I brought a Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard from Ebay but unfortunately it came with no wireless dongle. This rendered the keyboard pretty useless. The dongles are all unique to the keyboard. This left me with two options. Build a keyboard sniffer that can read any Microsoft wireless keyboard or hack a wire into the back. I decided the latter made me feel more comfortable.

Luckily somebody was way ahead of me with both of these options so I decided to go with the slightly more secure wired version. Blttll on github had created a US layout version for Microsoft Sculpt keyboards. and kindlly shared not only the code but also to CAD file to make a board.

I sent the board designs off to oshpark and within a couple of weeks had the boards and the Teensy and connector back and was ready to go.

/images/2018/sculpt_components.thumbnail.jpg

Hooking it all up I plugged it in and programmed the Teensy with the code and let it reboot. It works! I'm always surprised when these things do just work. As I tapped more keys more worked and where in the right place. I really thought I was in for a long session of remapping all the keys for the UK layout. Turns out there where only two keys missing. The and the #. So it was just a case of working out where on the matrix those keys live and updating the code to reflect that.

Most keyboards have a matrix system that has two grids of wires, one horizontal and one vertical. When you press a key it makes a connection between two of the lines, one in each direction. That way you don't need to have a wire for each key and the controller in the keyboard just scans all the wires two at a time and listens for things that are connected. It's slightly more complex I than that I think but it's the basic idea.

I was building this all at the hackspace. both because they have some good soldering irons but also because there is always somebody about to help. I worked out that the tmk code that I was using allowed you to put the keyboard into various debugging modes. These would then send various outputs about the keys you are pressing to the HID driver that you can then look at with a hid-listen. program. So off I went and quickly found out that the keys where wired up and I could work out where on the matrix they are. All I had to do then was add them to the three look up tables in the software that define the keyboard. This is where I came a little unstuck, I just could not get my head round how they all related and on my first go manage to remap the right shift to something odd and that's about it. Luckily help was on hand and John happend to ask what I was up to and after explaing where I was stuck pointed me to the right place to put the right numbers. We compiled it one more time and progammed the keyboard again and Yeh! we have a working # key. Then following the same pattern we where able to get the key working and it's all great! Thank you John.

Then it was just a case of making some small modifications to the case with a Dremmel to fit the new board in, drilling a hole in the back to let the cable out and it's all working fine. Just waiting for some sugru to set to hold the cable in place.

I am really happy I could save this one from the bin and in fact I'm using the keyboard right now and it's great although it's highlihgting how bad my typing is as I'm always reaching out to the wrong keys and now there is a gap in the middle I can't do that. I have sent a pull request on github to see if I can get my changes added upstream but I hope at least other might see that if they are hoping to do the same.

The Making of a Drinks Box

2017-09-21 15:00

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As a self respecting flat owner I felt the need to build my own drinks cabinet. I wanted somewhere I could keep some bottles but also sit on or use as a stool. I think in the end I managed it.

I started with the design that Paul Sellers used for his Joiner's toolbox video and adapted it for my design. Measured the tallest of my drinks bottles and the space I had.

Step one, as always seems to be the case, was gluing up some panels. I decided to use pine again as it's cheap and I intended to use paint. Cutting the planks to length, gluing up the panels and planing things flat. Even at this seeming rough stage I am learning it's important to get things accurate. Later on I will be relying on that to make everything come together.

Then came some dovetails. I went quite large as not only are they easier to cut but also I would be painting over them so they would not show that much. I quite enjoy the dovetail making now. My saw technique is now up to average so most of the time they come out okay first time. A sharp chisel and a few carefully placed hammer blows and the waste is remove and a clean gap is formed. Most of my joints do have a more functional look to them right now. Maybe I'll do some soon with a tighter pattern.

Fitting the base was fun, cutting the inside to be exactly the right length. You just have to be careful. There is quite a lot of back and forth. At this point I pretty much stopped measuring things and went of the box itself. Cut one set of dovetails, mark them as back right, then offer up the corner to the box and mark up for the next set.

After that was all assembled I posted a few pics online and some people commented that it would be a shame if the dovetails are all covered up. So I decided on a comprimise and taped them off. Painting the whole thing with milk paint. Then removing the masking to reveal the dovetails. Finally applying a coat of Osomo to seal it all up.

Next up was getting the lid together. My first thought was to use some oak or cherry to make a bit of a feature but in the end I decided to go for pine with a cover. At this point I just wanted to get it done and I figured I could work out what to do with the top at a later date.

