user ID domain, and “syn.irl.xyz” to host the Synapse homeserver.

Portable Radio Setup

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 16:15:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to document my portable radio setup for a while, so finally here is that blog post. This is a QRP setup, intended primarily for digimodes on HF.

HF antenna set up on Elrick Hill, Aberdeen

First I want to talk about the antenna setup. Pictured above is the antenna set up on Elrick Hill in Aberdeen. I walked straight up the hill last weekend with the kit and had the antenna up in under 10 minutes. The lower guy ropes can be put in without assistance as they are short enough to be able to hold the mast while you push the pegs in. If it had been windier I’d have done those and then I have a second set of guy ropes that go half way between those and the top.

Light OpenStreetMapping with GPS

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Now that lockdown is lifting a bit in Scotland, I’ve been going a bit further for exercise. One location I’ve been to a few times is Tyrebagger Woods. In theory, I can walk here from my house via Brimmond Hill although I’m not yet fit enough to do that in one go.

Instead of following the main path, I took a detour along some route that looked like it wanted to be a path but it hadn’t been maintained for a while. When I decided I’d had enough of this, I looked for a way back to the main path but OpenStreetMap didn’t seem to have the footpaths mapped out here yet.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-08

Fri, 08 May 2020 16:44:00 +0000

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on documentation, tests and tidying up. It’s good to keep technical debt in check and while no new big exciting features got made today on anything, lots of hard work was done.

I started the day on documentation, adding details on the new -b flag for aprsisd and details on which packets will be sent to APRS-IS. I also added a reference to the APRS-IS specifications to both the aprsisd(8) and the aprsis-filter(7) man pages.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-07

Thu, 07 May 2020 20:58:00 +0000

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on writing unit tests for aprsisd.

I’ve added a few unit tests to test the generation of the TNC2 format packets from AX.25 packets to upload to APRS-IS. There’s still some todo entries there as I’ve not made up packets for all the cases I wanted to check yet.

These are the first unit tests I’ve written for HamBSD and it’s definitely a different experience compared to writing Python unit tests for example. The framework for the tests uses bsd.regress.mk(5). The tests are C programs that include functions from aprsisd.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-06

Wed, 06 May 2020 20:30:00 +0000

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on gating from the Internet to RF.

In the morning I cleaned up the mess I made yesterday with escaping the non-printable characters in packets before uploading them. I ran some test packets through and both Xastir and aprs.fi could decode them so that must be the correct way to do it.

I also added filtering of generic station queries (?APRS?) and IGate queries (?IGATE?). When an IGate query is seen, aprsisd will now respond with a station capabilities packet. The packet is not very exciting as it only contains the “IGATE” capability right now, but at least it does that.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-05

Tue, 05 May 2020 19:55:00 +0000

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on converting AX.25 packets to the TNC2 format used by APRS-IS.

I fixed the path formatting to include the asterisks for used path entries. Before packets would always appear to APRS-IS to have been heard directly, which gave some impressive range statistics for packets that had in fact been through one or two digipeaters.

A little more filtering is now implemented for packets. The control field and PID are verified to ensure the packets are APRS packets.

Hetzner Dedicated Server Reverse DNS + Ansible

Sun, 03 May 2020 09:55:00 +0000

Continuing on the path towards all my stuff being managed by Ansible, I’ve figured out a method of managing the reverse DNS entries for subnets on the Hetzner Dedicated Server.

There’s a bunch of Ansible modules for handling Hetzner Cloud, but these servers are managed in Robot which the Cloud API doesn’t cover. Instead, you need to use the Robot Webservice.

Ansible does have a module for doing pretty arbitrary things with web APIs though, so using that I’ve got the following playbook figured out to keep the reverse DNS entries in sync:

Consolidation and simplification

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 18:23:00 +0100

I’ve been doing a lot of consolidation and simplification in an effort to reduce the amount of brain I have to expend on various tasks and responsibilities. I think it’s working.

Last week I wrote about Ansible for Tor Metrics. I’ve also been working on Ansible for my own stuff. Some of the things I’ve been working on include:

consistent user account setup and synchronised SSH public keys
consistent privilege escalation (doas on OpenBSD, sudo on Debian)
all hosts are backed up via BackupPC
all hosts are monitored in Nagios

If you want to check out this stuff as it evolves, I’ve pushed it to git.sr.ht (this link might break, I make no promises).

Continue as normal

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 17:48:00 +0100

I’m thinking to experiment with a loosely organised but perhaps more regular posting style. I’m going to post these under the tag “journal” because I think that will fit these quite well. We’ll see if I keep these up, or if this one ends up standing alone.

For many people right now is a time of uncertainty, anxiety, fear and loss. For me though today was pretty much a normal day. I work from home anyway so I’m doing what I do every week day. Today felt a little more normal than other days as I was attempting to work exlusively on a new laptop.

From socket(2) to .onion with pf(4)

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 19:35:00 +0000

I’ve been rebuilding my IRC bouncer setup and as part of this process I’ve decided to connect to IRC via onion services where possible. This setup isn’t intended to provide anonymity as once I’m connected I’m going to identify to NickServ anyway. I guess it provides a little protection in that my IP address shouldn’t be visible in that gap between connection and a cloak activating, but there’s so many other ways that my identity could leak.

Spoofing commits to repositories on GitHub

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 21:17:00 +0100

The following has already been reported to GitHub via HackerOne. Someone from GitHub has closed the report as “informative” but told me that it’s a known low-risk issue. As such, while they haven’t explicitly said so, I figure they don’t mind me blogging about it.

Check out this commit in torvalds’ linux.git on GitHub. In case this is fixed, here’s a screenshot of what I see when I look at this link:

An OpenBSD Mail Server on Digital Ocean

Wed, 08 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

I never finished this blog post, but I'm hitting publish anyway, maybe something in here is useful. If you were looking for a complete guide then this isn't going to be what you wanted.

I am one person, but I have many roles. I’m starting to find that I’m getting too much information from too many directions. I’m also finding that I don’t have access to certain information when I need it due to operational security issues. The biggest problem that I’m having with email right now is that 99.9% of my email is going into a single inbox.

Exploring Tor Exit Lists and ECC Signatures

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 16:34:00 +0000

At some point, I might write up a series of articles on the Tor Directory Protocol and how it is all working, but first there are some things I’m trying to get my head around in order to finish off a new specification for Tor Exit Lists that will include signatures. Tor Exit Lists are produced by an “exit scanner”. We archive exit lists and use them to provide data for ExoneraTor and Onionoo.

Functional Cryptography

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 17:07:00 +0000

I’m pretty good at buying books and not finding the time to read them. I did manage to finish The Manga Guide to Cryptography and have now started on Introducing Elixir. In order to make sure I’m understanding these topics, I’ve decided to implement the algorithms I’ve read about in the former, using the programming language I’m reading about in the latter.

I was pleased to find that installing Elixir on Debian is really easy:

Hard drive failure in my zpool 😞

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 20:13:00 +0000

I have a storage box in my house that stores important documents, backups, VM disk images, photos, a copy of the Tor Metrics archive and other odd things. I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that it is both reliable and performant. When I was working on a modern CollecTor for Tor Metrics recently, I used this to be able to run the entire history of the Tor network through the prototype replacement to see if I could catch any bugs.

IETF 104 in Prague

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 14:48:00 +0000

Thanks to support from Article 19, I was able to attend IETF 104 in Prague, Czech Republic this week. Primarily this was to present my Internet Draft which takes safe measurement principles from Tor Metrics work and the Research Safety Board and applies them to Internet Measurement in general.

My IETF badge, complete with additional tag for my nick

I attended with a free one-day pass for the IETF and free hackathon registration, so more than just the draft presentation happened. During the hackathon I sat at the MAPRG table and worked on PATHspider with Mirja Kühlewind from ETH Zurich. We have the code running again with the latest libraries available in Debian testing and this may become the basis of a future Tor exit scanner (for generating exit lists, and possibly also some bad exit detection). We ran a quick measurement campaign that was reported in the hackathon presentations.

Privacy-preserving monitoring of an anonymity network (FOSDEM 2019)

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 14:00:00 +0000

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at FOSDEM 2019 in the Monitoring and Observability devroom about the work of Tor Metrics.

Direct links:

Producing this transcript was more work than I had anticipated it would be, and I’ve done this in my free time, so if you find it useful then please do let me know otherwise I probably won’t be doing this again.

Cryptonoise: January 2019

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 16:30:00 +0000

On Thursday 17th January, we held the first Cryptonoise event of 2019. We had a good turn out and kicked off the discussion with a quick browse through Wikipedia’s list of data breaches.

Our first topic of discussion was relating to how we all used passwords and how password reuse can very quickly become problematic if it happens that your password is leaked.

