Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “personal”
Posts
Surviving Hotel Hell and Visa Chaos: A Cautionary Tale
As a 16-year-old, I made the decision to leave the UK due to my dislike of the politics and direction of Great Britain under the Conservative party, particularly under the leadership of Theresa May as Home Secretary. This decision was further solidified by the Brexit referendum and the actions of subsequent leaders such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Over the past decade, my views have only been reinforced by the events and developments in British politics.
Posts
Convincing a Scammer That They’re Going Crazy
According to 419eater.com, scambaiting is “enter[ing] into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves”. These scammers aim to take advantage of the elderly, people with disabilities, and others. I occasionally engage in scambaiting, but particularly enjoyed the encounter I document here.
Posts
The Perils of RSS
RSS, or RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary and most recently Really Simple Syndication, is a standard that allows readers to aggregate multiple blogs into one ‘reader’ interface, which displays these blogs posts in a standardised way. It’s an old standard, developed in 1999 at Netscape for use on their my.netscape.com portal. It allowed users to import RSS feeds from other websites and have their content appear on Netscapes feed syndicator.
Posts
kn100.me has been rebuilt!
Just a quick note to say kn100.me was fully rebuilt. I’ve done my best to keep all links the same, but it’s possible I’ve missed something. If you notice something broken or missing, let me know.
Thanks!
Posts
Ok, Ok, I'm Turning uPnP off.
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.
Posts
Diyode.com published a feature about the air quality meter!
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.
Posts
What My First ‘Real’ Software Engineering Job Taught Me
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.
Posts
World Explorer - a Unity VR Project
This project provides you with two main scripts. The first is a player controller which was designed with the Oculus Rift DK2 in mind, but should work perfectly with more modern hardware. This player controller will attempt to keep the player locked to the surface of whatever three dimensional shape they are walking on, similar to Super Mario Galaxy. ##Video demos For some video demos of it in action, please see these three videos: Assets A player controller that: Allows for forwards, backwards, and rotation motion Keeps the player locked to the surface of any given geometry, provided that it has a mesh collider (Think Super Mario Galaxy) Is compatible with VR headsets - tested with Oculus Home and Rift DK2.