Geekerama

Tyred

/ masher / 4 Comments

A couple of months back, a warning appeared on the dashboard in my car.

“Unable to read Tyre Pressure Monitor Sensors”, it said.  Oh great, something else to pay out for!

But then it disappeared. Then it came back. And then it disappeared again.  Eventually, it came back and it stayed there.  I thought I’d better look into it.

It turns out that what I thought was probably something only featuring on higher end cars, has actually been fitted to all new cars in the UK since 2012.  In fact, not just in the UK: Tyre Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) have been mandatory in all new cars sold in Europe since 2014 and in the United States since 2008.

Well, I never knew that.

Further research showed that the most likely reason I was getting the warning was that the battery had probably failed on one or more units. There is one fitted into the valve on each wheel and the battery should last between 8 to 10 years, apparently.

My car is 9 years old.

A couple of weeks back, I phoned my local tyre fitter and he quoted me 110 quid to replace the sensor in each wheel. That’s 440 quid!  I decided that I could live without TPMS… you know, just like we did in the old days. We managed to get by without such technology for decades, didn’t we?

But, apparently, it’s now an MOT fail.

In the end, I decided just to replace the one that had died so as to get rid of the warning on the dash.  I shall likely have to go again in a few months when another one dies. Maybe it’s time for me to look at buying a new car. Hmmm…

So, be warned, if your car is coming up to nine or ten years old, you may well have some unexpected expense coming your way.

Skynet

/ masher / 4 Comments

This week, I found myself in need of a new motorcycle helmet and so yesterday, I took a drive over to the nearest decent motorcycle shop, which is in Milton Keynes.

As I drove along the A421 in the rain – because it is seemingly going to rain for the rest of our lives – I spotted a little robot making its way along the pavement.  Like a large coolbox on wheels, it trundled along at a fair old pace, taking its package (or packages or whatever) from point A to point B.  “That could never happen in Luton”, I mused, “They’d nick it… or push it over and set fire to it”.

It was doing a mundane task (as robots are meant to do), but nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking that someone, somewhere would be more than happy to do that delivery job.

Similarly, when the current Mrs M and I went to Prague, earlier in the year, we had an early flight from Heathrow and when we arrived at the airport it was almost deserted, save for a dozen or so passengers who were on the same flight as us.  As we stood, in an untidy line waiting for the Check-In desk to open, a robotic floor cleaner rounded the corner and headed in our direction.  Detecting something in the way, it stopped a few feet away from us. Several of us stepped aside and after a few seconds it continued on its journey.

It didn’t get far though, as a woman a little further along, hadn’t seen it, because she had her eyes glued to her phone screen.  The cleaner stopped a few feet away from her and waited.  After a minute, it started up again and turned its wheels to the left… its internal algorithm deciding that it could go around the obstacle in front of it.  At this point, the woman looked up and saw that she was in the way. She picked up her suitcase and stepped aside…. back into the path of the robot cleaner, which took evasive action and turned again.  Realising what she had done, the woman once again moved out of the way… straight back into its path.

At this point, the cleaner gave up and shut itself down and there it stayed, motionless in the middle of the gangway, until a human operative eventually came along and took it away.

I think we are still a long way from the rise of the machines.

And, as amusing as it had been, watching this lady dance with a robotic floor cleaner, again I couldn’t help but think that someone, somewhere would be appreciative of such a job… even if they didn’t get to tango with the passengers.

At our hotel in Prague, the restaurant had a robotic trolley, which would navigate its way around the tables at breakfast time, stopping for people to place empty plates etc onto it, which it would then take into the kitchen, emerging several minutes later, emptied and ready to collect some more. It was fun to watch this little motorised cart going about its business, but again, it was effectively taking someone’s job.

Robots have long been touted as being the future, of being able to free us all from the drudgery of having to do mundane jobs, but for some people, the chance to do a job – any job, no matter how mundane – is all that they want.

I’m all for technological advancement, but I do wonder if it should be at the cost of those who are already struggling to find any kind of gainful employment.

Sunday, Sunday, So Good To Me

/ masher / 1 Comment

As Sunday’s go, yesterday’s was a pretty good one.

The weather was perfect – if maybe on the slightly chilly side, early on – as I rode up to Bletchley Park to meet up with a couple of mates for our annual Nerds Day Out. It was a lovely morning and the ride was most enjoyable – tempered only by some irritating roadworks that I should have known to avoid, as they’ve been there for ages.

Despite having visited many times, one of our little group had never been, so we had a good excuse for us to go again.  Not that I need an excuse: I must have been a dozen times already, but I still always learn something new whenever I go.