Over time, the probability that any entity holding a large store of sensitive private data will remain both competent enough to protect it adequately and honest enough to want to goes to zero. –@mattblaze

A Solution for Authoritative DNS

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:30:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about improving my DNS setup. So many things will use e-mail verification as a backup authentication measure that it is starting to show as a real weak point. An Ars Technica article earlier this year talked about how “[f]ederal authorities and private researchers are alerting companies to a wave of domain hijacking attacks that use relatively novel techniques to compromise targets at an almost unprecedented scale.”

The two attacks that are mentioned in that article, changing the nameserver and changing records, are something that DNSSEC could protect against. Records wouldn’t have to be changed on my chosen nameservers, a BGP-hijacking could just give another server the queries for records on my domain instead and then reply with whatever it chooses.

OpenBSD with GPS synchronised NTP

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 17:00:00 +0000

I wrote on Monday about how I’ve swapped my home router for an OpenBSD box. One of the fun things I’ve done with this box is configure it as a network time server using ntpd(8).

Synchronising time with servers on the Internet isn’t that exciting, but I’ve had a USB GPS dongle sitting doing nothing for a while. I originally purchased it to use with amateur radio projects but I haven’t done much radio recently. It looks like you can pick these up on eBay for around £11.00 and the newer ones also support GLONASS (mine only does GPS as far as I can tell).

OpenBSD with PlusNet VDSL

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 21:30:00 +0100

For a long time we’ve had a Cisco 887VA acting as our VDSL modem and gateway. We got this for the old flat when we moved in there in 2016 and took it with us to where we live now. It’s been quite reliable but the Ethernet interfaces are only 10/100Mbps and there are some limitations to the software where either features are hidden behind additional licenses or they are missing altogether. The software was last updated in 2016 and there’s no easy way to get hold of later firmware.

MB7VX Shutdown

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 14:20:00 +0100

The APRS digipeater MB7VX has been offline for quite a while now. I’m not going to bring it back any time soon and I have applied for a second NoV to release the frequency and callsign.

The original MB7VX setup using a donated Tait 2 meter radio and a 13.8 volt power supply from the local club junk sale

Body Scanners at BUD

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 11:10:00 +0200

Note: I wrote this post in the departures lounge at BUD, but it was not posted online until the 25th when I was back home.

I’m really not liking air travel. It makes me ridiculously uncomfortable. Really only one part of it though: security.

Since the introduction of the body scanners in airports, as I have something of an understanding of how they operate, going through security is a pretty terrifying prospect for me. I think that over time it’s got worse too.

Free Software Efforts (2018W33)

Sat, 18 Aug 2018 13:30:00 +0100

I’m writing this weekly report early this week as I won’t be around tomorrow to post it. I will be mostly offline next week as I will be at ACM SIGCOMM 2018 in Budapest, Hungary.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

Lots of Onionoo and Debian packaging this week.

Onionoo Graph History Documents

On Monday, we released Onionoo 1.16.1 and deployed this to the official Onionoo instances. This fixed the issue with the serialization of Graph History documents that was breaking history graphs on Relay Search.

Free Software Efforts (2018W32)

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 18:00:00 +0100

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

Lots of Relay Search and Onionoo this week.

Relay Search

Fixes to the aggregated map and top relays views were made to complete changes that had happened elsewhere in the codebase but not been kept in sync here. Unfortunately there is a little too much logic in Relay Search that really should be handled by the backend which has lead to code duplication in places.

Netlify Mixed Content Warnings

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 17:40:00 +0100

Looking at my blog today, I noticed that Netlify now warns you if you link to non-HTTPS URLs in your site:

2:37:56 PM: Starting post processing
2:37:56 PM: Mixed content detected in: /blog/index.html
2:37:56 PM: --> insecure link urls:
2:37:56 PM:   - http://w6d6vblb6vhuqxt6.onion/blog/
2:37:56 PM:   - http://tvin5bvfwew3ldttg5t6ynlif4t53y3mbmb7sgbyud7h5q6gblrpsnyd.onion/blog/
2:37:56 PM:   - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

This is really handy in catching those URLs you’ve forgotten to make into HTTPS URLs, but Tor Project exempts .onion hostnames from mixed content warnings (see Tor ticket #23439) and this is even applied upstream by Mozilla in Firefox (see Mozilla ticket #1382359).

Free Software Efforts (2018W31)

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 18:00:00 +0100

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

This week has been more reviews than writing code.

Onionoo history periods change

To simplify the Onionoo codebase and remove redundant data from the documents, the 3-month graphs will now become 6-month graphs and the 1-month graphs will be dropped. I have been reviewing changes for this in Onionoo and ensuring that Relay Search is prepared for the changes.

Tor Metrics News via Twitter

I’ve been exploring syndicating the Tor Metrics news feed via Twitter using Huginn. It’s not ready for use yet but it’s not far off either.

Free Software Efforts (2018W30)

Sun, 29 Jul 2018 18:00:00 +0100

Last week was my fourth week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

This week has been more reviews than writing code.

OONI Vanilla Tor Data

The plan for implementation of this has now been solidified following discussion at the Metrics team meeting.

vanguards Packaging for Debian

I have begun working on packaging vanguards for Debian, including looking at issues in its dependencies in Debian.

Free Software Efforts (2018W29)

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 18:00:00 +0100

Last week was my third week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

metrics-bot JavaDoc

In order to ensure metrics-bot remains maintainable, I have now increased the JavaDoc coverage for metrics-bot to 100% of the non-trivial public interfaces.

Onionoo Release

On Monday 16th, the Metrics Team released Onionoo 1.15.0 which implements Onionoo protocol version 6.1 (a minor bump from the previous release).

Free Software Efforts (2018W28)

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 18:00:00 +0100

Last week was my second week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

Relay Search Fixes

A few fixes for Relay Search. These were all small fixes but hopefully should also be quite high impact for usability.

Onionoo Enhancements

The improvements to Onionoo’s reverse DNS resolver have now been finalised and merged. The plan is that this will be deployed next week.

I have added support to Onionoo to filter relays by operating system. This was the oldest open Onionoo ticket until it was fixed.

Overblocking

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Last week when I found myself with my Internet connection down, I tried to use my EE LTE connection to work instead. This plan fell apart quite quickly when I discovered that *.torproject.org was blocked as 18+ content.

I found using the Open Rights Group’s tool, blocked.org.uk, that in fact a large number of UK ISPs have these wildcard blocks in place. This tool also provides a means to report misclassification and so I submitted requests to unblock the following domains:

Summer School on Internet Path Transparency Measurements

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 14:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published at the MAMI Project blog.

On June the 11th the Electronics Research Group hosted the MAMI Summer School on Internet Path Transparency Measurements in Aberdeen, Scotland. This consisted of a few hands-on workshops, with participation both on-site and remote via video conference.

The summer school started with Korian and Justin demonstrating Tracebox through a variety of topologies. The participants then worked on their own trying to uncover middleboxes and hidden topologies using a variety of tools, including tracebox and paris-traceroute.

Free Software Efforts (2018W27)

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 13:00:00 +0100

Last week was my first week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

On Tuesday, my Internet connection was interrupted for the entire workday which did make it a little more difficult to work. I was able to use my 4G connection but, unfortunately, access to the Tor bug tracker and all of the Metrics websites were blocked requiring me to verify I was over the age of 18 to access. Tor Browser was quite happy to go around the censorship so it was not impossible to work.

A Virtual Machine Host

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 18:00:00 +0000

It’s very easy to set up libvirt with QEMU/KVM on a Linux box and have it work for a while. It’s more difficult to have a system set up that’s going to be somewhat robust and maintainable over a longer period of time.

I am using a dedicated server from Hetzner. I have not personally had any serious problems with Hetzner, and price is the main reason that I’ve chosen them over other providers.

Mastodon + XMPP + SIP

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 15:00:00 +0000

This is an idea. I haven’t looked at actually doing it yet, but I might.

Mastodon needs complimentary instant messaging and I’ve been thinking about how this might be achieved. XMPP and SIP are great federated protocols and it’s possible to use the same domain used for Mastodon for these through SRV records.

Authentication for XMPP and SIP is based on passwords. Mastodon could be extended to write out password hashes to a database to have one password for each service per device. You could then have those servers query the database and check password hashes. I’m not sure what the security properties of this would be compared to OAuth, but I think it’s similar just without the in-band setup.

Talking to Hackers

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Yesterday Ana finished setting up FreePBX for our house, and revived the Cisco SIP phones to make them useful again. Eventphone provides SIP, DECT, GSM and other telephony technologies at hacker events like CCC and also runs a long-running SIP service, known as EPVPN to connect hackerspaces and hackers between events.

