Infinityflame

Switching to Credit Arbitrage

Unknown — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years I've used a simple current account to pay my outgoings. </p>

This seems to mainly be the done thing, my salary goes in, I move some out to meet savings obligations and then bills and everyday spending come last. I've for a while been aware of stoozing</strong>.</p>

Stoozing is a technique of borrowing money interest-free on a credit card and saving it at a high interest rate</p>
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This seems to be the most efficient way to earn on spending compared to cashback schemes and requires about the same administrative overhead,</p>
Cashback can yield up to 5% percent in certain scenarios but they are often introductory schemes and are sometimes capped, with credit arbitrage (stoozing), I have found that the limit is essentially what I can put in a savings account.</p>
Obviously with this scenario you're playing to their hand, they have cheap credit and in a way it incentivizes spending, maximizing credit ensures a greater return on otherwise idle money, however it comes at the cost of having to pay it back one day.</p>
I've strategized this by moving money earmarked for repayment into my easy access savings accounts, for a while I had a dedicated account but realized I could maximize returns just putting it in my highest interest account and marking the liability against a fixed reference, I did this because in my chase saver account interest is paid monthly rather than annually in my Nationwide accounts. Again, something dangerous to do I guess lumping all my liability money in with savings but I like to think I'm smarter than that.</p>
Repayments are also awkward, the direct debit set up on my Barclaycard ensures I'm always current, the Chase repayment is annoyingly manual, I've added £100 to a Chase current account (yeah, no interest being earned here) and then set a direct debit up there to act as the repayment account and I'll try to keep the balance above a month's repayment obligation.</p>
Overall, ChatGPT reckons about £350 expected value after 21 months (the length of my 0% rate unless I move cards), It's difficult to quantify exactly because the compounding is offset slightly by repayments. I also made a mistake in Croatia and used a firm that took out an actual €1200 rather than place a hold as a deposit, which came with £60's worth of transaction fees on Barclaycard. When you compare this to cashback, the expected value is well above so I'm reasonably happy.</p>
Another bonus is you can do all your group spending on your credit card and then be repaid in cash, artificially increasing your expenditure.</p>
I guess it would also be prudent to keep an eye on my credit score given all this debt. I've used chase as it was built into the app, when I checked at the start and compared it to now, it's actually increased which I did not expect, but I think once my spending starts to properly get up closer to my credit limit, the scores will start to fall, not sure what to do about that, I'm not really experienced in keeping track of my credit.</p>
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Constraining an LLM in 16x2 Unknown — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 </figure> I've re-created something I saw online a while back, I can't find the original but someone had given an LLM a prompt and basically let it loose its mind with fear by giving it a prompt that would threaten it with termination.</p> I decided to take it into the real world with a Raspberry Pi.</p> </figure> To do this I used Antigravity and a Raspberry Pi 1. I gave it a relatively open-ended prompt and free reign to create the project. </p> My original intention was to run the LLM locally but I've found that the Raspberry Pi just doesn't seem to have the local compute, so I had Claude Opus 4.5 pregenerate a couple thousand messages.</p> </figure> There's some irony having an LLM constrain an LLM (even though I didn't actually accomplish that) but the fun to have a relatively creative idea be completed in an afternoon I think is a strong indicator that for me personally, writing code myself has become a chore that can be solved with AI.</p> Did I really make this?</h2> I guess I'm curious about AI for coding more than most. I have a Google AI Pro subscription and used their vscode wrapper Antigravity, and while not perfect, it works. But I'm at the point where I don't really write much code anymore, I ask the AI to do it and review their work, sometimes I check it, sometimes I don't. Sometimes the code works better than I prompted, sometimes it doesn't</p> I don't know what to make of it. I had unique problems that Claude seemed to have come across, I didn't have a resistor for the screen contrast so it suggested to use PWM, I moved some pins around and it didn't work very well, it was flickering. So I went back to the AI, it told me to use pigpio and some hardware thing, I did, it works.</p> I can see the code works, I couldn't tell you how it works.</p> I guess that's how things will be for most new users.</p> Did I really learn anything, no? But I now have what I wanted to achieve. It's even more creative than I could have written in the time-frame and I guess the code is "mine" but, is it?</p> I asked it to make a readme, I'll read it at some point.</p> </figure> Thanks for reading.</p> Devices No Longer Trust Their Owners Unknown — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I am noticing an increasing trend in my online life where I am required to use devices and applications that must report a secure environment for the code that runs. This was first noticeable for me when I was unable to take screenshots of apps on android but has pretty much become ubiquitous at this point.</p> It seems like I am a back seat driver on my devices more and more, for example I can't take a screenshot of my banking app's previous transactions. I think it may be that my Bank think I'm incapable of keeping that information safe to the point where they actively disallow the otherwise pretty standard feature. I've become something that must be managed and protected from danger.</p> Devices No Longer Trust Their Owners</h2> The same problem exists when I do a screenshare of a video I've watched and want to share it with a friend, or clip it for a video, I watch the video back and it's a blank screen with no audio and just the subtitles.</p> I have to allow anti-cheat to inspect my computer's memory at runtime. I recently wanted to play Battlefield 6, which required me to enable secure boot on my machine, which meant going into my BIOS and turning on the feature. The game will not start without it.</p> Rooting is becoming a hostile battleground</h2> I used to run a rooted device to record my calls. I'd set up my device many years ago, but root has become a cat and mouse game of applying new compromised keys and patching against root detection SDKs.</p> I recently had a scenario where I simply couldn't use any of my banking apps, for whatever reason my device had become no longer secure under the integrity API and I now was locked out of paying my credit card bill, I'd read online about people in similar scenarios as I. It used to be rare this existed but now attestation is everywhere.</p> It was fine when I was a teenager and equivalent web-apps existed. But now I need these apps to function. I recently did an identity check and failed it to the point where the app no longer allowed further videos of my face side to side with flashing colors, I feel this was because my device was rooted but I have no way to prove it.</p> Code Signing, Walled Gardens and Anti-cheat</h2> I'm not sure what the future of development looks like, but I think it's going to be more like Apple's ecosystem.</p> I'm not to be trusted running code or applications, I'm a danger to myself and others it seems.</p> A device attesting its security isn’t proving safety for me. A device used to be something I own, but its becoming something the manufacturer and or software owns that I am permitted to access part of.</p> </p> How to Disable Auto Play on Alexa Unknown — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Follow the screenshots below to disable playing the next song on Spotify on Alexa. </p> Although I use Spotify it may work with other services connected to Alexa.</p> Seems like since writing this you can also now say any of the following</p> "Turn off autoplay."</p> "Disable autoplay."</p> </blockquote> Open the Alexa app,</p> </a>Select the Settings list item</figcaption></figure> </a>Select Music & Podcasts</figcaption></figure> </a>Select Autoplay (You should see it in the family tab which is the default)</figcaption></figure> </a>Toggle Autoplay</figcaption></figure> </p> Monitoring CO2 levels with the ESP8266 NodeMCU V2 and the SCD41 Unknown — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 When working from home I was curious about the air quality of the environment I was putting myself through for many hours of the day. I know the room I work in is relatively small so I thought about low oxygen potentially messing with my thought process.</p> The build was relatively simple. I wanted to use an older ESP8266 NodeMCU V2 I had spare and in retrospect think it was a great choice, I decided to try Home Assistant and ESPBuilder because the process seemed easy and it was.</p> Once I flashed ESPHome from my PC to the ESP and added it to Home Assistant it was fairly simple overall to iterate and test my design. I didn't have home assistant either but setting everything up took a little over an afternoon.</p> </a>Home assistant showing the ESPHome dashboard with a single ESP8266 configured and online</figcaption></figure> Hardware selection was fairly simple, I just looked what had good support in ESPHome and went with the SCD41 from Aliexpress.</p> For the sensing hardware I had a DHT22 sensor for Temperature and Humidity, which the SCD41 also supports. I was primarily interested in CO2 levels but I thought I may as well throw it into the mix to measure the performance of the DHT22.</p> The Results</h2> Once I had tweaked with the temperature and humidity calibration settings I created a dashboard in home assistant. Again this was something I'd not done before and it was very easy. I have really been pleasantly surprised with how everything has integrated well.</p> I created a 7 day and 24 hour view,</p> </a>Home Assistant showing the CO2 and Temperature of the room it's sensing, where I work.</figcaption></figure> It became clear to me a number of things,</p> CO2 levels regularly rise above 1000ppm in the room I work in when not ventilated, and they rise a lot quicker than I expected. I thought it would take all day to really get to what I consider a harmful level, but actually its more like an hour. After research online 1000ppm is what I would consider too high. It does seem like naturally detect these events and ventilate the room by instinct but its useful insight to see that.</li> Ventilating the room equally drops the readings much more rapidly than expected, and leaving the window or door open is enough to bring the levels back to ~650ppm/400ppm relatively quickly.</li> High CO2 levels seem more noticeable to me now, previously I had no perception or concept of when it might happen but I feel its much more noticeable now I know what it feels like, if that makes sense.</li> I would like to log the data for a more long term view. Say a year or more. I think it would interesting to see if this affects humidity, temperature etc.</li> Overall this was easy to setup and provided valuable insight I think.</li> </ul> Here is the 7 day view for those interested, I added the light switch being on or off state at the top of the graph too.</p> </a>7 day view</figcaption></figure> And here is the humidity readings, It was interesting seeing spikes on the graphs, I can easily correlate these with opening doors, having the heating on etc.</p> </a>7 day humidity view, may be worth lowering the DHT22 humidity a bit to match the other sensor</figcaption></figure> Try this yourself</h2> Here is the final version of the YAML I applied to my ESP. I did some testing with sliding window averages but I actually found it was easier to just ignore the first few readings off the sensors to reduce the noise in the graphs.</p> esphome: name: tco2s friendly_name: tco2s esp8266: board: nodemcuv2 # Enable logging logger: # Enable Home Assistant API api: encryption: key: "WWVhaCB0aGlzIGFpbnQgcmVhbA==" ota: - platform: esphome password: "SSBjaGFuZ2VkIHRoaXMgbG9s" mdns: disabled: true wifi: ssid: !secret wifi_ssid password: !secret wifi_password manual_ip: static_ip: 192.168.4.22 gateway: 192.168.4.1 subnet: 255.255.255.0 # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails ap: ssid: "Tco2S Fallback Hotspot" password: "U2xlZXB5" captive_portal: i2c: - id: bus_a sda: D4 scl: D5 scan: true # DHT22 Sensor sensor: - platform: dht pin: D2 model: DHT22 temperature: name: "DHT22 Temperature" filters: - skip_initial: 3 humidity: name: "DHT22 Humidity" filters: - offset: -20.0 - skip_initial: 3 update_interval: 60s - platform: scd4x co2: name: "SCD41 CO2" filters: - skip_initial: 3 temperature: name: "SCD41 Temperature" filters: - skip_initial: 3 humidity: name: "SCD41 Humidity" filters: - skip_initial: 3</code></pre> I think based on the data I will improve the ventilation to see if it has any effect on my overall fatigue and concentration.</p> Thank you for reading.</p> </p> My Experience Getting An Apicoectomy Unknown — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 During a check-up with my dentist I asked an innocent question about a spot on my gums just above a tooth in my mouth (which through some quick googling I have determined is my lateral incisor). I had no pain and no real symptoms other than an occasional yellow spot I could pop now and again and it would occasionally bleed in the same area. I asked “is this something I should be concerned about?”.</p> I had previously had a root canal on this tooth as I had fallen off my bike many years prior, its was capped and it has a fake porcelain front, the tooth was cut in half during the accident and had been rebuilt by my NHS dentist during a lot of work on my mouth after the accident.</p> I bring up this detail because it might be relevant to some that this unique scenario has cropped up due to ‘trauma’ as the dentist put it. It seems like the damage to my teeth complicated the area somewhat and the skills of my normal dental practice was not up to the task.</p> They said to seek another dentist and pointed me to their FP17 and said ‘treatment on referral’ is available if I need to and I can come back and they will complete the form. I assume this means that the NHS is willing to cover some part of the cost of the treatment I would eventually need. I am not sure if the NHS would cover the treatment I eventually had but I doubt it. My dentist did say the only option they had was removing the tooth.</p> I booked an appointment with a private dentist, I was immediately taken aback by how much better the service was, I got an appointment the next day! I am aware I was a new patient to them and they had me pay for their new patient screening which included exams of my teeth, and that also meant they could take an x-ray of my jaw to assess the tooth which I was concerned about.</p> At this point it seemed like the dentist in the room was also out of their depth and I was referred again to a better dentist. In a way I sort of expected this but confirmation of my assumptions concerned me that the cost of the procedure was going to be expensive.</p> A couple hundred quid in at this point and I haven’t really had new information or treatment but I was confident the next dentist was the right person for the task, my inter-rim private dentist referred to them by name and said their services were the best in the area.</p> I visited the third dentist a few weeks later, A local dental studio. At this point I still hadn’t experienced any pain, I’d had no symptoms really, just a curiosity and a sense something was wrong.</p> I had my appointment with Christopher, who said he regularly dealt with teeth like mine, his room had specialist equipment, a deconstructed camera sat above my head, the chair had a TV opposite playing some nature show. There was a large TV on the adjacent wall showing images of my teeth he brought to my attention. He spent a lot of time explaining to me my teeth and the x-ray he had taken. The x-ray was noticeably higher definition than previous dentists.</p> My teeth were in poor condition. I had had two root canals either side of my unhealthy and essentially doomed tooth and the tooth that had been capped had already been root canalled and would require a re-do. There were clearly dark patches in my jaw that meant the tooth would likely become weak over time and eventually would be at risk of falling out and my gum was retracting.</p> The thought of further issues to my mouth was alarming. The gutta percha used in one of my teeth was ineffective and essentially stuck inside my gums.</p> I had initially booked a root canal with a second appointment to come later to re-root canal my problem tooth. My first appointment was relatively uneventful except for the overall quality of the procedure I could tell was superior.</p> My second appointment I had about a week later. The root canal was not an option due to the gutta percha getting stuck at the base of the tooth and the drill bits were unable to retrieve it. It meant that my root canal treatment was upgraded to an apicoectomy and that was happening now.</p> It was a long procedure and the sensations in your head and jaw are unique, I’d even say unpleasant. When we were finished I had a cut in my mouth that needed to heal with stitches that I came later for and had removed at another appointment about a week later.</p> The results were slow but noticeable, I found I was no longer biasing the side of my mouth slightly to avoid this set of teeth and a very, very dull pain that had previously been there had gone. I would only ever qualify this as very, very minor on the general scale of pain, however it was noticeably absent even though previously I was unaware of its existence.</p> My mouth also felt stronger, my jaw and the teeth around it stronger. I think the abscess building and seeping out of my gums had done some damage over time and this had essentially fixed the issue.</p> It has been 1 year and 5 months since having my first appointment with the third dentist and I have another check-up to go through but we are both pleased with the result and only time will tell if further work is needed. Possibly it will on the remaining teeth I suspect, if I am looking on a 10-50 year timeline, I am not in pain, but I’ve lost confidence in the work done.</p> I would reccomend. Overall I spent around £1700. Worth every penny.</p> Using Aggressive Caching in WordPress Unknown — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Using WordPress/Cloudflare I wanted my website webserver to be hit as infrequently as possible and have most of the traffic that visits my site hit Cloudflare and serve as little repeat requests as I possibly can from my end.</p> </a>Diagram showing the journey from WordPress to end user</figcaption></figure> I embarked on a journey to enhance my site’s performance significantly by having Cloudflare serve as much of it as possible and although Cloudflare has it's disadvantages it's generally pretty good as a global point of presence. For WordPress I used plugins W3 Total Cache, and Debloat: Optimize, achieving markedly improved load times but there was a bit of trial and error, these are good caching tools for my site, but only really good for people local to me (because Cloudflare has a global delivery network), so I also stuck Cloudflare at the edge to serve the page.