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JAMES STANLEY
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The writing is bad and the stories are not very interesting. _Tagged: all | software | 3dprinting| electronics |
bitcoin | cpu | puzzle| smsprivacy | cnc
| chess | keyboard
| lawnmower | metalwork| cryptography |
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SCAMP WORKS AT 1 MHZ »_Sat 29 May 2021_
Thanks to Rory 's suggestion of CD4504 TTL-to-CMOS level shifters, last night I finally succeeded in moving the CompactFlash glue logic out of the Arduino and into physical hardware. Read more » A SHORT PENDULUM WITH A LONG PERIOD »_Sat 8 May 2021_
The period of a pendulum is proportional to the square root of its length: to double the period, the pendulum needs to become 4x as long. But actually physics has no idea how long your pendulum is, the thing that _really_ matters is the radius of the arc that the centre of mass travels through. There's no inherent reason that we wouldn't be able to increase the radius of this arc without increasing the height of the pendulum. Read more » A METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR POLISHING SHAFTS »_Sat 1 May 2021_
I have invented a new tool. From time to time, I expect you, like me, need to sand down the outside of a piece of round bar. I expect you, like me, chuck the round bar in a drill or a lathe, spin it up, and then hold sandpaper against it to sand it. This works fine when you are able to spin the round bar, but sometimes the bar is already connected to something big or inconvenient and you are not able to spin it, and you are left wondering what to do. Read more » SCAMP HAS BOOTED UP TO THE SHELL FOR THE FIRST TIME »_Sun 25 April 2021_
I reached another good milestone on SCAMP this week: the physical hardware booted all the way up to the shell. Granted, it only happened once, and I couldn't type any input once it got there. But it suggests that there are no fundamental problems with the hardware design that will prevent the computer from working, which I am very happy about.Read more »
THE KILO EDITOR »
_Sat 3 April 2021_
Thanks to the excellent Build Your Own Text Editor tutorial, SCAMP/OS now has an editor. It's pretty bare-bones, but perfect for what I need.Read more »
SCAMP IS ALIVE »
_Sun 21 March 2021_
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly. Read more » BANGLE.JS OPEN SOURCE HACKABLE SMART WATCH: FIRST IMPRESSIONS »_Wed 17 March 2021_
Bangle.js is an open source hackable smart watch running the Espruino JavaScript interpreter. It includes BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), heartrate monitor, temperature sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, GPS, compass, and touchscreen (ish), and is designed to be easy to program. Read more » FRONT PANELS FOR SCAMP » _Sun 28 February 2021_ I've put together the memory card for the SCAMP CPU, including the front panel with LEDs to show the bus contents and address register.Read more »
THE SCAMP KERNEL »
_Sat 27 February 2021_ You might think it's a bit early to be working on an operating system, given that I don't have a CPU to run it on. Maybe you're right. But working on software is easy and working on hardware is time-consuming, so here we are. Read more » A COMPILER FOR SCAMP, AND MACHINE CODE PROFILING » _Fri 19 February 2021_ I've been working on a compiler for the SCAMP CPU. It compiles a language I'm calling "SLANG" (which just stands for "SCAMP Language" pending a better backronym) into SCAMP assembly language. Read more » HOW TO USE AN AT28C16 EEPROM WITH AN ARDUINO UNO WITHOUT A PORTEXPANDER »
_Wed 17 February 2021_ The AT28C16 EEPROM stores 2048 bytes, which means to access it all you need to control 11 address lines and 8 data lines. You also need to operate "chip enable" (pull low to enable the AT28C16), "output enable" (pull low to enable output), and "write enable" (pull low to enable writing). That means in total you need to control 22 pins, but the Arduino Uno only has 12 general-purpose digital IO pins. Problem. Fortunately, there are some tricks that make it workable. Read more » MY SECOND ATTEMPT AT MILLING A PCB » _Mon 15 February 2021_ The day after my first attempt at milling a PCB , my new tooling arrived (a 1 mm drill bit and a 10° engraving tool), so I had another go at making a PCB. Readmore »
MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT MILLING A PCB » _Fri 12 February 2021_ I'm going to get most of the PCBs for SCAMP made by JLCPCB, but I'd like to try to mill the backplane on the CNC machine because it is both large (expensive at JLCPCB) and simple (single-sided, no vias, easy to make). Yesterday some small pieces of copper-clad board arrived and today I had a first attempt to see what would go wrong. Read more » MAKING A START ON THE SCAMP ALU CARDS » _Sat 6 February 2021_ I'm pretty happy with the CPU design now and am ready to proceed to making it physically exist. I am still finding the odd microcode bug, but these can be fixed at any time. I'm at least not finding any architecture-level bugs. Read more » DESIGNING THE INSTRUCTION SET FOR MY TTL CPU » _Sun 31 January 2021_ I (believe I) am making good progress on designing the TTL CPU. Most of the actual CPU design is relatively stable now, and bug discoveries in the hardware design are infrequent, so now I get to move up a level and work on the instruction set. After that, it's just the bootloader, operating system, and application software. Oh, and the small matter of the physical hardware assembly... Read more » PROGRESS ON MY TTL CPU DESIGN » _Sun 24 January 2021_ I want to make a CPU out of physical 74xx TTL chips. I have now implemented most of the parts using a subset of Verilog that maps directly to TTL chips, and I wanted to write a bit about the design.Read more »
I WANT TO CAST SOME RINGS » _Thu 21 January 2021_ Emma and I are getting married later this year, which means we need to acquire some wedding rings. I initially wanted to get rings made of some exotic alloy like Inconel , but now I think I'd like to cast them myself out of gold, which means I need to learn how to cast rings. If _you_ know how to cast rings, perhaps you can help me learn.Read more »
ADVENTURES IN CPU DESIGN » _Fri 15 January 2021_ On Graham 's recommendation, I recently bought an iCE40 FPGA and have been learning a bit about how to use it. The iCE40 is good to get because there is good open-source tooling that supports it. I was originally going to get the iCEstick evaluation board, but there are other alternatives available more cheaply and with more logic elements. I ended up getting an iceFun and have found it to be quite easy to use. The example projects are helpful. Read more » SOMEONE COPIED STEGOSEED AND DELETED MY NAME FROM IT » _Sun 3 January 2021_ I searched DuckDuckGo for "stegoseed" earlier and was surprised to find that the top result was not my stegoseed project , but was something else that seemed to do a similar thing: Read more » I WROTE A SEMI-LITERATE BRAINFUCK COMPILER FOR CP/M » _Tue 29 December 2020_ Literate Programmingis "a programming
paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given an explanation of its logic in a natural language". It's something I've wanted to have a go at for a while but never got around to. Yesterday, for fun, I wrote a brainfuck compiler for the RC2014 and it seemed like a good fit for Literate Programming because it's short enough to get my feet wet but has enough detail that there is some interesting stuff to explain. Readmore »
HOW TO COPY FILES TO/FROM THE RC2014 USING XMODEM » _Mon 28 December 2020_ Every time I get the RC2014 out and try to copy files to/from it, I have to relearn how to do it, so I thought it best to document what I have found to be the easiest way. Read more » MY ADVENT OF CODE STORY » _Sat 26 December 2020_ 4.40am. The alarm wakes me up, but I was pretty much awake already. I get out of bed, put on my dressing gown, make a cup of tea, and sit down at the computer. I warm up my fingers with a few rounds of 10fastfingers . I open up vim and type out my template: #!/usr/bin/perl, use strict; use warnings; while (<>) { chomp; }. I drink a sip of the tea and wait for the clock to tick down. 4:59:40. Almost time. My heart races. 4:59:55. I hover the mouse cursor over the number 22. 4:59:58. Why is time passing so slowly? The wait is agonising. 5:00:00. Finally. I click the left mouse button and off we go. Day 22 part 1: Crab Combat . The next 4 minutes and 58 seconds pass in a furious blur of reading, thinking, and typing. I submit my answer. 158th place. Gah, close. On to part 2. More reading, thinking, coding, debugging, until at 5:22:55 I submit my part 2 answer. 139th place. 0 points. Better luck next time. I browse Hacker News and /r/adventofcode for half an hour while the adrenaline wears off, and then go back to bed.Read more »
