How To Train Your Robot

2021-02-172021-02-16

The Master Algorithm Book Review

In The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, the author has some interesting thoughts on the “master algorithm”. Just like physicists want to find a universal formula for everything, a similar quest is what some in the machine learning world are looking for, and could simplify or bring new insights to how the world works through collected data. Just as many useful algorithms can be used in different ways – for example a super simple neural net can find pi, or a neural net can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, why can’t there be one that could run all machine learning problems?

2021-02-162021-02-16

Winter is a good time to think of prepping

As you may have seen on the news, this winter has been an especially hard one for folks staying home, staying apart, and now with icy weather causing blackouts it has been even harder in some areas. Time to stay home may give you more time to stay at home, focus on what matters, and more time to read and to be prepared… ideally before you need to be.

2021-01-242021-01-24

Remember to Composer Update for Security and Updates

Laravel updates and updates to various PHP libraries come once in awhile with little notice to your web application, and no notice is shown, no auto update runs – unlike WordPress. Once in awhile a security update comes, so how might you test it?

2021-01-232021-01-23

Setting private user home directory on Ubuntu

Recently it was announced that Ubuntu 21.04 will have private home directories. This would affect new users and new installs, but you can easily change this on your computer (or any Linux/unix computer) after checking your current setting…

2021-01-202021-01-20

Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:

Once in awhile a service may get compromised script or item in it – in a recent case, a Zoom link will actually take you to some random site as part of some sort of adware campaign??? However a closer look shows it is very important to test your links on email or sites:

The link I saw recently actually had a very odd looking script – script in a production service is generally minified sometimes, but won’t be oddly obfuscated or base64-encoded. The suspicious part of this script starts out in the <body> with an odd looking launchBase64:

2021-01-132021-01-13

New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()

This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):

2021-01-062021-01-06

FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings

If you’re setting a local server you may want some trusted admins to upload to, one good way is the vsftp server. DigitalOcean has a good tutorial on it, but there are some odd issues.

2021-01-042021-01-05

SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important

Much has been written about the recent SolarWinds hack – “Almost a cyber pandemic” that we may not know the true extent of for some time.

2021-01-032021-03-08

Cleaning up Python – and old libraries

Newer Ubuntu releases do not even pre install Python2, and after an upgrade and installing latest Python3.x included in the release, you likely have some old ones there too. Since you most likely will not be using the python2 unless you use some very old library, you can clean them up, clear a lot of disk space and use the “python3” / “pip3” command instead.

2020-12-26

Merry Christmas, and a Repeater Listing update

The repeater database has been udpated today as a Merry Christmas present for DMR Radio users! – over half of the radioid.net DMR listings have now been pulled in to Hearham repeater listing, with permission. This means users looking for DMR digital repeaters will find the RepeaterSTART app more useful in the future!