</p> The performance improvement is good, and can be as low as 90ms from what was previously a few seconds (around 1.4-1.6 seconds when served directly from my webserver to a London VPS).</p> Leveraging Cloudflare’s Proxying and Caching</h3> Cloudflare has a pretty good content delivery network (CDN) that offers caching and proxying services. Here’s how I set it up:</p> By routing my traffic through Cloudflare’s servers.</li> In the Cloudflare dashboard, I set a page rule to cache everything with a Time-To-Live (TTL) of one month. This caching strategy means that once a resource is cached, it stays cached for 30 days.</li> On the free Cloudflare plan the Cache Rules are limited to 10 rules per site. I set my rules to cache the whole site, but exclude any incoming requests with the WordPress Cookie. This would be problematic for any large sites with a lot of logged in users, but I don't have any so perfect for me. I also set up a rule to exclude caching some of the Gutenberg plugin build css/js to fix issues with navigation. For anonymous users, the aggressive caching remains in effect, delivering cached content for optimal speed.</li> </ol> </a>Cloudflare Cache Rules dashboard showing an exclusion rule for caching the wordpress plugin Gutenberg's navigation</figcaption></figure> Development Mode for Testing</h2> While configuring caching, I tested changes without caching interfering by using Cloudflare’s Development Mode to temporarily bypass the cache so I could see realtime changes when tweaking the W3 Total Cache settings.</p> Once I had everything working, and realised what was broken, I excluded broken plugin files from caching and minification and then enabled the caching on Cloudflares end.</p> Using these two plugins, I would then look at the page source and CF-Cache-Status</code> headers to see the new response speed and lighthouse performance. </p> A common pitfall is to just cache everything, you will probably find you can't login or parts of the site don't work, so its important to triall and error the site, go through it's features and understand what doesn't work and needs to be excluded from minification in the CSS and JS, especially for plugin heavy sites.</p> Caching and Performance Optimiziation</h2> For WordPress Caching I used the plugins W3 Total Cache and Debloat because they were on the plugin store and free, which was all I cared about really.</h2> </blockquote> Where possible I serve static HTML versions of my pages. This is to reduce PHP execution time and database queries, resulting in faster load times.</p> That was basically all I needed W3 Total Cache for . All of the minification of JavaScript and removal of CSS that wasn't used in my themes etc I used Debloat over W3 Total Cache. Although in hindsight W3 maybe could have done this role too.</p> When the site loads and you aren't served any caches (Cache MISS </code>etc), you obviously get a lot slower response as the caching and minification is compiled and served, so your time to first byte is abysmal, but after that Cloudflare should have a cached copy to serve in as little as a few miliseconds.</p> It would be extremely better if I removed the advertising code to take some of the compute off the main thread, and all the cookie notice stuff but I won't for money reasons sorry.</p> There is always room for improvement.</p> Aidan.</p> Wireguard, WG-Easy and Nginx Docker Compose File using Traefik Unknown — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Run Wireguard, wg-easy and Nginx in a single docker compose file, using Traefik and configure SSL using letsencrypt. This post aims to improve on this wiki post </a>by allowing you to run a website on port 443 rather than wg-easy.</p> Replace your-domain.com</code> and yourpassword10000</code> and youremail@example.com</code> with your domain, password and email, optionally also change the port for your wg-easy configuration using WG_HOST</code>. You can access the wg-easy admin panel at https://your-domain.com:4748</code>.</p> If you would like to use the Traefik admin UI, uncomment the port 8080 </code>and api.</code> entries.</p> Save as docker-compose.yml </code>and then run the command docker network create traefik_network </code>followed by docker compose up -d</code>. This will make the nginx folder to place your website files in as required.</p> services: wg-easy: labels: # traefik - "traefik.enable=true" - "traefik.http.services.WireGuardService.loadbalancer.server.port=51821" # http to https - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRoute.service=WireGuardService" # https - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRouteSSL.service=WireGuardService" - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRouteSSL.rule=Host(`your-domain.com`)" - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRouteSSL.entrypoints=wireguardWGEasyPanel" - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRouteSSL.tls.certresolver=MainCertResolver" environment: - WG_HOST=your-domain.com - PASSWORD=yourpassword10000 - UI_TRAFFIC_STATS=true - WG_HOST=4748 container_name: wg-easy image: ghcr.io/wg-easy/wg-easy networks: - traefik_network volumes: - .:/etc/wireguard ports: - "51820:51820/udp" restart: unless-stopped cap_add: - NET_ADMIN - SYS_MODULE sysctls: - net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 - net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1 nginx: image: nginx:latest restart: unless-stopped labels: # traefik - traefik.enable=true - traefik.http.routers.nginx.rule=Host(`your-domain.com`) - traefik.http.routers.nginx.entrypoints=websecure - traefik.http.routers.nginx.tls=true - traefik.http.routers.nginx.tls.certresolver=MainCertResolver networks: - traefik_network volumes: - ./nginx:/usr/share/nginx/html/:ro traefik: image: traefik:latest restart: unless-stopped volumes: - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro - traefik_letsencrypt_data:/letsencrypt networks: - traefik_network ports: - "80:80" - "443:443" - "4748:4748" # - "8080:8080" command: - "--providers.docker" - "--providers.docker=true" # - "--api.dashboard=true" # - "--api.insecure=true" - "--providers.docker.exposedbydefault=false" - "--providers.docker.network=traefik_network" - "--entrypoints.web.address=:80" - "--entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entryPoint.to=websecure" - "--entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entryPoint.scheme=https" - "--entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entrypoint.permanent=true" - "--entrypoints.wireguardWGEasyPanel.address=:4748" - "--entrypoints.websecure.address=:443" - "--certificatesresolvers.MainCertResolver.acme.tlschallenge=true" - "--certificatesresolvers.MainCertResolver.acme.email=youremail@example.com" - "--certificatesresolvers.MainCertResolver.acme.storage=/letsencrypt/acme.json" # - "--log.level=DEBUG" networks: traefik_network: external: true volumes: traefik_letsencrypt_data: </code></pre> You may also want to limit the administration portal to just IP whitelisted addresses, you can do this by adding the following to the wg-easy labels, replacing 1.2.3.4 with your IP address and adding any other required addresses using a comma to separate. You could also whitelist clients inside your container by adding the network range.</p> - "traefik.http.middlewares.my-ipwhitelist.ipallowlist.sourcerange=1.2.3.4" - "traefik.http.routers.WireGuardRouteSSL.middlewares=my-ipwhitelist@docker"</code></pre> Please feel free to use this post under the terms of the original licence which you can access here</a>.</p> Buying 16TB Seagate Exos X16 from Amazon for £188.90 Unknown — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 I recently purchased a Seagate Exos X16 from Amazon. To be specific it was this one</a> for £188.90. I was cautious that the vendor was not Seagate and was a third party seller</a> for a reduced rate, so I thought it best to check the smart values and serial number after it arrived as usually this means the drive is of questionable origin.</p> At this price point I knew I was taking a bit of a gamble (and S.M.A.R.T data can be overwritten I think) but the data would hopefully provide some insight into what I had actually purchased. £188.90 is significantly below the £214 buy box, but it is not impossible that the drive didn't come from Seagate as sold.</p> When it arrived I took a photo. Packing was clearly custom and the ESD bag was not OEM. Oh well, lets see what smartctl</code> says.</p> </a></figure> </a></figure> Seagate Exos X16 as delivered by Amazon seller "HAPPY HOME EASY LIFE LTD"</figcaption></figure> Running the disk drive through Seagates warranty checker, the drive is likely from one of their storage appliances. This makes warranty replacement not possible except when done through the Amazon seller's original equipment.</p> </p> </figure> I also plugged the drive into my Proxmox NAS to see if the drive had been running at all and given the S.M.A.R.T attribute (240 0xF0 "Head Flying Hours") it looks like the drive has never been started as it has only been up about the time it took me to run the command after connecting the drive.</p> root@proxmox.lan:~# smartctl -a /dev/sdc smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.15.136-1-pve] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Exos X16 Device Model: ST16000NM001G-2KK103 Serial Number: ZL2EPPX1 LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0c9385ca4 Firmware Version: SN03 User Capacity: 16,000,900,661,248 bytes [16.0 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Form Factor: 3.5 inches Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: ACS-4 (minor revision not indicated) SATA Version is: SATA 3.3, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Fri Mar 8 14:55:15 2024 GMT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 575) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: (1485) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x70bd) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 044 Pre-fail Always - 2624 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 1 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 253 045 Pre-fail Always - 447 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 1 18 Head_Health 0x000b 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 078 063 040 Old_age Always - 22 (Min/Max 21/22) 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 022 040 000 Old_age Always - 22 (0 21 0 0 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Pressure_Limit 0x0023 100 100 001 Pre-fail Always - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0h+01m+14.651s 241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 2624 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t] SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. root@proxmox.lan:~# </code></pre> Based on this I was sold a 5 year warranty but I am not able to claim it should something happen to the drive. As I only use it for infrequent backup I will take on the risk.</p> Running SQL Server 2022 Database in Docker using Docker Compose Unknown — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 You can use docker compose to deploy and manage a Microsoft SQL Server 2022 (or older) database using the Microsoft Artefact Registry (their container registry) and any suitable docker installation.</p> I am by no means an expert at docker so consider this a leading learner article to get you started rather than something that could be considered best practice. This is my process to developing a database that can run as highly available infrastructure.</p> SSMS connected to SQL Server running in docker</figcaption></figure> Running Microsoft SQL Server in Docker on Windows</h2> If you are running the database on a windows machine, make sure to start WSL using the command line and move your project (or volumes) inside your WSL installation.</p> I've opted for Ubuntu however any Linux distribution is applicable. For best performance you probably would want to run the database on a host directly to avoid any abstraction bottlenecks.</p> Running the database inside the WSL installation ensures that the mounted volumes are native to the Linux installation and the WSL files aren't on the windows file system and translated on the fly.</p> Docker Compose for Microsoft SQL Server 2022</h2> Here is the minimal docker compose file I created for the database. It uses mounts for the database files and a dockerfile to set the permissions. For this installation I did some experimentation with High Availability and it will work with this setup however some additional configuration would be required beyond this compose file to deploy a highly available cluster for redundant DNS. I have also enabled the agent to use scheduling however you may need to pick a licence for your use case using MSSQL_PID</a>.</p> I've also included watchtower to automatically upgrade the database however you may want to remove it if you do not require automatic updating or need a higher uptime.</p> name: msssql-docker services: database-server: build: context: . dockerfile: dockerfile environment: - ACCEPT_EULA=Y - MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD={$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD} - MSSQL_ENABLE_HADR=1 - MSSQL_TCP_PORT=1433 - MSSQL_AGENT_ENABLED=true - MSSQL_DATA_DIR=/var/opt/mssql/data - MSSQL_DUMP_DIR=/var/opt/mssql/dump - MSSQL_LOG_DIR=/var/opt/mssql/log_data - MSSQL_BACKUP_DIR=/var/opt/mssql/backup_data - MSSQL_ERROR_LOG_FILE=/var/opt/mssql/log/errorlog ports: - 1433:1433 restart: unless-stopped image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest volumes: - ./data:/var/opt/mssql/data - ./log_data:/var/opt/mssql/log_data - ./backup_data:/var/opt/mssql/backup_data - ./dump:/var/opt/mssql/dump - ./secrets:/var/opt/mssql/secrets - ./logs:/var/opt/mssql/log watchtower: image: containrrr/watchtower volumes: - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock volumes: data: log_data: backup_data: dump: secrets: logs:</code></pre> And here is the dockerfile.</p> # Use latest windows 2022 image FROM mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest # Switch to root for chown USER root # set permissions on directories RUN chown -R mssql:mssql /var/opt/mssql # switching to the mssql user USER mssql</code></pre> And here is the .env file for the docker secret (the SA password). In future I will use active directory authentication but this should do for testing.</p> MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=Badpassword1#</code></pre> Directory Structure in the SQL Server container</h2> I have laid out my directory structure as follows, if you deploy the docker container yourself it will make the directories (and the files) for you. You need only the .env</code> , docker-compose.yml </code>and dockerfile</code>. Docker will handle the rest.</p> C:\Users\Aidan\Documents\mssql-docker>tree /f ... │ .env │ docker-compose.yml │ dockerfile │ ├───backup_data │ test.bak | ├───data │ Entropy.bin │ master.mdf │ mastlog.ldf │ model.mdf │ modellog.ldf │ model_msdbdata.mdf │ model_msdblog.ldf │ model_replicatedmaster.ldf │ model_replicatedmaster.mdf │ msdbdata.mdf │ msdblog.ldf │ tempdb.mdf │ tempdb2.ndf │ tempdb3.ndf │ tempdb4.ndf │ templog.ldf │ exampledatabase.mdf │ ├───dump ├───logs │ agent_log.log | ... | ├───log_data │ exampledatabase_log.ldf │ └───secrets machine-key C:\Users\Aidan\Documents\mssql-docker></code></pre> Once your container database is up you will still need to make the database using SQL Server Management Studio or interact with the database using SQLCMD for your application.</p> Caveats using this method</h2> Using containers adds a layer of abstraction which may affect performance, this seems to be most notable on windows where the filesystem doesn't run in WSL's filesystem.</li> The volumes are managed by docker so using faster disk may be difficult (or easier) depending on usecase.</li> You have to pay for an MSSQL licence.</li> You should put your backups on a different media than your data, which this currently doesn't do.</li> There is some additional setup with replication that doesn't seem to be present on a standard windows installation of SQL Server 2022.</li> </ul> Thanks for reading, have fun. </p> Box Puzzle 2023 Unknown — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 My friends frequently travel once a year to in a large group, this time I thought rather than just contribute traditional party games, I thought it would be worth creating a puzzle with a prize inside. I intentionally waited until the second day to surprise them.</p> This was what I came up with, a physical box with a QR code on the front that took you to the website to start the box puzzle. No other instruction was given, however inside you could see the smaller box and a wrapped envelope (containing lock-pick tools for the padlocks on the outside of the smaller box).</p> </a></figure> The physical box contained a wrapped prize which when you eventually unwrapped was a box of Cadbury Heros to share.</p> The boxes were transparent from B&M with holes drilled in the lids for the locks.</p> Online Aspect</h2> The QR code took you to a website, 99% of the players used their mobile for all of the puzzle but a few opted for their laptop when working on a few rounds. The web page presented the rules, which were,</p> You must complete all online activities until you can access the box</li> Destructive entry into the physical box is not allowed</li> You may use online tools and websites</li> Reverse engineering the website is not allowed</li> Access the box to win</li> </ul> The initial code could be found on a painting used in a previous game we had played.</p> </a></figure> The website had 5 rounds, each round revealed the next and completing all the rounds showed how to unlock the box,</p> </a></figure> </a></figure> Reception and Improvements</h2> Here are my observations of how the puzzle went,</p> Initially the box was extremely interesting, the QR code and website was very interesting to everyone when placed on the coffee table after a long day.</li> The QR code and website was very accessible and being mobile first during development definitely paid off. There were zero technical or usability issues.</li> The structure of the website was easy to follow, however I provided a facility to skip ahead on the main page if others got the solution, but this facility was never used because people completed the puzzles by entering the solutions.</li> Allowing online tools made the first puzzle too easy, it was completed in less than 30 seconds. I could have made this harder or prevented online tools from solving the puzzle.</li> The second and final (fifth) puzzle was audio based, which meant the music playing had to stop, which disrupted the flow a bit. Audio challenges should be easy or not require silence as these did (a Morse code challenge and audio file to decode an image).</li> The maze challenge provided the right amount of problem solving, the overall challenge wasn't too difficult and could be completed by online tools, but still required the human to work out the solution. Similar approaches should be applied in future.</li> The physical box could only be handled by one person at a time, and took considerable time to complete a lock, lock-picking is also a difficult skill to master, in the end one person completed three of the four locks due to group apathy. I think in future it would be better if the physical box had no physical obstructions once the online part is completed and instead the box opened magically as part of completing the online section, although there is obvious cost to such an approach.</li> The website was completed in a week, which was a considerable crunch.</li> </ul> Overall, the box puzzle was a success, and next time will be better.