Having made the top I was pondering on how to do the covering when I remembered that there was an upholsterer round the corner who did open days where you could bring what you like and she would teach you how to cover it.

So I booked a day with Jo Walton and set off with the lid under my arm.

Jo has space in a small studio on FossGate, in York, and I spent a couple of great mornings there just working through adding the cover to the box. Jo showed me what I was supposed to be doing and provided all the right tools an materials. I set of cutting out the foam and padding then the material for the cover. Then started to add the nails to secure it down. All the time Jo was offering just the right amount of guidance and review. It was a really relaxing time as I find most hand crafts to be. I don't think I am going to be able to make a living at the rate I was going but I think it came out quite well. I will definitely be going back for other things as I make them.

The last part was to add a little magic. This came in the form of some LEDs round the base and a silver liner on the bottom. Now when you open the lid it sparkles. I just used a USB powerbank and a microswitch on the lid. This then powers up a DigiSpark Attiny85 board. I may replace that at some point as it takes ages to start up.

A little strip of aluminium finished off the lid and it's all done.

More images over in the Gallery

Velocity Conference Amsterdam

2017-01-31 15:00

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At the end of last year I attended the Velocity conference in Amsterdam. It was paid for by UCISA as part of their bursary scheme. So many thanks to them for having the foresight to see the benefit of these types of events.

Velocity is a conference focused around Web Application development and performance. It deals with all aspects of producing fast and efficient web applications. It has a wide audience ( in a narrow field if that makes sense ). I talked to front end web developers, business app producers and traditional operations folks. From companies large and small.

There seemed to be three main threads to the talks. Technical operations performance, such as server setups, monitoring and configuration. Application level changes, such as progressive web apps and image optimisation. And Finally the softer side of being part of one of those teams, such as diversity in your team, project based teamwork or team motivation. A lot of the talks crossed some of these areas but it felt to me they where the broad sections.

I'm not going to talk much about specific talks here but will try and summarise what I thought where the sub topics.

Progressive web apps

They are everywhere. Nearly all the talks mentioned them in some fashion. It seems these are going to become more and more important over the coming years. While at their most basic they let you scale your website to fit on many device types they are starting to add a lot more to apps in general. There is support for notifications and adding the "app" to the desktop or application menus in the browsers. This means that you can create what feels like a native application using web technologies. We are already seeing people ship applications that are nothing more than a thin wrapper around a web rendering engine. You should be looking at these now. Even if you are not using all the features that they suggest you can already be taking advantage of the boost in performance you get and helping future proof you a bit.

Http/2

There where a few talks about http/2 the new version of the standard that drives the web. http/2 is out there and supported by all modern browsers now. Talks varied from the W3C proposing new additions to improve performance to people writing servers and studying how browsers interact with http/2. While some of the newer and deeper technical details where overkill for general use it's still good to know how these things work under the hood. Like how a web browser will load as far as the end of the head section in a web page and then build a download map for what to do next. It might switch to download the images and stylesheets first then the rest of the page. You page, site and server can help the browser with these decisions by providing maps and hints. Push is a part of http/2. The server can push some things that it thinks the browser might need next. This leads to servers pushing things that the browser already has cached. So now there is a cache digest that the client can send with the first request so the server knows what the client has cached. While browser support is patchy there is a cacher-digest.js script to fall back on. The upcoming QUIC protocol based on UDP seems interesting as it cuts out a lot of the round trip time (RTT) for a packet to get to a client. These can all add up so by doing more things asynchronously the overall speed can be improved. There are lots of changes in http/2 some of which are easy to get the benefit from and others will only become obvious as app frameworks adapt to these new paradigms. In the meant time it looks like it's about time to turn it on.

Team diversity and development.