ALL THE GEARS, NO IDEAS: AN ESCAPE ROOM PUZZLE » _Fri 18 December 2020_ I designed a puzzle for an escape room. The company ended up not wanting to pay for it, but I thought the puzzle was interesting enough to be worth making for myself anyway. Read more » I MADE SOME ALUMINIUM KEYCAPS » _Sat 28 November 2020_ I've made some aluminium keycaps on the CNC machine. I couldn't work out how to do the CAM in FreeCAD (although I think I have now roughly figured it out), so I instead wrote a program to render depth maps of STL files so that I could generate toolpaths with my pngcamprogram (github
). Read more »
SAWING MY DINING TABLE IN HALF » _Thu 19 November 2020_ I liked my dining table, but it was a bit longer than necessary. It occurred to me that I could cut it in half, so that's what I did. Readmore »
SEASONAL.CSS: GIVE YOUR WEBSITE A SEASONAL COLOUR SCHEME » _Fri 6 November 2020_ I've been working on a project that gives a CSS colour scheme that varies based on the day of the year, with a vague attempt to match the colour to the season. In case you're wondering why my blog has a new purple colour scheme (at time of writing): this is why. Have another look tomorrow if you want to see the same content in an imperceptibly-different purple. Read more » CNC TOOLPATH GENERATION FROM HEIGHTMAPS » _Sat 24 October 2020_ I've been struggling with generating complex toolpaths in FreeCAD and thought that an easy approach would be to render a heightmap of the part, and then generating a toolpath from that should be easy. I understand that this is already a recognised technique, although I could not find an open source tool that would do it for me. Most of the heightmap-related stuff I found on DuckDuckGo was to do with auto-levelling the bed. And, anyway, it's a relatively simple idea and a fun challenge, so I did it myself. Read more » FIRST STEPS INTO CNC MACHINING » _Mon 5 October 2020_ I have bought a "6040" CNC router, and have been getting to grips with how to use it. This journey started with converting the machine to Grbl because I'm not interested in running proprietary software. Once Grbl was all working correctly, I clamped a small piece of plywood to the bed, fitted a 2mm end mill and made my first cuts, manually "jogging" the tool position using the buttons in the UGS interface.Read more »
HOW TO CONVERT A 6040 CNC MACHINE TO GRBL » _Wed 30 September 2020_ The 6040 CNC machine comes in 2 flavours: parallel port and USB. I don't have a parallel port on the laptop I was intending to operate it with, so I chose the USB option. This is possibly a "mistake" as the USB option uses a proprietary USB interface board which is only compatible with Mach3 and therefore only compatible with Windows. But now that I've got it set up with Grbl, I think I prefer this system to what I would have with a parallel port controlled by LinuxCNC. Read more » I MADE AN OPTICAL INLINE FUEL SENSOR » _Mon 28 September 2020_ We could automatically detect whether the racing mower is about to run out of fuel by shining a light through a section of clear fuel hose with a sensor on the other side. The idea is that when the fuel has disappeared the received light intensity will change, and we can detect this with a microcontroller. We can then turn on an LED on the dashboard to alert the driver so that he makes a pit stop instead of spluttering to a halt at the opposite end of the track. Read more » MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS ON MAKING STUFF » _Tue 15 September 2020_ This is just a selection of points related to manufacturing that are grouped into one post for no other reason than that I don't have enough on each one individually, but wanted to write about them before I forget. Read more » PROGRESS ON MY GODOT RACING GAME FOR OCULUS QUEST » _Wed 19 August 2020_ I've made some decent progress on the Oculus Quest racing game. I think it is already the most realistic driving simulator for the Quest, but that's not a very high bar as there are not any real competitors. Read more » HOW TO IMPORT ASSETTO CORSA RACE TRACKS INTO GODOT » _Thu 13 August 2020_ Assetto Corsa is a car racing game with emphasis on realism. It's basically what I'm trying to do for the Oculus Quest , except it doesn't run on the Oculus Quest. What it _does_ have is a thriving community of freely-available cars and tracks on assettocorsa.club . It is these free tracks that we'll be looking at importing into Godot. Read more » I MADE A MECHANICAL KEYBOARD WITH 3D-PRINTED SWITCHES »_Fri 7 August 2020_
The keyboard is done! This is basically the result of what I've been working on for the past 2 months, which has involved 3 iterations of testing machines, over 100 printed switches, and now finally a keyboard that I can type on. Unfortunately it is not a very good keyboard, but you can't win them all. Read more » I'M WORKING ON A VR CAR RACING GAME FOR OCULUS QUEST »_Sun 26 July 2020_
I've been playing a bit of Mini Motor Racing Xon the
Oculus Quest recently. It's good. The experience of driving a car in virtual reality is amazing, but this particular game is too much "game" and not enough "simulator" for my taste. I've always preferred Gran Turismo to Mario Kart, for example. Unfortunately, the Quest is quite an unusual platform, and none of the popular racing games are available for it. I recently discovered that the open source game engine Godot has Oculus Quest support, so I'd like to make a basic car racing simulator for Oculus Quest. Read more » ANOTHER NEW SWITCH TESTER, TEST RESULTS, AND THOUGHTS ON THE KEYBOARDDESIGN »
_Wed 15 July 2020_
Just an update on the keyboard switch project. I've built the new 10-way testing machine, ran a (somewhat inconclusive) test to work out the best thickness for the leaf springs, and thought a bit on how I'm going to design the actual keyboard. Read more » SECRETS OF THE HANAYAMA CAST MARBLE »_Wed 8 July 2020_
Cast Marble is a
mechanical puzzle sold by Hanayama . It was invented by Bram Cohen (who you may recognise as the inventor of BitTorrent ) and Oskar van Deventer , who has an interesting YouTube channel where he regularly posts new puzzle designs. Read more » I MADE A MACRO KEYPAD WITH 3D-PRINTED SWITCHES »_Mon 6 July 2020_
Latest on the 3d-printed keyboard switch project: I've reached a switch design that I think is probably reliable enough, and I've put 3 of them together to form a macro keypad just to see how it all goes together before I commit to a full keyboard. I don't have a number for how many presses the switch lasts, other than to say that the motor on the testing machine stopped working before the switch did (after about 250,000 presses). Read more » MAKING A GAME WITH 24A2 »_Sun 28 June 2020_
24a2 is an "ultra-minimalist" game engine. It was posted on Hacker News this morning and I found it so interesting that I decided to take a day off from breaking keyboard switches and make a tiny game instead. Read more » KEYBOARD SWITCH PROGRESS & TEST RESULTS »_Thu 25 June 2020_
Status on the 3d-printable keyboard switch is that the latest test managed 110,000 presses before failure, on the spinning cam tester. Read more »
A BETTER AUTOMATIC KEYBOARD SWITCH TESTER »_Sat 20 June 2020_
Since breaking the last switch , I re-printed the same design in PETG to see if it would last any longer, and it did! It reached over 100,000 presses under the gentle testing regime without showing any failures, a big improvement over failing at 13,907. Read more » I BROKE MY FIRST 3D-PRINTED KEYBOARD SWITCH »_Tue 16 June 2020_
Overnight I did my first test of a homemade keyboard switch on the automatic tester . The spring in the switch broke after 13907 presses. That makes Martin our competition winner, with a guess of 10000.Read more »
AUTOMATIC KEYBOARD SWITCH TESTER »_Sun 14 June 2020_
I'm working on designing an open source 3D-printable keyboard switch at the moment, with a view to eventually making my own mechanical keyboard using minimal off-the-shelf components (just an Arduino, wire, and diodes, with homemade parts for switches, keycaps, and case). I have not made a keyboard yet, but yesterday I made a device to test how many presses a switch can withstand before it stops working. Read more » THOUGHTS ON LASER LEVEL DESIGN »_Mon 1 June 2020_
A laser level is a device that projects a laser beam on to a wall or similar, to help you position things level to the ground. Read more » HOW TO RUN A CLOUD DESKTOP ON ANY VPS, WITH SPICE »_Thu 21 May 2020_
SPICE is the graphical protocol used by QEMU since 2013.
