I have a Netgear GS108 8-port gigabit ethernet switch, which died the other day. I found it working normally for a few seconds, and slowly flashing all of its lights for a few seconds, over and over again. During the flashing lights period, no packets were being passed. Naturally, this was playing havoc with my network.
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A couple of years ago I had a good go at getting my Sony Ericsson phone to talk to my IMAP server over SSL. That much worked (although the IMAP client doesn’t support folders so I had to do a bit of a bodge with multiple user accounts and symlinks in cyrus to get at important folders) but I could never get authenticated SMTP over TLS to work.
Today I cracked it.
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My bank recently sent me a new debit card, which included the non-optional feature of contactless payment.
This is based on NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, which utilises a loop antenna to allow a reader to communicate with the chip on the card in order to allow “small value” transactions to occur without physically touching the card, or (for most transactions) entering my PIN.
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Some time ago I bought a Digilent Nexys 2 FPGA development board and a Digilent PmodCLS LCD module. I spent some time implementing a more or less trivial CPU in the FPGA, and various bits and pieces to aid with debugging such as a driver for the 4-digit 7-segment LED display on the board (ideal for displaying the contents of 16-bit registers) and debug LEDs and switches to select what to display. I’ve been using this primarily as an exercise in learning Verilog. Read the rest of this entry »
Some months back, I picked up a 1GB DIMM at a computer fair. It was cheap, which was about the only thing going for it, but I thought I’d take a chance on it. When I got home I plugged it into my PC, and it all started going horribly wrong. Needless to say, a few minutes later I was running memtest+ and finding millions of errors.
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I am now officially impressed with the extensibility of monotone.
There are so many popular web applications around nowadays. Blogs, CMSs, Forums, Webmail, Site Administration, Project Management, Wikis, and many more. Yet I’m shocked at the lack of understanding of web security even among the authors of some of the most widely deployed applications.
I decided to have a play around with digital hardware. Having been exposed to some verilog at work, and seen that FPGA development boards have become quite affordable, I thought I’d have a go.
I’ve had a HP LaserJet 1010 for a few years, and I used to have it directly connected to my server, running lpd and samba. When I first set this up, I was plagued by “Unsupported Personality: PCL” errors. After much messing about, it was partially fixed, at least enough that Windows would happily print via samba, and I could occasionally print from NetBSD systems. Sure, I sometimes had to reset the printer, but most of the time it worked well enough.
Recently I switched to CUPS, because it made it easier to run the print spooler on my server while physically connecting the printer to my NSLU2, in a different room. Ever since this switch, the “Unsupported Personality: PCL” errors have been back with a vengeance, along with other types of problems such as raw PJL/PCL being printed as plain text.
This is perhaps an instantiation of Murphy’s Law, mixed in with a little bit of a rant.
Pizza is good. Pizza is the staple diet of geeks all around the world. Pizza is especially good when it’s home made. So I decided to make some.
Now, the dough takes time to rise, and the sauce takes time to simmer, and the lawn was in desperate need of mowing. What could possibly go wrong?