We looked around many of the huts and also made the obligatory (for us) trip to the National Radio Museum, before grabbing some lunch in Hut 4 and then going to see the Bombe.

After several hours, we’d seen enough, bade our farewells and we each went our seperate ways.

Back home, I had time for a quick cup of tea before I took the dog out and then Mrs M and I jumped in the car and headed to Milton Keynes.

We had just enough time time to shove a Nando’s down our necks before quickly heading to the theatre to see Ben Elton in his Authentic Stupidity tour.

He was this: fucking excellent.

I won’t write a review here, because many others can do it so much better, so I’ll just say: he didn’t disappoint.

That phrase could similarly sum up my Sunday as a whole.

In the words of every failed contestant on Bullseye, “I’ve had a lovely day”.

Horizons

/ masher / 7 Comments

Last night, I dragged the current Mrs M along to a lecture talk on cosmology given by Professor Brian Cox.

To be fair, she came willingly. “You never know, I might enjoy it”, she said.

It started with lots of pretty pictures of stars and galaxies and over the next ninety minutes he went on to explain formation and expansion of the universe, ending on black hole singularities and event horizons, even using some ‘simple’ maths to explain black hole temperatures and Hawking Radiation.

It was fascinating.

Mrs M held up surprisingly well and found much of it very interesting, but I thnk that by the time we had reached Einstein’s General Theory, time in the theatre was moving somewhat slower for her than it was for me.

Relatively, of course.

Stamp It Out

/ masher / 6 Comments

You’d probably not be surprised to learn that when I was a kid, I had a stamp collection.

Yup, pretty nerdy, even back then.

It wasn’t a particularly impressive collection, but I had a proper stamp collecting album and I used to save up my pocket money and send off for little packets of stamps from Stanley Gibbons.

They were nothing fancy, just random stamps from around the world and I would spend hours sticking them into the album, using stamp hinges.

For some reason, the packets that Mr Gibbons sent me, often contained several Hungarian stamps. “Magya Posta”, I remember being printed on them. I ended up with far too many Hungarian stamps, but had no-one with whom to swap. That was the problem with being the only nerd in the village.

I don’t know what happened to my stamp collection… probably ended up at the tip.

But, I have started collecting again… with a difference.

Every so often, Royal Mail release a set of stamps to commemorate something or other. And, if it’s something I am interested in, I’ll buy them.

No faffing about with stamp hinges now though. These commemoration stamps come in a small presentation pack which folds neatly, to fit into a see-through plastic wallet.  Unfolded, there is usually a whole lot of blurb about whichever subject the stamps are celebrating.

Royal Mail also produce a nice imitation leather (plastic) binder with which to display your collection.

Although I’ve been collecting them for a few years, I haven’t bought that many – for instance, last year they brought out a set to commemorate the Spice Girls.

I didn’t buy those.

But I do have: Doctor Who; Star Trek; Dad’s Army; Only Fools & Horses; James Bond; Marvel; Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet; Black Adder; Paddington Bear and a lovely set depicting Weather Forecasting throughout the ages.

Oh, and a set of Penny Blacks, Reds and Blues… which would be worth a fortune, if they weren’t replicas.

Alarming Progress

/ masher / 8 Comments

A couple of years ago, I decided I should get an alarm for the garage.  It’s always had one, but it’s not particularly good and now that I have en expensive motorcycle and a not-so-expensive motorcycle and several hundred pounds worth of power tools, I thought maybe it was time to upgrade.

However, I wanted the alarm to have several additional features that are just not available on commercial alarm systems, and so I decided to build my own.

As I say, it’s been a couple of years now since I started this project and it is still sitting on the bench. That’s it in the photo.

Unfortunately, it’s been one of those projects that has gone on and off my back burner quite a lot, and the main reason for that has been the programming side of things – I’m rubbish at it.

It’s also one of those projects that has suffered extensive scope creep… everytime I think I’ve reached a point where I’m happy with it, I find myself thinking “Hmmm… it would be good if it did so and so, as well”, and it then spends another few weeks on the bench while I fail miserably to get the amended programming to work and then lose interest in it.

The most recent example of this is where I decided that the alarm sounder side of things should be changed.  The siren is incredibly loud and the flashing lights are very bright and (trying to imagine every scenario), I thought the neighbours probably wouldn’t appreciate that going on for twenty minutes in the middle of the night, if we were away.  I came up with a solution, but again, my programming skills let me down and so the project headed for it’s home on the back burner. Again.

A chap I was talking to on the radio turned out to be very good at this sort of thing and offered to help, and so one evening last week, over Google Meet, I shared my code with him.  It took him about ten minutes to figure it out – I was doing the right thing, but I was putting the code in the wrong place… damn nested If Then loops!