If you've started a VM with QEMU, including with virt-manager or Gnome Boxes , then chances are you have used SPICE. It seems to be the same concept as VNC but more efficient.Read more »
AN EASY WAY TO PACKAGE PERL PROGRAMS »_Sat 16 May 2020_
The _right_ way to package Perl programs is with RPM, or DEB, or on CPAN with ExtUtils::MakeMaker or similar. But this is a hassle. Readmore »
ZERO-DOWNTIME DOCKER CONTAINER DEPLOYMENTS WITH NGINX »_Thu 14 May 2020_
Docker doesn't let you reassign port mappings while containers are running. That means if you want to deploy a new version of your application, you need to stop the old one and then start the new one, and there is a brief period of downtime in between. I wrote Ngindock to solve this problem. Read more » AUTOPATZER: MY AUTOMATIC CHESS BOARD »_Wed 6 May 2020_
My automatic chess board (the "Autopatzer") has reached the point where last night I was able to play its first online game against a real person using lichess's Boards API.
Read more »
YUBIKEY SSH AUTHENTICATION: THE EASY WAY »_Fri 1 May 2020_
I bought a YubiKey quite a while ago, with the intention of using it for SSH authentication, but never got to the point of actually using it because I found it too hard to set up. Today I had another go and managed to get it working using the "PIV"mode
.
Read more »
AUTOMATIC CHESS BOARD DESIGN »_Sat 14 March 2020_
Lichess has recently released a Boards API,
allowing anybody to interface a physical chess board with lichess in order to play online games using an automatic board. I previously thought about implementing my Strange Chess Clock using an automatic board, but never got round to it. With lichess now supporting online play with an automatic board, it's hard to justify not making one! Read more » MY FIRST COMBAT ROBOT TOURNAMENT » _Mon 3 February 2020_ At the weekend, I took Wedge of Glory to an antweight combat robot tournament in Hinckley called Ant Freeze7 . Read more »
I BUILT AN ANTWEIGHT COMBAT ROBOT » _Mon 27 January 2020_ If you've ever seen Robot Warsor BattleBots
, you'll know what a combat robot is. An ANTWEIGHT combat robot is the same concept, except it has to weigh no more than 150g and fit inside a 4-inch cube. I've built one, called "Wedge of Glory", and have my first competition this weekend! Read more » MY DIY CRYPTOSTEEL CAPSULE » _Mon 20 January 2020_ Bitcoin wallets give you a mnemonic seed to write down and keep safe. This is usually 12 to 24 words from the BIP39 word list.
But if you write it on paper, it is easily damaged by flood or fire. An improvement is "Cryptosteel"-type devices, which allow you to record the mnemonic seed in metal, such that it is recoverable in the event of flood or fire. I built one myself. Read more » CHASSIS DESIGN WITH FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS IN FREECAD » _Tue 7 January 2020_ Finite Element Analysisis a way to
calculate the stresses and strains on an object in various load conditions. The object is modelled as a series of "finite elements" (in our case triangles), and then we specify the locations of points that can't move (fixed points), and the locations, magnitudes, and directions of forces that are present. Read more » MY RC2014 WEB SERVER » _Tue 10 December 2019_ I wrote a web server for my RC2014. It runs from CP/M, which has no built-in concept of networking, so I had to implement every layer of the networking stack, which in this case is SLIP, IP, TCP, and HTTP. It totals about 1200 lines of C, all of which was written on the RC2014 in the ZDE 1.6 text editor,
and compiled with the Hi-Tech C compiler.
Read more »
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A Z80 COMPUTER FRONT PANEL » _Tue 12 November 2019_ I designed and built a front panel for my RC2014 . It allows you to view and alter the contents of memory, read and write to IO devices, and single-step through instructions. The RC2014 backplane basically just puts the Z80 CPU pins directly on the bus, so the same panel would work unmodified against almost any Z80-based computer, as long as you broke out the bus onto the 60-pin ribbon cable. Read more » THE RC2014 Z80 MICROCOMPUTER » _Mon 21 October 2019_ I recently came across the RC2014 . It is a simple computer sold in kit form, and using a Zilog Z80 CPU. Read more»
MY ARDUINO-BASED INDUSTRIAL PROCESS CONTROLLER » _Sun 1 September 2019_ For my 3d metal printing project , I need the sintering furnace to stick to a pre-defined temperature profile. Unfortunately, the controller that my furnace came with only allows you to set a constant temperature. It maintains a constant temperature very well, but the operator frequently has to manually update the temperature in order to stick to the defined profile. Read more » HOME 3D METAL PRINTING: FIRST RESULTS » _Mon 12 August 2019_ A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results. Read more » THE 2019 BLMRA 12 HOUR LAWNMOWER RACE »_Fri 9 August 2019_
We raced at the BLMRA 12 hour again this year. Read more » AN INTERESTING 3D METAL PRINTING PROCESS (HELP WANTED) »_Sun 28 July 2019_
I recently learnt about the Markforged Metal-X 3d printer from a post on 3DPReviews
.
It costs $100k USD, and can print metal objects. As far as I can tell, it is essentially an ordinary FDM printer, with a special filament that contains a high percentage of metal powder held together with a "binder". After printing, the part is washed in a solvent to remove most of the binder, and finally it is heated in a furnace to sinter the metal powder together. Read more » HOW TO MAKE A REV LIMITER WITH AN ARDUINO »_Mon 22 July 2019_
My racing mower has a tendency to over-rev on long straights. To avoid damaging the engine, we have been lifting off the throttle, but a more reliable solution would be an electronic rev limiter. I did buy a commercial rev limiter made by AccuSpark , but was unable to fit it to my mower because the AccuSpark unit needs access to both sides of the ignition coil, and my ignition coil is inaccessible, inside a black box with all the other ignition electronics. So my solution was to make a rev limiter with an Arduino. Read more » MY FIRST CHESS TOURNAMENT »_Mon 24 June 2019_
At the weekend, Bristol Grammar School played host to the June 2019 Bristol Chess Congress , the "13th Steve Boniface Memorial". It's a 5-round Swiss tournament, with 3
sections: open (for international rated players), major (players withECF grade
under 160), and minor (ECF grade under 120). Having never played in a rated tournament before, I don't have an ECF grade at all, so I was obviously in the minor section. Read more » A STRANGE CHESS CLOCK »_Thu 2 May 2019_
A chess clock is a device that has 2 countdown timers, used to place a limit on each player's thinking time in a chess game. White's clock is counting down while it's white's turn. After white plays his move, he hits the clock, and his clock pauses, and black's clock now counts down. Once black has played a move, he hits the clock, and white's clock resumes counting down, and so on. Read more » HOW TO WIN AT SCOTLAND YARD »_Thu 4 April 2019_
I've been playing Scotland Yard recently. It's a board game in which one player plays as "Mr. X", and the other players are all detectives, played on a map of London. Mr. X moves in secret, and his goal is to evade capture for 24 turns, while the detectives' goal is to capture him before 24 turns are up. It's a brilliant game. Read more »PUZZLE DRAWERS »
_Sun 17 March 2019_
For the last ~3 weeks I've been working on a chest of drawers. This is no ordinary chest of drawers, they are puzzle drawers. The idea is that the puzzler is presented with one of the drawers already open, and the goal is to manipulate the chest into a configuration where all of the drawers are closed. With a typical chest of drawers, this would be easy: just close the drawer that is open. In the puzzle drawers, there are 3d-printed internal mechanisms linking the drawers together.Read more »
THE WHEATSTONE CRYPTOGRAPH » _Fri 15 February 2019_ A few weeks ago I came up with an idea for a simple encryption device, then found that it had already been invented by Sir Charles Wheatstonearound the 1860s. I
ended up designing and 3d printing a replica of Wheatstone's cryptograph. Read more » TELESCOPE TRACKING WITH SOFTWARE AUTO-GUIDING » _Wed 23 January 2019_ The Earth rotates around its axis at a rate of ~360°/day, or ~15°/hr (it's actually slightly slower than this because "1 day" is the amount of time it takes for the sun to come around again, but we are also moving around the sun, so we don't need to rotate a full 360° per day). When zoomed in with a field-of-view only 0.25° wide, objects that are not very close to the North star appear to move quite quickly across the frame. For this reason, my telescope control software continually updates the coordinatesthat