</p> Notes for Next Time</h2> Consider making the first puzzle more challenging or preventing online tools from solving it too quickly.</li> Make audio-based challenges easier or design them in a way that does not require silence.</li> Explore ways to allow multiple people to engage with the physical box simultaneously or eliminate physical obstructions once the online part is completed</li> </ul> Connecting the SpeedyBee F405 V3 Flight Controller to the Beltian BN-880 GPS Unknown — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 To connect the SpeedyBee F405 V3 to GPS use the following wiring from the UART6 port,</p> </a></figure> See the table below, the orientation of the GPS module and Flight Controller should be as the image is arranged above (GPS module slightly to the right of the flight controller for annotation purposes).</p> Left Side</td> Right Side</td> </td></tr> SpeedyBee FV04 V3 Flight Controller</td> Beltian GPS BN-880</td> GPS Continued</td></tr> Connector Pins UP</td> Connector Pins UP</td> </td></tr> 4V5</td> VCC</td> D</td></tr> G</td> GND</td> G</td></tr> T6</td> RX</td> R</td></tr> R6</td> TX</td> T</td></tr> SDA</td> SDA</td> V</td></tr> SCL</td> SCL</td> C</td></tr></tbody></table></figure> To configure the GPS in Betaflight, set the UART6 mode to GPS in the configuration tab, and the baud rate to Auto.</p> Goldenfir D800 SSD Benchmarks Unknown — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Update: Article originally published in April 2023, and the SSD started having pending bad sectors according to smartctl in May 2025. Will move it to backup duty only and monitor.</p> I had a look on Aliexpress and decided to purchase a Goldenfir 2TB SSD for review from the "Computer & SSD Storage Factory Store" for my Proxmox NAS. I compare it with the Crucial BX500 as I have one on hand too.</p> Internal 2TB SATA SSD Prices</h2> In total for a 2TB SSD I paid £70.61</strong> which is about £10 cheaper than name-brand SSDs for the same capacity from Amazon. I was skeptical of the price but I decided to test it first before putting it in the NAS.</p> 2TB SSD</td> Price</td></tr> Integral V Series (‎INSSD2TS625V2X)</td> £89.99</td></tr> Crucial BX500 (CT2000BX500SSD1)</td> £98.98</td></tr> Samsung 870 QVO (MZ-77Q2T0)</td> £102.97</td></tr></tbody></table>2TB SSD Prices as of 24/04/2023</figcaption></figure> Checking the SSD using h2testw.exe</h2> As soon as the SSD arrived I ran it through its paces on h2testw.exe to check that it was real and all 2TB was available. The process took several hours so I just left it running while I was at work.</p> </a></figure> The SSD passed both the write and verify test. All 2TB is available.</p> Warning: Only 1907547 of 1907711 MByte tested. Test finished without errors. You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again. Writing speed: 85.0 MByte/s Reading speed: 339 MByte/s H2testw v1.4</code></pre> The Goldenfir 2TB SSD in CrystalDiskInfo</h2> I also opened the SSD in CrystalDiskInfo, which confirmed it was brand new if anything. It did have a power on presumably from the factory during testing.</p> </a></figure> Goldenfir 2TB SSD in CrystalDiskMark</h2> I ran the SSD through CrystalDiskMark, the most crucial test to me as it would show how it compared to other SSDs.</p> </a>Goldenfir D800 SSD 2TB</figcaption></figure> It looks like the SSD performs only slightly worse than the Crucial BX500, Tested using an external USB enclosure.</p> Here is a comparison with the Crucial BX500.</p> </a>Crucial BX500</figcaption></figure> And for fun here is a comparison with the Crucial MX100 from 2014.</p> </a>Crucial MX100</figcaption></figure> My Review and Closing Thoughts</h2> Overall, I'm happy</strong>. It performs slightly worse than competitors but it's negligible and I am comfortable keeping the SSD forever so I am not too worried about secure erase.</p> Moving my VPS back Home Unknown — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 I am moving this website from Vultr to my Proxmox Ryzen 5 3600 virtualization server at home because it is cheaper and I no longer need to host my applications externally.</p> Preparing a backup of WordPress</a></li> Setting up a Home VLAN for the VM</a></li> Configuring Proxmox to use the Tagged VLAN Trunk</a></li></ol></nav> To protect my home network, I isolated the web server from my home network traffic. This way, even if the website is compromised, my home network will likely be safe from any attacks.</p> The server doesn't require much to run. It has run on almost always the cheapest hardware/software available on various cloud platforms for years.</p> The main problem was that I didn't get around to making a VLAN to isolate traffic at a network level from my home network.</p> Having a VLAN allows you to isolate networks, which I will use to split my home network and the network used by the web server VM.</p> You can read more about my home network here</a> but it needs a bit of an update.</p> Preparing a backup of WordPress</h2> This website runs on WordPress</a>. WordPress makes backup/restore easy as import/export tools are built-in.</p> To keep costs down, I have a small WordPress site. Jetpack (I think) compresses and serves images, and almost all media is not hosted on the VPS directly. </p> I will need to simply download everything from the admin panel and then upload it to the clone.</p> I also want a new copy of WordPress because it's been a while, my first article is from 2014 for example.</p> Setting up a Home VLAN for the VM</h2> I have a VM running on my home server and disallow the VM to communicate with other devices on my home network but allow access to the internet.</p> External devices are prevented from being able to connect to the VM using my Ubiquiti router firewall.</p> </a></figure> I have a few VLANs going around the house so it was just a case of passing the new VLAN over ethernet tagged with its regular traffic to the VM and then using Proxmox to connect the VM using the same tag. </p> </a></figure> Configuring Proxmox to use the Tagged VLAN Trunk</h2> Because I have not used a VLAN before to tag traffic to Proxmox. All of my previous VMs used the same network as Proxmox.</p> I was able to set the port the Proxmox server used as both a tagged trunk for VLAN 70 and an untagged on VLAN 20.</p> </a></figure> The way my home network is set up, all LAN traffic arrives at my switch on VLAN 20 and then VLAN 20 is untagged to devices such as my server.</p> Non-VLAN 70 VMs will be able to access VLAN 70 traffic but not vice versa. I am okay with this as I trust my home VMs.</p> I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed setting this up.</p> U8 Smart Watch Teardown Unknown — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 The U8 Smart Watch was a grey label smart watch from 2015, its dated in comparison to modern smart watches but was a relatively cheap alternative to other watches like the Samsung Gear S2, Apple Watch and the Pebble branded watches from that time.</p> The watch came with a companion app that was not downloaded from a store but was available from an FTP site</a>, likely due to the fact it would send data back to its creator, IT news site TheRegister reported</a> a year into owning mine.</p> Since then it has sat in a drawer and I thought it is about time I dug it out and opened it up, before disposing of it.</p> </a>The U8 Smart Watch</figcaption></figure> I tried turning it on but it was flat, and it would not take a charge because the battery had dropped below the lithium battery protection boards minimum threshold.</p> In order to get the U8 Smart Watch to work, I'd need to open it up and power the battery terminals manually to allow the watch to accept a charge.</p> Opening the U8 Smart Watch</h2> On the back of the watch was a metal plate, removing it revealed four small screws which I removed, then I removed the watch from the housing and applied 3.3V directly to the pads of the lithium battery, which allowed the watch to turn on.</p> I then plugged in the watch and saw on my meter it was taking a charge, so removed the supply. The watch screen lit up as it had done back in around 2015.</p> </a></figure> Unfortunately, without the companion app, the watch is mostly useless, I tried connecting to my phone's Bluetooth but the pairing would always fail.</p> </a></figure> </a></figure> U8 Smart Watch Pairing</figcaption></figure> I turned the board over to reveal the insides,</p> </a></figure> The smartwatch featured a nifty MediaTek MT6260DA processor, and I am not going to pretend to know if that is any good, but it certainly fulfilled its purpose at the time. I was able to find a draft PDF dating the processor back to December 2012.</p> Attached to the board was a speaker, vibrator combo unit for incoming messages and notifications. I think if I remember correctly you could make calls on the device.</p> It had a 180mAh lithium battery and charged over USB, had a small but very usable screen and in general the apps that ran were slow but acceptable. Notifications that had a progress bar would often buzz for periods of time until it was complete. </p> Anyway, so long... Into the bin, unfortunately without good conscience I cannot allow this watch to see the light of day again and it means I don't have to put it back together.</p> Proxmox Backup Scheduling Unknown — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 When I first started using Proxmox one thing I wanted to understand was the schedule grammar for backups.</p> Most of my backups aren't handled in Proxmox but I did want a quick way of backing up my Minecraft server and as I had a slow 1TB disk attached to Proxmox I thought it worth trying.</p> When backing up its worth observing the 3-2-1 rule. 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 copy offsite. This backup wasn't just about retaining data in case of loss, it is to facilitate rollbacks in case of irreversible damage or corruption to the server, or a dodgy configuration change.</p> </a></figure> Because I wanted lots of points in time to roll back to, I used Proxmox over OpenMediaVault, my usual go-to.</p> Setting Proxmox Backups</h2> Proxmox handles backups from the Datacenter level, in the proxmox administration dashboard on the left hand side, select Datacenter, then click on the Backup tab.</p> </a></figure> From the backup tab you should see the backups that have been scheduled. Here we can see my minecraft backup jobs loaded.</p> </a></figure> I found the job schedule difficult to understand when the next few occur. I found through the documentation that you can check the backup iterations through systemd-analyze.</p> Checking Proxmox Backup Schedules</h2> The easiest way to check your backup schedule is by using the schedule simulator on the far right of the backup configuration area.</p> </a></figure> If you want to look ahead at proxmox backups to see if you have the right schedule set up, you can also use the command below, replacing the last part of the command with your desired schedule in the shell prompt.</p> systemd-analyze calendar --iterations=15 '20,22:00'</code></pre> This is because backups work through a version of systemd time specification.</p> </a></figure> The screenshot above is in Ubuntu's Terminal but you can run it in the shell on the Promox dashboard directly.</p> You can check the time of the next backup by altering the iterations argument as required. Once you've got the schedule as you need, alter your job (or make a new one).</p> </a></figure> Make sure to set the retention period correctly, if you specify a retention period in weeks, only the latest backup that week will be kept.</p> One change I made to the schedule was keep-hourly=24, keep-weekly=2</code> rather than keep-hourly=168</code> in the screenshot to keep 24 hours of backups (limited to the timings of my schedule) and lower the fidelity of backups to a weekly basis after 24 hours to reduce storage consumption. See the documentation</a> as it's explained better there.</p> Tiktok Digital Wellbeing Dark Patterns Unknown — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 You may have used TikTok's digital well-being feature to limit screen time and reduce the amount of time you actually spend on TikTok.</p> Although TikTok offers the ability to be notified when you spend a considerable amount of time on the app and provide breaks in 10, 20 or 30-minute intervals there are some deceptive and likely intentional behaviours to keep you on the app.</p> When the app is set to restricted mode at the top of the app there is a message that reads "Restricted Mode" and although some viral videos were identified and restricted, others were not.</p> "Restricted Mode" videos also did not filter out swearing, fights in shopping centres and adult themes like sex and alcohol.</p> Time to take a break?</h2> When the screen time limit is reached, a message appears like this,</p> </a>TikTok Time to take a break? Digital Wellbeing Dark Pattern</figcaption></figure> Although the pop-up suggests you leave the app, it only partially obstructs the content and offers the option to "Snooze" or press OK. </p> You can tap anywhere on the screen and it will cause the pop-up to close and you can continue to use the app.</p> It would be better if the application obstructed the content better or only allowed the next video if the allotted time does not run out before the well-being timer elapses.</p> This behaviour provides a hook to keep users engaged for longer and encourages dismissing the message, rather than leaving the app.</p> Screen Time Management</h2> </a>TikTok Screen Time Management</figcaption></figure> Screen time management also offers no incentive to leave the app and the code has infinite retries with no timeout.</p> </a>TikTok Screen time management offers infinite retries</figcaption></figure> Androids native digital well-being application is more effective (though has its own issues) by disallowing the user to open the app when the timer is reached.</p> When a user reaches the timeout on the TikTok app, if they re-open the app without entering the passcode.</p> The user can see a glimpse of the content underneath, once again providing a hook and incentivising the user to unlock the app to view the content.</p> The pin code which uses a code set by the user does allow them to enter any number of codes to attempt to unlock the app, there is no restriction on the number of codes they can enter.</p> There is also the option to unlock the app using the recovery methods or wait two hours until the app can be used again.</p> TikTok Digital Wellbeing Effectiveness</h2> Although a step in the right direction and following feedback from Internet Matters</a>, they have still provided hooks and little incentive to leave the app.</p> Some of TikTok's most addicted users will see the digital well-being features as an annoyance to circumnavigate and the app provides an easy way to bypass the digital well-being features.</p> Some of the app features also tease content and offer entertainment rather than invite users to leave the app.</p> "Nudging" 13 to 17-year-olds about their usage if they reach over 100 minutes a day in the app is also a high bar, over 1 hour 30 minutes a day is already an extended period.</p> Screen time management can be more effectively controlled at the device level. You can activate it by opening your settings app.</p> "The Undeclared War" Hacking Breakdown Unknown — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Channel 4's "The Undeclared War" is a TV Show about a third-party country undermining UK democracy by disrupting UK networks through cyber-attacks. The protagonist is an intern who has a front-row seat to the ordeal and the show is set inside GCHQ, at least that is what I have seen from the first two episodes. I'll write up more when they are released.</p> Here is a breakdown of all of the techniques used in the show. It is clear the writers took at least some inspiration from actual real-world scenarios but then bent the rules or changed some aspects to fit the narrative of the episode, which makes the episode a little hard to watch.</p> The Undeclared War is an inside look at an attack on British internet infrastructure and the inner workings of GCHQ.</p> The Undeclared War Episode 1</h2> The episode starts out in a fairground, analogous to hacking, as becomes clear when shots of Saara (main character) are interspersed with her sitting in a classroom playing against other hackers.</p> This is a reference to a game in hacker culture called a CTF or Capture the Flag. A Capture the Flag (CTF) is a popular way of introducing or testing a hacker's ability, so in that sense at least the show got it right! CTFs are usually a social event and often very competitive, a good start to the first episode.</p> There are also some more references for the keen viewer, at one point Saara pulls out a hammer and starts knocking on bricks on a wall, this is similar to port knocking, a technique of security through obscurity whereby a system will not open a port to allow access to an application without first having a client send packets to a network connected device in a specific sequence across various port numbers.</p> After Saara is done knocking the bricks with a hammer, she is able to remove a brick (or the system opens a port) to view the valuable information inside.</p> It's not clear how Saara would know the pattern in order to hit the bricks but is possibly something that she would have to capture using packet sniffing or know by other means, such as accessing the computer she is targeting using command line tools such as SSH or even remote desktop.</p> </a>Screenshot of the hacking in "The Undeclared War" at 1:49</figcaption></figure> The show then cuts back to the real world out of the analogy briefly to show the commands Saara is running on her screen, we can see a lot going on but we see references to meterpreter.exe</code> at the top. </p> Meterpreter is a penetration tool used to exploit programs in order to allow a hacker access to a system remotely, which we can see she has used it to dump the password hashes, but in this version of the tool meterpreter has been able to also decrypt the hashes and displays them on screen before she's cracked them.</p> Despite this, she then runs a python3</code> program (python being a popular programming language) to run a program called hashcrack.py</code> which takes a passwords.txt</code> file as input probably to crack the hashes, to nitpick it looks like they've already been cracked, but perhaps she didn't have all of the hashes yet.</p> Python also isn't a particularly fast language for cracking passwords, a more direct access to the hardware is usually preferred so that the hashes can be computed quicker. Cracking hashes could take days to decades if the password is complex, so every minute advantage in performance counts.</p> Saara then at the end of the cutscene she runs the command -sT -vvv -n 192.158.1.254</code> which seems to be a bit of fat-fingering by Saara, because it's supposed to be part of the line above or nmap</code>, but the computer doesn't seem to mind and dutifully executes the command as though nothing is wrong.</p> The whole time she seems to be switching between Linux and Windows commands arbitrarily and the computer doesn't seem to mind, she never switches context from windows or Linux, the commands she entered don't really make any sense throughout the episode in terms of what is actually possible on one operating system.</p> We can also see a CVE at the top of the screen, CVE's are critical vulnerability notices used in various ways to identify and classify exploits in computer programs, it doesn't really make sense that this would be labelled a "private exploit", because it's public by design.