We set up our extension as a trunk in FreePBX and could easily test outbound calls, but it was a little more difficult to test inbound calls. There was no system to queue up a test call (at least that I could find) so we needed to find someone to call back manually.

Free Software Efforts (2017W44)

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 44 of 2017. This has been a quiet week.

Tor Project

In this week I have looked at metrics-bot being compliant with the Tor metrics team’s Java style guide (#24080 ) and integrating it into a unified package naming scheme (#24036 ).

There has been a lot of refactoring in metrics-bot this week as components are starting to mature. I have started work on using metrics-base, the metrics team directory structure for Java projects and also formatting, but this still needs more work before it is completed.

Free Software Efforts (2017W43)

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 43 of 2017. This has been a quiet week.

Tor Project

In this week metrics-bot has had some issues where Onionoo was disappearing (#23928 ). I have been building in better error handling for requests to external services. I’ve also started to investigate other templates for status updates that might be useful (#23937 ), and have added a configuration framework to allow for credentials for services to be externally provided (#23933 ).

Mastodon

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

I joined Mastodon today. So did metrics-bot who is now simultooting to the fediverse.

metrics-bot on Mastodon

Annoyingly, the API for Mastodon is different enough from the API for Twitter that I’ve needed to use a new library in metrics-bot. I’m using the mastodon4j library for now, but I’m really using so little of the API I do wonder if it would be easier to just reimplement the parts that are needed and drop the rest. The only part I’m really worried about is the OAuth authentication and I’m sure that won’t be anywhere near as bad as I think it will be.

Behringer Xenyx 302USB

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

I have decided to invest in a USB audio interface. My primary motivation for this is that I might like to produce some screencasts in the near future. My secondary motivation was being able to have a headphone socket on my desk to give me more freedom of movement than I would have plugged into the front of the workstation under my desk.

I went with a Behringer Xenyx 302USB and I’ve been quite happy with it so far.

Security by Obscurity

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Today this blog post turned up on Hacker News, titled “Obscurity is a Valid Security Layer”. It makes some excellent points on the distinction between good and bad obscurity and it gives an example of good obscurity with SSH.

From the post:

I configured my SSH daemon to listen on port 24 in addition to its regular port of 22 so I could see the difference in attempts to connect to each (the connections are usually password guessing attempts). My expected result is far fewer attempts to access SSH on port 24 than port 22, which I equate to less risk to my, or any, SSH daemon.

Bugs in websites

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Reporting a bug in free software is easy. It turns out that everything I thought I knew about bug reporting was turned on its head when I tried to report a bug in the Tesco groceries website.

I was finding some sort of JavaScript problems in that my CPU was held at 100% and the page wasn’t really usable.

As with bug reports, I was expecting to at least have some technical information logged along with my email address so someone can contact me if they want me to try some things out. What I actually got:

Free Software Efforts (2017W42)

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 42 of 2017. In this week I have replaced my spacebar, failed to replace a HDD and begun the process to replace my YubiKey.

Debian

Eariler in the week I blogged about powerline-taskwarrior . There is a new upstream version available that includes the patches I had produced for Python 2 support and I have filed #879225 to remind me to package this.

The state of emscripten is still not great, and as I don’t have the time to chase this up and I certainly don’t have the time to fix it myself, I’ve converted the ITP for csdr to an RFP.

map.debian.net

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

I operated map.debian.net to provide a map of Debian contributors and mirrors. There were plans to add in Debian events/sprints but I just did not have the time. The service broke one day, and I didn’t find the time to fix it.

I’ve now uploaded the sources of this very simple application to GitHub and perhaps someone else will pick it up. Having given the code a go today, I’ve not managed to persuade it to load any objects onto the map.

metrics-bot

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

On Thursday during the metrics team meeting we decided to rename AtlasBot to metrics-bot to better fit the naming scheme of the team’s other projects.

It would appear that there has been interest in the bot and that it’s something that people want.

The JavaDoc has now moved to a new location, a git repository has been created and there is a new Trac component to organise the metrics-bot todo list.

I’ve planning to be able to push the sources for metrics-bot to the git repository early next week. I just need to do one more pass to make sure there’s no Twitter credentials left in it, and then I’ll be able to close #23933 too.

Yubikey 4

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

Today my new Yubikey arrived, a Yubikey 4. There’s a whole load of features packed into the YubiKey, but the only feature I really use is the OpenPGP applet which emulates an OpenPGP smartcard.

This is the only device that is trusted to see my private GnuPG keys at the points where I use them. It helps to keep track of where my keys are, as they can only be in a single place.

Replacing a hard drive

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

I’ve got a hard drive in a zpool that is starting to show some SMART errors. I’d really like to replace it, but unfortunately it’s in a zpool that is configured to stripe and not mirror. I do not have enough SATA ports or disks to convert it to stripe+mirror.

Currently, it’s not possible to remove a drive from a striped zpool. You have to destroy the pool and start again. This is really annoying.

Outer Spacebar

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

I use a mechicanical keyboard. This is more a matter of necessity than a matter of preference as I was really starting to get pain in my fingers using the old rubber dome keyboard. I absolutely cannot stand the keyboard on my MacBook Pro but I usually am either using this with an external keyboard or only when travelling, so this is bearable.

If you’re going to have a mechanical keyboard, you have to have fun with it. My keyboard has red/blue backlighting and I’ve replaced my function keys with cats.

powerline-taskwarrior

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

Basically all of my work time, both paid and volunteer, is organised by my taskwarrior database.

Sometimes it can be hard to keep focus, and in times where you find yourself forgetting what you were doing, a handy reminder can get you back on track quickly.

If you’re a powerline user then here’s something to keep you on track:

apt install python-powerline-taskwarrior python3-powerline-taskwarrior

You can configure powerline to then show you your context, active task or next task with:

No more no surprises

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0100

Debian has generally always had, as a rule, “sane defaults” and “no surprises”. This was completely shattered for me when Vim decided to hijack the mouse from my terminal and break all copy/paste functionality. This has occured since the release of Debian 9.

I expect for my terminal to behave consistently, and this is broken every time I log in to a Debian 9 system where I have not configured Vim to disable this functionality. I also see I’m not alone in this frustration.

Free Software Efforts (2017W41)

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 41 of 2017. In this week I have explored some Java 8 features, looked at automatic updates in a few Linux distributions and decided that actually I don’t need swap anymore.

Debian

The issue that was preventing the migration of the Tasktools Packaging Team’s mailing list from Alioth to Savannah has now been resolved.

Ana’s chkservice package that I sponsored last week has been ACCEPTED into unstable and since MIGRATED to testing.

Tor Project

I have produced a patch for the Tor Project website to update links to the Onionoo documentation now this has moved (#23802 ). I’ve updated the Debian and Ubuntu relay configuration instructions to use systemctl instead of service where appropriate (#23048 ).

Shortcodes for my Weekly Reports

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0100

I’ve been writing weekly reports on my free software activities for over a month now, so I’m looking at ways of making these easier to write. Each review takes about an hour to write up, and I’m spending enough time formatting links to packages and bug reports that I’ve written some Hugo shortcodes to help.

For Debian:

{{ with ( .Get "bug" ) }}{{ range ( first 1 ( split . "," ) ) }}<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/{{ . }}">#{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ if ( ( gt ( len ( split . "," ) )  1 ) ) }}{{ range ( after 1 ( split . "," ) ) }}, <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/{{ . }}">#{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ end }}{{ end }}
{{ with ( .Get "src" ) }}{{ range ( first 1 ( split . "," ) ) }}<a href="https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/{{ . }}">{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ if ( ( gt ( len ( split . "," ) )  1 ) ) }}{{ range ( after 1 ( split . "," )) }}, <a href="https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/{{ . }}">{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ end }}{{ end }}
{{ with ( .Get "pkg" ) }}{{ range ( first 1 ( split . "," ) ) }}<a href="https://packages.debian.org/sid/{{ . }}">{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ if ( ( gt ( len ( split . "," ) )  1 ) ) }}{{ range ( after 1 ( split . "," )) }}, <a href="https://packages.debian.org/sid/{{ . }}">{{ . }}</a>{{ end }}{{ end }}{{ end }}

For Tor Project:

vimdiff

Sat, 14 Oct 2017 08:00:00 +0100

Yesterday I was looking at merging review edits in a LaTeX document. I decided that I would use vimdiff, which meant learning the keybindings (again, for maybe the fifth or sixth time).

It’s pretty easy to use vimdiff once you get the hang of it. Open two files like:

vimdiff file1.tex file2.tex

You navigate between the two windows just like any other split in vim: Ctrl-w followed by h or l (to move left or right). Then you can navigate the documents and merge things:

swapoff

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0100

When working with datasets from PATHspider it’s very easy to max out your memory. When running an analysis recently, I found my computer locking up and generally being unresponsive. This new machine should be able to cope so this was odd, and then I realised that I was running two jupyter notebooks and the other had previously loaded all the data into memory, so this second one pushed me into swap. 6GB of memory got swapped and then the machine was near useless almost instantly.