And so, it is now definitely finished (probably).  I just need tofinish building it, stick it in a box and fit it in the garage.

And then my garage will be protected by an alarm that:

  • Has multiple and adjustable length keypad entry codes
  • Different entry times depending on which entrance is used to access the garage
  • Single button-press alarm setting
  • Auto alarm arming (should you forget to set it when leaving the garage it will arm itself, providing a set of criteria have been met)
  • An incredibly loud siren that sounds in conjuction with some flashing floodlights inside the garage, but which turns off after a set period of time, leaving the floodlights flashing until the whole system resets itself after another set period.
  • A set of floodlights that flash as per above, but can also be switched on and off manually by the keypad when the system is unarmed, to provide a good working light when tinkering with motorbikes, etc.
  • Control of the normal garage lights – ie, the lights come on when the door is opened and go off again when the door is closed and the system is armed (either manually or automatically)
  • Battery backup if the mains supply fails.

So now I need to crack on and get it built (in truth, a lot of it is already done).

But it’s carrently on that back burner again, whilst I think of shit to write in this here blog.

Porch Pirates

/ masher / 7 Comments

On the way back from our morning walk, each day, Saber and I pass some houses in a small close.

One of the houses has a storm porch that covers the front door and the window to one side of it.

Under the window and on the step of the storm porch are a couple of large plant pots – not that I have ever seen anything growing out of them.

But, taped to the inside of the window glass is an A4 sized piece of paper and printed on that paper in a large font – large enough that I can read it easily from the footpath as we walk past – are the words “Delivery Drivers: Please Hide Parcels Behind Plant Pots”.

If I were a passing porch thief, I’d be tempted to take a look behind those pots each day to see if my luck was in.

Now, I don’t know if they have ever had anything stolen from their porch, but maybe a smaller, more discreet piece of paper – that can’t be read from twenty-five feet away – would be a better bet.

Either that, or take a leaf from Mark Rober’s book (I just love the stuff this guy does!)

S’cuse Me Guv… Got The Time?

/ masher / 6 Comments

Last night, I saw a lecture at the Royal Institution.

It was all about time – a subject that has always fascinated me.

Called “Fragile Times: Why Accurate And Resilient Timekeeping Is Critical”, I found it amusing – and, of course, somewhat ironic – that it started two and a half minutes late.

But it was enjoyable, nonetheless.

Several speakers from the National Physics Laboratory, gave talks covering their particualr fields of expertise: starting off with a bit of history, then some examples of areas where accurate timekeeping is essential; onto the current range of atomic clocks, using caesium fountains and hydrogen masers and finally onto the latest devices which are under development: optical clocks.

With an uncertainty of just a couple of parts in 1018  these latest timepieces are 100 times more accurate than the best atomic clocks we have today.

To give an example of the level of accuracy they hope to achieve, one of the speakers said that it would be like calculating the age of the universe (circa 14 billion years)… to within half a second.

Boom! Mind blown.

Juxtaposition

/ masher / 6 Comments

I was walking the dog through the woods, early this morning.

Early Sunday mornings are a great time: nobody about.

I could tell I was the first to be treading the multiple paths that criss-cross the woods, this morning, by the amount of cobwebs that I walked into.

As I walked, I was thinking about nerdy stuff – as I often do.  AX25 Packet Radio links and the issues I’m having with getting some connections, if you must know.

I do a lot of thinking in those woods. Some of my best ideas have come to me whilst I been walking the dog through there. If I have a problem, more often than not, I have solved it whilst traipsing along the many paths that have been worn into place by the footsteps of a thousand dog-walkers. All thinking their own thoughts… some nerdy, some not, I am guessing.

I wandered along, deep in thought.

And then the rising sun reached a point where it’s light lit everything around me with a warm orange glow.

Suddenly torn from my nerdy thoughts, I stopped and took in my surroundings.  Orange sunlight dappled playfully through the leaves – still green but with a few brown autumnal colours starting to appear. The silence was delightful, with the warm breeze  causing just a few rustles in the branches of the trees.  Saber stood at my side, ears up, motionless but alert, her nose thrust high in the air. She could smell something.  About 20 metres away, I could see a Muntjack deer. Saber couldn’t see it from her low vantage point. The deer was stood motionless too, aware of our presence and not wanting to give away it’s location.

The deer; the trees; the sun; the stillness… this was nature at her finest.  A perfect morning.

I walked on.

“Ahh, now, what if I reduce the packet size using PACLEN…”

“Some salt on your MD5 hash, sir?”

/ masher / 11 Comments

I reckon only 50% of my readership will understand that post title.

The other one will have no idea.