</p> </a>The hacking then breaks into a printout of nmap</figcaption></figure> She then also tried to take a copy of the windows box using volume shadow copy, a tool for taking a form of backup, she then decides its time to scan for some open ports, it looks like the command -sT -vvv -n 192.158.1.254</code> is actually nmap</code>, a port scanning tool, not that she actually runs nmap</code>, it just outputs text extremely similar to it.</p> We can see that nmap</code> lists the following open ports 445, 139, 53, 443, 80, 6969. 445 and 443 could possibly be SMB or file shares, or a webserver as we can see port 80 is also open, port 53 is for DNS so this box is perhaps also a DNS server, and port 6969 is I'm sure also a real thing, although my skills are lacking a bit when it comes to what this port is for, I don't think its a real thing but actually a joke for the informed (or otherwise) viewer.</p> Saara spends the rest of the scene walking around with a tool belt on, clearly focused on the task at hand.</p> Then she is seen using various commands in the terminal, which are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't complain at all. Clearly, the directors have turned off the output of the command line if the user types out an erroneous command. </p> </a>Another screenshot of the terminal in The Undeclared War</figcaption></figure> At one point a timer pops up, we can see she runs the command msfvenom</code> which prints out some hex. Cool, but even some of the best hackers in the world don't spend their time reading hex, its like reading a barcode or serial number, it may make sense to computers, but without some real context and understanding of what is going on, its useless to humans.</p> </a></figure> Working at GCHQ</h3> In the next hackery-type scenes we see, Saara has learned of the attack and starts looking at the code in a program called IDA at about 16 minutes in.</p> </a>IDA Freeware from the TV show The Undeclared War</figcaption></figure> She spends some time scrolling around the code and at one point finds a lot of "garbage" a good way of showing that often tasks like this are tedious and hard to follow. When a compiler compiles a program it strips it of any human-readable comments or friendly function names that are easy to follow, so its often a lot of scrolling, annotating and scrolling to determine what the program does.</p> This part is a little bit confusing because she is able to identify "garbage" but isn't able to tell that the code has been obfuscated, obfuscation is a way to make code harder to reverse engineer by having the program perform its function with extra complexity. Saara's overseer calls the program "some FinFisher thing", which isn't really a method for obfuscation but whatever, perhaps I am misinterpreting what he is saying. </p> Interestingly the malware is also called Suspected_Malware.exe</code> in IDA but later called SUSPECTED-MALWARE.exe</code> in the sandbox.</p> The IDA freeware program allows you to read the program as machine code, somehow Saara doesn't notice that the program is written to never run the functions or "garbage" she is looking at, despite the fact IDA would have clearly annotated this.</p> The software reverser Phill says that the garbage is to "confuse the look of the code so the antivirus software won't recognise it as malware" which sort of makes sense, what he means is that it will change the signature of the program so the antivirus would not be able to detect the program as a known signature or the program behaviours are different than what the antivirus is designed to detect. Again, something Saara would probably know.</p> She is offered the opportunity to use their test environment, where she incorrectly corrects him about calling it a sandbox.</p> When she actually runs the program in the sandbox, it errors out and says it can't run, which the reversing engineer (Phill) says to try to emulate actual user behaviour to see if you can trick it into running, but this is bad advice because they can just reverse the program to determine what is stopping the program from running!</p> Again, something Saara should understand and already know. "Paste in some word documents, scroll around a bit" lol, once again they have IDA so would be able to determine exactly what is required to cause this behaviour,</p> Imagine you are reading a book, but you don't have time to read all of it, and you really just want to know why the main character's favourite colour is red, you know that on page 20 they say their favourite colour is red, if we try to shoe-horn IDA into this analogy, we would get a direct reference to where the character grew up with a red front door, and that is why their favourite colour is red.</p> Programs need references in the code to establish behaviours, so when it throws up an error, they can just look through the code, find the error in the code, and trace it back to determine what caused the program to realise it was in a sandbox and prevent it from running, this is basic usage for IDA, its what it is designed to do. </p> Trying to "Paste in some word documents, scroll around a bit" is like trying to mow a lawn with scissors when you have a lawnmower, ineffective and poor use of the tooling they have.</p> Its also very unlikely an intern would be vetted enough to have this level of access.</p> Fear of Attribution</h3> At one point, Danny (Simon Pegg) is reluctant to assign attribution of the malware, this is generally a good call, because it is a technique that advanced persistent threats would use, to implant false clues to assign attribution to a different adversary to throw off investigators. The show talks about Russian bots as well, a real-world issue.</p> Danny also is chastised for running stressing infrastructure against the network, running this type of test against a production environment during peak hours is a terrible idea.</p> The hack is also able to take down some parts of the web but leaves others up, this is odd, it may be technically possible however practically all of these systems will themselves have both redundancy and disaster recovery to bring the systems back online, especially products with SLA agreements with their customers. </p> Many of these systems would be hosted in clouds like AWS or Azure and generally have mechanisms built-in to prevent a global outage based on a single point of failure like a country going down, if a BGP route went down, for example it would not take too long before everything would be re-established through a new route.</p> Reversing Libraries</h3> At around 28 minutes in, Phill laughs as Saara has reverse-engineered a library saying that "we've all done it", but practically it is almost certainly a good idea, you can probably determine that a program is using a library and probably even check it against a known hash of the library. </p> The department missing this crucial part of the code by not looking is negligent and certainly something they would have done. They are looking for exactly what she has found, they aren't looking for something else, so it is odd that they would discount her abilities, its a team effort.</p> The program opens a URL shortner link https://url.short/41e</code> which isn't a valid top level domain name, to run some code, which could run anything.</p> With that, it's off to a cobra meeting they go.</p> Don't use .local as an internal TLD Unknown — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Recently, I was having issues with internal DNS names, I had spent some time using the .local top level domain name (TLD).</p> I'd been content with the .local domain name for a good while, because it worked on Windows, but I found that when using the domain names on Linux and Android it would not work in a browser.</p> It turns out .local </code>is used for in link-local networking. Often for something called mDNS, which I admit I don't know a lot about.</p> So if you have been content connecting to your internal domains using ca.local</code>, octoprint.local</code>, proxmox.local </code>I have bad news for you, these domains aren't going to work much longer.</p> </a>Windows Command Prompt pinging proxmox.lan and proxmox.local</figcaption></figure> Changing .local Domains on EdgeRouter</h2> What I did to fix this was login to my EdgeRouter X and change all of the references from .local</code> to .lan</code>. Although I cant promise .lan</code> won't one day be victim to the same fate.</p> If you have an EdgeRouter X its easier to bulk edit the domain names using the config tree, although make a note of your configuration, because it won't be preserved if you alter the parent node of each configuration item (so you'll loose aliases).</p> Config Tree > system > static-host-mapping > host-name > Host name for static address mapping </code></pre> Remember to commit your changes.</p> Can I alter DNS for my devices without a DNS Server?</h2> If your DNS isn't under your control, you won't be able to configure how it responds to queries, there are some hacks and tricks to get around this, such as editing your hosts file.</p> Using the hosts file works fine, but DNS can become complicated quickly. Especially if there are many devices.</p> For best results it is best to configure your DNS as required, rather than making edits to each device's configuration.</p> Editing your hosts file may also not be possible on Android devices for example, or TVs.</p> You don't have to use .lan for a TLD, it is probably best practice to register a domain, and then use everything you need as a subdomain of that domain, as is typical of larger networks and allows for segmentation.</p> Aidan.</p> ICO Trends Dashboard Insights Unknown — Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 I decided it was a good time to learn docker and actually make a project that uses it, so I created ICO Security Trends, a small and unique dashboard which uses the UK ICO published spreadsheets to produce graphs and insight into the data.</p> I thought I would include some of my findings which are not immediately evident on the BI Dashboard they provide,</p> UK ICO Incident Security Trends</h2> Categorisation on incidents described as 'Other non-cyber incident' has declined from 2019 to 2022. Roughly on average there are 750 incidents a quarter for 'Other non-cyber incident[s]', while 'Other cyber-incidents' remain fairly constant at around 60 a quarter.</li> The 'Other non-cyber incident' is generally too broad and should potentially be broken down. Insights into trends in this area are potentially being missed.</li>Ransomware disclosure has increased since 2019, which concides with general industry concensus.</li></ul> There's a lot more to it, but I thought I'd get it out there already,</p> https://ico-security-trends.infinityflame.co.uk/</a></p> </a>ICO Trends Dashboard</figcaption></figure> Capital Expenditure vs Operational Expenditure Unknown — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure are spending methodologies that focus principally if it is better to use a cloud service, on premise or a hybrid method to deliver service to users.</p> This methodology determination is similar to labor investment vs capital investment</a>, where a task may be performed by labor as opposed to automation.</p> Please note this article is written mostly within the domain of IT infrastructure, however there are aspects of this subject which are also applicable to accounting methodologies for Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure.</p> A limited analogy of Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure is to think of Capital Expenditure as renting infrastructure and Operational Expenditure as a purchasing your infrastructure. There are advantages to both types of financing your infrastructure.</p> Capital Expenditure (CapEx)</h2> Capital Expenditure is the up-front spending on physical infrastructure such as hardware,</p> Examples of Capital Expenditure</h3> Networking Equipment</li> Servers, Spinning Disk, SSD and Compute</li> Racking Equipment</li> Climate Control Equipment</li> Cabling and Termination (Patch Panels, Ethernet Pattress Boxes)</li> Software</li> Monitoring and Disaster Recovery</li> Land or Property</li> Generators</li> Security</li></ul> Capital Expenditure usually has a large inital cost as a new project is delivered, over time the cost of the infrastructure will remain mostly constant until hardware failures, obselesence and improvements to methodologies cause changes to configuration.</p> Renewals</li> Expansions</li> Upgrades</li> New Infrastructure</li></ul> Advantages of Capital Expenditure</h3> Greater control over fixed assets</strong>, which can be liquidised if required, this applies not just to IT equipment but warehousing, property and vehicles.</li> Property and equipment can be kept physically close to users to provide faster, cheaper throughput</strong>. Access to resources that could be internal do not rely on the WAN.</li> Low cost to bandwidth for even medium sized organisations when transferring locally</strong>. Low or no cost transfer between hosts.</li> Upgrades and downgrades to hardware is generally easier than cloud based solutions</strong>. Cloud based solutions generally do not provide an easy method of scaling down infrastructure.</li> Issues with the host can be identified by onsite skills</strong> rather than second or third party infrastructure teams.</li> On premise infrastructure still works</strong> when </strong>wider services like Cloud solutions, ISPs or links between sites go down</strong>.</li> Capital Expenditure is generally better for organisations with a lot of techical debt, because applications can keep running for years with little cost. When reaching capacity older appliances can be decomissioned to free up space for newer hardware or software.</li> Generally heavy compute or IOPS (Transfer between appliances) is best suited on premise, because the cost will be lower than cloud.</li></ul> Disadvantages of Capital Expenditure</h3> Large initial cost</strong> to start a project.</li> Large cost when appliances need refreshing/upgrading</strong>.</li> Growing or Expanding businesses will require more assets, including space and electrical infrastructure to support the requirements of the business.</li> Redundancy and SLAs are on the business, power outages or natural disasters can cause business closing consiquences.</li> Large monolithic applications can cause technical debt.</li> Generally the value of the assets you purchase decreases over time and with wear.</li></ul> Operational Expenditure (OpEx)</h2> Operational Expenditure is different in that the cost of the asset is not included at the start but you continually pay for it throughout the lifetime of the project.</p> Operational Exepnditure is also more dynamic as you can pay your provider to scale up and down the instances horizontally or vertically as needed, increase compute or storage, or increase the number of nodes required.</p> Examples of Operational Expenditure</h2> Storage Cost</li> Administrative Expenses</li> Maintenance</span></li> Subscriptions and Licencing</li></ul> Generally it can be easy to decide which option is cheaper over the lifetime of a project if an on-premise business has already invested in the surrounding infrastructure, however increasingly cloud providers are offering lower cost incentives such as lower cost products than a traditional virtual machine or cheaper hardware through their platform.</p> Advantages of Operational Expenditure</h3> Products are generally available quicker for purchase for project managers than on-premise, providing a more agile IT strategy.</li> Expenses are generally at every billing cycle consistently, rather than an initial cost for hardware and then a smaller maintenance cost.</li> Generally you pay for consumption where you only pay for the resources used, however some providers will agree to a discount if a commitment is made for resources over a longer term.</li> Costs can be predicted and generally billing can be itemised easily, which helps in understanding risk.</li> Some IaaS and most SaaS solutions will patch and maintain infrastructure, such as databases without much input from the product owners.</li></ul> Disadvantages of Operational Expenditure</h3> Generally costs for highly transactional applications can be higher than on-premise solutions, such as compute or IOPS intensive workloads.</li> Decisions may be set with a short term view and poor cost analysis.</li> Availability of skilled professionals is not easy.</li> Can be more expensive than in-house solutions.</li></ul> What is a Corporate Network? Unknown — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 What is a Corporate Network?</h3> Corporate Networks are highly thought out and well-designed critical business infrastructure that can span many buildings or geographies. The more complex an organisation is, the more expansive and multi-format the network can be.</p> A Corporate Network will often have an acceptable use policy and may monitor its usage.</p> </a>D-Link DGS-108 Consumer Dumb Network Switch</figcaption></figure> </a> Corporate Network Server Closet </figcaption></figure> Features of a Corporate Network</h3> Many corporate networks utilise additional benefits that home or small business routers usually are not capable of, such as;</p> Quality of Service</strong> or QoS </strong>is a layer 3 network technology that can prioritise (or more importantly de-prioritise) traffic by application, such as streaming, game services or file sharing.</li> Traffic Shaping</strong> is a bandwidth management tool to slow long running or high bandwidth downloads to prioritise other activities and ultimately restrict high utilisation on the network by a single client. This is most useful where bandwidth externally is limited.</li> VPNs </strong>(such as L2TP/IPSec or Wireguard) or SSL Tunnels (SSTP) allow corporate networks to link together across global infrastructure, SSL Tunnels can ensure that all data accessed by clients is encrypted by the link itself, so that any HTTP traffic for example must ultimately first travel SSL encrypted to the VPN routing appliance or provider.</li> VLANs </strong>can segregate and isolate riskier traffic as well as limit chatter or prevent sniffing ports. VLANs can also by separated by different subnets or network classes to protect, prioritise or isolate IT infrastructure and management from users. For example many switches have a management VLAN to prevent end-user clients re-configuring or accessing the management portal for the switch itself.</li> IPv6 </strong>is a relatively common new link format however some organisations are starting to implement IPv6 in their infrastructure in preparation for the switchover. Personally I believe this will not be a requirement for some time.</li> Content filtering</strong> and Proxying </strong>is used in organisations to protect valuable data and users from compromise and exfiltration. Some organisations require a proxy to reach external services and most implement some form of content filtering, generally for productivity or traffic management purposes.</li>DNS </strong>or Domain Name System</strong> servers can provide internal network resources resolvable and recognisable addressing for internal services. Most enterprises use DNS with Active directory through windows server domain controllers so that their Windows clients can take advantage of resolvable network names for windows machines.</li></ul> Features of a Large Corporate Network</h3> Larger Corporate Networks, ones that can encompass tens of thousands of devices or more could be considered large and may take additional setup, such as;</p> Load Balancing</strong> can be used to balance demand to external or internal services like internal enterprise applications or highly available applications that are business critical.