I'll get round to it eventually
Back in May 2012, a younger and more naive Mike left the world of console gaming for the glorious lands of the PC Master Race. Excited by the pace of advancement, as soon as my new PC was finished I was already planning the next iteration.
2016 was due to bring Intel’s 10nm Skymont CPU’s, and by then I’d have left university and be able to afford a shiny new PC that would leave my old one in its dust. Then…
Nothing…
I finally managed to upgrade my PC, 5 years late (more on that later). Getting hold of parts has not been easy, but why has there been such a shortage of semiconductors?
Continue reading “What Caused the Global Semiconductor Shortage”
I saw an idea for a nerdy gift on Reddit for your significant other. A word-cloud of conversations you have had. That seemed like a quick and easy idea for a anniversary card…
Now that I’m done, I can explain what a massive pain this turned out to be.
Since Covid hit last year, Zoom has become a verb for video chats. Some of their questionable security practices and their ties to China have made some people wary of using it.
Fortunately, if you didn’t want to install something you can always join from a browser, if you’re willing to give up the very useful Gallery view.
The single most useful thing you can do to help fight the Coronavirus is to follow advice on self-isolating, social distancing and washing your hands.
But there is also a more practical thing you can do, running distributed computing programs.
I found a website (k6.io) which allows you to load test websites and API’s using AWS. With a free account you can test from one location with 50 virtual units for up to 12 mins. Spinning up a load test of get requests, Cloudflare served up all the traffic no problem, leaving my minimal VPS web-server alone. Then I tried again with post requests and BAM… 100% CPU load, response time over 6 seconds.
What was happening? Shouldn’t Cloudflare stop things like this?
According to my page revision history, 9 months ago I started writing a guide on using Cloudflare as a free CND for websites. I’m sure I’ll finish that eventually, but for now here is why I think it is so great. Free load balancing!
Being incredibly lazy, I am always on the lookout for ways to automate my life. Something I heard about a long time ago, but never got around to looking at was AutoHotKey. Now it is an essential tool I used everyday for text macros.
I like to sing the praises of Troy Hunt and his efforts to improve the world’s password security. I also take digital security very seriously, but I can understand why most people don’t. Even the most keen people can suffer from apathy from time to time.
Example below:
Troy Hunt continues to be amazing for cyber security with the Have I Been Pwned project. All the Version 3 passwords have been released as NTLM hashes, the password hash used by Windows. This should be really useful for any sysadmins managing a Windows Enterprise deployment wanting to make sure that users aren’t using bad passwords. Hopefully as this is adopted it will also reduce the number of poor password rules that many companies still enforce.
Things like: Continue reading “Have You Been Pwned: NTLM Hashes”