http://hodor:hodor@hodor.hodor.hodor/hodor?hodor=hodor
All I need now is for ICANN to approve the .hodor top-level domain…
So with the ST205 in pieces, the ST185 needing a complete teardown and rebuild and the truck having exploded (it’s still on the naughty step because of its tantrum at the moment) I needed a random car to move me to work and back. Thankfully, one of my colleagues sold me a 2001 Mondeo estate for the princely sum of £300, and I am quite astonished how good it is.
There are known problems: the clutch is only just clinging to life and the release bearing yowls like an angry cat when you press the pedal, but other than that, everything works! What’s more the gearbox is good, engine is good (and had a cam belt done approximately 40,000 miles ago), the ride is quite frankly excellent and it is a perfectly pleasant way to waft to and from work.
It’s by no means quick and it won’t thank you for hurrying it around a corner, but as a “Plan B” car, it’s perfectly fine. I have to admit that I’ve always had the preconception that they were a bit naff, but the interior’s worn well and there’s not a single squeak or knock anywhere. Even the remote boot release works! Very impressed…
Whilst blocking entire countries (hi China!) from my mail server, I stumbled across this little gem in the form of a whois driveby.
In looking at a particular IP address, I found this domain name and out of routine did a whois lookup:
Fine so far, but as the contact details were pulled, this appeared:
If you happened to be using a web-based whois servce, specifically one that’s not careful about sanitising the output of whichever whois server it’s using, you may well end up performing a remote file include on yourself! Obviously this is fairly benign when done from the command line, but from a badly coded web whois client it has the potential to be a bit… sneaky!
Just for completeness, I pulled the referenced file and it contained nothing but a line that writes a null string to the document, but that’s not to say that it wouldn’t have something a little more interesting should an appropriate referrer and user-agent be reported at GET time…
From having a rummage around to see if anyone else had spotted this, it looks like it was done by the registry to insert their logo in web-based whois lookups, but that still doesn’t make me feel any happier about it!
That is how much Halfords want to charge for reading out the codes from a friend’s car because it had a “check engine” light on. Really? I mean, one of these plus this bit of software and you have a tool that you can use over and over and over again for less money than they want to charge you for one code-pull!
Bonkers…
Absolutely fascinating talk – well worth a watch…
Well – the unbreakable vehicle has broken at only 280,000 miles 
I got very bored with my existing (read: crap) backup scripts for my colo server, and hence decided to do something about it.
Previously I’d been using tar, pbzip, openssl and sha256sum in a script doing discrete operations, but this was inefficient in both disk IOPS, temporary space usage and processor time.
With a bit of tinkering, the whole thing can be done in one pass with a bit of BASH-fu:
tar -cf - $FILESPEC 2>/dev/null \
|pbzip2 \
|openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass file:$SECRET \
|tee >(sha256sum |sed "s/\-/$OUTFILE/g" > $LOCALPATH/$OUTFILE.sha256sum)\
|cat - > $LOCALPATH/$OUTFILE
This will use tar to archive the contents of $FILESPEC and send it to pbzip (parallel bzip compression – scales over as many cores as you have in your box – very useful!). This is then piped into OpenSSL which applies a 256-bit AES cyclical block cipher, locked with a password read from the file specified by $SECRET.
Finally, tee is then used to split the output of OpenSSL – one stream goes to sha256sum to generate the checksum, while the other is sent to cat which writes it to disk. The sha256sum looks a bit more complex than expected as, due to the fact that sha256sum is receiving data on STDIN, it will use “-” as the filename in the checksum file.
This is not ideal as using sha256sum’s “-c” option to subsequently verify the file will result in a file not found error. The sed command takes the output of sha256sum, looks for the occurrence of “-” and replaces it with the filename, suffixed by “.sha256sum”.
And, surprisingly, it works 
Having been chatting with a couple of people about speedo converters, speed limiters and soforth on JDM cars (specifically the ST205 Celica GT-Four in this case), I put together a little video detailing my experiments and findings. Hope it helps someone!
In addition to the ST205, I’ve managed to acquire an ST185 to play with in return for helping a friend with his XK8. Yet another time-sink / money pit
It’s in a bit of a state seeing as some little tw@ decided to stuff a brick through the rear window, but all of the important bits are present…
OK, so I was a cheapskate and now I’m paying the price for not having stumped up the quite frankly preposterous number of sheckles required to have a factory-fit Solid State Drive (SSD) in my iMac. This little rambling post should allow you to get an idea for how I’ve gone about performing this upgrade. It’s actually not that difficult and anyone who’s swapped a drive out in a PC before now should be more than capable of doing this.
It’s also worth underlining that you do not need to open your iShiny during this procedure – it’s purely external. Having had to open a friend’s iMac the other day to replace his hard drive (yes, you can do that without the fans going mad – more here) and the hassle involved in keeping everything dust- and fingerprint-free, I was more than willing to investigate the external options afforded by my until-recently unused Thunderbolt ports. continue reading…