“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power” – Abe Lincoln.

I once tallied my power sockets distributed around my house at 84 active outlets. That’s a whole lotta power!  Of course my home has far more gadgets than that – more likely closer to 200 things which could reasonably consume power at any one time – but this was the count of active, powered outlets which could deliver power right then.  It may amaze you, or dismay you, or even simply make you say “so what?” but that gives an average of nine outlets per room in my mid-sized English semi-detached house.

Do I really have 9 things in each room which need power?  Is my home occupied at a ratio of almost 10:1 powered things to people?  Counting CPUs it gets crazy as I once estimated that there were over 32 intelligent things in my house, and that was about 5 years ago.  Since then my light bulbs have firmware updates and I don’t even have an internet TV, however everything else seems to have processing power in some way.

I’ve been on a drive to lower the whole cost of this and recently powered down my dual-CPU, dual-core server rack (with added acoustic padding and low-speed fans) as the Minecraft server herein was no longer needed.  It has been replaced by a smaller, more efficient rack of wall-mounted micro systems (of which see below) and I am saving up to replace them and move the NodeRED stuff to Resin.io to use Docker in place of the underlying Debian.  I like the idea of mixed hardware and movement of services across my environment, however don’t think the system services such as NodeRED nor Nginx are decomposed enough yet into micro-services.  Or are they?  Should I check?

Whatever, power demand from my farm has dropped by whopping amounts quarter on quarter and I am aiming to take it down further over the winter months by upgrading domestic appliances where possible, and monitoring and switching off low-power standby things overnight.  We shall see!

I don’t use cash anymore.

Or at least not so much as I did last year.  Everywhere I travel in the UK I tend to use a card to pay for things.  Although I still hold bills in my cash clip the notes are getting old and tattered as I very rarely use cash.  I’m using contactless (‘NFC’) a whole lot more.

This may be down to a couple of things: I don’t park using on-street meters a lot, the few times I park in a multi-story car park I pay using a card, and the coffee shops I frequent now take contactless payment pretty much everywhere.  In fact, I was so surprised at my local MacDonalds when they didn’t accept contactless for a burger recently that I was tempted to pay using an actual bank note.  My use of notes has receded for another reason: I mostly used them for paying for cab rides in the City but now take the London Underground in preference.

So my personal economy has gone cashless and now with the imminent arrival of Apple Pay into the European market I wonder how soon I will be using my phone instead of a card to pay?  I welcome it as taking multiple items (car keys, wallet, cash clip, mobile phone, laptop) as I travel bothers me and I typically do a ‘pat down’ of my clothes as I exit the office, exit a train, exit my home to check that I have my triumvirate of items.

I’m an IT professional with a long and varied career.  I guess that may stand for something when I say that passwords are like belts AND braces: they give a feeling of security and familiarity, but don’t add anything to the overall function of the system.  Perhaps you have a better analogy?

I’ve just gone through the routine of password changing for my employer and this is mandated every 90 days (due to some arcane European law) with attendant rules such as “must be eight characters or more” and including upper, lower case with special characters.  Now, that last piece was my undoing today.

I agree with the whole ‘complexity equals security’ thing to some degree but I have at least ten places that I regularly sign into for my work (corporate websites, email client, laptop, file sharing) and I like to keep them in sync – one day’s pain is enough without contemplating different passwords for each.  So I take a couple of hours each quarter and hit the buttons, working my way through a list of sites and technologies.  I do it in a particular order too – change my BYOD MDM before changing the underlying mobile email client’s so that I don’t time out my access via too many ‘sync’ events while working through the list.  It feels a little like standing on one leg while whistling Dixie.

And that’s the thing.  I’m very hardened to computing technology’s ability to impose stringent rules and logically do the illogical.  I once lost hundreds of hours of typing on a computer program I’d written while doing my degree, all down to a single press of the wrong button.  Ever since I’ve held no awe for computing’s infallibility, and today revealed another step on the downwards spiral.  For today I chose a special character for my password which represents a currency symbol – pounds, dollars or whatnot.  Most of the password systems accepted it but as I reached mid-point through the list one rejected it.  With a sigh I substituted another character but then the next rejected that also, leaving me now with THREE different variations of password and no way back.

