I recently wrote a blog post concerning my discovery that my NAS had decided to expose itself all over the internet. If you haven’t seen that, it’s probably worth reading first. That post took off in a way I wasn’t quite expecting, and of course I didn’t quite dot my Is and cross my T’s as well as I should have, leading to a fair bit of misunderstanding in the HN post that initially kicked all this off. Read More…

Addendum: The most controversial detail in this blog post so far has been my claim that disabling uPnP is a significant hit to convenience. I wanted to be fully transparent and say that I do not have data to back this claim up, and this is more of a feeling than it is an analytical decision. This criticism somewhat misses the point however, since the vast majority of consumer routes I’ve encountered personally have uPnP enabled by default, and the consumers purchasing this NAS might have no idea what uPnP is or how to disable it. Read More…

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on cloud services. This is purely ideological, I have no real reason to distrust the cloud, nor am I going to attempt to convince you to. I just made a decision a while ago that all my mission critical/sensitive stuff needed to be moved off of centralised cloud storage. The stories of people losing their Google accounts for practically no reason scare me. Read More…

So, it turns out that a lot of smart gear from many manufacturers, including ones you’ve almost certainly heard of, comes from a company called Tuya. They seem to make all sorts of fun IOT gear, which all connects to the Tuya cloud. What Tuya seem to do is sell whitelabeled ‘versions’ of their products to various brands who then sell them as if they’d manufactured them themselves. Very interesting right? Read More…

Note: While the general themes in this post are still accurate, this blog post has predictably fallen out of date. I will eventually write a follow up for Pipewire, but for now, here be dragons. Yee hath been warned! Bluetooth Audio is generally considered convenient, but not ‘audiophile’. Any self respecting audiophile is probably connecting their fancy headphones to some Digital to Analog Converter/Amp combo which might be connected to their computer using some fancy gold plated USB Cable. Read More…

My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out after a quick internal inspection had revealed nothing obviously wrong, and went shopping for a new hub. Read More…

You may have seen my article on the air quality meter I built a while ago. Diyode, a print magazine in Australia kindly published an article discussing the process I took to create the thing! It’s a really cool feeling to be featured somewhere like this. The article is a great read, check it out over on Diyode: Sense of Smell.

The Finished Product - quite rustic! This article was recently featured in Hackaday and Diyode! I’m bored. I’m sure you are too. I’m personally very thankful that I can still work through this strange period - but there are still hours in the day to fill. I wanted a personal project, so I thought about remote working and the health impacts. Most offices here have air handling units, air conditioners, and fans to keep air circulating. Read More…

I recently installed Pop!_OS on my new desktop machine and have been loving it, but have been suffering with this really strange issue where the entire UI would stutter roughly every second for a few milliseconds. This got really, really annoying so I had a little dig around and found out the cause was actually a strange interaction between Ubuntu AppIndicator (a bundled extension for Gnome Shell in Pop!_OS) and YTMDesktop - an electron wrapper for Youtube Music. Read More…

Having speed makes others happy in the short term. Having velocity makes you happy in the long term. One of the biggest lessons I learned was to prioritise ‘velocity’ over ‘speed’. This probably sounds meaningless to you, but allow me to explain. At some point around a year ago, during my one to ones with my manager, we were discussing the fact that I was heavily distracted and finding it tough to concentrate on tasks I wanted to work on. Read More…