Anyway, I was reading an article last week, about the security of the passwords we all use.

Most of us pick something memorable and use that for everything… which is not a good idea!

I have my own system, which I have always considered to be pretty difficult for the hackers to crack, but as computing power gets faster and cracking software gets better, I wondered whether that would still be the case.  And of course, now that we all have access to AI systems, who knows how much quicker and easier it will be for the naughty hackers  to crack our passwords.

From what I can gather – and put simply – the longer the password, the more difficult it is to crack. But of course, having different 18-character passwords for everything, isn’t easy.  We need a compromise between security and convenience.

As such, I took a long, hard look at the system I use.  All my internet login passwords use a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters as shown in the far right column in the table above. They tend to be of different lengths, but generally all fall into the orange area… which is fine: if some hacker wants to spend three years trying to get into my Cineworld account, then so be it.

On the financial side of things – banking logins, etc – I use a slightly stronger system and it all falls into the the yellow area. Coupled with 2FA, I feel this is probably secure enough.

But, whilst my system makes it pretty easy for me  – and me alone –  to guess my passwords, there are still too many for me to try and remember (bearing in mind, you normally need to remember a login name as well as a password). And so, I use a Password Manager on my phone – with a desktop application – and it currently holds about 200 different passwords.

There are plenty of good ones available – I won’t be recommending any here, just do a search – and even the free ones look pretty good.

With a Password Manager, you only need to remember one master password – so make it a good one and make sure you don’t forget it!

Of course, you may be thinking that if I lose my phone and someone then finds it and manages to guess the sign-in pattern I use, and then also somehow figures out the master password for the Password Manager, then they would have access to all of my passwords.  But no: without that key piece of info about each password, that is known only to me, they won’t get very far.

So, after several days of looking at different password systems and different Password Managers, I’m happy that my current system is up to the job.

So long as I don’t accidentally download a keylogger.

Nerds Day Out

/ masher / 9 Comments

Last Saturday afternoon, still tired from my Friday night out withy the missus, myself and a couple of mates met up in that London, for a day of nerdiness at The Science Museum.

The last time I had been there, was many years ago with the family. We didn’t stay long, that time, because it turns out my family  – unlike me – have no sense of wonder and lack any thirst for knowledge.

To be fair, the kids were only little at the time and could probably only take so much of seeing their dad get over-excited in front of a mock-up of the lunar lander.

But this time, there were no kids… apart from those inside three grown men with a combined age of 130.

For several hours we wandered around, marveling at this, that and some of the other.

It was impossible to see it all in just one visit, but we gave it a helluver good go!

The area devoted to telecommunications was probably my favourite (as you might guess) and I could easily have spent the whole day just in that section.

Once we’d had enough, we headed out onto the street and went in search of a pub that sold food.

The first one we came to was packed to the rafters – as one might expect on a Saturday night in that London. As was the next one, but luckily, just as we were about to give up on that one, a table became available and we grabbed it.

Many beers (and a couple of whiskys) later, having put the world to rights several times over, closing time arrived and we were turfed out.

We parted company and boarded our respective trains home.

I fell asleep on the tube and was fortunate to wake up just in time.

I then also fell asleep on the mainline train. Luckily for me, it terminated at Luton. It was the sound of the driver slamming his door on the way out, which woke me.

With BST arriving and adding a virtual hour to my watch, it was a long old day.

But, as Bill (and/or Ted) might say, it was most excellent.

Quantumania

/ masher / 6 Comments

Last night, the kids and I went to the pictures, to see the latest Marvel film – Ant Man & The Wasp: Quantumania.

Ant Man has never been one of my more favoured protagonists from the Marvel cannon, but I do like Paul Rudd’s portrayal of the character and I did enjoy the previous two efforts, so this one was always going to be on the cards for us.

Also, this is the first film in Phase 5, so whoever the big bad guy is in this one, he’s also likely to feature as the big bad guy in all the films that Marvel release over the next couple of years.

He’s the new Thanos.

Of course, ‘he’ could be a ‘she’… I’m not saying.

But, unfortunately, this film just didn’t work for me.  It was too silly (yes, I know all Marvel films are silly, but this one was a little too much for my tastes) and it just didn’t hold my attention.

In fact, I fell asleep half way through and missed a big chunk of it.

Also – as is to be expected in a film like this – there was a lot of CGI. It was good, but it didn’t feel as well done as in some other films – I’m thinking here of the recent Avatar- Way Of Water, where the CGI was done so well, that I didn’t feel I was watching animated characters.

Overall, I enjoyed most of what I saw though and I’m suitably impressed with the new bad guy. It’s enough to give me hope for the future releases in this phase of the MCU.