List Comprehension

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0100

Still in the process or tidying up the bot behind the @TorAtlas Twitter account, which means I’m still writing Java. I’ve now been exploring “list comprehension"-like techniques using another new Java 8 feature, Streams. Essentially this involves creating lists from lists in an elegant way.

In Python, I would do something like:

runningRelays = [relay for relay in relays if relay['is_running']]

(I know something is happening because writing that example line I had an incredible urge to terminate the line with a semicolon.)

Duration and Period

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:00:00 +0100

I’m in the process or tidying up the bot behind TorAtlas and I’ve chosen to write it in Java. My undergraduate degree had a lot of Java in it, but that was while ago now, and there are some cool new features I’ve learnt about including Period and Duration.

Some of the tweets coming from the bot talk about how long a relay has been contributing to the Tor network. When fetching the details document I look at the first_seen field and get this as a ZonedDateTime to make sure I’m doing all my calculations in UTC. I then use the between() method on various ChronoUnits to work out how long between the first time the relay was seen and now, and then I produced something human readable from this:

Automatic Updates

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 19:00:00 +0100

We have instructions for setting up new Tor relays on Debian. The only time the word “upgrade” is mentioned here is:

Be sure to set your ContactInfo line so we can contact you if you need to upgrade or something goes wrong.

This isn’t great. We should have some decent instructions for keeping your relay up to date too. I’ve been compiling a set of documentation for enabling automatic updates on various Linux distributions, here’s a taste of what I have so far:

My IRC Setup

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 08:30:00 +0100

I use IRC every day. I use it to speak to people at my local hackerspace and to fellow Debian or Tor Project developers. My set up is a little complex but every part serves a purpose.

Connection diagram for my IRC setup

The service that actually performs the connections to IRC servers is ZNC, an IRC bouncer. The main features this provides are aggressively remaining connected to ensure that I’m not missing anything and also to authenticate to NickServ automatically in the case of a disconnect. Other features from ZNC I use are the keepnick plugin (to keep trying for my primary nick) and the chansaver plugin to keep track of which channels I’m in.

Free Software Efforts (2017W40)

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 40 of 2017. In this week I have looked at censorship in Catalonia and had my “deleted” Facebook account hacked (which made HN front page). I’ve also been thinking about DRM on the web.

Debian

I have prepared and uploaded fixes for the measurement-kit and hamradio-maintguide packages.

I have also sponsored uploads for gnustep-base (to experimental) and chkservice.

I have given DM upload privileges to Eric Heintzmann for the gnustep-base package as he has shown to care for the GNUstep packages well. In the near future, I think we’re looking at a transition for gnustep-{base,back,gui} as these packages all have updates.

Tor Relays on Twitter

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:00:00 +0100

A while ago I played with a Twitter bot that would track radio amateurs using a packet radio position reporting system, tweet their location and a picture from Flickr that was taken near to their location and a link to their packet radio activity on aprs.fi. It’s really not that hard to put these things together and they can be a lot of fun. The tweets looked like this:

[tweet missing]

This isn’t about building a system that serves any critical purpose, it’s about fun. As the radio stations were chosen essentially at random, there could be some cool things showing up that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Maybe you’d spot a callsign of a station you’ve spoken to before on HF or perhaps you’d see stations in areas near you or in cool places.

Twitter for Websites

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 15:00:00 +0100

In yesterday’s post, I tried out the Hugo shortcode for embedding tweets from Twitter.

After having gone to some effort to remove external assets from my website, it’s not great that this shortcode will automatically include JavaScript from the Twitter website. The way that Twitter for Websites seems to work is that the JavaScript provides enhancement but the JavaScript is not required for the content to work. This is great, as it means that content still works when syndicated on planets or viewed in an RSS reader or through a text-only browser.

Atari ST Terminfo

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 16:00:00 +0100

Terminfo configuration for the Atari ST does exist.

Encrypted Media Extensions

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 16:00:00 +0100

Now that Season 3 of Rick and Morty has been completely aired, it’s time to start watching. I’m not a big fan of waiting a week between episodes, especially when the episodes are only 20 minutes long.

As of last night, all but the final episode of the season was available on Netflix and Ana has a subscription for this. This is the first time I’ve seen Netflix being used, so I didn’t know that the W3C Recommendedation “Encrypted Media Extensions” that upset the EFF enough for them to resign from the W3C has actually been in use by Netflix since April 2013 (growing platform support over time, not supporting all platforms immediately).

Hugo Syntax Highlighting

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 20:00:00 +0100

I’ve been tidying up my Hugo theme in an effort to make it reusable by others. In doing so, I’ve learnt about a lot of Hugo features that I didn’t know existed, like shortcodes. I remembered this concept from long ago in Wordpress and I had even written a plugin that took advantage of them.

I’ve been manually writing out HTML for figures, instead of using the figure shortcode. I haven’t started to fix these up yet, but I have made some changes for syntax highlighting.

MAC Catching

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0100

As we walk around with mobile phones in our pockets, there are multiple radios each with identifiers that can be captured and recorded just through their normal operation. Bluetooth and Wifi devices have MAC addresses and can advertise their presence to other devices merely by sending traffic, or by probing for devices to connect to if they’re not connected.

I found a simple tool, probemon that allows for anyone with a wifi card to track who is at which location at any given time. You could deploy a few of these with Raspberry Pis or even go even cheaper with a number of ESP8266.

Facebook Lies

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0000

In the past, I had a Facebook account. Long ago I “deleted” this account through the procedure outlined on their help pages. In theory, 14 days after I used this process my account would be irrevocably gone. This was all lies.

My account was not deleted and yesterday I received an email:

Screenshot of the email I received from Facebook

It took me a moment to figure it out, but what had happened here is someone had logged into my Facebook account using my email address and password. Facebook simply reactivated the account, which had not had its data deleted, as if I had logged in.

Censorship Resistance in Cyberspace

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0100

Yesterday, Catalonia held a referendum on independence from Spain. There are arguments to be made that Spain has acted in a way incompatible with Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty in their violent reactions to this. Watching videos of the Guardia Civil (organised as a military force charged with police duties) was pretty horrifying, I would imagine being there was many times worse.

There has been plenty of coverage of the referendum but I wanted to talk about four things that maybe haven’t been covered so much, from cyberspace:

Free Software Efforts (2017W39)

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 39 of 2017. In this week I have travelled to Berlin and caught up on some podcasts in doing so. I’ve also had some trouble with the RSS feeds on my blog but hopefully this is all fixed now.

Thanks to Martin Milbret I now have a replacement for my dead workstation, an HP Z600, and there will be a blog post about this new set up to come next week. Thanks also to Sýlvan and a number of others that made donations towards getting me up and running again. A breakdown of the donations and expenses can be found at the end of this post.

Microblogging clients

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 22:00:00 +0100

My Twitter activity has really picked up in the last couple of months. I’d love to have something more integrated with my desktop but so far the best Twitter client I’ve found is the Twitter website.

I sponsored the original inclusion of corebird into Debian’s package repsoitories. This is a great native client and Phillip Rinn does a great job maintaining it (I gave him Debian Maintainer privileges now to do uploads without my picking apart every upload). He’s also added a backport of the latest version so it can be installed on the current Debian stable release. My problem with corebird however is that it doesn’t support “free” networks.

Breaking RSS Change in Hugo

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 13:00:00 +0100

My website and blog are managed by the static site generator Hugo. I’ve found this to be a stable and flexible system, but at the last upgrade a breaking change has occurred that broken the syndication of my blog on various planets.

At first I thought perhaps with my increased posting rate the planets were truncating my posts but this was not the case. The problem was in Hugo pull request #3129 where for some reason they have changed the RSS feed to contain only a “lead” instead of the full article.

Tor Metrics Team Meeting in Berlin

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0100

We had a meeting of the Metrics Team in Berlin yesterday to organise a roadmap for the next 12 months. This roadmap isn’t yet finalised as it will now be taken to the main Tor developers meeting in Montreal where perhaps there are things we thought were needed but aren’t, or things that we had forgotten. Still we have a pretty good draft and we were all quite happy with it.