it wants to point at, in order to keep the scope pointed at the same part of the sky. Read more » IMAGING THE ORION NEBULA WITH THE PIKON TELESCOPE » _Tue 8 January 2019_ On Friday night I took some photographs of the Orion nebula with my motorised PiKon telescope from my back garden. There is lots of light pollution around, but this is the final image I got: Read more » TOWARDS A BETTER PYTHAGOREAN CUP » _Fri 4 January 2019_ There was an article on Hacker News the other day by David Richeson entitled Make Your Own Pythagorean Cup. A
Pythagorean cup is a cup with a built-in siphon. Supposedly invented by Pythagoras, the cup functions just like an ordinary cup as long as it is only filled to a certain level. If anyone gets greedy and tries to take too much wine, the level rises above the top of the siphon, which causes the siphon to self-start, and the greedy person is punished by having the entire contents of the cup dumped into theirlap. Read more »
FIRST LIGHT IN THE PIKON TELESCOPE » _Sun 16 December 2018_ On Thursday night I had an opportunity to try out my motorised PiKon telescope for the first time. Emma and I drove to a cemetery that is about 5 minutes away. It is not an ideal astronomy spot, but it is better than our back garden as it is a bit further from trees, tall buildings, and street lights. Readmore »
FLAT EARTH AND THE CORIOLIS FORCE » _Sun 9 December 2018_ I've been learning about "flat-Earthers" recently. They're a fascinating group of people who genuinely believe that the Earth is flat and that governments, scientists, and industry are in on a big conspiracy to trick everyone into thinking the Earth is round. Readmore »
MY PIKON TELESCOPE HARDWARE » _Mon 3 December 2018_ Since the last post I've been working on the hardware of my telescope. I think the hardware is basically done, I just have a bit more software to write, and then need to wait for a convenient and cloud-free night in which to try it out. Readmore »
RAMBLINGS ABOUT A COMPUTERISED TELESCOPE » _Mon 19 November 2018_ The PiKon telescope is a brilliant design for a cheap but powerful telescope using 3d printed parts and a Raspberry Pi. It is a Newtonian reflector telescope, designed to be
mounted and aimed with an ordinary camera tripod, and then the Raspberry Pi camera is used to capture images. It uses a relatively inexpensive concave "spherical" mirror for the primary mirror, and has no secondary mirror: the Pi camera is small enough that it is simply mounted in the centre of the tube and captures light where the secondary mirror would normally be placed. Read more » DEANONYMISING A TOR HIDDEN SERVICE WITH TRAFFIC CORRELATION » _Thu 18 October 2018_ We've all heard that Tor hidden services can be traced to an IP address by an attacker who has sufficient visibility into global internet traffic, by correlating traffic sent to/from the hidden service with traffic sent to/from real IP addresses. But how easy is it in practice? How much data do you need? And how good do you need to be at statistics? I decided to find out. Read more » HOW TO USE RICOCHET IM ON TAILS » _Sat 13 October 2018_ I've been using Tails (a privacy-focused Linux distro) as my day-to-day operating system recently, and I was disappointed to find that Ricochet IM does not work out-of-the-box. Read more » HIDING MESSAGES IN CHESS GAMES » _Tue 9 October 2018_ I designed a steganography system that encodes data as a chess game. A convenient way to communicate chess games is PGN, but any means
of communicating the moves of the game would work, as the information is encoded conceptually in the moves themselves, rather than taking advantage of any redundancy in the PGN format. Read more » SOMEONE USED MY IPFS GATEWAY FOR PHISHING » _Thu 4 October 2018_ At 02:43 this morning, I received an abuse complaint email. It was sent by PhishLabs to DigitalOcean, and DigitalOcean forwarded it to me. Read more » HOW RICOCHET IM WORKS » _Tue 18 September 2018_ Ricochet is instant messaging software that communicates over Tor, authenticates peers by their Tor onion address, and communicates directly peer-to-peer (via Tor hidden services) without any centralised servers involved. Read more » PLEASE DON'T BLOCK EUROPE » _Thu 13 September 2018_ Yesterday the EU approved a "Copyright Directive",
which includes a tax on linking to other websites, and mandatory upload filters on all user-submitted content, to prevent copyright infringement. Read more » HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU 18.04 LTS ON A LENOVO IDEACENTRE 310S » _Wed 12 September 2018_ Yesterday I was asked to install Ubuntu on a Lenovo Ideacentre 310s. I expected this to be quite easy but it was not. Read more » SPELUNKING THE WEB SERVERS OF THE LIGHTNING NETWORK » _Wed 29 August 2018_ I've finally got around to playing with Bitcoin's Lightning Network over the past couple of days. I managed to buy one of the "I got Lightning working and all I got was this sticker"stickers
from BlockStream's Lightning store, and I'm in the process of adding Lightning payment support to SMS Privacy .Read more »
A 4X4 CHESS PUZZLE » _Tue 28 August 2018_ Playing Isopath a lot recently led to a broader interest in board games, which led to me playing a lot of go , and particularly chess (you can add me on lichess , but I'm not very good). I had a look at some single-player variants of chess and played "Hippodrome" a few times but found it very easy, however it gave me an idea for another possibility. Read more » WE ENTERED THE BLMRA 12 HOUR LAWNMOWER RACE AGAIN » _Sat 11 August 2018_ After last year's poor show at the 12 hour , we did some much-needed work on the mower and had another go. Read more » I TRIED TO MAKE A VINYL RECORD ON THE LATHE »_Thu 9 August 2018_
In order to produce sound, a record player needle needs to ride in a track that has a tiny physical model of the waveform of the sound.Read more »
WHAT'S INSIDE AN HSBC SECUREKEY? »_Thu 12 July 2018_
You've probably seen an HSBC SecureKey. It's a 2-factor authentication device for online banking. I was given one because the previous owner had started using the bank's smartphone app and no longer needed the SecureKey. It looks like this: Read more » INTRODUCTION TO ISOPATH »_Sat 30 June 2018_
Isopath is a game invented by YouTube user pocket83 . The game was initially presented in this videowhere pocket83
shows how he made the board and tiles, and then explains the game rules from 15:45 onwards. Isopath is a zero-sum, turn-based, deterministc, perfect-information game, which puts it in the same class as games like chess, draughts, go, noughts-and-crosses, etc.Read more »
MY HOMEMADE EBIKE CONTROL PANEL »_Fri 1 June 2018_
I wrote before about dismantling the control panel from my ebike to find out how it works, and had some
ideas for an improved design. Read more » A ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS AI THAT IS TOO GOOD »_Fri 25 May 2018_
Yesterday I had an idea for a simple Rock-Paper-Scissors AI based on Markov chains. The "state" would be what the opponent played in the last N rounds, and would be used to predict the probability that the opponent would play Rock, Paper, or Scissors next. The AI would choose what to play, to beat what the opponent is expected to play, weighted by the expected probability for each possible action. Read more » REVERSE ENGINEERING AN EBIKE 3-MODE PAS LED PANEL »_Fri 11 May 2018_
I bought an electric bicycle recently. It is an incredible machine, and I think everyone should get one. The thing I never liked about cycling is how tired you get going up hills, and the electric bicycle solves this problem without taking away any of the fun parts of cycling. A truly incredible machine. Read more » WHAT WOULD THE TOTAL COMPUTING POWER OF THE ENTIRE WORLD IN 1970 COSTTODAY? »
_Sun 29 April 2018_
Some dubious mathematics and lots of guesswork. Maybe the conclusion is within a few orders of magnitude of correct... Read more » HOW I CRACKED THE BITCOIN KEYS IN ANDY BAUCH'S LEGO ARTWORK »_Sat 24 March 2018_
Yesterday I read an article about a series of art pieces created by Andy Bauch with $10,000 of cryptocurrency hidden in them. Each of the pieces is assembled out of lego bricks. Read more » HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOUR DATA GETS STOLEN (URL CANARY) »_Fri 23 March 2018_