There where quite a lot of talks about the soft side of the craft. One of the keynotes was themed on how a diverse team is a more productive team and hiring in your own image ends up creating a team that is fixed in its ways. Other talks where about how teams have scaled, switching to smaller mixed teams with cross group knowledge sharing. I think my favourite one though came from a member of the wellness team ( What your enterprise might call HR) for the German company who talked about their review process and how that works when you don't have any managers. They essentially get people to volunteer to be reviewers, select the good ones, and then everybody gets to pick who does their review. The opening talk, Word Done vs Work as Imagined, touched on many things but a couple that stood out where about setting metrics and automated alerts vs an human skill and experience. On the first point they used the fact that too many alarms went off on a flight and the pilots had to ignore them and fly using experience. This maybe true to some extent in this instance but it also might point to bad alerting interface. I would recommend that you read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande at some point though for an interesting looks at how sometimes human instincts need some backup. Next up was the measurement, reward and punishment of workers using metrics a firm favourite of the UK Government. I think it still bears repeating that you get out only what the metrics are requiring of people so be careful. If you set a 4 hour minimum to be seen in A+E then staff, even good ones like doctors and nurses, will bend and break all the other rules to achieve that. Systems are invented to meet the target even if that is a worse way of doing things.

Containers and system reliability

Containers have moved on and are no longer a big topic at conferences I think. I don't know where they are on the hype curve but it seems that the assumption with a lot of the talks was that you where already running them. Topics like Immutable Infrastructure and even Serverless did get a mention now and again. It feels like the technology stack has shifted slightly again. People are concerned with Docker Swarm or Kubernetes for managing applications rather than managing servers specifically. It seems assumed that you will be running on some sort of "cloud" where groups of "servers" come and go. Now we are looking at how to make systems tolerate failure rather than be 100% reliable. Gone are the Dual power supplies and redundant networking being replaced with autosizing clouds and redundant cloud suppliers. Fun times.

Metrics

Metrics are key to any sort of modern development. They give insight into what is working and what is not. They let you test changes and make sure they are not breaking things in subtle ways. Gathering and processing metrics is hard. We can very simply monitor systems and times but figuring out what is important or what an issue looks like is more tricky. It does not seem that long ago that the #monitoringsucks hashtag was all the rage, closely followed by the slightly more positive #monitinglove one. At the time Nagios and Cacti where the tool and we struggled to make use of them where we could. Now it feels we are spoilt for choice. There seemed to be two main themes to the talks those talking about how to gather the statistics and those dealing with interpreting them. On the gathering side probably the most interesting for me was the description of the close integration of Kubernetes and Prometheus. These two tools seem to be the very hot at the moment and are starting to change the way we think about our infrastructure. Completing the move from snowflake servers that we nurture and run applications on to 'pods' that house applications that we run on clusters. With this shift in complexity we need new tools to manage this. Kubernetes handles the running and scaling of the applications themselves while Prometheus gives us the eyes into the system. The other side of metrics is interpreting them. I think my favourite talk here was 'How the users see the data'. It gave a whistle stop tour of how to display metrics. A lot of it based on the work of William S Cleveland and his Graphical Perception paper Showing how people read graphs and giving advice on how to display data to get the most meaning. Some examples included "Stacked anything is nearly always a mistake as are pie charts. Use two charts or only show the important data". Or that there is a scale on which people are better are interpreting data that goes from Position on a common scale to shading. So we are much better at recognising values and difference on a scale than we are say angles or direction. There is a lot more to it than that but I feel I learned a lot there. Anomaly detection was also a theme that cropped up, people have differing opinions on what works and what does not but when you are starting to gather large groups of statics. I attended the tutorial on the last day about using some basic AI and stats in python to spot anomalies in your data even if its not regular. While it was interesting it did feel like it needed a lot of manual work to get the best results so you might need to focus on just a few important metrics.

Continuous Security

The concept of Continuous Delivery is well established in the DevOps world. Keeping the software always deploy-able at all times. Security on the other hand is much more of a mixed bag. The tag DevOpsSecBiz was proposed and while the name will probably not take off it does point to a different approach. First things first you have to get a commitment from the project sponsor or manager that security is important. Then you can start to apply all the techniques that you learned from DevOps to add in security. Sit your teams together, all working towards the same goal including security. Don't make it a "security team" problem that you tack on at the end. Start the project with threat modelling, get your developers to buy into this. Then automate the tests, add them to the infrastructure. Start adding tests to your code for security, unit tests that reflect your goals. Start running checkers for bad code smells and practices in the builds. Add in automatic scanners in test and production. Code reviews, OWASP ASVS is a good starting point. I think one of the final points of the talks was interesting a focus on the security team not being off somewhere "handling security" and probing and testing but being part of the teams improving process and culture.

