Having a rather long commute to the office, there are a number of podcasts that I listen to. This morning I was catching up with some old Planet Money1 episodes and came across the Anatomy of a Hustle, which talks about Paul Manafort who has been helping on various political campaigns, including in Ukraine. He was caught trying to get payments from this work back to the US via accounts in Cyprus, shell companies and property. ...

The Java user group of Switzerland organised a continuous delivery workshop last night, which was run by Oliver Nautsch, with a really nice structure. Oliver has documented the process, with slides in GitHub, so if anyone missed the session, you can run through the exercises in your own time. Before the session we were given instructions describing what we would need to install on our laptops ahead of time. This basically involved cloning a GitHub repository and then using vagrant to start up a Linux virtual machine. ...

For a long time, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to play around with two factor authentication (2FA) for the root account on my Raspberry Pi’s. This week I’ve finally got around to doing it, and as with so many tasks on the Pi, once you get going it’s pretty straight forward, with the google authenticator. The steps that I want to follow would be: Create a standard user account, from which the sudo commands will be issued. Block ssh access to the root user Enable Google authenticator for sudo commands Setting up sudo access If you have not already created personal accounts on your box, run the adduser command: ...

Over the past few months I’ve been changing out the light in our apartment for some of the plain white Philips Hue lamps. On the whole I’ve been pretty impressed. Using apps like Yonomi I was able to set up a kids bedtime routine, where with the click of a single button, the main lamp in the kids room turns off, the side lamp dims to 1% and the Sonos starts playing lullabies at 15% volume. ...

Since the Google Chromecast was first introduced I’ve loved the device. It just feels like the fight way to control the TV, you use the rich interface on your phone to find what you want to watch and then with the press of a button it’s on your TV. Having only played briefly with Apple TV, and it’s silly little remote control, Chromecast just feels right. There were some issues with the original Chromecast where streaming would occasionally buffer. With Netflix it was fine, but Plex did have quite a few issues, even with the WiFi access point in the same room. Ensuring that the WiFi connection to the Chromecast was not encrypted by Plex did help (as the Chromecast only has limited processing power), but there were still issues. ...

I should start this off by saying I love both my QNAP NAS and the online backup service provided by CrashPlan. When I found that there were packages that could be installed on the NAS which would automatically backup to the cloud it seemed like the perfect solution. At home I make sure all photos get copied to the NAS, then the CrashPlan process does it’s magic and makes sure that they are all backedup. ...

It has taken me a long time to get around to finally setting up the Raspberty Pi’s I received over Christmas. Supprisingly, it was very simple to setup the Pi, once over coming my only real issue. I had some old 4GB SD cards lying around, which I wanted to use. However, it would appear that the official Raspbian download I was working with needed an 8Gb card to install. At this point I sarted looking for an alternative and found minibian, a cutdown version of the Raspbian distribution without the GUI components. ...

Years ago I installed WhatsApp on my phone. When I opened it up for the first time, I was asked if I wanted to upload my entire contact list onto their servers. I was unsure if I should really do this, as the contact data is not mine to give away. There is no way I could choose which of the contacts I wanted to share with WhatsApp, and in the end decided I would rather just delete the application. ...

So guess what some nice people got me for Christmas? Now I need to start some new projects. I think that first on the list will be moving this website from an old laptop.

I am not sure what keeps drawing me back. I want to blog, start a little, then have no time for it, so give up again. So here is another attempt at setting up a @withknown server at home to see if I can keep going for more than 5 minutes. I already appear to be having some issues with dyndns, which does not appear to propagate my address out to everyone. But that is something to work on later.