Posts

After many many years of consideration, deliberation, hesitation, and procrastination, I have started a Masters degree at Royal Holloway, University of London. It is a distance-learning degree, and it is delivered in a part-time format, so it means I can fit it around (some) work. Fun party fact: University of London, Royal Holloway was mentioned in Dan Brown’s book ‘The Da Vinci Code’ as the university the Cryptographer heroine studied cryptography at Royal Holloway, in which would have been the ISG department , where I am to be studying!) It’s a shame the rest of the book is so terrible. ...

On hq.local, I have two Calibre libraries, one for EPUBs, and one for PDFs/comics. Size There are approximately 80,000 books across both libraries. Ebooks Inventory plus counts Comics Inventory plus counts But.. WHY?! I use both libraries both for recreational reading, (mostly comics and some written fiction) and research for work, as a tech worker, and as an aspiring ‘renaissance man ’. Hosting They are managed by Server.io’s Calibre docker containerised services . They are both running Calibre content server to serve directly to my e-readers. I also use Calibre Web Automated docker containerised services for both libraries. So in total, there are three services hosted, and three ways of accessing each Calibre library, per library - 1) the Calibre application running via a web-based remote desktop client, which I use for serious administration, but only sparingly as it takes up a lot of server resources when connected 2) The Calibre content server accessible on my e-readers and 3) The Calibre Web interface which I use to browse and read the books on computers. Sources I have built them up primarily from HumbleBundle.com book purchases, where the majority of the money goes to charity, and I still get a good set of e-books. I also ‘inherited’ a large collection of already DRM-stripped fiction books from a friend. Occasionally I use resources such as Anna’s Archive to download DRM-stripped books. Access Both libraries are accessible via my ZeroTier VPN . I use the Moon Reader application on Android devices to access the Calibre content server port, and I use the Calibre content server web interface on my Kobo H20 E-Reader . ...

I have spent a lot of time tidying up my hq.local server config, the IOC code that hosts all my services, including my Plex server, my full set of arr services,my calibre libraries, my SWAG Hugo blog sites, and various indexing, conversion and backup scripts. It should all be a lot easier to maintain going forward, and just ‘work’. That’s the intention anyway. For me to spend more time actually consuming the media on my digital media collection than collecting, indexing and maintaining the collection. ...

Portswigger Academy I have signed up to, and have been learning a lot from, the Portswigger Academy using the Burp Suite Community Edition. I have gone through all the ‘Apprentice’ labs, all 62 of them. I honestly think web application pentesting is something that could suit me incredibly well, given my background in web developer and SDET work. It’s so much more interesting than the stuff I was doing before! As soon as I can, I would love to purchase a license for the full version of Burp Suite, and start working on the other labs, with a view to take the certification they offer. ...

So today I finally ordered an 8TB moving platter disk drive so that I can expand the home server - hq.local. hq.local currently has about 19TB in disk space, almost all of which is fully utilised currently. The extra space will mean that I can rip more Blu-rays to put on the Plex server, and download more things through the *arr services. It has been frustrating being limited by hard disk space for at least 6 months, but before I simply could not afford a meaningful upgrade. ...

Someone made a comment the other day on a post I made on forum, that made me think. My post was asking ‘how to avoid becoming bitter and cynical as you age’. A pretty standard topic that I’ve seen affect many people as they get older. I outlined my life story so far, how some of it has been great, and how some of it has not been so great, and what I’ve achieved. ...

I’ve updated the repository that generates my CVs in PDF and HTML form, from a markdown file. The repository is https://github.com/wordswords/dpc-resume.git and it contains my patched version of a 8 years old markdown to HTML generator I found on the web, see here: https://github.com/wordswords/markdown-resume-2024 . I used the modified HTML CV generator to do most of the work, but then, instead of using the old inbuilt feature that doesn’t work very well anymore, to convert it to PDF, I use another repository that I found, https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/html-pdf-converter to convert the HTML into PDF using Chrome. ...

I recently converted my old server case, motherboard RAM and CPU into a Linux workstation, that I’ve installed Kali Linux on, and will help me up-skill in computer security. I put in a new Nvidia 710 graphics card with 2GB ram. It is entirely passively cooled and has low power usage. It is enough to do work-related stuff on my 1440p monitor. It required installed the legacy 470 graphics drivers to stop it crashing regularly, but it seems to be working fine now. ...

The year of 2024 comes to an end, and what a year it has been! As I usually do, I post (at least) yearly retrospectives, covering my life in the past year. This is one I posted mid-year 2024 , and this is 2023s . It is meant to inform people outside my inner social circle how my life has been going - to give an overview that people who talk to me every day may not have, for example. ...

I had a problem recently with the server where the server was constantly having to boot into ‘rescue mode’ due to a problem with the fstab. I didn’t understand at first why this kept happening. Then I realised that somehow, the sata disk order was occasionally being rearranged. This meant that the correct sata disk order was not being maintained, which meant that Kali Linux was kicking the server into rescue mode, as it was not finding the files it expected to at the correct mount points. /sda1 was becoming /sdc1, for example. ...