I hold a joint honours degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, although I graduated over 20 years ago, so the AI knowledge I was taught is no longer very uptodate! I have therefore signed up for a 7 month certificate at Imperial College London where I will be updating my knowledge on AI and ML, including learning about LLMs. This is in order to position myself to work best in the intersection between Cyber Security, AI and software engineering.

I have signed up for a 7 month professional certificate in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Imperial College London! I never thought I’d get the opportunity to study at the University of London in any capacity, but now I’m studying at two UOL colleges at the same time! (even though Imperial is technically independent from the UOL college network nowadays). So I will be balancing my Cyber Security MSc taught by Royal Holloway, which I’m undertaking in part-time mode, with this part-time course in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Imperial College London. ...

I have founded my first company! As of a few days ago, Straylight Research Ltd is registered at the UK companies house. While I will be using this business as a catch-all holding for anything I do that is self-employed, the main focus though will be on building a software product that bridges the worlds of GenAI and Cyber Security. I am currently reading a lot of business books and self-employment sites to figure out just how to go about this, and how to market this product effectively. ...

The dust has settled on our move to Preston. After months and months being out of action, a serious upgrade, and two bike services, my Tern e-cargo bike is back in action! I am so happy to have it back in good working order! I had an excellent experience with Leisure Lakes Bikes in Preston, who I highly recommend and will be taking my bike to for any and all future services. ...

We’ve decided to rent a place in Preston, instead of Bolton. Preston still has reasonable train links into central Manchester, and offers a much cheaper rental market, and housing market. It also has great food and great cycling routes nearby. The neighbourhood we’re looking at is in South Ribble, so not technically in Preston, but it might as well be considered so. It is a very, very nice area with very large, very cheap, very peaceful homes. ...

We finally did it!! After 3+ years of attempting to sell our house, it has finally completed and we’ve moved out! I’m so happy! We are currently based around the Bolton/Preston area, looking to move into a rented place somewhere near Bolton transport links. We will be staying in this location until I’ve finished my ’learning sabbatical’ which involves studying for my distance learning MSc in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, getting my OSCP+ cert (Offensive Security Certified Pentester), and some other certs and learning goals which I haven’t fully defined yet. ...

I have been recently spending quite a lot of time working on the Hugo blog framework that I use to build all my web content and serve it up in static format. I think I will be moving over to using Github pages to serve my Hugo content for all blogs, because I don’t see any advantage to hosting it locally - I have already learned how to do that now, and the very real advantage to hosting on Github.io is that when my home server is down, my blogs are still up and readable. To that end, I have been working on Github actions to automate Hugo building and deployment to Github pages. I now have a good, working, pipeline that I can re-use on all 6 of my Hugo blog domains. I have also been adding some scripts locally for easier post authoring, which means it’s much easier for me to write content in a standard way and get started with a post without too much faffing about. I have finally fixed a problem that had been annoying me for ages - when I post my blog posts to social media, they used to look rubbish - just a static generic blog image showing my face, and no explanation of the content or a post-specific thumbnail. - In order to fix this, I have developed my own ‘spinoff’ of the Hugo PaperMod theme, called PaperMod-dpc . In this customised theme, I have made some improvements and adjustments for my own needs, including an ‘intelligent’ way of handling the social media opengraph data, where it will display much better and interesting preview content on social media.

Moving House We have been spending literally ALL our time packing heavy duty packing crates as part of our planned house sale and move to Bolton. We’re both under so much stress right now! I hope it’s over soon.

The house is in the final stages of being sold, and so I have taken down the house server down while we move. This is the server that self-hosts all my domains, including this website. In the meantime while it’s down, I have created a mirror of the hugo site automatically deploying on commit to wordswords.github.io - my static github pages site. This should work for this domain only, but not other domains, such as davidcraddock.games because this is all I’ve had time to do. ...

I have setup the excellent and free Thor Lite AV APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) malware scanner running on my server. It’s a paid product, but the free version is still much better than any other Linux anti-virus I’ve seen. I use it to find problematic files in the many files I download from torrents/unsavoury sources etc. It does a great job of identifying potentially suspicious files. The full version then goes on to move these files to a proprietry quarantine service. ...