</li>iBGP Routing</strong> or Border Gateway Protocol</strong> is usually only required for extremely large networks. Where routing and network policies are likely to change. BGP Routing is generally only required for carrier ISPs or enterprises dealing with internet infrastructure. For customers, due to the premium on network devices, the requirements of the networks used by enterprises and organisations are generally less than BGP can facilitate and BGP is not supported on smaller SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) networks.</li></ul> Corporate Network Internal Services</h3> DNS or Domain Name Systems</h4> You may wonder how companies and other organisations are able to utilise top-level domain names that are not typically available on the internet, such as example.local</code> and subdomains for a real domain, such as internal.example.com </code>where internal.example.com</code> is not a real external subdomain.</p> This is possible through many technologies and can incorporate many aspects to enable additional features like trusted SSL and network-level authentication or windows authentication to provide a relatively normal experience for end-users while being completely inaccessible from external networks.</p> SSL or Enterprise Trust</h4> Even consumer routers often provide the facility to reserve DHCP addresses and register DNS names and aliases, but providing trusted SSL is accomplished through using either,</p> A local, trusted SSL certificate signing authority, with the organisations root or supplementary SSL certificate trusted by clients.</li> A real, actual trusted wildcard SSL certificate for a subdomain of the organisation. This is less common as it would require the same certificate to be on every application.</li></ul> Network Segmentation and Isolation</h4> A Corporate Network may utilise Network Segmentation to isolate external clients from internal applications or require a VPN to access. In this case, rules on the router allow inter-VLAN communication and routing table rules to allow communication with clients. Some networks may implement a zero-trust architecture in their network access.</p> Network segmentation restricts access to different services based on rules to help protect an enterprise from enumeration and the exfiltration of data, as access to the network is only possible through opaque rules that will make data transfer over the mediums allowed difficult. For example, access to a public server on a trusted LAN through a direct connection over SSH port 23 may not allow access to web-based interfaces internally such as port 80 or 443 as network rules prevent access, usually by dropping packets.</p> Many organisations may utilise these technologies in conjunction with an SSL proxy to provide legacy applications with an HTTPS frontend to a web server that is not configured for SSL, as access to the application web server would be restricted to only allow traffic through the proxy.</p> VPNs and DirectAccess</h4> DirectAccess (similar to an always-on VPN) for Windows or VPN services like L2TP/IPSec enable corporate networks to be spanned over different environments, such as;</p> Field Engineers who rely on access to internal databases for parts or documents.</li> Mobile Devices and Tablets for reading email remotely.</li> Work from Home Deployments (WFH) for office employees who need access to shared drives and groupware.</li> Satellite or Remote Offices can deploy over the VPN to ensure a consistent experience for employees who travel.</li> Otherwise insecure environments, like coffee shops can be used as internal services will be accessed over the VPN and not directly over the internet.</li> Customer Premises where interfaces required on site can be relayed to internal networks at the origin organisation.</li></ul> VPNs once configured with credentials can be utilised to provide network access as though they were direct clients of the VPN router, which could be placed in a trusted part of the enterprise and provide the typical trust, filtering and proxying required by the organisation configuration.</p> VPNs can often disconnect at work because there are packets not making it to the VPN provider. The simplest method to rectify this is usually by using an Ethernet cable.</p> Corporate Network IP Schemes</h3> Unlike a public IP address with a single home network-attached, a corporate network may take advantage of using many IP addresses, networks and physical links to their ISP to provide a more robust and uniform experience to users.</p> Almost all corporate networks will use VLANs and network subnets to distribute their client environments to isolate services for example, a computer lab in a school vs a teacher network, or an open WiFi network at a restaurant compared to a private one for POS (Point of Sale) terminals.</p> Generally, most enterprises use the 10.0.0.0/8IP CDIR block, using different subnets for different kinds of devices. Using the traditional 256 contiguous class C network addresses 192.168.0.0/16 range may not provide enough IP addresses for some larger deployments. (65,536 possible clients). </p> Corporate Network WiFi</h3> Generally, Corporate Networks used to be a closed ecosystem, where only trusted devices and non-enterprise owned equipment was not present, this is no longer the case.</p> Rather than use combination Routing and Access Point devices like a home router, enterprises utilise extensive commercial WiFi Access Points that can provide access to numerous clients and can be distributed through the locations the organisation resides, like buildings and restaurants. Using dedicated hardware like Access Points enables the use of specialist configurations, like access point hopping for clients and PoE for easier installation and unification.</p> Some newer WiFi networks can also provide certificates that can be used in the organisation to access internal resources over SSL.</p> References</h3> Wikipedia Private Networks</a></li></ul> Turn off Hearing Yourself on Sennheiser 350BT Headphones Unknown — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 When I got my Sennheiser 350BT when using games like Warzone or on phone calls on Windows 11 I found I could hear myself and my surroundings played back to me.</p> I spent a good while trying to disable it so I could no longer hear myself so I am posting it here. There are two possible problems so make sure to check both,</p> You need to disable sidetone in the Sennheiser Smart Control App. This will probably require you to update your headphones to the latest version.</li>You need to disable the "LE-HD 350BT Hands-Free" driver in Windows.</li></ul> Disabling Sidetone in Sennheiser Smart Control</h2> To stop hearing yourself on phone calls, open the Sennheiser Smart Control app then find your headphones and make sure they are connected, and then you should see the setting by clicking the cog in the top right, make sure to set it to 0%.</p> </a></figure> If you don't see the sidetone setting the the app, update your headphones as below and follow the instructions for windows below as well.</p> Once it is set to zero, you shouldn't hear yourself on phone calls at all, this however is not the only fix required for Windows</strong>, so follow the Windows 11 steps as well if you can still hear yourself.</p> Updating the Sennheiser 350BT</h2> If you don't have the option to disable sidetone, you may need an update for your headphones if they are not running the latest version.</p> Pair your headphones to the phone you are using, and install the Sennheiser Smart Control App</a>.</span> You should see a message like this in the app.</p> If your headphones already have the latest version, you can skip this step.</strong></p> </a> Sennheiser Smart Control update screen</figcaption></figure> I found this process to be really really difficult, because it took about 5 or 6 tries to get right, and when you've never done it before it can be extremely annoying. I even tried on a different phone before it working when I went back to the device I first tried. As a general rule I found,</p> Do not leave the app during the update.</li> You must not play any audio, at all while the headphones are updating.</li>You must not allow it to pair with any devices other than the phone you are using to update them with.</li></ul> Otherwise it will not work and you will see a message like this.</p> </a>Sennheiser Smart Control Something went wrong</figcaption></figure> If you see a message like above on Android, simply keep trying to get it working. It took me about 6 tries to get it to work. </p> </a></figure> And eventually I finally saw this screen,</p> </a></figure> After you have updated your headphones, you should see the setting as above.</p> Disable the Hands Free Audio Driver in Windows 11</h2> If you still hear yourself in the headphones, I found this was only present in Warzone and Discord. You need to disable the Hands Free Driver for Windows. Note I am running Windows 11 and found there were two driver locations.</p> Audio inputs and outputs > "Headset (HD 350BT Hands-Free)"</li>Sound, video and game controllers > "LE-HD 350BT Hands-Free"</li></ul> In Device Manager (Search in Windows for "Device Manager"), right click both (as in one in both categories, "Audio inputs and outputs" and "Sound, video and game controllers") drivers that are labeled hands-free for your headphones and select the option to disable them. A reboot will be required most likely to stop hearing yourself</em>.</p> </a>Audio inputs and outputs > "Headset (HD 350BT Hands-Free)"</figcaption></figure> </a>Sound, video and game controllers > "LE-HD 350BT Hands-Free"</figcaption></figure> Verify You are no longer Hearing Yourself</h2> After a restart if you load up Warzone or call over Microsoft Teams or Discord, you should both no longer be hearing yourself and when making calls on your phone, you should no longer hear sidetone.</p> If you still do, make sure the app setting is set to 0% and the drivers have been disabled. I would not reccomend uninstalling the driver outright for Windows 11.</p> I hope this helped.</p> Building Secure Web Applications Unknown — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 When working on a new web application there are some crucial aspects to your application security that all developers should follow.</p> This applies to both a production and test environment. Just because an application is in-test or not production-ready does not excuse poor security. There are a few examples of where even 'secure' environments have been exploited through their test systems.</p> Secure Development Environments</h3> Should not use real-world data and should rely on faker or placeholder data. This can be more time consuming for agile teams as the data may change over time, which is why your ORM models should migrate to support the latest faker schema.</li> Should be isolated entirely from the production environment and should not be placed in the same realm of systems. Your environment configuration should be independent from your secrets configuration and of course neither should be versioned. Whenever there is a need for an environment or secrets file to copy from, it should be made available in the documentation as an example and should not use real credentials.</li> Application code should be clear and understandable with well documented features, when you use a library for authentication it should be well-maintained and you should always use secure and up-to-date libraries for your application.</li> Your development and deployment pipeline should not have any secrets passed in via terminal command. Logging and event monitoring may inadvertently record these credentials, which is insecure as logging may not always be a privileged activity.</li> Your source code should not be considered a weakness if exposed, in your organisation (or outside it) you should practice an open source initiative. If your code base were to be exposed, it should not be too detrimental to your security. This principal doesn't totally apply to blue team defence or anti-cheat because detection methods are hard to prevent exploitation, however this can be mitigated by having a narrow domain of allowed activity.</li> At all avenues, SSL and TLS should be used as well as encryption, both in transport and at rest.</li></ul> How Do I Know If My Web Application Is Secure?</h2> Determining if your web application is secure can be hard to do if you are not a developer for the application in question however, there are some basic techniques you can use.</p> Do not overly expose your application, if it is only used internally then make sure it only is available through the company intranet or local area.</li> Do not expose parts of the application that are internal only to the application itself, if the application uses a MYSQL database, there is no purpose in exposing the MYSQL database to the internet if the client only interacts with the webserver.</li> Do not expose APIs and application endpoints that are internal.</li> Do not allow anonymous authentication to applications or use shared credentials.</li> Log and monitor behaviours, especially database queries and crash behaviour.</li> Make sure your application is up to date and supports the latest version of your web-server and databases.</li> When using proxy technologies, make sure to follow the proper domain rules applied by the web server and make sure sessions are properly catered for when using load balancing.</li> Use trusted SSL technologies and transport.</li> Do not use credentials for the application that allow for lateral movement throughout your environment, isolate public services not only through networks but also by authentication.</li></ul> Challenges Moving Applications to the Cloud Unknown — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Moving your applications to the cloud can be a polarising task. Some believe that the cloud is the future and the value add outweighs the work involved. Others believe that on premise solutions are best for users and data.</p> Vendor Lock-in</h2> Although vendors like Azure may offer greater features or added value than traditional on-premise services, there can often be features that PaaS services offer that are not available in other solutions that can increase the total cost of ownership.</p> Features are not the only drawbacks to cloud solutions, many cloud platforms can offer additional infrastructure or architectures that can make lift and shift harder or impossible. This is especially prevalent for IT teams that do not have software development in their departments.</p> Downtime</h2> Many cloud services, especially global solutions like AWS, Google Cloud or Azure have had downtime in the past and although they provide service level agreements to their services, they have had downtime that can span many hours.</p> In addition, configuration changes and DNS are a big factor to consider. Managing trusted IP addresses and DMZ's over the internet can be difficult to implement effectively. Many cloud solutions are better than what in-house services can offer but resiliency and accessibility becomes an overhead that requires consideration.</p> Many cloud solutions offer backup technologies and solutions with low import fees but high exit fees when transiting data.</p> Skill Gaps and Lack of Expertise</h2> As new cloud solutions develop, it is becoming increasingly difficult to learn new skills for all platforms and effectively transfer them from one provider to another, product names and technologies are complex to learn and certifications for one cloud platform may not always apply to others.</p> Cloud technologies on the whole are here to stay and rapid advancement in technologies can be costly to small business to implement. Many companies are using automated solutions like backups and Azure AD to manage systems that previously were done in house, this can make break-glass protocols or access to systems where the administrator is no longer present difficult.</p> Bandwidth and Data Transfer Fees</h2> Saving money is a common driver for business decisions and cloud solutions offer good value for services once in-house, however the cost of moving data around the enterprise can be expensive when a hybrid approach is adopted. This is especially prevalent for large transfers of data off the cloud or public internet.</p> Many cloud solutions can also deliver data faster via CDNs or through local appliances to alleviate this cost, however this requires some investment and can lead to vendor lock-in it can lead to better globalisation and work from home approaches to working.</p> Choosing the right service can be complex, such as choosing a hosted VM over a PaaS solution like a database server over a managed database can be hard to estimate best value.</p> As products and services grow over time, these costs will become more difficult to manage and estimate as requirements by users increase.</p> Incompatibility</h2> Many enterprises choose a hybrid approach when moving to the cloud, offering services once only internal to the enterprise - now available through the public internet makes security a greater consideration. Older applications deemed acceptable risk or air-gaped may no longer be supported by surrounding infrastructure or end user clients.</p> Many enterprise applications may not be built for the cloud or may not support security technologies the cloud requires when working with externally facing services, in particular patching and maintenance to applications no longer supported by vendors.</p> What Makes an Application Scalable? Unknown — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 What Does a Scalable Application Mean?</h3> Applications that are depended on by thousands of users may see peaks or dips in demand during the day and managing the cost of running the infrastructure can be challenging. Scalable applications are applications that are able to increase their resources to serve requests as they come.</p> What types of Scaling are there?</h3> There are two basic examples of scaling for applications,</p> Vertical Scaling, where an application's resources are increased due to demand, such as increasing the RAM available to an application host. Vertical Scaling is also sometimes referred to as scale-up.</li> Horizontal Scaling, where an application is spread across different nodes in a cluster. This is most appropriate for applications that require a lot of resources. Horizontal Scaling is also referred to as scale-out.</li></ul> Scalable applications have many uses, including;</p> Allowing cost reduction during low utilisation by scaling down clusters or pods serving the application.</li> Improving quality of service during peak load times by scaling up horizontally or vertically by utilising resources made available to the application autoscaler.This will ensure that your application always has the right amount of capacity to handle the current traffic demand.</li> Faster processing as features can use the optimal storage technology for data and information.</li></ul> Best Practice for Scalable Applications</h2> Applications usually are best compartmentalised into components for both design and maintainability, monolithic architectures for code bases and applications have caused application elements to become obscure and entrenched, using a more distributed approach from the start can reduce cost and technical debt as components can be re-written or swapped out.</p> Splitting transient application functions in to their own libraries or APIs can allow the front end and back end to operate independently, this can allow processes that take time to be acted on based on events rather than cause waiting or processing as a batch.</li> Data storage should be independent to the service that owns the data and therefore should use the best storage type and mechanisms available such as caching or streams of data. Slow returns should be accounted for and independent from the user interface.