Tutorials

The final day was tutorials. This was a mixed bag. I chose to do a mixture of topics so I would get a taster of each. It was great to learn about optimising images for the web lots of good things in that one. Getting to explore the basic data science allowed me to think about some of the talks from the previous couple of days. The first tutorial was a programming one using eBPF, which is a low level kernel task that is really powerful. I could have spent most of the day playing with that but it seems to be at odds with the worlds of containers and disposable infrastructure. It does highlight how the split is forming, there seem to be now companies that provide large infrastructure and have the need to dig that deep and a move for most companies to consume those container or even functions hosting services. I do wonder how long my role as a generic systems administrator will exist. Where should I aim for next?

Overall

The conference felt very large and quite anonymous. I managed to speak to quite a few people over lunch and I think things like the birds of a feather (BOF) tables at lunch helped open people up a bit. As ever with techy conferences though I think this can be an awkward time for a lot of people. It felt a shame that there was not something on after the event. People stood around chatting to their peers or the vendors for a while then went off. I have been to other conferences where that time seems better spent in a group. ( Having said that by day three I was shattered! ) The packed schedule gave little time to thinking, which may seem weird but as I read through the notes I managed to scratch out in between sessions it seems I could have done with some more time to digest some of this. Not sure there is a sensible solution to that one though.

Systemd Boot order and Tomcat7 and nslcd

2016-07-21 10:00

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I had a problem yesterday with on of our servers not starting up tomcat after a reboot. I eventually tracked it down to an error in the boot ordering. I thought it might be useful to write down the steps I took to work out what was happening and how I fixed it.

First thing is tracking down the error. The logs has the following line:

start-stop-daemon: user 'xyz' not found

Now this suggests that the users I am trying to run tomcat as is not available. This is linked to the fact that the user xyz is a user that comes from ldap. My hunch is that this is a boot order thing. So how do we start to find out what is going on?

Luckily systemd comes with quite a lot of tools to help sort this out. But first of all a quick scan of the logs shows that nslcd, the daemon that provides ldap users, does indeed start after tomcat.

Lets start to look at what is happening. The first tool I picked on is 'systemd-analyse' and this shows a little information.

systemd-analyze dot "tomcat7*"
digraph systemd {
	"graphical.target"->"tomcat7.service" [color="green"];
	"graphical.target"->"tomcat7.service" [color="grey66"];
	"multi-user.target"->"tomcat7.service" [color="green"];
	"multi-user.target"->"tomcat7.service" [color="grey66"];
	"shutdown.target"->"tomcat7.service" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"network-online.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"local-fs.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"remote-fs.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"systemd-journald.socket" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"sysinit.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"basic.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"nss-lookup.target" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"system.slice" [color="green"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"sysinit.target" [color="black"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"system.slice" [color="black"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"network-online.target" [color="grey66"];
	"tomcat7.service"->"shutdown.target" [color="red"];
}

This is a dot file and you can view it in graphical form using something like dotty but for this small section I can read it fine. We can see here that there is not dependency between the two services that we are interested in. Now it maybe there are other things in play here but lets continue to look at nslcd.

systemd-analyze dot "nslcd*"
   digraph systemd {
	"atd.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"courier-pop-ssl.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"apache2.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"courier-ldap.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"kdm.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"mail-transport-agent.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"masqmail.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"courier-pop.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"graphical.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"graphical.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="grey66"];
	"kolab-cyrus-common.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"multi-user.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"multi-user.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="grey66"];
	"nullmailer.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"system.slice" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"time-sync.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"basic.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"network-online.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"remote-fs.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"nss-lookup.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"slapd.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"sysinit.target" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"systemd-journald.socket" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"shishi-kdc.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"heimdal-kcm.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"heimdal-kdc.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"krb5-kdc.service" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"systemd-journald-dev-log.socket" [color="green"];
	"nslcd.service"->"sysinit.target" [color="black"];
	"nslcd.service"->"system.slice" [color="black"];
	"nslcd.service"->"network-online.target" [color="grey66"];
	"nslcd.service"->"shutdown.target" [color="red"];
	"citadel.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"courier-mta.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"cyrus-imapd.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"sendmail.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"cron.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"wdm.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"xdm.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"courier-mta-ssl.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"am-utils.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"slim.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"autofs.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"shutdown.target"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"display-manager.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"gdm3.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"exim4.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
	"dovecot.service"->"nslcd.service" [color="green"];
}

Again not link between the two but notice all those other services? I think we are heading in the right direction. Time for a different tool now. Lets look at the config for some of these services.

