29 August 2018

EMF 2016 Retrospective

Naturally I procrastinated too much to write anything about EMF 2016, but since I’m going again in 2018 I though I’d write a little of what I remember for comparison later.

My friends had been to EMF 2014 and convinced me to go with them in 2016, and I’m really glad they did. It was an awesome 3 days!

18 July 2018

Have You Been Pwned: Update 2

Troy Hunt has updated the haveibeenpwned list of pwned passwords, which now contains a staggering 517 million compromise passwords (as SHA1 hashes).

27 May 2018

Securing Your e-mail Account

e-mail accounts are a pretty serious single point of failure, more so than I think most people ever consider. Recovery accounts and 2 factor authentication help (if you have them setup), but there is a new option that a lot of people won’t know about, email address aliases.

14 April 2018

Good Guy CloudFlare

CloudFlare had a great April Fools Day joke, they were creating two new public DNS servers. Except it wasn’t a joke, they have really created them, with highly memorable addresses:

1.1.1.1
1.0.0.1
2606:4700:4700::1111
2606:4700:4700::1001

Ok, so IPV6 addresses aren’t as memorable…

15 March 2018

Have You Been Pwned: Update

Troy Hunt has updated the haveibeenpwned list of pwned passwords, which now contains a staggering 501 million compromise passwords (as SHA1 hashes). It now also includes a count of how many time that password has been found, so you can see just how poor your password choices are!

29 December 2017

Linux Server Setup

I wrote a post in February called Linux Server Pulling Sextuple Duty, describing all the things I use a Linux server for. I said that I would write a guide on how to set it up, since I was always breaking things and needed a guide myself. I have now broken my server so many times that I am pretty good at getting a new one going again. So here is part one of my setup guides.

20 November 2017

GitHub Saved Me - ESP WiFi Manager

GitHub is a great place for anyone doing software development. If there is anything you are trying to do that anyone else might have thought about doing at some point in the past, it probably exists on GitHub.

15 November 2017

Theme Changes and Optimization

After using the Raven theme for a while, because I like dark themes, I have gone back to the standard WordPress 2017 theme. Mostly because it had a dark option. It also doesn’t look terrible, which the Raven theme kind of did.

31 October 2017

G-Sync: The Best Thing Since SSD's?

I am a bit of a sucker for buying nice shiny things when it comes to tech. I have been wanting a triple monitor setup for a while, along with higher refresh rates and G-Sync (my graphics card is a GTX 1060). Since it was Amazon prime day and they had no good monitor deals, I bought an AOC G2460PG from Aria.co.uk.

The G2460PG

The monitor is a 24-inch monitor with a 1920x1080 350Cd 144Hz TN panel. For a TN panel, it is pretty good in terms of colour reproduction, certainly the best monitor I own. I did notice a slight waving effect on some dark websites with compressed background images. Turning down the refresh rate to 120Hz seemed to fix this. I don’t really care about aesthetics, but it does look nice with the brushed aluminium effect around the bezel, which is pleasingly small. The only issue I had setting it up was the European kettle lead included which I was able to replace with a UK one I had lying around. Front view of the AOC G2460PG G-Sync monitor

18 August 2017

Have You Been Pwned?

Have you been pwned? Troy Hunt, a security researcher at Microsoft has set up a great project called “haveibeenpwned” so you can find out. You can use the website to search for an e-mail address and see if they have been included in past data breaches. You can also sign up to be notified of future breaches too. If your e-mail has been found, it will tells you what data has been leaked, such as poorly hashed passwords. My results (for my generic sign-up email) are below. The Adobe and LastFM password leaks are a serious concern since MD5 is no longer considered a secure hashing algorithm. Oops.