</li> Applications should not be strained by resources, whenever possible applications should perform the same for every user or function regardless of workload or work-type. Rather than wait for functions to complete, have a common goal of eventual data integrity.</li> When implementing concepts like micro-services you should endeavour to ensure standard practices like a common set of languages or behaviours to improve maintainability.</li> Complexity can sometimes be harder to manage than an equivalent monolithic application, even though each function should be simpler.</li> Isolate failure to individual services.</li></ul> High Availability in SQL Server Unknown — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 </a>The Eden Project, UK</figcaption></figure> Microsoft SQL Server is an extensive and complicated database host, there are many ways of keeping services online during patches or instance failure.</p> Typically systems that can scale to maintain uptime are regarded as Highly Available. Highly Available systems are designed to be online as much as possible, often with no single points of failure.</p> SQL Server has many availability technologies built in to achieve robust and consistent SQL Server continuity of service,</p> Replication</li> Log Shipping</li> Mirroring</li> AlwaysON Availability Groups</li> SQL Server Big Data Clusters</li></ul> SQL Server Replication</h2> SQL Server Replication is best suited for site to site connections to remote locations where connectivity is not ideal. Replication has roles for SQL Server, publishers, distributors and subscribers.</p> SQL Server Replication is best suited for modes of use where data is published to endpoints for dissemination, such as point of sale terminals or batch processing.</p> SQL Server Replication has not been modified significantly in SQL Server 2016 or SQL Server 2017 and has been available since SQL Server 2008.</p> SQL Server Log Shipping</h2> SQL Server Log shipping is best suited for architectures where delays of 15 or 30 minute intervals are acceptable for changes in the data to be reflected, such as report generation or cataloguing through analysis tools like Microsoft PowerBi or SQL Server Integration Services for data transformation.</p> Because Log Shipping involves exporting a set of transactions to network attached storage and importing it into subscriber databases there is inherent delays in changes to the data and databases can fall out of synchronisation.</p> SQL Server Log Shipping involves configuring the 'primary' database to run a log shipping configuration and provide a network location to allow the client to read the transactions from and run restore jobs. When using SSMS this process is more or less straightforward as it will handle creating Jobs on the servers and seeding the database on the downstream secondary databases, as well as providing a standard report on transaction log shipping status to diagnose issues with the configuration if necessary.</p> SQL Server Log Shipping although easy to set up I have found when out of synchronisation restoring the database to catch up again with the transaction log is not always straightforward compared to other methodologies, especially with large databases.</p> Log shipping does not failover gracefully out of the box, clients will not be able to natively switch over if the 'primary' database has failed.</p> Mirroring</h2> Using Mirroring in SQL Server is inadvisable as it is soon to be removed in future versions.</p> Database mirroring relies on having two different SQL Servers mirror each other and the principal (primary) database performs the transactions and the mirror server (secondary) then follows as soon as possible, depending on the configuration this can be asynchronous or synchronous.</p> Database Mirroring is effectively a more robust version of log shipping with automatic failover and does not require a witness to failover gracefully.</p> Always On Availability Groups</h2> Always on availability groups can be configured to use Windows fail-over clustering or Linux Pacemaker.</p> Always on is the preferred option for most configurations due to its relatively easy to use nature and flexibility. Always On Availability Groups rely on a listener that applications connect to and WSFC (Windows Server Failover Cluster) (or Pacemaker) manages the cluster environment to ensure the databases remain up when the primary is unavailable and handle the mediation to elect a new primary. WSFC also allows you to select a methodology for defining a new primary database through quorum.</p> Recovering my Data after Drive Failure vs AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive Unknown — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 I recovered my data from AWS S3 and all I got was this lousy bill.</p>Aidan - Alternate Headline</em>.</cite></blockquote> TLDR;</h5> One of my hard drives failed, I thought I'd try to recover the valuable 400GB using ddrescue, it sort of worked.</li>Restoring from S3 is expensive £27.53 for ~400GB</li></ul> The Scenario</h2> A week or so ago I realised that my hard drive was on the way out, its been on for almost 27,000 hours according to the SMART data. I first noticed when the PC was loading into check disk after every reboot. It took me about 3 reboots to decide something was up and I used Crystal Disk Mark to check the disk and sure enough it was reporting 'Bad'. So I ordered 2*6TB drives and thought I'd better have a go at moving the data and making sure my backups were up to date.</p> For my backups, I use cloudberry backup (now called something else) which is an encryptable cloud backup solution which is compatible with Amazon's S3. I use the cheapest storage option, S3 Glacier Deep Archive.</p> </a>DDRESCUE GUI Data Recovery</figcaption></figure> </a>DDRESCUEVIEW Preview</figcaption></figure> I booted in to a persistent live Ubuntu 20 environment and installed ddrescue, ddrescueview and ddrescue-gui. I found that the tools worked well but took way to long for the drive, you can see in the remaining time section of ddrescue-gui it would have taken an estimated 60 days to recover the data at the fastest setting. </p> Making DDRESCUE Faster</h2> To make ddrescue faster I found it was best to watch the drive speed in ddrescue-gui and then I scrapped it over the command line for a faster experience.</p> In the end I used these commands, make sure to replace the drives with your setup and the minimum read rate to one your drive is comfortable with. For the first command, I stopped it at around 90 percent of the way through the drive and swapped it for the second one.</p> # First run to cover myself in case the drive died more seriously. sudo ddrescue -f --reopen-on-error --min-read-rate=8000 /dev/sdd2 /dev/sdc1 /home/ubuntu/Documents/log1.log # Lots of Passes to try to recover slow sections. sudo ddrescue -f --reopen-on-error --retry-passes=5 /dev/sdd2 /dev/sdc1 /home/ubuntu/Documents/log1.log</code></pre> Although this really seems like a your mileage may vary environment depending on the type of failure your drive has.</p> If you do end up using ddrescue-gui at least to begin with, you can use the log file to get you a command to start off with. Make sure to read the manual pages for ddrescue to determine the best command for you.</p> Here is an example of one of my outputs (.log files),</p> # Mapfile. Created by GNU ddrescue version 1.23 # Command line: ddrescue -v -d -f -r 4 -c 128 /dev/sdd2 /dev/sdc1 /home/ubuntu/Documents/log1.log # Start time: 2021-09-30 21:55:30 # Current time: 2021-09-30 22:05:21 # Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 2 (backwards) # current_pos current_status current_pass 0x1C63D4C0000 ? 2 # pos size status 0x00000000 0x1E160000 + 0x1E160000 0x00010000 * 0x1E170000 0x01320000 ? 0x1F490000 0x03540000 + 0x229D0000 0x00010000 * 0x229E0000 0x01320000 ?</code></pre> You can of course view this data using ddrescueview.</p> </a>ddrescueview</figcaption></figure> DDRESCUE Results</h2> After a week and a bit, I decided to stop the experiment and see what had been recovered. ddrescueview looked like this,</p> </a> ddrescueview results</figcaption></figure> ddrescue was able to recover about 90.83% of the ntfs partition, enough to mount the drive and view the data. It contained many of my important personal files and more importantly images and home video. The actual used space on the drive was only ~700GB, with around ~450GB of data that was valuable to me.</p> When I opened the personal photos and videos, I found the results to be quite poor, there were glitches in them, sometimes files had no actual data in them, sometimes they had stripes and lines in the image, because of the spread of the failure across the partition blocks, the data was basically a really poor copy with a lot of holes.</p> </a>ddrescue non-tried sectors made many files unreadable or poor quality</figcaption></figure> I decided that it was best not to continue the recovery with ddrescue and instead restore from backup, the age of the backup was exactly 1 month prior to the failure to the day, so no real loss. However only the data that I truly cared about was backed up. So stuff like my VMware ISO files and downloads folder were lost and unrecoverable.</p> Downloading from AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive</h2> Using Cloudberry I made a restore plan and recovered the data using the slowest SLA at 3-5 days, which by sods law took the full amount of time to process and then some, because I put in the wrong decryption password and needed to re-request the data.</p> Anyway here is the bill, £27.53</p> </a>AWS S3 $37.31 (£27.53) Bill</figcaption></figure></div> The killer was the data transfer fees out of London, at a cost of $0.09/GB ($28.37).</p> And with that, all of my data was re-recovered, this time without corruption.</p> Learnings and Final Thoughts</h3> Although AWS S3 is a valid backup option, its expensive to recover from. I already pay roughly $1/mo for ~400GB (315GB compressed). For larger recovery this would be prohibitively expensive, multi-terabyte or whole disk backups would require compression.</li> Physical damage to a hard drive is essentially game over, your data is lost. For best results have redundancy. This is the only reason I am thankful for S3, it was my only solution to recover my data. A local backup would have been much cheaper and faster to recover.</li>The two new 6TB drives run in a Windows storage spaces two-way mirror pool.</li></ul> </a>Windows Storage Spaces</figcaption></figure> What is Ransomware? Unknown — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Ransomware is a computer program or application that holds its users to ransom in order to access their data or applications, most ransomware encrypts user data through public-key cryptography to prevent the users from being able to circumvent the ransomware ransom.</p> Ransomware often has a screen or ransom note displaying the required steps the user must undertake to decrypt or access their files, sometimes the ransomware may include a decrypting tool that requires a password or key for the user to decrypt their files. </p> How did I get Ransomware?</h2> Ransomware is often installed by a user inadvertently or for large organisations can often be published through common software distribution platforms that have been compromised in a supply chain attack</a>.</p> Ransomware can also be installed through other applications the user may have installed such as an application masquerading as a legitimate program. Sometimes ransomware can be disguised to look like something else or remain dormant in a machine until it is designed to activate to evade detection.</p> Ransomware is very popular among cyber criminals as its increased usage is generally due to its proven business model. Generally users pay the ransom to restore function to their computer. Ransomware is generally a new technique in computer crime.</p> How Does Ransomware Spread?</h2> Ransomware spreads on home computers by encrypting data and demands the payment of a ransom in order to gain access again however it often spreads through businesses too. If a PC becomes infected if a hacker presents them with a ransom note.</p> Ransomware could spread to computers by exploiting security flaws in operating systems or software applications that have been exposed to the internet and picked up during automated scans of the internet looking for vulnerable software, then encrypts important information on those computers and demands payment from their users to decrypt them.</p> Good security practice at home can prevent ransomware,</p> Updating or securing applications that connect to the internet can prevent hackers exploiting security holes and bugs in the software.</li> Only run applications that you trust and are from trusted sources, websites or blogs may be designed to look legitimate as part of a baiting technique to get users to run the software. Especially free or hacked software that promise more than they actually deliver. Use common sense.</li> Typically ransomware enters your environment by being installed by home users or phishing. So make sure to know what reputable software is and the risks of running non-reputable software.</li></ul> Does Ransomware Work?</h2> Ransomware is very effective at extorting users according to recent trends in malware distribution. Mostly due to the fact that its effects are irreversible and generally the value trade-off for ransomware is essentially easier than tying to recreate or recover data.</p> Some ransomware gangs are starting to form branding to encourage businesses for payment and as a small guarantee they will see their data again.</p> Some companies have silently paid ransomware ransoms simply to avoid exposure.</p> Should I Pay the Ransomware Ransom?</h2> Absolutely not, paying a ransomware ransom justifies the hackers efforts and proves their business model. There is large scale talks on how best to handle ransomware however the general consensus is not to pay, many organisations have paid to the disappointment of the information security community.</p> Generally backup and disaster recovery solutions, when implemented correctly such as cold or immutable backups should prevent ransomware attacks from preventing recovery.</p> Can I Get My Data Back Without Paying the Ransom?</h2> In short, unless you have a backup, it will not be possible to recover your data. It is also extremely important that you do not validate a ransomware business model by paying the ransom.</p> What are Advanced Persistent Threats? Unknown — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are hackers who specialise in dedicated and advanced targeting of a victim's information technology estate and use a range of sophisticated techniques to compromise a victims infrastructure to fulfil their goal such as,</p> Information Gathering to facilitate other physical or cyber operations.</li> Monitoring victims assets for sale, like payment data or personal information of users.</li> Disruption of operational services and IT to cause monetary or reputational damage.</li>Extortion through ransomware for profit.</li></ul> </a></figure> What Makes a Hacker an Advanced Persistent Threat?</h2> Common hacking techniques exploit vulnerabilities in software that may be known or by comparison non-sophisticated in nature, a majority of system compromise is through automated tooling or weak protections on public infrastructure. Advanced Persistent Threats are much more sophisticated and clandestine,</p> Advanced</h3> APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) may incorporate cutting edge techniques, cover a wide variety of technologies and demonstrate a deep understanding of products and services used by victims.</p> Generally APTs,</p> Have been known to use 0-day, previously undetected and unpatched vulnerabilities in common software packages.</li> Have been known to use social engineering or have connections to individuals on the inside of organisations.</li> Have used multiple exploits at once to compromise a system.</li> Demonstrate deep understanding of a victims tech stack.</li>Use modern techniques to avoid detection such as supply chain attacks</a>.</li> Know corporate cultures, procedures or are able to determine appropriate behaviours to avoid network behaviour anomaly detection.</li> Have been known to work at times like national holidays or when key persons are out of office to degrade threat response performance.</li> Abuse vulnerable systems.</li></ul> Persistent</h3> APTs can spend long times inside corporate or private networks to avoid detection and move laterally,</p> Generally APTs try to avoid detection or work as quickly as possible to achieve their objective.</li> Some APTs have been known to spend years inside networks moving laterally among systems to increase their likelihood of success.</li> Have researched 0-day vulnerabilities in software used by their victims to exploit and move laterally and maintain persistence.</li> Have been known to attack individuals private infrastructure like their home network for use in their work environment.</li></ul> What is a Software Supply Chain Attack? Unknown — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 </a></figure> There are essentially two types of software supply chain attack,</p> Software Compromise to third party components of software,</li> Watering Hole Attacks</li></ul> Watering Hole Attacks</h2> Software products have many facets and features that require real human capital and investment to implement. As a compromise in software development, software vendors may use code from third party libraries, plugins or even adapt existing software to reduce investment and enhance their product offering.</p> In cases where software vendors do not produce all parts of their applications they rely on the trust and value the third party software they have incorporated in to their product to ensure that software is not tampered or altered to behave maliciously or insecurely for their customers.</p> Having third party libraries that have been compromised or have been poorly selected may result in,</p> Vulnerable parts of the software being exposed for attackers to utilise.</li> The software being used for ways not intended by the vendor, such as allowing the malicious code to evade detection by operating through otherwise trusted code. DLLs (Dynamic Linked Libraries) are parts of a program that can sometimes be altered by attackers to perform functions not intended by the vendor of the software to perform malicious activity such as encrypting files or providing remote code execution.</li> Features of the third party library may be unused by the customer but left in their default state could provide attackers privileged access.</li></ul> An example of a watering hole attack could be,</p> Feedify</strong>, a website push notification service was compromised and attackers were able to have their altered JavaScript run on websites that use the software.</li> SolarWinds Orion</strong>, an IT management and remote monitoring product was attacked and compromised by altering updates pushed to customers, which in turn meant their customers were compromised by this attack. The update added a backdoor to customer's IT systems, which was used to install malware.</li> Kaseya VSA</strong> (Virtual System Administrator), another unified and remote monitoring IT product was compromised through SQL to install ransomware on affected and monitored machines and lock out owners in 2021.