Podcasts

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0100

When I’m travelling, I take the opportunity to catch up on podcasts. I always enjoy discovering a new podcast that is interesting for me, so I thought I’d share the current set of podcasts I’m subscribing to:

Security Now - Probably my longest running subscription, but I don’t listen to every episode (they’re 2 hours long which is quite an investment to make). Covers a wide range of security related topics.
Off The Hook - This is a recent addition to my podcast listening, from the 2600 people, and covers topics including hacking, phone systems, Internet protocols and security.
Intercepted - A newish podcast covering political events with a slant towards human rights issues.
Pod Save The World - Again, another political podcast.
DJ Cotts - The Aussie Hardcore Podcast - Music for working.
Keeping The Rave Alive - More music for working.

Maybe you’ll enjoy discovering some of these too. If you know of a podcast you think I’d enjoy, you can send me an email or tweet.

"Security Scanners" Again

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0100

Early this morning I was flying from Aberdeen Airport to Berlin for the Tor Metrics Team meeting. I noticed that they have finally put up some signage before the security area and writing this blog post I really wish I’d taken a picture of it just to show how ridiculous it was.

It didn’t have much information on it, but the information it had was almost laughable. For example: “The scanner is lower than a mobile phone”. As someone who understands radio, I assume they mean field strength, but they don’t specify this so they could mean height or long distance call prices.

SMS Verification

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0100

I’ve received an email today from Barclaycard with the following:

“From time to time, to make sure it’s you who’s using your Barclaycard online, we’ll send you a text with a verification code for you to use on the Verified by Visa screen that’ll pop up on your payment page.”

The proprietary nature of mobile phones with the hardware specifications and the software being closed off from inspection or audit and considered to be trade secrets make my phone and my tablet the least trusted devices I own and use.

Updated Blog Theme

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 10:45:00 +0100

I’ve taken a go at updating the theme for my blog. Previously I’d been using a theme that was a hacked up version of a theme from the Hugo themes directory. I tried to look just now for the theme I’d based it on, but can’t seem to find it.

In the new theme I’m aiming for accessibility and some machine readableness. Accessibility really comes down to making sure you’ve separated content from presentation so that it can be easily converted into other mediums automatically. For machine readableness, I’ve been exploring XFN, RDF (Dublin Core, FOAF, Open Graph) and, of course, Atom.

Free Software Efforts (2017W38)

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 12:00:00 +0100

Here’s my weekly report for week 38 of 2017. This week has not been a great week as I saw my primary development machine die in a spectacular reboot loop. Thanks to the wonderful community around Debian and free software (that if you’re reading this, you’re probably part of), I should be back up to speed soon. A replacement workstation is currently moving towards me and I’ve received a number of smaller donations that will go towards video converters and upgrades to get me back to full productivity.

Onion Services

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 10:45:00 +0100

In the summer 2017 edition of 2600 magazine there is a brilliant article on running onion services as part of a series on censorship resistant services. Onion services provide privacy and security for readers above that which is possible through the use of HTTPS.

Since moving my website to Netlify, my onion service died as Netlify doesn’t provide automatic onion services (although they do offer automated Let’s Encrypt certificate provisioning). If anyone from Netlify is reading this, please consider adding a one-click onion service button next to the Let’s Encrypt button.

VM on bhyve not booting

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 10:45:00 +0100

Last night I installed updates on my FreeNAS box and rebooted it. As expected my network died, but then it never came back, which I hadn’t expected.

My FreeNAS box provides backup storage space, a local Debian mirror and a mirror of talks from recent conferences. It also runs a couple of virtual machines and one of these provides my local DNS resolver.

I hooked up the VNC console to the virtual machine and the problem looked to be that it was booting from the Debian installer CD. I removed the CD from the VM and rebooted, thinking that would be the end of it, but nope:

It Died: An Update

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 08:30:00 +0100

Update: I’ve had an offer of a used workstation that I’m following up. I would still appreciate any donations to go towards costs for cables/converters/upgrades needed with the new system but the hard part should hopefully be out the way now. (:

Thanks for all the responses I’ve received about the death of my desktop PC. As I updated in my previous post, I find it unlikely that I will have to orphan any of my packages as I believe that I should be able to get a new workstation soon.

It Died

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 10:10:00 +0100

On Sunday, in my weekly report on my free software activities, I wrote about how sustainable my current level of activites are. I had identified the risk that the computer that I use for almost all of my free software work was slowly dying. Last night it entered an endless reboot loop and subsequent efforts to save it have failed.

I cannot afford to replace this machine and my next best machine has half the cores, half the RAM and less than half of the screen real estate. As this is going to be a serious hit to my productivity, I need to seriously consider if I am able to continue to maintain the number of packages I currently do in Debian.

Easy APT Repository

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 08:30:00 +0100

The PATHspider software I maintain as part of my work depends on some features in cURL and in PycURL that have only just been mereged or are still awaiting merge. I need to build a docker container that includes these as Debian packages, so I need to quickly build an APT repository.

A Debian repository can essentially be seen as a static website and the contents are GPG signed so it doesn’t necessarily need to be hosted somewhere trusted (unless availability is critical for your application). I host my blog with Netlify, a static website host, and I figured they would be perfect for this use case. They also support open source projects.

Small Glowing Thing

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 08:30:00 +0100

Quite a while ago I obtained an Adafruit NeoPixel Stick. It was cheap enough to be an impulse buy but it took me some time to get around to actually doing something with it.

I’ve been wanting to play a little more with the ATtiny range of microcontrollers so these things seemed to go together nicely. It turns out that getting an ATtiny programmed is actually rather simple using an Arduino as an ISP programmer. I’ve written up some notes on the procedure at the 57North Hacklab wiki.

The Final Click

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 07:00:00 +0100

On my desktop, I had been using a Logitech G500 mouse. This was a really nice mouse that had the perfect feature set for me but it had a problem. Single clicks would turn into double clicks and it was nearly impossible to click and drag.

Some consequences of this include tweets being unliked instantly after liking them, ordering twice as many apples as necessary from Tesco and pasting my entire Twitter timeline into an IRC buffer instead of the two lines of log file. If there’s going to be an electromechanical component of your computer go wrong, the left mouse button is not a great choice.

Free Software Efforts (2017W37)

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 18:00:00 +0100

I’d like to start making weekly reports again on my free software efforts. Part of the reason for these reports is for me to see how much time I’m putting into free software. Hopefully I can keep these reports up.

Debian

I have updated txtorcon (a Twisted-based asynchronous Tor control protocol implementation used by ooniprobe, magic-wormhole and tahoe-lafs) to its latest upstream version. I’ve also added two new binary packages that are built by the txtorcon source package: python3-txtorcon and python-txtorcon-doc for Python 3 support and generated HTML documentation respectively.

Recent Atlas Improvements

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:22:13 +0100

This post was originally posted to the Tor Project blog. If you would like to comment on this post, please do so there.

Atlas is a web application to learn about currently running Tor relays and bridges. You can search by fingerprint, nickname, country, flags and contact information and be returned information about its advertised bandwidth, uptime, exit policies and more.

Screenshot of Atlas

I’m taking this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m Iain R. Learmonth, or just irl on IRC. I began contributing to Atlas in June last year, and I’m currently serving as the maintainer for Atlas. We have made some usability improvements to Atlas recently that we are happy to share with you today.

The Internet of Dangerous Auction Sites

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 22:25:13 +0100

It might be that the internet era of fun and games is over, because the internet is now dangerous. – Bruce Schneier

Ok, I know this is kind of old news now, but Bruce Schneier gave testimony to the House of Representatives’ Energy & Commerce Committee about computer security after the Dyn attack. I’m including this quote because I feel it sets the scene nicely for what follows here.

Last week, I was browsing the popular online auction site eBay and I noticed that there was no TLS. For a moment, I considered that maybe my traffic was being intercepted deliberately, there’s no way that eBay as a global company would be deliberately risking users in this way. I was wrong. There is not and has never been TLS for large swathes of the eBay site. In fact, the only point at which I’ve found TLS is in their help pages and when it comes to entering card details (although it’ll give you back the last 4 digits of your card over a plaintext channel).

vmdebootstrap Sprint Report

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 13:06:13 +0100

This is now a little overdue, but here it is. On the 10th and 11th of November, the second vmdebootstrap sprint took place. Lars Wirzenius (liw), Ana Custura (ana_c) and myself were present. liw focussed on the core of vmdebootstrap, where he sketched out what the future of vmdebootstrap may look like. He documented this in a mailing list post and also presented (video).

Ana and myself worked on live-wrapper, which uses vmdebootstrap internally for the squashfs generation. I worked on improving logging, using a better method for getting paths within the image, enabling generation of Packages and Release files for the image archive and also made the images installable (live-wrapper 0.5 onwards will include an installer by default).

PATHspider Plugins

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:46:13 +0100

This post is cross-posted on the MAMI Project blog here.