In February I started working on a new project called URL Canary . The premise is that it helps you create custom URLs that you can store next to your private data (database backups, git repositories, executive inboxes, etc.). Then, if your data gets compromised and the attacker makes the mistake of visiting your oh-so-enticingly-named URL, you'll receive an email alert, you'll know your data has been stolen, and you can take remedial measures.Read more »
SAAS PROFIT IS MARKET INEFFICIENCY, AND IT WILL END »_Tue 20 March 2018_
I don't think the profitability of "software as a service" businesses is going to last, in the long term (on a timescale looking at, say, 100 years from now). I wrote before about machine-owned enterprises competing the profit out of SaaS, but even before that happens, _humans_ ought to be able to compete most of the profit out of it. Read more » HOW TO RUN SSH AND HTTP ON THE SAME PORT » _Mon 26 February 2018_ Last month I ran a small puzzle in which, after having picked up an SSH key in one of the rounds, a subsequent round involved connecting to a (supposed) web server using an SSH client. It's quite a neat trick so I thought it deserved sharing. Read more » A VISUAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE PERILS OF KEY REUSE IN A ONE-TIME PAD » _Sat 17 February 2018_ I was playing with applying one-time pad encryption to images recently, and stumbled across some interesting visualisations that I want to share. Read more » I DESIGNED A TRICK CHESS PIECE WITH HIDDEN COMPARTMENTS » _Sun 4 February 2018_ It's quite easy to model a traditional chess piece (apart from a knight) using CAD software. You basically just have to draw a sketch of the outline and revolve it around its centre. I modelled, and 3d printed, a Queen that includes some hidden compartments for storing small bits of paper, e.g. containing passwords or Bitcoin keys. Readmore »
MAGNETIC CUBES PUZZLE: IN PRACTICE » _Mon 22 January 2018_ I've put together a physical version of the magnetic cubes puzzle and have spent a good few hours playing with it. (You don't need to have read that post in order for this one to make sense, but it might help, and it's certainly worth having a look at the table that labels the different cube configurations). I haven't yet managed to solve it without consulting a computer. Read more » MAGNETIC CUBES PUZZLE: IN THEORY » _Sat 20 January 2018_ I had an idea for a puzzle. Imagine 27 small cubes. Put a magnet on each face of each cube, with variation as to whether North or South is facing outwards. Now try to assemble the cubes into a 3x3x3 "cube of cubes". Read more » HOW TO GET YOUR BITCOINS OUT OF XAPO WITHOUT RUNNING THEIR APP ON YOURPHONE »
_Mon 15 January 2018_ Xapo is a company that offered a Bitcoin Visa debit card. You'd top up your account with Bitcoins, and you can then spend them, using the card, anywhere that takes Visa payments. This is super convenient for anyone who earns income in Bitcoin. Read more » KNIVES: THEY CUT, AND THEY DON'T ASK NO FUCKING QUESTIONS. YET. » _Wed 27 December 2017_ I recently watched Captain Disillusion's video Miss Ping Debunk in which he explains how an old knife-throwing video was made, and why, and by whom. It's a good video. It also has a joke advert in the middle: Read more » HOW TO CONTROL A DIGITAL SPEEDOMETER » _Tue 12 December 2017_ As part of my YX140 scooter project(now
finished ) I discovered that the scooter's speedometer is controlled digitally. There was a sensor in the original engine which generated pulses to signal the speed of rotation of the gearbox output shaft. The new engine has no such sensor, so I had to do a little electronics to make the speedo work.Read more »
IS MEGA.CO.NZ CENSORED BY EVERY MAJOR SEARCH ENGINE? » _Sun 10 December 2017_ I was watching Vice's video on Kim Dotcomtoday, and ended up
typing "mega" into DuckDuckGo to see what it came up with. Read more»
FINDING UNSECURED S3 BUCKETS USING PASSIVE DNS » _Sat 2 December 2017_ There was a post on Hacker News yesterday about a tool called bucket-stream that looks at certificate transparency logs and uses them to find corresponding Amazon S3 bucket names. Read more » MACHINES AS FIRST-CLASS CITIZENS » _Tue 21 November 2017_ Throughout history, various groups have been subject to various prejudices which restricted their ability to act freely in otherwise-free societies. Obvious examples include Jewish people, black people, and gay people. Read more » NEW PROJECT: YX140 ENGINE IN A HONDA INNOVA SCOOTER » _Thu 16 November 2017_ At the weekend I picked up a Honda Innova 125i scooter for £550: Readmore »
SOMEONE CREATED A TOR HIDDEN SERVICE TO PHISH MY TOR HIDDEN SERVICE » _Fri 13 October 2017_ SMS Privacy is available as a Tor hidden service, and it turns out ~10% of users actually use it that way. This post details what I found when somebody created a phishing site of my Tor hidden service. Read more » ON GUMTREE, "BITCOIN" IS A DIRTY WORD » _Sun 1 October 2017_ I tried to list a sofa bed on Gumtree today. I went through the usual rigmarole of dusting the item off, taking some photos, uploading the photos to Gumtree, and writing a compelling description that would hook in the buyers and secure me great riches. Read more » SOLVING THE MATCHSTICKS GAME » _Wed 20 September 2017_ I was on holiday in Iceland last week , and while we were away, Charlie introduced me to the "Matchsticks" game. We played a few rounds and it got me thinking about how to solve it. I couldn't find any information about the game online so I'm sharing what I've learnt... Read more » GOOGLE TRENDS PORTFOLIO: SELLING RIPPLE » _Thu 7 September 2017_ Another update on the Google Trends portfolio. Read more »
GOOGLE TRENDS PORTFOLIO: BUYING MONERO » _Thu 31 August 2017_ Just a quick update on the Google Trends portfolio. Read more »
USING GOOGLE TRENDS DATA TO SPECULATE ON CRYPTOCURRENCIES » _Sun 27 August 2017_ I did a little analysis this evening to try to find cryptocurrencies that are under-valued relative to Bitcoin, based on Google Trends data, with the intention of buying whatever is under-valued and waiting for it to go up. I found some possibilities and I spent some money. Read more » I TRIED TO DO THE BLMRA 12 HOUR LAWNMOWER RACE » _Wed 16 August 2017_ Earlier this year I bought a ride-on lawnmower to go lawnmower racing. I talked Feroz Salam and James Nicholls into driving it with me, and Matt Game and my Dad into helping in the pits, and we entered the BLMRA 12 hour endurance race. Read more » I FOUND A SECURITY VULNERABILITY IN SMS PRIVACY THIS MORNING »_Mon 7 August 2017_
I woke up this morning to find an email from my SMS Privacy server informing me about an error: Readmore »
THE ONLY TIME HACKER NEWS IS THIS INTERESTED IN BITCOIN IS WHEN THERE'S A BUBBLE FORMING »_Sun 30 July 2017_
You might have got the impression that there are a lot of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News lately. With SegWit set to activate in the next few weeks, and Bitcoin Cash likely to fork off on the 1st of August, I took a look at Hacker News' relationship with Bitcoin over the past years. Read more » BTC-E, ALEXANDER VINNIK, AND THE MISSING MTGOX BITCOINS »_Wed 26 July 2017_
> _Q: How do you launder the Bitcoins you stole from MtGox? > A: Set up your own exchange and sell them on there_Read more »
I TRIED TO BUY A THING OFF A DARK NET MARKET, AND THE FBI STOLE MYMONEY »
_Tue 25 July 2017_
I'm interested in online privacy and freedom, and I've wanted to make a purchase on a dark net market for quite a while. On the 26th of June I took the plunge. I'd heard AlphaBay was a popular market so (for the full experience) I loaded up Tails Linux in a virtual machine and navigated to the AlphaBay site. Read more » WHY BITCOIN HAS TO SUCCEED »_Tue 11 July 2017_
Some people want to transition to a cashless society. If that happens (and governments, at least, appear very keen to make that happen), we'll all be left with no way to pay each other without going through a third party payments company (banks, Visa, PayPal, etc.). This means people have no way to pay each other without asking permission from such a company, and being subject to censorship and surveillance at best, and the risk of the funds being stolen at worst. Read more » DOUBLE-CHECK BITCOIN ADDRESSES WHEN PASTING (BITCOIN TX GENERATORMALWARE) »
_Sun 9 July 2017_
Back in April I wrote about the Large Bitcoin Collider and how it is probably malware . Well, now there's another (even more blatant) piece of malware being spread via.