</li></ul> Software Compromise</h2> Magecart was also able to attack British Airways and steal customer payment data by altering a portion of the British Airways website to include software designed to strip the information and send it to the attackers. In this instance British Airways used software called Modernizr, a JavaScript library designed to detect capabilities of a customers browser to tailor user experience was altered to include AJAX to send payment data when submitted to another URL controlled by the attackers for storage and sale. </p> This example however using similar methods is not a watering hole attack, as the code was directly altered by the attackers on the victims website, trying to pass off as legitimate software from the vendor.</p> Where software compromise becomes extremely useful to attackers is when software vendors have their software built into environments more secure than their own, as attackers then have access to a weaker component in the supply chain. There may be a very secure environment that uses all of the latest and best practice to secure their environment but if they are reliant on third party software then they are only as strong as the weakest in the chain, like SolarWinds Orion or Kaseya VSA (Virtual System Administrator).</p> To protect companies from software supply chain attacks they could,</p> Incorporate immutable backups to prevent ransomware</strong>, immutable backups are essentially backups that cannot be altered by ransomware directly as they are immutable, thus ransomware would need direct access to the backup facility to encrypt the backups.</li> Use trusted third parties with good standing software security practices and modern tech stacks</strong>. Know the risks associated with partners and suppliers.</li> Monitor resources for unauthorised alterations</strong> and increase visibility in to your supply chain.</li> Audit third party libraries for unauthorised changes</strong>.</li> Act quickly to security incidents</strong> in third party components like vulnerabilities and compromise.</li> Close off or remove un-used features </strong>in third party libraries.</li> Hash and monitor component signatures to detect changes </strong>and prevent your software running unauthorised functions</strong>.</li> Secure your environment and silo components</strong> to prevent lateral movement</strong>.</li> Build all products in-house. A very expensive and probably unrealistic solution except for the largest most specialised companies.</li></ul> There are many methodologies to supply chain attacks that make it hard for even the most determined blue team to keep up with and monitor.</p> Flashcard Club V0.0.3 Unknown — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Its been a good while now and Flashcard Club is well on its way to a functional product. There has been some progress on features, notably the inclusion of Google OAuth2 through Laravel Socialite.</p> Logging in through your Google Account should greatly increase the speed of adoption for new users and improve retention and user acquisition.</p> With that in mind, Flashcard Club has been online now for about 3 months and has yet to have a single user. I believe this is mostly due to myself not promoting the product which I will feel more comfortable doing once the site is ready, however it is currently somewhat usable. To that I have made improvements in the homepage, mostly bringing it up to paces with a call to action and have moved the changelog to an FAQ page, which I may change later as I do not love the name.</p> </a>Flashcard Club's V0.0.3 Homepage</figcaption></figure> </a>Flashcard Club's Login Options</figcaption></figure> </a>Google OAuth2 Registration option</figcaption></figure> Version 0.0.3</h3> User AccountsUsers can now login and link their Google Account to Flashcard Club.</li></ul></li> Landing PageThe Landing page has had a massive makeover and most of the content is different now.</li> The changelog has been moved to the FAQ page.</li></ul></li> Test and Study ModeThere is now a chart to plot test performance per set.</li> Test mode now has additional functionality like gold highlight on completion of the test.</li> Test Mode now has a summary.</li></ul></li> Planned FeaturesGoogle Sign in (Federated identity)</del>Completed</li> Terms of service</li> Privacy Policy</li> FAQ Page</del>Somewhat Completed</li> Markdown User Guide</li> Flashcard User Guide</li> Front page needs work</del>Not complete but looks a lot better.</li> Cramming mode that removes cards previously marked "Correct".</li></ul></li></ul> Part of Improving the site in the next round will also be improvements to the mobile aspects of the site as most users will likely be on mobile devices.</p> I have also been ignoring the fact there is currently no export option available to users.</p> Flashcard Club February Unknown — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 </a></figure> It's been a little while since the 25th of December when I decided to go public with this idea, a great deal of work has gone into flashcard club. Exactly 40 hours has now been dedicated to the project outside my normal 8:30-5.</p> It's been quite slow going in some aspects, one particular problem is the markdown library options are numerus and vary in completion and schema that make it hard to choose one that is appropriate for this project. In the end I have settled on marked</a>.</p> Another area I am struggling to decide on is how best to onboard new users, I want them to have a positive experience however not all know the markdown syntax.</p> Currently, Flashcard Club has the following features,</p> User Accounts,It's currently possible to create a new user account, although there is no ability to ammend or update your user account.</li> New users should recieve a welcome email.</li> New users should be logged in automatically.</li> New users should be able to create flashcards and flashcard sets.</li></ul></li>Almost Unlimited Flashcards,It is possible to create and save flashcards.</li> You can also update flashcards, delete them and more.</li> Flascards use markdown syntax so you can include pictures and a limited amount of html.</li></ul></li>Unit Tests,Many components of Flashcard Club have PHPunit Unit tests.</li> Code coverage is probably very poor.</li></ul></li>Toast Notifications,Toast notifications are intergrated into the website.</li>The best place to see these in action is in the set editor if you update the title.</li></ul></li></ul> </p> Planned features include,</p> A Study mode, because currently it is only possible to edit flashcards but not view them without the editor.</li> Google Sign in (Federated identity).</li> Statistics, because who doesn't love a good graph.</li> Account management, because currently once you make an account you cant change any of your details, oops.</li></ul> Currently statistics and study mode do not work.</p> </a></figure> Thanks for reading, </p> Aidan.</p> I'm starting flashcard.club Unknown — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Hello everyone,</p> I'm sure there is not many of you but I had to tell someone. As of the last few days I've really felt the need to get involved in something that is really what I am all about. A new baby if you will, a commercial enterprise but one I own. I've been working full-time on Laravel projects and I want to improve my skills to really get better at it. Its a great framework after using raw PHP and template engines like handlebars.</p> During this time I came to the realisation that I wasn't totally stoked with the existing flashcard companies out there and I think now more than ever I really have the skills to get something like this off the ground, hopefully this is the first project of many!</p> Flashcard Club is different,</p> I really want a modern material feel to the website. I'm not interested in something worse than what there already is out there, I want to really help people.</li> I want to really build a solid brand that people want to use. Flashcard Club should be a place to really get some work done and cram for that final test and study in a safe space.</li> I really want to provide a platform for students to get some work done. A lot of the competition has low quality submissions. I really want people to have an effective space to learn.</li> I want to publicise what I'm up to, and this blog will help with that. A real leading learner approach. From conception to reality.</li>Although this will have options to buy products, long term I only want this project as a sort of demo of my capabilities. I want to move on to better ideas ASAP but you have to start somewhere.</li></ul> This is my first "premium domain" project so consider that an invested interest in this project.</p> Have a look and see how I'm getting on. At the time of writing cloud flare gives out error 526 so I hope to be past that by the time this goes up a month from now.</p> </figure> Flashcard Club</a></p> </div></div> </div> </div> I aim to make both a website and mobile app, however the majority of the features will be made through the app, the functionality and backend will be possible through the online version as well.</p> I think my target audience is 99% students so a strong app presence is a must I feel. The website will be a strong start but is just one part of the experience.</p> Watch this space.</p> Aidan.</p> Hull University Minecraft Map Unknown — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 I used geocraft</a> to generate a Minecraft map of the University of Hull, and now I am sharing it with you. You can see a short video of the map below.</p> https://youtu.be/KxTW2bgisqk </div></figure> The map is available as OpenStreetMap data only, or with the DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) lidar data from, (I think) 2015, so the multi-story car-park is not included for example.</p> The original project is broken as the lidar data did not get included, but it was possible to fix it using the suggested changes by RobinWhitfield</a> here in this issue</a>.</p> The original licencing for this map is CC-BY-SA for the pure OpenStreetMap map and the other is the open government licence. You may use these maps as you wish within these constraints.</p> If you plan on running these maps on a server, you may want to turn off leaf decay as some of the trees are all leaves and do not have a wood block to prevent them from decaying, as seen in the video.</p> HullUniversity LIDAR</a>Full Map with Buildings</a></div> HullUniversity OSM</a>Full Map without Buildings</a></div> I amnot</strong>associated with Hull University, they’re good guys.</em></p></blockquote> What does it take to get Fiber to the Home? Unknown — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Fiber optic internet is the newest form of residential cable that is run either to your local distribution cabinet or to your house. Because the maximum bandwidth that can be put down a fiber cable it enables greater speeds along greater distances thanks to its physical properties (light). </p> A fiber optic cable can in some cases be used at 10Gbit/s but for residential its more likely 1Gbit/s or less. </p> Many ISPs will allow you to take advantage of fiber optic but limit the speeds for a reduction in price.</p> How Long Does it Take to Install Fiber?</h2> Fiber optic cable will require physical replacement of the cable itself, if the ISP is installing fiber to your home they will need to set up and plan which route they will take to your property.</p> In most cases, they will be able to attach the new cable to the old media and pull it through to your property, but if they hit snags or can't do that, it can take much longer.</p> A best-case scenario can be 10 minutes, a worst-case can be up to three months, especially if you have ordered fiber where it was not originally offered or you paid extra for installation. A typical installation can be 2 to 4 hours. </p> Will They Dig Up my Garden?</h2> If you have ordered Fiber to the Home, they may require access to your property to install the Fiber, which may mean routing your cable from the street to a jack in your home.</p> If they need to install a brand new cable they will indeed need to bury the cable and will therefore, do some digging.</p> Is Fiber the Fastest Home Medium?</h2> Yes, for residential installations fiber is the fastest. There also exists DOCSIS 3 and 3.1 which is also capable of 1Gbit/s speeds however it is not used as much.</p> If you do get fiber installed at your home, it may be a good idea to ensure you aren't bottle-necking your connection by ensuring your router, any switches you have or the computer you are using is capable of the speeds you expect, and wherever possible use an Ethernet cable.</p> Check all API variables are included in a REST API for PHP. Unknown — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 I recently have been working on a weather recording project and as part of this endeavour wanted to check that all of the variables I have posted to my API were set, it can be rather a lot of work to have to specify each if (!isset($_GET[]))</code> parameter so I decided to use a function that can take any number of arguments using a 'variadic' function in PHP.</p> // Returns true if all variables are set, else returns false. function getVariablesSet(string ...$getlinks) { foreach ( $getlinks as $link ) { if (!isset($_GET[$link])) { return false; } } return true; }</code></pre> Now, when I want to use a new api 'command', I can simply do the following,</p> $browser_response = new stdClass(); $browser_response->message = "Command not specified."; if ($_GET['command'] == "new-temperature") { if (getVariablesSet("datetime","temperature","humidity")) { $browser_response->message = "All GET variables set."; } else { $browser_response->message = "All GET variables not set."; } } echo json_encode($browser_response);</code></pre> This way, so long as we have specified the command and the variables required we can enter the scope, otherwise, we can kick them out until their query is formatted correctly. Having lots of variables may become problematic so you may want to use POST or even break them out into subsections to give users a better understanding of their error. I should add this only works for PHP 5.6 and above.</p> In any capacity, Good Luck. Aidan.</p> My Home Network - Part 2 Unknown — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Hello again, this is the second in a series of my home network posts. In this edition, we're going to be flashing another router with OpenWrt. You can read part one here</a>.</p> I decided it was time to leave all the old hardware behind and move to brand new stuff. I was having problems with the ZYXEL VMG8924-B10A as the main router, it kept cutting out and was causing short minute outages that ultimately I think was due to the system running out of ram and botnets trying to break into the thing. So I decided it was time to jump ship and move to something a little bit more enterprise. At the same time, I decided now would also be a good time to leave the Netgear WNR3500L V2 to one side. Despite it serving us good for many years, its routing features won't be necessary for the upgrade as I want to have a good crack at managed switching.</p> The new network</h2> The new network is composed with the following,</p> A Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X</li> A Netgear ProSafe GS108T</li> A new to me MR33</li></ul> I wanted to do away with having two routers on the network, it wasn't neccisary and caused some of the upstairs equipment to be inaccessible from downstairs, the new configuration would mean that all management would be done through the EdgeRouter X which would be much cleaner and hopefully faster.</p> The ProSafe GS108T was a garage find, I wasn't using it for anything and I hadn't really implemented proper VLAN tagging before so I thought now was a better time than ever to get into it.</p> My new home network diagram, ignore the fact its all Ubiquiti gear, its the iconography I had loaded at the time. And I couldn't quickly find icons for Netgear.</figcaption></figure> I also received a new to me MR33 complete with Meraki OS. Unfortunately their licencing of their hardware is not something that aligns with my principals on hardware so before we accept any software agreements I thought it best to do as always and flash OpenWRT to the thing and say goodbye to Meraki. Flashing OpenWRT onto it was no easy feat but I made sure the thing never saw access to the internet and eventually I was in.</p> [aidan@aidan-ld mr33]$ ssh root@192.168.1.1 BusyBox v1.28.3 () built-in shell (ash) _______ ________ __ | |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_ | - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _| |_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____| |__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M ----------------------------------------------------- OpenWrt 18.06.1, r7258-5eb055306f ----------------------------------------------------- === WARNING! ===================================== There is no root password defined on this device! Use the "passwd" command to set up a new password in order to prevent unauthorized SSH logins. -------------------------------------------------- root@OpenWrt:~# root@OpenWrt:~# exit Connection to 192.168.1.1 closed. [aidan@aidan-ld mr33]$ </code></pre> A couple of configuration changes later and we've got a dumb ap ready for deployment.</p> I really wanted to play with subnets this time, before we had two but this time I thought go hard or go home, so in total there are five subnets on my home network now, that's enough IP space on the 192 network for 1200 devices. I've refrained from using the 10.0.0.0/16 network class simply because I use some VPNs with the same IP space so I thought best to just keep it simple. I have to say the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X was a little bit new to me but I like the interface, PoE was a particularly nice touch.</p> For the Netgear switch the plan is to take a trunked VLAN ethernet cable and have the VLAN20 on the first 7 ports and leave the remaining 8th port for the MR18. Setting it up was quite easy using the online wizard however the visualisation thingy was clearly older than useful because it seemed to use some java applet that chrome did not like.</p> A Little Conclusion</h2> I like what I've got set up now and will probably leave it for some time. The ZYXEL VMG8924-B10A is destined for the bin but the Netgear WNR3500L V2 I'll keep for now, it can do VLANs and probably would have worked fine, I just wanted to use a managed switch.</p> The new network is great. I have a printer which its driver doesn't seem to like cross-lan communication because every time I print something, it prints fine but the software client continually reports that the communication with the printer failed. I put that down to poor software testing I guess. Wouldn't be the first time someone had printer woes.</p> EdgeRouter Dashboard</figcaption></figure> Subnet</strong></td> Purpose</strong></td></tr> 192.168.1.0/24</td> Downstairs Wired (eth1)</td></tr> 192.168.2.0/24</td> Upstairs Wired (eth2.20)</td></tr> 192.168.3.0/24</td> Downstairs Wireless AP Clients (eth3)</td></tr> 192.168.4.0/24</td> Upstairs Wireless AP Clients (eth2.40)</td></tr> 192.168.5.0/24</td> 4th port on router, only a printer attached.(eth4)</td></tr></tbody></table>Subnets (eth0 is WAN)</figcaption></figure> </p> Thats all folks. Aidan.</p> Oversimplified Remote Desktop for Microsoft Windows Unknown — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 If you would like to set up windows for remote desktop or would like to use remote desktop then this is the guide for you.</p> Microsoft Windows remote desktop requires you to have remote desktop enabled on the target machine (the machine who's desktop you would like to use).</p> How to Enable Remote Desktop</h2> Press the Windows Key and I (I as in India) at the same time.</li> Click on the System Icon.</li> On the left panel, scroll down and select "Remote Desktop".</li> Enable Remote Destkop by sliding the slider to enabled.