Recently I wrote about how I got here without knowing what it was I wanted to do. That was a prelude to the other half of the equation; I may not know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want. At this moment in my life, I don’t to work. At all. I want to have the luxury to be able to lie in, to read a book, to stay up late hacking on some code or whatever…
So I don’t do much “streaming”. I’m old school; if I like a show then I’ll buy it (or get it as a present) on physical media… BluRay or 4K these days. This meant I hadn’t seen much of New Trek. A few years back I got Picard Season 1 on BluRay, then season 2. But this year I’ve received/bought a lot of the new stuff, and I thought I might write down my thoughts and opinions.
One of the most annoying interview questions is “where do you see yourself in five years time?“. I hate it. I have no vision of the future like this. Hell, I barely know what I want to do tomorrow. I’m good at foreseeing the future, honest! So my first job, straight out of uni, was with a small Greek shipping company. I learned a lot there ‘cos I had to do it all.
A number of years ago I wrote a Hue Bridge Emulator that would let you emulate light bulbs in shell script in such a way that these devices could be controlled by Alexa (and so used in routines and the like). It worked well. But recently Amazon appear to be changing how hue bridges are detected. The big challenge appears to be it wants the server to listen on port 80.
Else-net there was a discussion on how “security” is generally seen as a blocker; they’re seen as gate keepers and people who just say “no”, or who may be focused on regulatory compliance and not actual security. Who needs Mordac, the Preventer Of Information Services when you have a security team?! The thing is, “security” isn’t a monolith, and it’s not a one way street. Many teams I’ve only really seen security from a megacorp perspective, both from the companies I’ve worked for and the people from other companies I’ve spoken with over the years.
Previously I had modified a digital safe to be controlled via an ESP8266; basically a WiFi safe. I was asked if I could create a firmware for it that made it act like a timer safe; something along the lines of a Kitchen Safe. I decided to take the opportunity to build (yet another) safe, using the combined esp/relay board. Without any soldering, I’m sure I can make a cleaner more reliable build!
table { table-layout: fixed ; width: 100% ; border-collapse: collapse; border-style: hidden; } td { width: 1 ; border: visible; } Yes, this is a blog about a very old TV show. I went down a rabbit hole. A very stupid rabbit hole. A meaningless rabbit hole. There was a 1983 Gerry Anderson puppet show “Terrahawks”. It wasn’t as good as his older stuff (e.g. the original Thunderbirds).
The problem I use the Ookla Speedtest CLI in a cron job to get an idea of the speed of my internet connection (Verizon FIOS), and spot if there are problems. Why? Because why not :-) It let’s me draw graphs like this. However, recently I was starting to get error messages that the command wasn’t able to reach speedtest.net to get the configuration. It wasn’t happening every time; sometimes it would go hours without issue, other times it would fail 3 or 4 times in succession.
This is one of my infrequent “philosophical” type posts. An earlier version of this appeared on LinkedIn. There was a LinkedIn post along the lines of “are we treating ChatGPT today like we used to treat calculators in the past”. In my mind the question is “what skill do we believe is valuable that ChatGPT will replace”. The parallels between how we treated calculators in a school setting (“no you can’t use them for homework”) vs how we’re treating ChatGPT (“no you can’t use them for homework”) needs a deeper dive.
I don’t normally write about specific products, but I was asked to take a look at the YubiKey series (primarily 4 and 5) and write up a summary of when and how it can be used. This is timely, because CISA is pushing for access management enhancements and recently published a chart for phishing resistance. I thought this interesting; typically I’ve looked at this from a user perspective (“can I use this to secure access to my bank account?