In today’s Internet we see an increasing deployment of middleboxes. While middleboxes provide in-network functionality that is necessary to keep networks manageable and economically viable, any packet mangling — whether essential for the needed functionality or accidental as an unwanted side effect — makes it more and more difficult to deploy new protocols or extensions of existing protocols.

For the evolution of the protocol stack, it is important to know which network impairments exist and potentially need to be worked around. While classical network measurement tools are often focused on absolute performance values, PATHspider performs A/B testing between two different protocols or different protocol extensions to perform controlled experiments of protocol-dependent connectivity problems as well as differential treatment.

Powers to Investigate

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 01:17:13 +0100

The Communication Data Bill was draft legislation introduced first in May 2012. It sought to compel ISPs to store details of communications usage so that it can later be used for law enforcement purposes. In 2013 the passage of this bill into law had been blocked and the bill was dead.

In 2014 we saw the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 appear. This seemed to be in response to the Data Retention Directive being successfully challenged at the European Court of Justice by Digital Rights Ireland on human rights grounds, with a judgment given in 2014. It essentially reimplemented the Data Retention Directive along with a whole load of other nasty things.

live-wrapper 0.4 released!

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 04:21:13 +0100

Last week saw the quiet upload of live-wrapper 0.4 to unstable. I would have blogged at the time, but there is another announcement coming later in this blog post that I wanted to make at the same time.

live-wrapper is a wrapper around vmdebootstrap for producing bootable live images using Debian GNU/Linux. Accompanied by the live-tasks package in Debian, this provides the toolchain and configuration necessary for building live images using Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE and XFCE. There is also work ongoing to add a GNUstep image to this.

The Domain Name System

Sat, 22 Oct 2016 19:15:13 +0100

As I posted yesterday, we released PATHspider 1.0.0. What I didn’t talk about in that post was an event that occured only a few hours before the release.

Everything was going fine, proofreading of the documentation was in progress, a quick git push with the documentation updates and… CI FAILED!?! Our CI doesn’t build the documentation, only tests the core code. I’m planning to release real soon and something has broken.

PATHspider 1.0.0 released!

Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:46:13 +0100

Decentralise (in a kind of centralised way)

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 17:30:00 +0100

Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens.

We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place. Facebook, Google and Twitter spring to mind as examples of companies that have grown to dangerous sizes with little competition. This is not paranoia. This is real. We make it a lot more difficult when we spread out.

Azure from Debian

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 23:03:13 +0100

Around a week ago, I started to play with programmatically controlling Azure. I needed to create and destroy a bunch of VMs over and over again, and this seemed like something I would want to automate once instead of doing manually and repeatedly. I started to look into the azure-sdk-for-python and mentioned that I wanted to look into this in #debian-python. ardumont from Software Heritage noticed me, and was planning to package azure-storage-python. We joined forces and started a packaging team for Azure-related software.

Burgers 2016

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 11:20:13 +0100

Me and Ana travelled to Cambridge last weekend for the Debian UK BBQ. We travelled by train and it was a rather scenic journey. In the past, on long journeys, I’ve used APRS-IS to beacon my location and plot my route but I have recently obtained the GPS module for my Yaesu VX-8DE and I thought I’d give some real RF APRS a go this time.

While the APRS IGate coverage in the UK is a little disappointing, as is evidenced by the map, a few cool things did happen. I recieved a simplex APRS message from a radio amateur 2M0RRT with the text “test test IO86ML” (but unfortunately didn’t notice until we’d long passed by, sorry for not replying!) and quite a few of my packets, sent from a 5 watt handheld in Cambridge, were heard by the station M0BPQ-1 in North London (digipeated by MB7UM).

MiniDebCamp Vienna 2016

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently in Vienna for MiniDebCamp and MiniDebConf at FH Technikum Wien, hosted as a part of Linuxwochen Wien. Today and yesterday have been spent hacking on Debian, and I’ve produced a few package updates and closed a few bugs.

Scapy

The last update to Scapy in Debian was in August 2011. Bug # 773554 was filed in 2014 to request a new upstream version be packaged and in a few days this bug should be closed. As this package is maintained by someone else and I’m performing a non-maintainer upload, the upload will sit in the delayed queue for 3 days.

After FOSDEM 2016

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM was fun. It was great to see all these open source projects coming together in one place and it was really good to talk to people that were just as enthusiastic about the FOSS activities they do as I am about mine.

Thanks go to Saúl Corretgé who looked after the real-time communications dev room and made sure everything ran smoothly. I was very pleased to find that I had to stand for a couple of talks as the room was full with people eager to learn more about the world of RTC.

FOSDEM 2016

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM 2016 starts tomorrow and I will be attending. I’ve not got off to a brilliant start with my flight being cancelled, though SAS have now rebooked me onto a later flight and I’m going to arrive in time for the start tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I am going to miss the Friday beer event.

On the Saturday, the real-time communications devroom will be happening, and I am one of the devroom admins that helped to organise this. There will be a full day of talks and demonstrations about real-time communications using open standards and free software. I’m rather excited about this.

Trust

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I’m not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I’d like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It’s likely we will never know what has brought us here.

Adventures at London Luton

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing on my journey home, once again I was asked to step into the full-body scanner. This time I was certain that I didn’t want to use it, I was so angry last time that I had been forced into it that I actually threw up.

It wasn’t until I was in tears and asking them to take my bags off the plane, planning to take the train instead, that they gave me the manual pat-down.

Fun in Hamburg Airport

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m travelling home from 32c3, back to Aberdeen via London from Hamburg Airport. My experience passing through security to get to the gates this morning has angered me to the point that I had to vent.

They have full-body scanners installed, which in my opinion are a massive invasion of my personal privacy. As I approached the security checkpoint, I noticed a sign where it stated that use of the scanner was not mandatory and that a manual screening process was available.

Detail on OpenStreetMap

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The OpenStreetMap data model allows for far more detail than would ever be useful to be recorded. For different people, different levels of detail are going to be useful and sometimes it can be hard to decide how much detail to record when out surveying.

Obviously, the less detail you record the wider the area you can cover, so there’s one trade-off you can consider straight away. In more densely populated areas, you’re likely not to be the only person mapping and so you can distribute the workload and tackle higher detail in smaller areas.

Free Software Efforts (2015W51)

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For the last week I have been stuck in England. For the vast majority of that time, I’ve had nothing to do except work on Debian and this blog post documents some of the things I worked on.

Obviously spending a whole week on Debian, there’s going to be some packaging involved. The following packages got new versions in unstable this last week:

cowdancer
debian-installer-launcher
chirp
python-flask-rdf

Packaging updates were one of the simpler tasks tackled this week though. I spent a lot of time this week on Debian Live along with others in the # debian-live IRC channel. Over the last week we achieved a number of things, possibly the most important being that all the generic live support packages (i.e. live-boot, live-config and live-tools) have now been converted into native packages, have their VCS repositories hosted on Alioth and have seen a good number of patches merged from the BTS and from the old patch system. All future patches will be managed via the BTS for Debian Live, as with other Debian projects.

YubiKey + udev follow-ups

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post, I talked about the udev hack I had used with the YubiKey and how it was not the correct way to do things. I recieved a lot of feedback on this post, and here I’m hoping to summarise what the correct way to do it is.

The rule I was originally using was:

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1050",ATTRS{idProduct}=="0111", OWNER="irl"

The problem with this rule was that it always made my own username the owner of the YubiKey. For my use on my laptop, this was fine, as I’m the only user ever logged into my laptop, but this is not the right way to do this.

YubiKey NEO as an OpenPGP token

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was first interested in the idea of using a smartcard to store OpenPGP subkeys when I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe as a Fellow and recieved my FSFE Fellowship Card. By performing all cryptographic operations on the smartcard it would remove almost all the routes by which the secret key material could be compromised as the host operating system never has access to that secret material.

I decided that this was something I wanted to try out and I purchased two Cherry G83-6644 keyboards. One of the nice things I noticed about this product was that it was both FIPS 201 approved and GOST R approved. If both the Americans and the Russians could agree it was a good keyboard, it had a good chance of being a good keyboard.

Amateur Radio and the Internet

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet is starting to catch on. In a few years time, we may have Internet connections in nearly every major city across the UK. The real issue that needs to be looked at here is how does this new-fangled technology fit in with Amateur Radio?

I assist with the running of MB7VX, an APRS digipeater hosted at the University of Aberdeen. This station is run under a NoV issued by Ofcom that states that it can be configured only as an “APRS Digipeater”. The recieved packets from this station are copied to a software component that injects the packets into the APRS-IS service, which is Internet based.

Donmouth Local Nature Reserve

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, when I went for the radio adventure day, I took my camera and took some lovely photos around the beach. The weather was good again today and I know I haven’t done much photography in a while so I thought I’d get some more practice in by taking the camera out again.