Read more »
HOW TO CREATE 3D-PRINTED STENCILS FOR SPRAY-PAINTING »_Mon 3 July 2017_
I wanted to make some custom spray-painting stencils. I've done it before by printing on paper and cutting out the shapes, but found it to be laborious and time-consuming. Also the stencils don't last for more than a couple of uses before the paper gets too soggy. Read more»
SOMEONE CLONED MY WEBSITE AND IS USING IT TO SCAM PEOPLE »_Fri 16 June 2017_
I was looking on the DuckDuckGo search results for "anonymous bitcoin sms" today, just to see what was out there. My SMS Privacy was the top result, as expected. But the second result was new to me: Read more » HARDBIN: THE WORLD'S MOST SECURE ENCRYPTED PASTEBIN »_Fri 19 May 2017_
Over the past week I've been working on hardbin . Hardbin is an encrypted pastebin, with the decryption key passed in the URL fragment, and the code and data served securely with IPFS. (IPFS is a distributed content-addressable storage system that is web-compatible; it's basically bittorrent for the web). Read more » I MADE A BASE58 ENCODING/DECODING TOOL »_Sat 13 May 2017_
Base58 encoding allows arbitrary data to be encoded using only alphanumeric characters. It is analogous to base64 except base58 does not map neatly on to bytes (4 base64 characters is 3 bytes), and base58 does not include any non-alphanumeric characters.Read more »
HOW TO USE BITADDRESS.ORG SECURELY (SPOILER: USE IPFS) »_Wed 10 May 2017_
Bitaddress.org is a single-page web app for generating Bitcoin paper wallets. It's a great tool, and runs entirely client-side so (in theory) you can audit the code and don't have to trust that the server is not stealing your keys. Read more » I'VE BEEN PLAYING WITH IPFS »_Tue 9 May 2017_
There was an article on Hacker News yesterday about Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS . I read it with great interest (I recommend you read it too) and ended up going down a huge rabbit hole of learning about IPFS. Read more » I SEMI-DEANONYMISED SOME METAMASK USERS, AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELYLOADED »
_Tue 2 May 2017_
Yesterday, I published a post about drive-by identification of MetaMask users (and submitted it to /r/ethereum on reddit). The post included an implementation (now disabled) of an attack that could associate website visitors' IP addresses with their Ethereum accounts, with no user interaction required. This is what I found. Read more » DRIVE-BY IDENTIFICATION OF METAMASK USERS »_Mon 1 May 2017_
MetaMask is a Chrome plugin that turns an ordinary Chrome browser into a Dapp browser. A Dapp is a web app that is augmented to use the browser's local web3object to
access the Ethereum blockchain. Compared to Mist , another Dapp browser, MetaMask streamlines the user interface by not requiring users to "Connect" an account before using it in a Dapp. Read more » EBAY DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE DODGE THEIR FEES »_Sun 30 April 2017_
I've been selling some stuff on eBay recently, and I had a pretty crap experience with one particular item. Read more » IS THE LARGE BITCOIN COLLIDER MALWARE? »_Tue 18 April 2017_
Yesterday, /u/SopaXorzTakersubmitted a post to
r/Bitcoin suggesting the Large Bitcoin Collider (a.k.a. "LBC", not to be confused with Local Bitcoins) is probably malicious.
He did a great service to the community by doing so. Read more » I MADE A RHYMING DICTIONARY »_Mon 17 April 2017_
Some friends and I were trying to come up with rhymes for "mowing", to help us think of a witty name for a lawnmower racing team. This seemed like a job for a machine, so I looked online for something that mighthelp. Read more »
I STARTED ACCEPTING 0-CONF BITCOIN PAYMENTS, AND IT WAS GREAT »_Wed 29 March 2017_
Customers of SMS Privacy have been frustrated with long confirmation times for Bitcoin payments. Even though I only required 1 confirmation, it can still take a long time for that first confirmation if the transaction was accidentally sent with a fee that is too low. Instead of sending money and being able to use the service immediately, customers sometimes had to wait hours. This is immensely frustrating for a legitimate customer: you've sent the money, you're not trying to steal anything, why do you have towait? Read more »
ON THE INEVITABILITY OF THE MACHINE-OWNED ENTERPRISE »_Wed 22 March 2017_
A machine-owned enterprise is one in which none of the profits go to any human, and none of the work is performed by any human. The entirety of the business is owned and operated completely autonomously. Read more » I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY SOLDIERS ARE TAKING DRUGS, AND NEITHER DO YOU »_Fri 3 March 2017_
I read a story, in some online comment section, about a clever trick the US Army used to work out how many soldiers were taking drugs. It went something like this: Read more » SMS PRIVACY WAS ATTACKED LAST NIGHT » _Sat 25 February 2017_ This morning I checked on the list of SMS Privacy user accounts, as I do every morning, and found that quite a large number had been created overnight, between 22:48 and 23:10 GMT on 24th of Feb 2017. Most of them had names like:Read more »
STEGANOGRAPHIC BITCOIN SEEDS: HIDING CASH IN PLAIN SIGHT » _Wed 22 February 2017_ I made a tool, stegoseed , to generate sentences which steganographically encode Bitcoin wallet seeds, and to decode such sentences to retrieve wallet seeds. It comes with an example BIP39 seed to play with. Read more » PRECAUTIONS FOR GENERATING BITCOIN QR CODES » _Wed 15 February 2017_ A couple of people have been asking me to add QR codes to the payment page on SMS Privacy . I'd been putting it off for a while because I didn't want to do it in a way that opens up avenues for exploitation. Read more » ENCRYPTED EMAIL IS STILL A PAIN IN 2017 » _Mon 13 February 2017_ Today I sent an email to somebody who specified that he "prefers GPG mail". I didn't have any GPG set up, so I just sent a normal email, which worked perfectly well. But it made me look in to GPG, and this is what I learnt... Read more » I BOUGHT AN EXTREMELY CHEAP 3D PRINTER AND IT'S GREAT » _Wed 25 January 2017_ I had a look on eBay last week to see what sort of price 3d printers are going for these days, and was surprised to find some on offer for £150. At that price it's obviously not going to be very good, but should be fun anyway. Read more » WHY MINIMUM WAGE IS BAD, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE GOOD, AND TICKETSCALPING IS FINE »
_Tue 17 January 2017_ At first glance these three topics might seem unrelated, but the same basic argument of supply and demand applies in each case. Read more » THE GAME THEORY CASE FOR BITCOIN » _Thu 5 January 2017_ During a period of only 4 hours today, the value of Bitcoin dropped by more than 30% (8888 CNY down to 6000 CNY). This sparked some discussion at work about what it is that makes Bitcoin worth anything in the first place. Read more » SECRETS OF THE MEDTRONIC MYCARELINK PATIENT MONITOR » _Sun 4 December 2016_ I have acquired a "Medtronic MyCareLink Patient Monitor 24950" and have been playing with it a little this weekend. It looks like this:Read more »
PLEASE STOP MAKING POPUP MENU BARS » _Fri 2 December 2016_ There is a trend on the web at the moment to make menu bars that disappear when you scroll down, and reappear when you scroll up. Thisarticle
encourages everybody to do it because "menus aren't pretty" and screen space is at a premium on mobile devices. Read more » HOW (AND WHY) TO ACCEPT BITCOIN PAYMENTS YOURSELF (WITHOUT RUNNING AFULL NODE) »
