Near future foundry (by alaric)

When we moved in, I was very excited about the prospect of turning the little garage into a foundry. Even thought it started off tidy and I optimistically hoped that I'd have finished my backlog of work by the time I had all my tools moved in, I ended up busy all the time and it slowly filled with boxes of stuff.

However, come the flood, we had to move much of the contents of our home out into storage. Then more, as the electrician needed to rewire the whole place, so we moved most of the large static boxes from the little garage (our vast crockery+cutlery+glasses empire, our Christmas decorations, our bulky garden toys, that sort of thing). And the nice electrician put many more power points around it (three double sockets spaced out, rather than one waaay at the back!).

And then at the house-re-warming party, my pyromaniac nerd friends got all excited about the fabrication possibilities of the foundry...

So, I've been clearing the place out, and tidying up the results of several years of things-being-shoved-in. And sealing up the gaps, too; after the garage was built against the house it seems to have moved several centimetres away from it. Somebody went around the outside sealing the gap with cement, but they missed a big bit behind the gutters, meaning that daylight shines in through the gap.

A few months back I went up a ladder and packed the gap with cement.

But there's still a bit of light peeking through, and some more up where the roof is (although, by some miracle, no sign of water coming in when it rains), and a large cobweb-infested dark gap around the inside.

So I've been going around the INSIDE sealing the gap up with expanding foam (a delightful material to work with).

The foam didn't go as far as I'd thought - I need to sort out some more...

And putting foam strips around the front door to seal the gaps there up, too, and putting a block of wood in to fill a hole in the door jamb, in the hope that the place will stop being a haven of creepy-crawlies.

TechAdventure 2008 (by alaric)

Sarah and I went to TechAdventure in Bristol on Saturday.

It was fun! We'd both been rather sad about the fact that we'd not really gotten into the local geek scene. Almost all our nerdy friends are London-based. So we were keen to go to a local geek event...

So we swapped some EPROM programming and erasing gear for some books and a patch panel at the swapshop.

I was rigged for motion capture:

We have a video of me moving around with the rig on. It's rather dark, so you need to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up to see it properly...

We saw John Honniball and a tiny subset of his extensive collection of ancient computers.

We saw a guy who'd made a plotter from a turntable and a horizontal carriage from a printer.

And we saw and participated in a whole bunch of other stuff...

And we met loads of people. Which is great, since we want to meet more tecchie people from this neck of the woods!

Public Key Cryptography (by alaric)

Last night, I somehow managed to pull off the first ORG key signing event successfully!

We exchanged proofs of identity - the ostensible purpose of the event. And the ORG people spread the word about ORG to everyone who attended (and even at least one random person who came up and asked what we were doing), and we all had good discussions about digital rights and crypto.

One topic that came up was the one us cryptogeeks rarely worry about too much:

Why bother?

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I’ve finally started cabling my house (by alaric)

In our house, the telephone sockets are downstairs, at one end of the building, while my office (where my office telephone and computers sit) is upstairs and at the opposite end of the building.

So to get working quickly amongst the hubbub of moving in, I ran Ethernet and telephone cables from the phone sockets (the ADSL router that provides our Internet connection sits rights by the phone sockets, since the DSL signal quality is so bad anyway I wanted to maximise signal strength by not putting the ADSL router on the end of a cheap telephone extension cable) up to the office. The longest Ethernet cables I had were ten metres long, so I put the core router in the airing cupboard, more or less exactly between the phone sockets and my desk, and also conveniently having a power outlet to run it - then ran a ten-metre cable to it from the ADSL router and another one from my desk.

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More on n2n (by alaric)

I've been discussing n2n with my friends, and one of them raised an interesting point.

He pointed out that since n2n offers access control only at the network level - you need to know the network key to join a network - it works like the Internet of old: once you're in, you're in and fully trusted, and people can't get rid of you; they can just ignore you.

If that's a problem, then you have to do what the Internet had to do - set up local firewalling and access control.

This struck me as an interesting point about the trust model you're using.

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