I visited the Donmouth Local Nature Reserve which is approximately half a mile from my home on a bearing of 350° from my home in Aberdeen. Sorry there’s no APRS trace for this adventure, my phone still hadn’t been charged from yesterday’s adventure.

Webpage Load Times

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

gordonjcp ╡ irl: jesus christ, scale your fucking images

My last post about the adventure to the Donmouth Local Nature Reserve turned out to have a total page size of 69.2MB. Oops.

I’m new to using Ghost as a blogging platform, and in the past blogging platforms have scaled images for me. It turns out that Ghost does not do this. There is currently an open issue on GitHub discussing this but I don’t think this feature will be appearing at any point soon.

APRS on HF

Sat, 14 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, an email appeared on the hackerspace mailing list proposing an adventure to a distant land where we would operate portable amateur radio stations. Today I went on an adventure to Burghead, a place by the sea approximately 64 miles on a bearing of 305° from my home in Aberdeen. The group embarking on this adventure included Hibby MM3ZRZ, Tom MM6IRQ, Ed MM6MVP and Derecho PA1XOR. We travelled by car and beaconed our journey with APRS-IS on the way.

Installing MediaGoblin on FreeBSD

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

GNU MediaGoblin is a web application for hosting and sharing media. At 57North Hacklab, we currently have a Flickr group but to post to Flickr it is necessary to have a Yahoo! account and this seems like an unreasonable requirement to impose on members that want to share photos. This led to me setting up MediaGoblin. Hopefully it will also be useful for sharing other forms of media beyond photos too.

Streaming APRS data over XMPP

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently started playing with radios again and I’ve been looking mainly at packet radio. APRS is a system which uses amateur radio to transmit position reports, weather reports, and messages between users. There is an Internet backbone for APRS called APRS-IS that can be used to access a filtered feed of APRS broadcasts. I thought it would be nice if such a feed were also available via XMPP so set about building a gateway.

Code The City - Day One

Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:00:00 +0000

CodeTheCity is an event that I was loosely involved in organising that we’re now half way through. It’s all about rapid prototyping of services for the community. While the event is structured as a hackathon, many of those invited were not coders at all and a few times I heard mix ups like confusing Windows with Office and anti-virus software with a firewall. You would think that at an event where the aim is to produce a prototype these people might hold hacks back but it became apparent quickly that the domain knowledge they had could help jumpstart a project. The developers in the teams seemed to code with more confidence knowing they’d got the requirements directly from the person that would be using the system.

Debian Med Sprint 2014

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Last weekend, I attended the Debian Med Sprint for 2014 in Stonehaven, Aberdeen. The event was essentially an unconference hackathon with a few untalks.

On the Saturday, I participated in Andreas‘ live packaging session where we packaged seqtk and dnaclust. I found the documentation for dnaclust and produced a man page for inclusion in the package.

With my new Debian packaging knowledge, I packaged a personal project python-fitbitscraper as python3-fitbitscraper in Debian. This effort ran to the end of the sprint.

Dreaming of a secure browser

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000

The web used to be simple. It used to be a place where you could go and find reference materials, news and discussions about just about anything. All this content was wrapped up in HTML, maybe with some CSS to give it a tidier look, and served over HTTP. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. You can no longer survive on the web with cookies or JavaScript disabled as websites have been designed expecting that people will have those features available in their browser. On top of that, not satisfied with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (which, by the way, is Turing-compatible – there is not really a need for anything beyond JavaScript for client side scripting in the browser) we’ve got Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Java applets too. Because these technologies exist, they are used, and anyone attempting to visit a site using them will have a pretty difficult time in navigating it without allowing the code, that you’ve likely never seen the source to and have no reason to trust, to run on your computer.

Full disk encryption on OpenBSD 5.3

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Full disk encryption is becoming (it should always have been) more popular. When your laptop gets stolen, a login password is only a minor inconvenience to a hacker trying to steal your identity. Pop in a live CD or USB stick with Knoppix or Backtrack (or in fact basically any Linux distribution) and all your information is there for the attacker to use to steal your identity, impersonate you online and perhaps even empty your bank accounts. By booting not into the installed operating system, but into their own, the computer obeys the attacker and any protection your login password could have offered is irrelevant as the installed operating system isn’t running. If an attacker has physical access to a machine and enough time, it becomes the attacker’s machine, but the data doesn’t have to become that attacker’s data. This is where full disk encryption comes in.

Ludum Dare 24: Update 3

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 12:00:03 +0000

I have loaded my game into a git repository now and uploaded it to GitHub. You can find the repository at: https://github.com/irl/la-cucina.

I have also uploaded some instructions and a base64 encoded archive for JS/Linux and you can find them in a gist.

Only a short update this time but this is a milestone for me as whatever happens now, I have a playable game I can submit.

Tom has now come back into the room and has started working on his entry again. Let’s hope today was as interesting, exciting and educational as yesterday.

Ludum Dare 24: Update 2

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 12:00:02 +0000

I seem to be the only one still going in Room 205 at the moment. Everyone else has gone home for some sleep before continuing. I may have made an error in marching on, but only time will tell. There’s now about 18 hours to go and I have a playable game.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts during this Ludum Dare “compo”, my game is written in pure C using ncurses. You play the role of a pizza chef that has to make pizzas. I intended to have a steep learning curve to the game and I believe I have achieved that. This forces the player to evolve, a twist on the theme where I imaging most games will have either the character in the game or game elements doing the evolving.

Ludum Dare 24: Update 1

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:00:01 +0000

The AUCS meetup is continuing and everyone is making progress. When I arrived at 12pm, everyone was already in Room 205 and busy working on their games.

Progress seems to have stalled at the moment as people are hitting blocks and tricky to solve problems now their basics are in. Tom Jones was having touble with “font rondering” (sic) but has now fixed this by not rendering fonts.

I have made good progress with my Pizza game’s UI and basic logic, although the bulk of the logic is yet to be written.

Ludum Dare 24

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Ludum Dare is a world renowned rapid game development competition which started in 2002 and has since increased in popularity due to the participation of professionals such as Notch, the creator of Minecraft. Since Ludum Dare 22, the Aberdeen University Computing Science Society has hosted meetups in Room 205, Meston Building at the University of Aberdeen.

Our meetup started at 6pm on the 24th of August, which as I write this was now yesterday. We ate calzones from a local takeaway and then watched Blade Runner on the Room 205 television. After the film, we all began to brush up on our programming skills whilst waiting for the theme announcement. The Ludum Dare IRC channel was shown on the television while we waited.

mosh in a lift

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Every quater, me and my flatmate pay about £80 to the Aberdeen City Council for maintainence of the lifts in our building. As I write this, I am trapped in one of these lifts. It appears that none of the buttons work except for the alarm button. You’d think this would connect you to an operator somewhere who would dispatch a repair team, but no. This sounds a loud alarm and nothing else.

Debian installer, non-free firmware, one USB stick

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

As part of my job, I’ve had to re-install Linux on one of our Dell Poweredge servers. This is something I can do in my sleep, so this didn’t bother me, until the installer asked for some non-free firmware. This is quite common with Dell PowerEdge servers I’ve found. The same thing occured when I was setting up the Computing Society’s server. The files I needed were the same both times:

Streaming video over Gopher

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Yesterday on the gopher-project mailing list, Wolfgang Faust gave a Gopher link to a streaming text file showing the current server time. Today, with his help, I have got video streaming over Gopher. In webcam streaming, Motion JPEG over HTTP is the defacto standard. The problem with Motion JPEG is that it is not actually a file format but a method of sending single JPEG frames over HTTP, one after another, as a MIME multipart document.

last.fm is back in my life

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

It seems last.fm is making a reappearance in my life once again. It seems to fade in and out, but one of my long-term projects is to record data about myself, produce some graphs and see if I can learn a bit more about myself.

One of the biggest problems I face with last.fm, that I’m sure others also face, is making sure the data gets there. I cannot fault last.fm for the audioscrobbler API as it’s well documented and anyone can implement a client but I found a couple of instances where no one has.

Security. When is it overkill?

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

My answer to this question is usually never for anything I’m setting up for myself, as long as it’s economically viable and allows me timely access to any data, process or network I need to access. I haven’t, for example, decided to live in a fallout shelter with a huge bulkhead door as the only entrance to keep anyone from gaining physical access to my computer. If it was economically viable though, I would. There is always a trade-off with security against convienience but deliberately introducing flaws in the security of a system purely for convinience doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Days 4 and 5 - Thursday and Friday

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

My only scheduled session on Thursday started at 2pm, so I didn’t go into Uni until I’d made sure that I had a good lunch. The session was a practical for Distributed Systems, although no task was set, only to work on the assessment due the next day. Some had nearly finished, some had finished and some had hardly started.

