Category: Personal
Any posts that I’m personally invested in, mostly long running passion projects that may never see an end.
Recently I’ve taken up maintenance on my 20 year old car. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time and have done a few small jobs over the years, but acquiring the tools to do anything larger is a bit of an investment I’ve been working up to. It’s been interesting seeing how simple some scary-sounding mechanical jobs can be and applying my knowledge of electrics and computers to vehicle systems.
Having fixed a lot of other problems that all occured around the same time I was left with a single fault code on the airbag (SRS) system which is permanently stored and unable to be reset by regular diagnostic tools. Let’s take a look at what’s involved in repairing this ourselves!
Continue reading “Clearing permanent faults on a car airbag controller”The elevator pitch for this post: configuring a Raspberry Pi to run a deluged BitTorrent server only through OpenVPN.
Read on if that sounds like fun.
Continue reading “Configuring a Raspberry Pi server: deluged via a VPN”Hello again! I know, this post isn’t coming that long after the previous – almost like I’m trying to blog regularly! Also – much like the previous post – this one concerns an oddity in Windows 10 that’s been annoying me, again, starting with the November update.
Continue reading “Windows 10 and the Outlook popup of anger”
Evening all, I trust this post finds you well.
You might’ve been able to guess, or you might’ve just assumed, but yes, I am enrolled in the Windows Insider Program. It was pretty fun throughout Windows 10’s development and even after the initial release, culminating in the very recent roll out of “TH2” or “the real Windows 10”. There’ve been a few stutters along the way, odd glitches and issues, but here’s one that popped up recently and has been annoying me a little…
Continue reading “Windows 10 and the Double Arrow icon of death”
Because I’m a lame nerd I also made a spreadsheet of them all so I don’t buy dupes. Oh dear.
I’m thinking I need to add digital games too, since Games with Gold and numerous sales has gifted me a whole load more games in the last couple of years. Physical games have a greater charm though, I think. They take up space but I like having them, especially Xbox 360 and prior where games still had manuals (pretty enormous manuals in some cases!)
Any recommendations you don’t see on the list and that haven’t been given away via GwG? Let me know!
— B
Hello everyone, today we’ll take a very quick look at a hardware mod I did a little while back on an old D-Link DIR-615.
This was initially an experiment in building a wireless repeater network to span some more of my workplace, so I wanted to fit large, high gain antennae. The DIR-615 seems an odd choice then, given it has fixed, non-removable antennae and is fairly famous for dodgy wireless performance out-the-box.
But I haven’t lost all my marbles because it also supports DD-WRT, the open source router firmware that gives you a worrying amount of control. Coupled with the fact that I was able to buy two DIR-615‘s for under £10, I think we have a winner!
Continue reading “D-Link DIR-615 Modding”Before the current Nerdshack, and before the previous Nerdshack, there was the original Nerdshack – the same site really, blog, portfolio and random drivel, but in a more designed shell.
I recently found this single screenshot of the old design and figured I’d publish it for posterity. I still like it – those boxy headline backgrounds were based on the window frames from the Watercolour theme in Windows Whistler (XP) builds 2410-2419, and the boxy layout of the sidebar complimented it nicely.
In the final iteration, the lower boxes on the sidebar contained links to recent blog posts, and clicking any link in to the blog triggered a smooth transition to the identically laid out but much darker design of the blog. I’m currently investigating building a similar theme for the current site – the grey is nice but it is a bit depressing after a while!
Hopefully this week I’ll be recieving a large number of LEDs and some replacement chips for ones that were fried in my first attempt and I can finish off my new Xbox mod. I pulled it apart and figured out all these problems over the weekend, and fixed a few small glitches while I was there, as well as finally switching the ROL lights in my 360 to blue so they match the Xbox1. One photo now, one in a few weeks when everything’s finished and beautiful :D
Well I’ve spent a lot of my downtime the last few days crawling through C++ in the Visual Studio debugger, and gathering crash data via adb from my tablet, all in the name of fixing threading bugs! A few core classes lightly stripped down and occasionally rewritten, a few things jiggled about and we have something that’s stable [on Windows].
I left several copies of this code running the other day as a test — none explicitly crashed, although there are persistent memory leak issues (aka, “gunking up”) over time which eventually lead to what is basically a freeze on the second thread, which does all the work. But in my testing all the sessions ran for at least half an hour at double speed (only a debug option right now, sorry), notching up an impressive health of over -5000. For reference, besides the threading related crashes everything else is basically the same as in the previous demo, so still lots of unfinished/unfixed/placeholder content and code.
So NOW go download this demo of Tower Defence, representing build 44.
At what point do you own too any games? Having just moved, I unpacked all my games and lined them up in the only place with enough room for them – the top of a wardrobe. It’s a pretty long line of stuff, and it doesn’t include all the games I keep on the hard drive of my original Xbox (also not pictured: Halo 4, Forza Horizon and L.A. Noire, because they’re all near my 360.) Only one game there is still in plastic (DiRT 2), although there are a few that I’ve only played briefly for whatever reason (most embarrassingly, Just Cause 2, because I thought the original Just Cause was amazing.) The plain DVD case at the top is a backup of ‘Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay’ because my original copy was damaged long long ago, if you were wondering.
How many games do you have and do you think you have too many? As long as I have a chance of finishing them all before my aging 360 RRoDs again I figure I’m alright!