21 September 2020

Makeshift Home Internet

I am moving house soon, which means setting a sweet new home network. Exciting times! Unfortunately the move was pushed back by a week, which is fine, except… hey what happened to the internet? Oooops.

What to do? A jankey interim solution obviously.

25 March 2020

Coronavirus - Science @ Home

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.

2 March 2020

Cloudflare Firewall Rules

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?

28 July 2019

Free Load Balancing With Cloudflare

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!

30 June 2019

AutoHotkey Text Expansion

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.

25 January 2019

Why You Really Need a Password Manager

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:

6 December 2018

Creating a Fast, Secure Website

Introduction

I recently move my website form an OVH hosted solution, to an OVH VPS (virtual private server). Doing things yourself is often much cheaper, but can be more complex. Web solutions like Square Space offer fast, reliable hosting which scales to sudden demand. However for £10 a month it is nearly three times more expensive than my VPS and it is possible to get the same level of performance and scaling, thanks to Cloudflare.

6 October 2018

Have You Been Pwned: NTLM Hashes

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.

25 September 2018

Domain Move

If you are reading this, then you must be using the new URL for my website. I moved from procrastinatingengineer.co.uk to procrastinatingengineer.uk

Mostly because it’s shorter and I think it looks nicer, but also I wanted to play around with self hosted Wordpress and CND setups. More on this coming soon!

1 September 2018

Is Netflix Better in the USA?

TL;DR - Yes, yes it is. But Japan is better!