Our group project normally meets on a Friday morning, but we had already agreed that this would be moved to Monday due to the deadline.

Day 3 - Wednesday

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

My first timetabled session on a Wednesday is a lecture for Distributed Systems. I overslept and had missed the first half hour of this lecture by the time I got into Uni. Rather than turn up to the lecture late, I went straight to Room 205 to look at the lecture slides online.

I then started on the Enterprise Computing practical. This is scheduled at 12pm and runs until 2pm but I run the Computing Science Society helpdesk in Room 205 every Wednesday from 1pm and so I never make it to this practical. If I have any problems during the practical, I speak to Bruce, the lecturer, after the next Enterprise Computing lecture.

Day 2 - Tuesday

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Tuesday is my busiest timetabled day. The first lecture is at 10am, for Distributed Systems. The topic of the lecture was network security. This is an area I am interested in and have done a lot of reading about before the lecture but there were still new concepts being introduced and others that I didn’t understand fully being better explained.

Directly after this was another lecture, this time for CS3518. This lecture continued on yesterday’s lecture talking about Computability and Complexity.

Day 1 - Monday

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:00:01 +0000

On a Monday, I do not have any timetabled classes until 1pm. Typically though, I will get in earlier than this to deal with any emails or small jobs that may have appeared over the weekend. Before my first lecture, at around 11:30am, I go to Subway for lunch. There is a group of us that go for this and the reason we aim for half past is because at 12pm, everyone that has left a lecture and is looking for lunch will join the queue at Subway meaning a massive wait.

A week in the life

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Every day this week I will be posting here to this blog to try to communicate to you, the reader of this blog, whoever you may be, what the average week in the life of a Computing Science student is all about.

I study at the University of Aberdeen where my course lasts for four years. I’m currently about half way through the second half of my third year at the moment. I’m studying five courses in this semester.

Leaving the bubble

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Christmas and the New Year are now behind us, and for many a welcome break from reality. For me, it’s quite the opposite. I leave the nice friendly bubble that the University life creates and re-enter the real world. At University, I am funded by both my student loan and occasional work for the University. Money troubles rarely occur and thus I can spend my time learning by either reading fascinating articles (or slightly less fascinating lecture slides) and implementing really cool things like those I have created in Room 205. It is odd, and exciting, to think that one day I will be plunged into this “real” world where a lot of my friends from college already are.

Ludum Dare 22

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Whilst not participating in the actual event, I have been learning about Python and PyGame this weekend. Initially, me and two others were going to work as a group, but later it became apparent that our sleep patterns were not syncing up at all which made this all but impossible. As a result, a playable, actually quite fun, game has risen from my “messing about to get some ideas”.

Titled “Kitten’s Missions”, the player takes the role of a cat that must go on missions and then return to it’s friends. There are currently two missions; the first begins where the kitten is lost, but on it’s way to a party. On the way, the kitten must collect enough beer for itself and the three kitten friends.

Installing Windows 3.11 in DosBox

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

This is my first ever attempt at a video howto guide. By the end of this video, you will have installed Windows 3.11 and all the important drivers into a DOSBox system that you can start from your desktop, taskbar or start menu.

Ingredients

Windows 3.11 installation media (don’t ask me for this, try eBay or a local charity shop)
Video Driver
Sound Card Driver
Joystick Driver

Credit

A forum post by Dominus at vogons.zetafleet.com was an invaluable resource in compiling this video. Thanks. (:

High-latency messaging via lego robot courier

Mon, 09 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Wireless doesn’t necessarily have to mean radio waves. If you’re worried about people listening in on your conversations, why not use a courier instead?

This is a solution I developed as part of my degree programme at the University of Aberdeen. At each end are two VT100 terminals, these connect to the robot through tin foil contacts at each end of the board. A switch on the robot lets it know that it’s hit the wall and (hopefully) docked with the contacts. The robot then spits out any message it was carrying and asks for another message by displaying a prompt on the terminal and then storing the input. Once the Enter key has been hit, it travels back again to the other terminal.

Starting with Python

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

For absolutely ages I’ve been wanting to start to learn Python, but I always find it hard to think of a system to try and implement that will test me and force me to learn things I don’t already know. Luckily, where I’m learning Java as part of my University degree, there’s a whole load of problems to solve and all I have to do is translate them into Python.

WordPress Projects

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

So, I’ve been working on the Last.FM plugin, which got slightly out of hand when I tried to add a new post type to WordPress for music reviews and then integrate it with Last.FM. It might be an interesting project to work on, but not at the moment. I have too much else going on including SpaceBarPlus stuff.

I’m going to focus my time for the next few weeks on:

Adapa’s Last.FM plugin for WordPress

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Over the last few days, you may have noticed the “Music” link appear on my navigation bar. Music, and the pages under Music, are generated by a new plugin I’ve written to allow the inclusion of Last.FM information on WordPress pages.

I’ve used other Last.FM plugins for WordPress before, but never found one that had everything I wanted. For this reason, I’m in the process of creating the most comprehensive Last.FM plugin to ever have existed. If you have any feature requests, you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll implement it.

All aboard for the Imagine Cup

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

The Imagine Cup is about saving the world through technology. It’s about showcasing what you can do by building a solution on a Microsoft platform. It’s about securing the next generation of talented software developers, and your last chance to enter is now. You can solve problems, give your career options a boost, and have fun while doing so.

At 23:59 on Friday 10th December (that’s tomorrow night) the first round of the Imagine Cup closes for the UK – this means that, after that point, you won’t be able to enter the Software Design and Embedded Development sections of the Imagine Cup for this year.

Display driver updates on the Li3710

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

As you’ll see in a previous post, I reverted to Windows on my Amilo, in order to play Steam games. I was very disappointed to discover that on running L4D2, my system blue screened and then rebooted. After some Google-ing, I discovered that there are a lot of idiots in the world. From Yahoo! Canada Answers:

There are 3 step to repair blue screen crash error

If you got blue screen crash error then there is a 94% chance that your computer has registry problems. To repair blue screen crash error you need to follow the steps below:

Windows XP PowerToys

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

I always found that the Microsoft PowerToys to be very useful, but you never really hear about them. Hence, here is my review of the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP.

Microsoft PowerToys is a set of programs provided by Microsoft for the Windows operating system. PowerToys are not integrated into Windows since they are released after the public release of a Windows operating system. They are also not under technical support because they do not undergo the same rigorous testing that the operating system components do.

Installing Windows XP on the Fujitsu Amilo Li3710

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

My Amilo originally came with Windows Vista installed, which in my opinion was a terrible operating system, and Windows 7 is no better. I want to use applications, not the OS, and Microsoft increasingly does not understand this concept. I was happy with Ubuntu as the sole OS running on the machine for a time, but later found that I did actually need to run some Windows specific applications that did not run well in Wine (i.e. Steam).

Snow, snow and more snow

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:00:00 +0000

People back home are telling me that I’m lucky to have snow, but I’m not really seeing it that way. You may remember my post from last year (which appears to have been lost somewhere) in which I commented on how much I hate snow.

Well, here’s pretty much the same thing all over again:

I just went to the shops, a trip that should only have taken around 20 minutes to get there and back, but it took me nearly an hour. During this trip:

Plans for SpaceBarOS

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:00:00 +0000

I am planning to branch SpaceBarOS to form SpaceBarPlus. Whilst all the core functionality will be retained, there will be changes. The biggest of these changes will be that the space bar monitoring will be performed by an application that will be loaded by the kernel. A full API will be documented and others can choose to use the SpaceBarPlus platform in order to develop their applications.

New features in the kernel will include:

Windows Phone 7

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Windows Phone 7. It’s a new operating system for phones.

“Windows Phone 7 is easily the most unique UI in the smartphone race right now, and the real perk here is that it doesn’t just seem like an arbitrary decision to make things look different than other OSs — there is real purpose and utility to a lot of what Microsoft has come up with.” – Engadget

My last Windows phone was a while ago, when I was still in secondary school. It was the HTC Typhoon (Orange C500), and I absolutely loved it. Outlook is without a doubt one of the best applications ever produced by Microsoft in my opinion, and I used it to organise my whole life. Email, calendar, contacts and todo lists were all organised in Outlook, and with the C500, I could take them all with me.

SpaceBarOS

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SpaceBarOS is a lightweight spacebar-oriented operating system for the x86 platform.

To get started with SpaceBarOS, using a Debian-like system:

sudo apt install build-essential nasm qemu-system-x86
git clone https://github.com/irl/SpaceBarOS.git
cd SpaceBarOS
make run

SpaceBarOS will then launch in QEMU.

A JavaScript based simulator of SpaceBarOS is available for those that would like to have the experience of running it without having to set up a VM or finding a PC to run it on.