systemctl cat tomcat7
    # /run/systemd/generator.late/tomcat7.service
    # Automatically generated by systemd-sysv-generator

    [Unit]
    Documentation=man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    SourcePath=/etc/init.d/tomcat7
    Description=LSB: Start Tomcat.
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=graphical.target
    Before=shutdown.target
    After=local-fs.target
    After=remote-fs.target
    After=network-online.target
    After=nss-lookup.target
    Wants=network-online.target
    Conflicts=shutdown.target

    [Service]
    Type=forking
    Restart=no
    TimeoutSec=5min
    IgnoreSIGPIPE=no
    KillMode=process
    GuessMainPID=no
    RemainAfterExit=yes
    ExecStart=/etc/init.d/tomcat7 start
    ExecStop=/etc/init.d/tomcat7 stop

This tells us a couple of things. First off systemd is using the old sysv init script to start tomcat. And second there is little in there to indicate a dependency on anything more than a basic system. Now lets look at nslcd

systemctl cat nslcd
    /run/systemd/generator.late/nslcd.service
    # Automatically generated by systemd-sysv-generator

    [Unit]
    Documentation=man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    SourcePath=/etc/init.d/nslcd
    Description=LSB: LDAP connection daemon
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=multi-user.target
    Before=graphical.target
    Before=shutdown.target
    Before=mail-transport-agent.target
    Before=display-manager.service
    Before=am-utils.service
    Before=apache2.service
    Before=atd.service
    Before=autofs.service
    Before=citadel.service
    Before=courier-ldap.service
    Before=courier-mta.service
    Before=courier-mta-ssl.service
    Before=courier-pop.service
    Before=courier-pop-ssl.service
    Before=cron.service
    Before=cyrus-imapd.service
    Before=dovecot.service
    Before=exim4.service
    Before=gdm3.service
    Before=kdm.service
    Before=kolab-cyrus-common.service
    Before=mail-transport-agent.target
    Before=masqmail.service
    Before=nullmailer.service
    Before=sendmail.service
    Before=slim.service
    Before=wdm.service
    Before=xdm.service
    After=remote-fs.target
    After=systemd-journald-dev-log.socket
    After=time-sync.target
    After=nss-lookup.target
    After=network-online.target
    After=slapd.service
    After=krb5-kdc.service
    After=heimdal-kdc.service
    After=heimdal-kcm.service
    After=shishi-kdc.service
    Wants=network-online.target
    Conflicts=shutdown.target

    [Service]
    Type=forking
    Restart=no
    TimeoutSec=5min
    IgnoreSIGPIPE=no
    KillMode=process

Ah okay antother sysv init script and this is where my deps are defined. Not that this info is different from the systemd-analyse output as it shows the config from the files and not a full dependency tree. So lets have a look at the top of the nslcd init script:

head -35 /etc/init.d/nslcd |tail -15

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nslcd
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog $time
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Should-Start:      $named $network slapd krb5-kdc heimdal-kdc heimdal-kcm shishi-kdc
# Should-Stop:       $network
# X-Start-Before:    $mail-transport-agent $x-display-manager am-utils apache2 atd autofs citadel courier-ldap courier-mta courier-mta-ssl courier-pop courier-pop-ssl cron cyrus-imapd dovecot exim4 gdm3 kdm kolab-cyrus-common mail-transport-agent masqmail nullmailer sendmail slim wdm xdm
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: LDAP connection daemon
# Description:       nslcd is a LDAP connection daemon that is used to
#                    do LDAP queries for the NSS and PAM modules.
### END INIT INFO

These are the LSB headers that systemd will use to work out the start order for old sysv init scripts. And the X-Start-Before header is the one we want to fix. Adding "tomcat7 tomcat8" to the end of that line will "fix" this and I have added a bug to ubuntu to try and get that fixed. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nss-pam-ldapd/+bug/1605167

In actual fact I ended up adding "nslcd" to the end of the Required-Start line in the tomcat7 init script as it felt like a better fit for my setup.

I think the correct systemd way is to add a file '/etc/systemd/system/tomcat7.service.d/override.conf' with the following content

[Unit]
After=nslcd.service

This can be done simply by running 'systemctl edit tomcat7'.

Either of those solution seem to be a little odd, having all those services hard coded seems odd. Maybe a better solution would be to have another $ service such as $network_users and have services depend on that?

I made myself some bathroom drawers.