_Fri 11 November 2016_ Accepting Bitcoin payments for an online service can be daunting at first (I worked out how to do it, for SMS Privacy , a couple of months ago). What I describe is not the only way to accept Bitcoin payments - it's not even the _best_ way to accept Bitcoin payments - but it works for me. And it might work for you, too. Read more » BITCOIN DEBIT CARDS: XAPO VS CRYPTOPAY » _Mon 31 October 2016_ I've written before about my Cryptopay Bitcoin debit card . A number of people on reddit recommended some other company's offerings that hadn't come up in my searches. Xapo was most recommended, so I bought a Xapo card shortly after and have been using it on-and-off ever since. Read more » I MADE A HIDDEN BOOKCASE DOOR » _Fri 21 October 2016_ Ever since Emma and I moved into this house, I've been talking about making a hidden bookcase door. Well I've done it now. Read more » SMS PRIVACY MONTH 1 REVIEW » _Mon 10 October 2016_ It's a month since I launched SMS Privacy , a web service offering anonymous phone numbers paid in Bitcoin. This is what's happened over the last month... Read more » SMS PRIVACY NOW PROVIDES ANONYMOUS VOICEMAIL » _Mon 19 September 2016_ One of the use cases that inspired me to create SMS Privacy is signing up for accounts for online services without having to link that to a real-world identity. Unfortunately, it turned out that my API provider is blocking the verification codes that many of these services send, in an effort to prevent people from abusing their API to automate the bulk creation of accounts. Read more » WHAT IS THE MOST INTERESTING THING LIVE STREAMING RIGHT NOW? » _Sat 17 September 2016_ I had an idea for an interesting project: it would simply show whatever is the most interesting live stream available at the current moment. It ought to update the stream dynamically whenever a new more interesting stream becomes available. Read more » THE SMS PRIVACY CONVERSION FUNNEL » _Mon 12 September 2016_ I'm a big fan of Patrick McKenzie's blog . If you're interested in small-time software business it's worth working through his greatest hits page . A powerful idea I learnt from his site is the conversion funnel : all the visitors to your site pour into the top, they then pass through several filter layers, and some proportion of them pop out at the bottom as paying customers. To get more paying customers you either need to put more users in the top, or get a higher proportion of them to pop out at the bottom. Read more » HOW TO BUY PHONE NUMBERS ANONYMOUSLY » _Sat 10 September 2016_ Over the last week or so I've been working on a project that allows anyone to buy phone numbers using Bitcoin anonymously , and use them to send and receive SMS. I think this is an important piece of the puzzle of allowing people to interact with the world anonymously, as a large number of services use SMS for account verification or 2-factor-authentication. Being able to buy phone numbers anonymously allows you to create new identities more easily. Read more » WHAT IF WE COULD ASSUME NEW IDENTITIES AT WILL? » _Sun 21 August 2016_ I've been thinking a lot about privacy and anonymity recently. It's reasonably possible to create a new online identity, with no links to your real-world identity, as long as you don't need to buy anything and you're careful. Use Tor , get an email address from SIGAINT , and you can sign up for accounts on a lot of other services and speak your mind freely. Readmore »
LIVING WITH A BITCOIN DEBIT CARD »_Sat 30 July 2016_
My new project produces profit in Bitcoin. I wanted a way to be able to spend the Bitcoin without having to: Read more » PERL'S DIGEST::SHA::HMAC_SHA256_BASE64 IS WRONG »_Wed 6 July 2016_
I spent nearly 2 hours today struggling to authenticate with an API that uses base64 SHA256 HMAC's, only to find that the hmac_sha256_base64 implementation appears to be wrong. Read more » ON THE DESIGN OF A HERB JAR LID »_Mon 27 June 2016_
My herb jar lid has two operating modes: one has small holes which allow you to shake the herb out slowly, and the other is a single large hole which allows you to shake the herb out quickly. Read more»
I DELIVERED AN OAK MIRROR TO A LADY »_Fri 27 May 2016_
My latest business venture is Bristol Oak Mirrors . The website is crap but the idea is I make oak-framed mirrors and sell them. Read more » HOW TO COPY WORDPRESS THEME CUSTOMISATIONS TO A CHILD THEME »_Mon 23 May 2016_
I've been working with Wordpress a little lately. I learnt that you're supposed to create a child theme in order to make modifications to it, but I'd already modified the theme settings (colours, etc.) using the Wordpress 'Customise' tool and couldn't see how to copy these settings to the child theme. Read more » HOW TO DEFEAT NAIVE IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY »_Wed 27 April 2016_
As a teenager, I wrote a C program to do image steganography. It hid the secret image in the least significant bits of the cover image. I also made a PHP web interface to it, which now sees about 3,000 users per month. So I've made a better version, it gives previews of the input images, doesn't upload the images to my server (privacy, yo), and is faster. Read more » STOCKFIGHTER REVIEW (NO SPOILERS) »_Fri 22 April 2016_
I've been playing Stockfighter thisweek. Read more »
HOW (AND WHY) TO MAKE YOUR SOFTWARE FASTER »_Fri 15 April 2016_
Have you ever been bothered by how slowly your webapp loads, but never profiled it? Much like test-driven development and A/B tests, performance profiling almost always throws up surprises and big wins, and yet most people never bother to do it. If you have anything that runs too slowly, you should profile it today, you _will_ find improvements to make. Read more »GOING SOLO »
_Fri 8 April 2016_
Today marks the last day of the "full-time job" stage of my career! For the foreseeable future, I'll be working part-time for Netcraft. I will also be trying to find work freelancing (hire me!), and trying to make more money from my other projects (e.g. ads on the Countdown Solver , and selling SMS Travel Map subscriptions). Read more » HOW TO PEEK ALL OF THE JOBS IN A BEANSTALK TUBE »_Wed 30 March 2016_
This problem came up at work today. There was a Beanstalk tube with a few hundred jobs in it, getting processed slowly. A particular input didn't seem to be getting processed, and I wanted to know if it existed in the tube and simply hadn't come out yet, or was missing entirely. Read more » I DELIVERED 2 SOFAS FOR VINCENT »_Sun 27 March 2016_
My phone rang early yesterday morning, while I was still basically asleep. A mobile number I did not recognise. I answered. It was "Vincent". He asked me if I was free to deliver 2 sofas from Bristol to Weston-Super-Mare. I groggily suggested 50 quid, with no idea how long it would take, and Vincent said he would be in touch. I don't know where these people get my number from as I haven't had an ad for over 6 months... Read more » HOW TO INTERRUPT A REGEX IN PERL »_Wed 23 March 2016_
Since 5.8.0, Perl's "safe signals" defers the delivery of signals when a custom signal handler is in use, until it is at a safe point to handle them. This means you can not simply use alarm() to interrupt a long-running regex. Read more » HOW TO USE GNU SCREEN FOR AD-HOC CLUSTER MANAGEMENT »_Fri 11 March 2016_
If you have a cluster of machines, you can use GNU screen to run a management process on them all, monitor the output, and manually take over and repair any issues that come up on any individual machine.Read more »
I TRIED TO GO PIT BIKING » _Sun 28 February 2016_ Tormarton pit bike track was finally open yesterday so I took my pit bike there. Read more » I MADE A VIDEO OF DRIVING MY VAN » _Thu 25 February 2016_ I had an idea for a video series, where I put a camera in the passenger seat of my van while I'm going places, and you listen to my anecdotes and watch me driving, etc. Read more » I TRIED TO CHANGE THE GLOW PLUGS IN MY VAN » _Sat 20 February 2016_ My van has been tricky to start on cold mornings lately so I decided to try to replace the glow plugs. I replaced 3 of the glow plugs. (There are 4). Read more » I BOUGHT A PIT BIKE » _Fri 1 January 2016_ I picked up a pit bike on Wednesday evening. It is basically an off-road mini moto. It cost £250 and is a non-runner. Also the clutch lever is missing, the brake lever falls outwards on its own, the chain is rusty, the tyres are worn out, there's lots of rust, one of the plastic panels is missing, the air filter is missing, the wiring has obviously been mucked about with, and the front brake did not work.Read more »
I RODE MY MOTORBIKE OFF ROAD AND MADE A VIDEO » _Sun 29 November 2015_ Lately I've been a bit interested in Green laningon my motorbike.