In case you think I should just change them all to something else – my corporate systems at one point mandate that passwords should not be changed more than once per day, so no, that’s no solution also.  Until tomorrow…

We seriously need to rethink this computing paradigm.

One of the best explanations of IP addressing, I’ll just link to it from here.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/24043-wake-on-wan-warning-long/

I just upgraded my Macbook Air to OS X Yosemite.  But never mind about that; I realise that I’ve started building a bird’s nest of wires.

Recently I’ve become enamoured of a couple of things.  The first is saving money and especially that money which ‘leaks’ from my family budget through slow, grumbling month-on-month charges like electricity.  I measured my large 4U server with dual-core, dual-Opteron motherboard and it was chomping 183W every hour of every day.  As it was a £10 purchase off eBay the motherboard was a good buy but at my local electricity supplier’s rates that was costing me approximately £17 per month.  Too much!

So I started a drive to move services such as my web server and gaming software off it onto something lower powered.

I fell in love with small form factor PCs such as the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black.  They are truly astonishing and I have a wonderful collection of them on my wall, festooned with power cables and wires which keep them fed.  Take for example the Raspberry Pi – it draws just 250 milliamps when under light workload.  The Beaglebone Black (of which I am highly impressed) draws just over 300.  In terms of power usage that is much better than the large server hardware underneath them.  Of course they are less capable machines and do less – however for what they do that does not matter.  If you think of computers in terms of four main measures of CPU, memory, storage and network then not all computers need everything big.  Something like my little Raspberry Pi for example, let’s call him “hugo”, only need to monitor signals from the variety of devices I’ve scattered around my house and environment to measure things such as light levels.  Hugo then passes things off to another small computer – let’s call her “jess” – who then determines if house lights should be switched off or on.

Much more satisfying than having a great clunking computer doing all this is a little farm of smaller devices which share out the work.  Each can be specialised to do their job well, an added advantage is that they can be turned off independently and worked on without affecting what the others are doing.

I love my micro-PCs!

I just typed my password into a google search.

That was accidental; I run a multitude of different operating systems across a number of different hardware and virtual platforms.  Some of the places I’m required to enter passwords save them securely for me (for example, my corporate VPN client), others I use a password manager in the browser.  But sometimes I still have to enter them manually.

I like my bank – it uses _parts_ of my password so I never inadvertently type it anywhere.  However this entering of my password in Google happened because of a couple of things: being eternally vigilante throughout the day does not equate to having to enter a password multiple times, and screen blanking versus screen locking.  In the case in question one of my laptops went blank screen to powersave, I then started typing my unlock password (which is mandated changed every 90 days) and pressed enter, only to find that the screen had blanked but not locked.  Of course I can alter this so that when it blanks it also locks, but my point is that constantly entering passwords is counterproductive and some sort of presence (RFID? geo-fencing?) is more applicable than the simple you-have-not-touched-the-keyboard time out, and is probably better for security control.

And don’t get me on to the mis-handled SSO tokens, constant re-entry of passwords throughout the day as I use corporate internal websites!

Want to block ambulance-chasing lawyers?  Friends you don’t like anymore?  Random strangers?

Normally blocking incoming callers on the Android platform is easy: register their number as a contact, then select ‘block this caller’ from their contact entry.  However calls where caller-id is withheld or not known don’t have the equivalent under Android unless you use an app, and those apps would normally ask to have access to all your contacts and their details – surely a privacy warning!

I was randomly set upon by some law firms who wished me to claim personal injury for a no-fault accident in my car.  The fact that I was stationary at the time and received no injury didn’t deter them, so I looked for another way of doing this.  Google is your friend, of course and somewhere on the internet this little gem appeared.  Almost all the calls have dropped to zero now, along with blocking them on my home telephone line using a powerful wifi router from AVM, and by migrating my phone line physically to a VOIP system which allows greater control (- and that was done before the calls started, for cost reasons).

The easy answer is to create a entry in your Google userid contacts, the same one which you sign in on your telephone, with a list of phone numbers in text such as ‘Unknown’, ‘(Unknown)’, or ‘Private number’.  The reason for doing it off the phone is that the phone person app, which edits your contacts, does not allow text numbers, only numeric numbers.  This may vary of course by hardware – but the offline editing works for them all.  Now when your Google id is synced to your phone it will have a new entry with those numbers, and you can then edit them and select to block the caller.  Simples!