2016-05-14 19:03

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Bathroom Drawers

Over the last few weeks I have made a set of bathroom drawers. I had one of those wire racks that came with the flat I am renting and its just a mess, slightly rusty and collecting dust. Plus it does not fit everything in.

I set about making a simple set of drawers. I was not going from any designs so just made it square all round. I wanted the bottom drawer to hinge out at the bottom to give access in the small space that it fits in. The bottom drawer is all front as it takes mostly tall bottles of cleaner and the like. Seems to work quite well. Top drawer is quite standard I think. I brought the back in a little so that the side rails are still supporting it when you can see everything in it.

Top Drawer Until I had finished it there was still no plan for the finish. I quite like a shellac or Osmo oil but I don't actually like pine furniture that much so I went with a grey paint. It's a Rustins chalk paint so it went on really easy. I put a coat of shellac on the whole thing inside and out before I had fitted the bottom drawer. Then the chalk paint, two coats. Finished the whole thing off with a couple of coats of Osmo Oil.

This project to a little longer than expected I think mostly because I was not confident about the bottom hinge idea so kept putting off building it up. It turns out this was very simple in the end and the system seems to work very well so far.

Bottom Drawer It's another wonky build, the main frame just came out slightly off square all round so I had to shave the bottom flat and make the drawers to fit. I think I got frustrated at that point so did not finish the joints or sides off properly and it shows on the final object. One of the differences with a paint finish is that the grain pattern does not cover up any of the badly finished bits. It's a shame looking back that I did not go over those bits with more care. All told I think I know the exact times that I was doing the marking out and was tired so not paying enough attention. Layout and detail is critical so I should probably save them for a good day.

It's all a bit chunky on the inside. Especially the top drawer which I made out of the same wood I used for the main body of the box. I should have used thinner stuff. Same for the bottom one. Front bits are okay, just the sides and back. It won't wear out I suppose.

Oh and that big knot on the front is rather annoying. Again pay attention when marking up.

Europe is not about money and laws it's about people.

2016-02-20 10:33

Comments

The debate about Europe is not one of how much we pay, or who is allowed to live where, or what laws are made. Europe is about breaking down borders and living with your neighbour but nobody will mention that in the next few months.

The Tories have come back from Europe with some tweaks to the treaty most of which are small minded and self centred. But at least we have got that bit over with and can get on with the real debate. Or at least that is what you would hope but both sides have already started to spout rubbish and fight over insignificant details.

David Cameron thinks that the big issues are things like protecting the banks from international regulation. It's like he just slept through the last recession. He wants to stop people coming to this country claiming benefits. A policy that looks more aimed at the UKIP voters and middle England who think that it's really a problem, than at making any positive change. He is haggling over the lives of people struggling to make their way in the world to save a few million on the budget while billions go missing under laws written to allow large companies to move money out of the country. He wants to protect the City because he can't see anything better about this country than the cash it generates in the City. He talks about "British Values" then wants to stop them at our borders.

The way to tackle migration is to make it less attractive for people to leave their home countries. (Assuming you think it needs tackling) If you want to stop people from Poland coming to the UK then invest in Poland. Then we can get on with letting people come and go as they please. Similar to my idea on how York should solve it's house price issues by investing in neighbouring Selby. Europe is set up to help with this. The flow of labour allows people not only to work where they want but also encourages people to spend time outside of their borders and experience life in other peoples shoes. The flow of Money allows areas that are less attractive to get a start on the ladder. When you look at the difference European money has made to places like Sheffield giving it the breathing space to rebuild and redefine itself. I hope the same would be done in Donetsk it's twin city in the Ukraine (incidentally a city founded by a Welsh immigrant) Allowing that city to grow in the same way. Supporting everybody through tough times. (Obviously not now as Russia annexed it).

At the moment we think we are in a bad way but the solution is not to go back to small states fighting each other. Let not lash out at groups of people that are a little different and blame them for all our problems. Europe has tried that before and it turned out rather bad.

Europe is much more than laws and budgets its about a sense of belonging, of freedom, of being part of one thing and not lots of little things fighting each other. Lets see if this is the focus of the coming months.

Made some cable ties

2015-07-28 22:00

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Inspired by a youtube video from Mod in a Box about creating cable ties from wire I finally thought of a use for that half meter of 50A mains cable I had lying around.

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So taking the wire, some Sugru and a pair of pliers I set to work.