Read more »
I MADE A GONG »
_Wed 11 November 2015_ Some colleagues at work somehow quickly became obsessed with gongs. So I made a gong. From brass. Read more » I MADE A PUZZLE GAME » _Sun 1 November 2015_ This evening I had an idea for a small puzzle game and implemented it.Read more »
IF YOU SERVE JAVASCRIPT WITH A 404 STATUS DOES IT STILL GET EXECUTED?»
_Wed 7 October 2015_ This topic came up at work today when we noticed a Javascript file was missing. Does the browser still try to execute the 404 page that gets returned? And if not, would it if the Content-Type were set appropriately? Read more » I MADE A KNIFE OUT OF A FILE »_Sun 28 June 2015_
Since making a little knife out of a hacksaw blade a few weeks ago, I've been working on a bigger knife made from a file. Read more » LOGROTATE RACE CONDITION WITH COPYTRUNCATE »_Thu 11 June 2015_
The logrotate tool has a mode called copytruncate which copies the log file and truncates the original, rather than renaming the original, so that the daemon doesn't need to reopen the log file. Read more » I MADE A LITTLE KNIFE »_Sun 31 May 2015_
I made a knife today. Just a little one, out of an old hacksaw blade. Only half a hacksaw blade, I used the other half to make a gasket scraper (not pictured). Read more » I MADE A PLYMETAL HEART DECORATION »_Sun 26 April 2015_
This evening I had an idea for making an effect like plywood, but out of metals (hence "plymetal"). I tried it out to make a little heart decoration and it worked great, although I did a poor job. Read more»
I PAINTED MY VAN WHEELS »_Sat 11 April 2015_
My van has steel wheels and they were pretty rusty so I decided to paint them. Read more » HOW TO CLOSE A RUNNING PROCESS'S SOCKET »_Thu 9 April 2015_
I had a problem this morning of a process that was stuck waiting for an HTTP fetch to complete, and had been stuck for 8 hours. Obviously the fetch had not been successful, and additionally some sort of timeout had broken, but I wanted the process to continue executing for the time being. What to do? Read more » I DROVE A TRUCK AND BOUGHT A CAR »_Mon 23 March 2015_
Yesterday me and Emma went to pick up a Nissan Micra I bought off eBay for £375. We currently have no intention of taxing or insuring the car as she needs to learn to drive first, and I didn't feel comfortable driving the car all the way back with no tax or insurance.Read more »
DIGITAL OCEAN PRIVATE NETWORKING IS NOT PRIVATE »_Thu 5 March 2015_
Digital Ocean offer a "Private Networking" option which, to many people, sounds like it is accessible only to other droplets created by the same Digital Ocean account. Read more » I BUILT A CAMPERVAN » _Thu 26 February 2015_ I took today off work to work on the interior of my van. I intend to use the van as a camper van, but my main priority is that it can still be used as a normal van. I don't go in for these camper van designs that leave no usable space (e.g. to carry a motorbike, or a secondhand sofa). Martin gave me a futon, which is brilliant - it is basically an instant camper van as it provides seating and bedding in one. Readmore »
I AM BACK ON THE BIKE » _Sun 15 February 2015_ I ride a 1989 Honda VFR750F. It's a brilliant bike, but has had very tatty fairings due to being knocked over several times. Read more » I BUILT AN OAK CHEST » _Sun 8 February 2015_ Since the start of the year I've been spending some time at weekends building an oak storage chest. Read more » HOW TO MAKE DRIFTWOOD SINK » _Tue 3 February 2015_ I went to the seaside on Sunday and picked up some driftwood to put in my fish tank. Read more » I BOUGHT SOME FISH » _Sat 31 January 2015_ On Thursday I bought 3 fish. The biggest one is a barb, and I can't remember what the other two are. Read more » I MADE A RING OUT OF A COIN » _Tue 27 January 2015_ Around the start of this month I made a ring for Emma. Read more » I DROVE IN THE SNOW » _Sat 27 December 2014_ Yesterday I drove my new van up North to visit Emma. Halfway through it started to snow. Read more »SMS TRAVEL MAP »
_Sat 6 December 2014_ As I mentioned before , I built an SMS-updating coordinate-tracking system to use on the Mongol Rally so that everyone left behind could keep track of our progress. Readmore »
STORIES FROM THE MONGOL RALLY: MONGOLIAN BLACK MARKET PICKPOCKET » _Wed 19 November 2014_ After completing the rally, and during our time as regular tourists in Ulaanbaatar, we visited a large market known as the "black market".Read more »
STORIES FROM THE MONGOL RALLY: KAZAKHSTAN POLICEMAN SELFIE » _Tue 18 November 2014_ Within about half an hour of getting into Kazakhstan, we were pulled over by the filth. We were travelling with an American team, 3FLP, by this point. Read more » STORIES FROM THE MONGOL RALLY: THE GEORGIAN DIESEL INCIDENT » _Mon 17 November 2014_ Shortly after we got into Georgia, we pulled into a petrol station to fuel up the car. The writing in this country uses these Georgiansquiggles so it is
impossible to even pronounce the words. Fortunately, most of the pumps in this petrol station also had writing in Latin, and we determined that the green pumps (like in Europe) pump petrol. So far, so good.Read more »
COUNTER CREATOR »
_Sun 16 November 2014_ A while ago Feroz created an online counter for the number of times I've said something that could be considered racist. The idea is that whenever I put my foot in it, somebody clicks the button and the count increases. Read more » I MADE A BRASS BOX » _Thu 6 November 2014_ At the weekend I decided to use up the brass sheet I had lying around and construct a box. Read more » I RAN OUT OF FUEL IN MY VAN » _Sat 1 November 2014_ Yesterday, on my way into work, I glanced at my fuel gauge and noticed that it was extremely low. Thinking to myself, "wow! I've never seen it that low before", I made a mental note to fill up on the way home.Read more »
I HELPED A FRENCH CHILD FIX A STOLEN MOPED » _Thu 16 October 2014_ While Feroz and I were driving my van around France, we came across a child with a moped at the side of the road in some woods. He appeared to have broken down and we decided to help him. We pulled over and asked if he spoke English. He did not. Read more » WEST COUNTRY PLACE NAME GENERATOR »_Fri 18 July 2014_
I've recently written a West Country Place Name Generator. Read more »
YURT LUSH LIVE TRACKING »_Sun 29 June 2014_
In about 3 weeks' time I'm setting off on the Mongol Rallyas one half of team
Yurt Lush . Read more »HUNGMAN »
_Wed 11 December 2013_ I've made a hangman solver, currently called Hungman . The user interface is bad but most of the idea is there. Read more »NFC TAG »
_Sun 6 October 2013_ Idea: NFC tag game. Whenever possible, bump your phone at someone else's to make them "it". Then they have to do it, and periodically there is some sort of punishment for the person who is "it". Like it vibrates to pretend there's a text message. Read more »BEER »
_Mon 23 September 2013_ I've been brewing some more beer recently. Read more »XORY »
_Tue 10 September 2013_ My latest project: Xory . I started this on Friday afternoon and now consider it releasable. Read more »MAZDA MX-5 »
_Wed 28 August 2013_ Today I almost bought a Mazda MX-5. Read more » THE GLOWSTICK DEBACLE » _Thu 15 August 2013_ This is a story about how I tried to make some money on eBay, and ended up losing a bunch instead. Read more » 8 OUT OF 10 COUNTDOWN VIEWERS » _Sun 11 August 2013_ I added more fine-grained analytics to my Countdown Solver recently, and I noticed something interesting today. Here are the most-solved letter sets from Friday (note the last three): Read more » POLYNOMIAL INTERPOLATOR » _Sat 10 August 2013_ Here's what the web needs: a simple-to-use polynomial interpolationtool. Read more »
PHONE POSTING SETBACK »_Thu 8 August 2013_
Yet another setback in the phone posting project. Read more » ------------------------- James Stanley - james@incoherency.co.uk | jesblogfnk2boep4.onion|
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