November 10, 2024 FreeBSD

I used to run FreeBSD back around the time of version 5.x. The problem was I also ran at the time

• Mandrake/Mandriva
• Gentoo
• Windows 2000
• IPCop firewall
• QMail

Each of those had their own PC on 24/7 and the heat and noise got to me. I had bought my 2 week old daughter a PowerBook laptop¹ and I was impressed by the BSDness of OSX 10.3 so I resolved to ditch all my noisy PCs and cut down to one or two Macs. So for a large number of years I fiddled with iMacs and Mac Minis.

Read More

October 17, 2024 Car

This was the original brake pedal fitted to the car. The more I studied it, the scarier it got. Apart from the poorly set up balance bar, it wasn’t fitted securely to the car. The bracket it pivoted on was held on by two bolts through the floor which was a steel sheet approx 1-1.6mm thick. The bolts were located side by side so there was effectively no leverage advantage to reduce the load on the floor. Over time this had bent and I’d expect it to fail. You always want a brake pedal to fail when you’re pushing on it hard, it makes life that little bit more exciting.

Read More

October 13, 2024 Car

More About The History Of The Stupid Car

I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.

Read More

August 31, 2024 Car

I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader….

There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.66, which amused me. It was quick, it could heft it’s 2 tonnes to 60 in 5.2 seconds, which was quicker than the Lotus Elise I used to own. So off I go to Sevenoaks and I bought it.

Read More

August 16, 2024 Car

In chasing down the issues with my car , I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6.

I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises. Immediately, a thin jet of fuel at 4 bar pressure shoots across the engine bay to land on the exhaust manifold. At first I think it’s a fault with the hoses, but no, there is a small pin hole in the tee piece itself.

Read More

August 14, 2024 Tech

As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked.

Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server.

However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this

Read More

August 13, 2024 Tech

I have a menagerie of tech at home.

Connectivity

ISP

Andrews & Arnold , who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses.

Heracles

The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT . My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus.

Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart

A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house. 5 is probably overkill. I run 4 separate SSIDs as VLANs to separate out House, Guest, Work and IOT with various rules as to who can talk to what. Alfred sits on both the wired network and the IOT one to act as a bridge. They have Bluetooth as well so one day I’ll investigate using them as a BLE to MQTT gateway instead of the couple of ESP32 I have filling that duty.

Read More

August 13, 2024 Car / History

As so many of my posts will be about my car, I thought I’d better write something about it. It is a Fisher Fury kit car, with a 4.3L V8 engine.

Background

I used to have a Lotus Elise which was a lot of fun (even though I crashed it due to running out of talent). However I found it frustrating to own. Although I’m a software engineer, I find software unsatisfying as it’s ephemeral. There is nothing to touch, there is nothing to point at and fiddle with physically. I wanted a car to tinker with, but the Elise wasn’t it. Access was poor and I knew I’d break it and lose a lot of money in the process.

Read More

August 12, 2024 Meta

If anyone other than me is subbed to the RSS feed, I’m tweaking a lot of things still as I learn Hugo and that is causing all the previous posts to get re-posted. Sorry about that.

Read More

August 12, 2024 Tech / Meta

I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh .

I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek.

However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears.

1. No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory. After half a dozen posts with a few pictures each it became a mess. I wanted to be able to separate out the images in some sensible manner.
2. There was no control over the size of images unless you appended some API parameters to the file name. This broke the image preview in a Markdown viewer which meant I couldn’t see what the image looked like until I published the post.

So, Hugo. I originally wanted to use Hexo, but the image plugin for that doesn’t install. I plumped for Hugo as https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil uses it for his blog and that’s good enough for me.

Read More