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I stripped off the outer grey covering and cut the wire into some random lengths. Anywhere from about 5cm to 15cm. Even really short ones seem to work as they rely on the bend in the wire more than the twisting.

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Next up I bent the end of the wire back on itself. Turns out nice big pliers are the best for this not pointy ones. The wire is very stiff. Put a little paper or card over the grip on the pliers so you don't mark the outer shielding.

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Next up put a small blob of Sugru on the end. Just enough to seal it up and cover any damaged bits. You only really want to stop it catching on things and make it look smart.

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Then just leave them to dry for 24hrs. Then you have some really nice cable ties. I like how the close round any cable and hold it together in a small clump without having those horrible pointy wire ends.

Evening classes and my new Hi-Fi stand

2015-06-11 11:48

Comments

There will be an exhibition of my work in the York Explore Library this weekend ( 20-21 June 2015 ). Well technically it's not about my work but the York Adult Learning exhibition but hey, I have to start somewhere and I have one thing on show!

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It started when I signed up of an evening class with York Council ( I think this is the website https://www.yortime.org.uk/ but I can't make it's search work ) it was called Furniture Design, Make or Restore. With Julian Marston.

Basically every Monday night I would cycle over to the school where it was held and get some woodwork done.

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First day was a bit daunting as you would exact, everything new. I was late of course ( I may have stopped for some chips ). But did not miss much of the introduction. There seemed to be a few people who where regulars and had just started to get on with things and a few like myself who had no idea what it was all about. Julian gave us a quick tour round all the tools that we might want to use and then let us have a go on them. Band saw, pillar drill and belt sander. Then just left us to it. I was later to realise that was generally his style. If you needed help he would be there with advice and help but other than a chat now and again you where free to get on with things.

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That first day I chatted with some of the people there wandered around a bit, and had some tea. Then went away with the puzzling question about what to make. It's not like I don't have enough things I want to do but this had to fit in ten weeks and be able to go back and forth on my bike each week. I pondered for a bit then chose to make a stand for my Hi-Fi. I have recently sold all my large Hi-Fi. Gone is the large surround amp, separate DAB radio and CD player and now I just have a small amp and a squeezebox. So I wanted a simpler stand that reflected that. My speakers have also shrunk but have matching stands that look rather neat so decided to mimic that in wood.

The design phase consisted of a couple of sheets of paper and a very rough sketch. Mostly I was going to wing it as I don't really know what I am doing. Measuring things up I headed out to the local timber merchant. I came back with a couple of planks of oak. This was going to be a fancy stand after all. For reference a couple of 2m oak planks is no problem on the bike.

A little bit of planning now had to happen as I wanted to glue the planks to make a sheet. So I did that at home. This process, as with most of mine at the moment, started with an hour watching YouTube. After realising that I needed an electric jointer, planer and table saw I managed to find some good videos showing what I was supposed to be doing. Paul Sellers and The English Woodworker where a great help as always.

So I took my newly created sheets of wood to school and tried to plane them flat. I had not realised how good it was not to have to chase the workbench around the room as you plane. Even if these benches where a little on the low side. Planing went well and I am still surprised how smooth and neat it all looks with just a plane much better than an electric sander. The second sheet seemed a lot harder, no matter how I tried it just seem to either dig in or skim over. It was at that point that Julian popped over and causally mentioned that he had a sharpening stone if I needed it. How right he was! Just a couple of seconds on the stone and I was back in business. I let Julian show me how so I could pick up some more sharpening tips. I have some diamond stones at home and at the time was struggling to get things right with them so I guessed I would be no better with the oil stone.

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A scratch block is a really old style tool consisting of something metal jammed into a bit of wood. You then drag this down the side of your work piece and it scores a line in it. I made one from a screw with the edge filed off. It worked really well and was a lot less scary to used than a router. With this I scored the three lines down the front to reflect the same pattern in my speaker stands.

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Next up was the glass. York Glass Supplies where really great. I took in my paper template, drawn up in FreeCAD, and they just cut it out and drilled the holes. Even smoothed over the edges nicely. There was a slight delay while they waited for the right sized drill bit to be delivered from Germany but other than that a really great service.

( Funny story about the York glass supplies website. Their ssl certificate shows as bad because it is only valid for manloveforensics.co.uk. I decided not to look any further into that )

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Next up I had a go on the lathe. What fun. Sawdust everywhere! I had a practice making a square block round then went ahead an made up the little feed to go on the end of the glass and the front.

