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Politics Technology

IET Communications Policy Panel at the House of Lords

I was fortunate to be invited as an Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Diamond Jubilee scholar to the 10th Communications Policy Panel luncheon, hosted by Lord Broers (an electrical engineer, and Vice Chancellor at Cambridge) this Tuesday, 27th November. The topics of discussion focused on the key issues around 5G for policymakers — having worked with […]

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Technology

A dash cam setup for under £40: fitting the Anmyox Lanka to a VW Polo 9N

I’ve been looking at dash cams recently, and wanted to see just how affordable it could be to fit one to a vehicle. Honest John recommended the Lanka HD camera, which at £21.99 from Amazon was well within my budget for this project.

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Politics Technology

Enforcing the new TV Licensing rules

Further to ‘Thoughts on the “iPlayer Loophole”‘, The Telegraph this morning revealed that the BBC will be deploying a new breed of ‘detector van’ to catch those who don’t cough up. The article says “the BBC vans will fan out … capturing information from private WiFi networks to “sniff out” those who have not paid”. It’s clear […]

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Politics Technology

Thoughts on “The iPlayer Loophole”

In the UK, one requires a licence to watch television as it is broadcast live, which costs around £145/year. However, no such licence is required to watch television programmes on catch-up services such as the BBC’s iPlayer. Of course, in the eyes of the BBC, this is a Bad Thing, as sales of DVD box sets of series […]

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Crypto Technology

Finding your way around GPG

GPG is pretty fiddly to work with in the command line (you’re generally better off using something like Enigmail in Thunderbird), so here’s an overview of the various functions.

Categories
Internet

Renew your domains now – Nominet Price Hike

This evening I renewed two of my .uk domains for 8 years (bringing them up to a maximum of 10 years each), in advance of Nominet’s imminent price hike. From 1 March 2016 the cost of domains in the UK namespace (.uk and its subsidiaries) will increase by 50%. This is the first price increase since 2000, so […]

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Radio Technology

Watson W8681 weather station feeding data to WUnderground via a Raspberry Pi

Install Raspbian on your Pi. In the setup process go to Advanced and enable SSH. Also, set it to boot to the command line rather than the desktop – you should be able to run this headless. Do some basic maintenance sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo rpi-update sudo reboot Install Python sudo apt-get […]

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Crypto

GPG – set smartcard public key URL

gpg –card-edit gpg> admin Admin commands are allowed gpg> url Note: you can also edit name, PIN, lang, sex etc. Handy resource: http://aeriagloris.net/2013/09/23/setting-up-gpg/

Categories
Crypto

GPG Key to Card

How to move your PGP private key across to a smartcard using gpg for Windows: gpg –edit-key Key_ID_here * You should see some background on your key. Key line is “Secret key available.” GPG will enter interactive mode – you will see gpg> at the start of the command line. toggle then key 1 followed […]

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Technology

Switching to ODF in Office 2013

Open Word, create a new document (or edit an existing one) File>Options>Save Change ‘Save files in this format’ to OpenDocument Text (*.odt). Press OK. A pop-up will come up with “You are changing your default file format to OpenDocument Format. Do you also want to change this setting for all other Microsoft Office applications that support this […]