Then there was the rounding of the edges. Marked up with pencil I went at it with the plane. First at 45 degrees then gradually smoothing that out. Then a little tidy up with a rhasp and things where starting to look tidy.

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I had to do all my gluing up at home so that it would have time to dry before going on the bike. It worked out quite well as I had just treated myself to a load of clamps. We will see if it all holds together in the long run but I don't think there where many gaps which is the important thing.

Once I had the mortice and tenon cut for the top it was time for the finish to go on. This was however after the end of the course so none of my workmates got to see the final showing. I used some Osmo oil partly because I like the mat finish and partly because it's really easy to apply with just a scouring cloth.

All done and in place. I am really please with how it turned out. I am sure I would do things a little differently next time round but I think it looks pretty neat.

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Starting nfc-eventd from systemd on the beaglebone

2015-03-18 22:18

Comments

Attaching an nfc reader to the beaglebone. In my case a cheap one called COOQROBOT which I think is pn532 variant.

I installed both libnfc and nfc-eventd from source. The ususal ./configure; make ; sudo make install. ( You might need to follow this with a ldconfig -v to get the library picked up )

Now you can start a service that monitors your nfc reader for new tags. Just drop the following into /etc/systemd/system/nfceventd.service and run sudo systemd daemon-reload.

[Unit]
Description=nfc-eventd

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/nfc-eventd

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now you can start the service with systemctl start nfceventd.service. And look at errors and output with systemctl status nfceventd.service.

By default the config for nfc-eventd just saves the events to /tmp/nfc-eventd. If you edit /usr/local/etc/nfc-eventd.conf you can change what this now does. So it could for instance send those events to your node-red server via mqtt.

action = "mosquitto_pub -h mosquitto.example.com -t /nfc/tag/ -m $TAG_UID "

Bash Linting. Checking your scripts are nice and lint free

2015-02-05 09:55

Comments

Continiuing on from my previous post on testing shell scripts with bats I have been looking for a linting solution for shell scripts. And I think I have found a nice one in shellcheck. Which is aviailble as both a website and a packge on debian.

It's really simple to run just give it your shell script as an argument and you get a nice set of comments on the style of your code. Here is the result of testing their test script.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## Example of a broken script. Hit the Down Arrow button to ShellCheck it!
for f in $(ls *.m3u)
do
  grep -qi hq.*mp3 $f \
    && echo 'Playlist $f contains a HQ file in mp3 format'
done

Then run shellcheck foo.sh

In foo.sh line 3:
for f in $(ls *.m3u)
         ^-- SC2045: Iterating over ls output is fragile. Use globs.
              ^-- SC2035: Use ./*.m3u so names with dashes won't become options.


In foo.sh line 5:
  grep -qi hq.*mp3 $f \
           ^-- SC2062: Quote the grep pattern so the shell won't interpret it.
                   ^-- SC2086: Double quote to prevent globbing and word splitting.


In foo.sh line 6:
    && echo 'Playlist $f contains a HQ file in mp3 format'
            ^-- SC2016: Expressions don't expand in single quotes, use double quotes for that.

I have a simple makefile now that's just there mostly as a reminder of the testing that is aviailble for that script.

bats: *.bats
    bats *.bats

lint: your_script your_nextscript
    shellcheck your_script
    shellcheck your_nextscript

Next up is intergration with vim. I use the really nice syntastic vim plugin. Syntastic does automatic style checking on files as you save them and shows a set of errors. Installing it is simple. Install shellcheck, I use apt-get install shellcheck on Debian but you can use your favorite way on your OS. Then install the vim syntastic, again I use Vundle so adding Bundle scrooloose/syntastic to my .vimrc and then running BundleInstall in vim did the trick for me. Now when I write a shell script to disk vim will comment on my style.

Choffee

Hacking a cable into the Microsoft Sculpt wireless keyboard

The Making of a Drinks Box

Velocity Conference Amsterdam

Progressive web apps

Http/2

Team diversity and development.

Containers and system reliability

Metrics

Continuous Security

Tutorials

Overall

Systemd Boot order and Tomcat7 and nslcd

I made myself some bathroom drawers.

Europe is not about money and laws it's about people.

Made some cable ties

Evening classes and my new Hi-Fi stand

Starting nfc-eventd from systemd on the beaglebone

Bash Linting. Checking your scripts are nice and lint free