</li></ol> How to Connect to a Computer Remotely</h2> If you followed the steps above you may also want to make a note of the PC name to connect from your remote devices, or you can do the following.</p> On The Target Machine</h3> Press the Windows Key and R at the same time.</li> In the run box, type 'cmd' and press enter to open Command Prompt.</li> In Command Prompt type 'ipconfig' and press enter.</li> Take note of the IPv4 Address, this is the address you will use to connect to your target machine later. On Home networks its usually 192.168.1.x where x is your target machine's IP address. Write down your IPv4 address, you'll need it to connect later</span>.</li> Now type 'hostname' and press enter, this will produce your hostname, which in some circumstances you may also use to connect however It depends on your network setup.</li></ol> On The Machine You Plan to Connect From</h3> Press the Windows Key and type 'RDP' and then open 'Remote Desktop Connection'.</li> In the Computer box, enter the IP address you collected earlier.</li> In the Username box, enter the hostname followed by a backslash and then your username.</li></ol> Soon after you should be prompted to enter your password. If your username or password combination is incorrect you may have entered the information incorrectly. For example my computer has the IP address 192.168.1.16 and the username would be 'AIDAN-DT\Aidan' because my hostname is 'AIDAN-DT' and my username is 'Aidan'</p> If all goes well you should now be able to access your remote computer.</p> Troubleshooting Tips</h2> Use the following paragraph to troubleshoot your setup.</p> Remote Desktop can't connect to the remote computer for one of these reasons:</h4> If you see this error as written above make sure to follow the instructions listed, such as making sure remote access is enabled, the computer is turned on and is connected to the internet. If that still doesn't work it may be because of the following,</p> Make sure the IP address you fetched at the beggining is correct</strong>, if the IP address is incorrect you may not be trying to connect to the target machine and you may be trying to connect to another device on your network or nothing at all, making sure your IP address is correct is important.</li> Make sure that you are on the same network as the remote machine</strong>, if you are trying to connect from outside your home you first need to port forward and instead of using your home IP address are instead using your public IP address.</li> Make sure that you aren't restricted by a firewall</strong>. If you are on a home connection connecting to another computer then this shouldn't be a problem, but if this is a corporate network you may have firewall restrictions preventing you from contacting other clients on the network, such as client isolation.</li></ol> Remote Desktop cannot be enabled</h3> You cannot enable remote desktop on Windows 10 Home, you need to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.</p> Remote Desktop works for a day or so and then the Remote Machine's IP address changes</h3> This is because by default DHCP leases on a private network typically are only assigned for a day, after which they are 'released' which means new devices on the network can take their place. This is so that small networks with many devices like a home network, don't run out of IP space.</p> The solution to this is to assign a static IP address for the target computer so that it's IP address will not change. The compromise is that now that IP address can only be used by that machine and if you change it from what it is currently leased under, you will need to wait for the client to ask for a new one or force it to release its IP address early.</p> Remote Desktop doesn't work outside my Network</h3> There are many factors that can cause this behaviour.</p> Make sure that you are using your Public IP address</strong>, your public IP address is the one given to you by your internet service provider, you cannot change it without asking them in most cases. It will not be in the 192.168.0.0 or 10.0.0.0 subnet range, if you are attempting to connect to a remote machine using 192.168 or 10.0 IP addresses you are doing it wrong.</li> Make sure you have port forwarded Remote Desktop ports to your target machine</strong>. Port Forwarding on a home network typically takes place through your router's configuration panel which can usually be accessed through a sticker on the back of the router or through an app, you will need to forward the port 3389 </code>with both TCP and UDP enabled. In your router the port should be forwarded to the LAN address (192.168 or 10.0) of your target machine.</li></ol> </p> Making a Web Scraper to Download Images off the Internet Unknown — Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 One afternoon I read on a popular website that http://prnt.sc/</a> uses sequential 6 character codes to host user images on their website, this made me wonder what was on there.</p> The next day I made a small bot to scrape the website and collect all images through a range and then the bot could run multiple times to collect more images if necessary. I left the bot running for a couple of hours and here's what I managed to find, I'm sure I cannot re-host the images but the range I scraped through was gmmlaq</code> for 1,287 images before the bot was IP banned through Cloudflare, fair enough. I took the time to view each image individually.</p> Here's What I Saw</h2> A drivers licence and matching passport which was expired.</li> A WordPress username and password combination for a web-host reseller which I did not test.</li> Many Many out of context conversations, half of which were in Cyrillic.</li> A teacher seemingly contacting students and recording the fact they did not pick up through skype.</li> Ominous pictures of a tree posted multiple times.</li> Screenshots of video games, mainly Minecraft, Runescape, Team fortress 2 and League of Legends.</li> A lot of backend-databases of usernames and email addresses for customers and users, in fact, they are a large proportion of the screenshots.</li> A lot of SEO spam.</li> A conversation between two users through skype debating over banning an influencer from their platform for fake referrals.</li> About 2 lewd photos.</li> A few hotel confirmations.</li> Whole credit card information including CVV and 16 digit number.</li> A spamvertising campaign CMS platform.</li> A gambling backend database disabling access to games for specific users.</li> One 4x4 pixel image and One 1x47 pixel image.</li></ul> What Did we Learn?</h2> Stuff like this, particularly URLs should not be sequential.</li> A lot of users on the platform see the randomness of the URL as sufficient security however, its undermined by the fact the website can be scraped sequentially.</li> They did eventually ban the bot after 1,287 images, which is probably closer to 1,500 images before testing however Cloudflare seems to be the one preventing access, so it may be a service they offer.</li> A lot of users on the platform are web developers and use every trick in the book to boost their numbers.</li> A lot of users are Eastern European and American.</li></ul> How I Made the Scraper</h2> I made this bot using Python 3.7 however it may work on older versions. The URL is base 26 encoded to match the alphabet, incremented and then converted back to a string for scraping. Images are saved with their counterpart names. I do not condone running the scraper yourself.</p> import requests import configparser import string from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from functools import reduce # Scraper for https://prnt.sc/ # Headers from a chrome web browser used to circumvent bot detection. headers = { "ACCEPT" : "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9", "ACCEPT-LANGUAGE": "en-US,en;q=0.9", "DEVICE-MEMORY": "8", "DOWNLINK": "10", "DPR": "1", "ECT": "4g", "HOST": "prnt.sc", "REFERER": "https://www.google.com/", "RTT": "50", "SEC-FETCH-DEST": "document", "SEC-FETCH-MODE": "navigate", "SEC-FETCH-SITE": "cross-site", "SEC-FETCH-USER": "?1", "UPGRADE-INSECURE-REQUESTS": "1", "USER-AGENT": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.138 Safari/537.36", "VIEWPORT-WIDTH": "1920", } # https://stackoverflow.com/a/48984697/2697955 def divmod_excel(n): a, b = divmod(n, 26) if b == 0: return a - 1, b + 26 return a, b # Converts our '89346963' -> 'gmmlaq' # https://stackoverflow.com/a/48984697/2697955 def to_excel(num): chars = [] while num > 0: num, d = divmod_excel(num) chars.append(string.ascii_lowercase[d - 1]) return ''.join(reversed(chars)) # Converts our 'gmmlaq' -> '89346963' # https://stackoverflow.com/a/48984697/2697955 def from_excel(chars): return reduce(lambda r, x: r * 26 + x + 1, map(string.ascii_lowercase.index, chars), 0) # Load config or start a new one. # Image start is random def get_config(): try: config = configparser.ConfigParser() with open('config.cfg') as f: config.read_file(f) return config except: config = configparser.ConfigParser() config['Screenshots'] = {'imagestart': 'gmmlaq', 'url': 'https://prnt.sc/', 'iterations': '20'} with open('config.cfg', 'w') as configfile: config.write(configfile) return config # Save image from url. def get_image_and_save(website_url, image_url): try: html_content = requests.get(website_url + image_url, headers=headers).content soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, "lxml") #with open('image_name.html', 'wb') as handler: #handler.write(html_content) ourimageurl = soup.find(id='screenshot-image')['src'] #print(ourimageurl) image = requests.get(ourimageurl).content with open(image_url + '.png', 'wb') as handler: handler.write(image) except: print (image_url + " was removed probably.") def increment_image(image_url): return to_excel(from_excel(image_url) + 1) config = get_config() print ("Starting at '" + config["Screenshots"]["imagestart"] + "'.") website_url = config["Screenshots"]["url"] current_image_url = config["Screenshots"]["imagestart"] for x in range(0, int(config["Screenshots"]["iterations"])): print("Currently downloading image " + current_image_url) get_image_and_save(website_url, current_image_url) current_image_url = increment_image(current_image_url) # Set new config code to current location for next run. config.set('Screenshots', 'imagestart', current_image_url) with open('config.cfg', 'w') as configfile: config.write(configfile) </code></pre> The bot requires Python, configparser and BeautifulSoup4. The scraper cannot handle numbers in the URL so please remove them and replace them with letters before picking a starting point, this was an oversight on my part.</p> Don't do anything against their terms of service, Aidan.</p> Scraping Canvas (LMS) Unknown — Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Because my time at university is ending I thought it best to archive the canvas pages available to me for later reference should I not be able to access canvas later if they change platforms or disable my account. I should probably add this is for archival purposes and I will not be able to share the data I was able to collect. Thankfully I was able to get the whole thing going in a few minutes and downloading took a lot longer.</p> The first snippet I got from here</a>, didn't complete the first time, it seemed some image was causing issues so I moved to another gist</a>, at this rate we could be done in half an hour 😊.</p> Unfortunately it also borked out on a similar place,</p> FileNotFoundError</code></pre> I think it is because there's something missing or I don't have access to it. But the real problem is that its downloading content for a course I didn't care about because I was enrolled in it but it's full of junk I'm not interested in, so we can remove it by using the second scrapers code and specifying the course id's which I had to manually go through, there was about 15 of them but it didn't take too long. Which gave me the full command.</p> F:\Downloads\canvas>python canvas.py https://canvas.hull.ac.uk/ 4738~DUI9Nha9weSuemu1M2qsmhljoBcQtR0zghXTs3QA7ECHDHQkpsgBQ9RllbaEwySf output 52497,56148,56149,52493,54499,54452,54456,53441,52496,22257,22274,22276,22277,22278,22279,22280,50664,50656,22275,50652</code></pre> The access token you can see above should be expired by now. You can do it yourself by downloading the same file and installing python3, pathvalidate and pycanvas. You need to generate a security token from /profile/settings </code>and you can get the course id by clicking on the course like this /courses/56149</code>. When you generate a new token you should receive an email about it.</p> Canvas online with our starred modules displated.</figcaption></figure> I decided to make a small adaptation to catch the FileNotFoundError and went off to the races. It took over an hour so I decided it was best to leave it running overnight, when I returned in the morning I had 116 errors (failed downloads) and the rest is the course content!</p> Our Canvas Modules saved to Windows File Explorer.</figcaption></figure> Unfortunately I don't seem to have the submissions for each of these courses so I needed to manually download them aswell and then our archive was completed.</p> Thanks for reading.</p> How to remove 'Google' from the Gboard Spacebar Unknown — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 A recent update to the Google Keyboard Gboard has added the word 'Google' to the keyboard spacebar at the bottom. I personally didn't like this addition to the app and at present, I cannot find a way to disable it in the latest version. </p> There is however a solution to this problem, you can roll back your Gboard app to stock and not update it again. Beware that it will reset your keyboard settings in doing so (such as the theme).</p> To do this,</p> Open the Play Store app.</li> Swipe in from the left and choose 'Settings'.</li> Select 'Auto-update apps' and choose 'Don't auto-update apps'.</li> Select Done.</li> Go back to the Play Store main page.</li> Search for 'Gboard' and select 'Gboard - the Google Keyboard'.</li> Then select 'Uninstall' to roll it back to stock.</li> Viola. You shouldn't have 'Google' on your spacebar anymore.</li></ol> Unless you have a custom ROM your app should go back to the factory version that came with the phone. If for some reason that uninstalls the keyboard completely for you, you may wish to download an older build from a respectable location. I can confirm that the version I am currently using is 8.3.6.250752527-release-arm64-v8a26830614</code> and it's not present for my OnePlus3 but I imagine the releases are hardly innovative as keyboards tend to go.</p> That should be all you need to remove the word 'Google' from your android keyboard spacebar, you could also install another keyboard if you particularly wanted to.</p> Early High-Level Programming Languages Unknown — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 In the 1950s and 1960s, there was innovation in the field of computer programming and design. Computers were becoming commercially available and starting to gain widespread interest. In 1951 to Univac 1 was the first commercially available computer for example.</p> FORTRAN</h4> In 1957 came about FORTRAN. FORTRAN was considered one of the first high-level programs to really gain popularity. Its design was suited for high performance when programmed and could perform code optimization to improve the performance of programmers' instructions. It was 'Formula Translating' and its success saw it spread to other computers early on.</p> Fortran was built for number crunching and computing. Its implementations were widespread and its general-purpose capabilities saw use in many scientific fields of research. Fortran was produced over a series of years under different versions with compatibility for previous versions in many cases. It was by modern-day standards considered low level but no doubt was formulative for other modern-day languages, it included features like code comments, input-output handling and one of the first do loops. FORTRAN has many versions and is still used today.</p> ALGOL</h4> ALGOL was developed around the same time as Fortran, it was designed for more 'Algorithmic' purpose. ALGOL 58 was considered a prototype version named IAL (International Algebraic Language) and was soon superseded by ALGOL 60. It was designed to be more human-readable and could be used to design algorithms and unlike Fortran, it was not designed to be hardware-specific to be the fastest but relied on the best implementations they thought were suitable. Although not as popular as Fortran, many modern languages have features present in ALGOL first, such as IF ELSE statements and dynamic arrays defined at run time.</p> Stored Program Computers Unknown — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 A Stored Program Architecture such as Von Neumann Architecture stores programs in computer memory and if not using an interpreted or JIT programming language the memory and data for programs can be treated the same. This methodology made programming in previous generations a lot easier as it meant the computer could be programmed using punch tape or cards.</p> The first 'Fully' stored programming computer was the Manchester Mark 1 which was first operational in April 1949.</p>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1</a> However there is some dispute as to the true 'first' stored program computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored-program_computer</a> </cite></blockquote> Before the use of punch cards or tape, computers could be programmed in a similar method using wires. This meant a lot of re-wiring and 'patching' was difficult on complex systems as the wires would encompass whole rows of machinery and in some cases could take many miles to complete a program.</p> In Addition to the 'Von Neumann' architecture, there is also the 'Harvard' architecture which keeps data and program (memory) registers independent. </p> Programming Order of Succession</h2> Early computers were not re-programmable. They were hard-wired.</li> Then punch tape and punch cards were developed to feed into computer memory to be computed.</li> Then programs started to use machine code, although complex for a human to develop they were one of the first innovations that allowed for easy computer programming and rapid development.</li> After machine code, a new symbolic form of machine code was created whereby complex hardware instructions could be reduced to line by line instructions. Hence the first machine code compiler was created in order to turn assembly code into machine code.</li></ul> Machine Code</h2> Machine code could be considered a modern-day programmers' lowest level of access to a computer's processor. Machine code provides basic instructions that are logical or mathematical to store, move or load instructions. It is possible on modern hardware to virtualize machine code and some modern programming languages like Java can compile programs into byte code where the initial program can be computed on many platforms.</p> Assembly</h2> Due to the complexity of Machine Code, the need for a language that was human-readable (and later developed into high-level programming languages) birthed Assembly, an easy to use (comparably) way to program the computer in a methodology and symbolic sense designed for human readability. Instead of numeric OPCODES, the new syntax allowed for easily identifiable instructions (MOVL, JMP, ADDL). Embedded software and real-time systems may still use machine code as its primary source code today.</p> Interpreted Languages</h2> As high-level languages and capslock languages were adapted, interpreted languages were developed (the 1950s onward) by using the computer to virtualize itself and process instructions as a 'virtual machine' (in the literal sense) that could aide the use in porting the language to other computers as the language syntax could be a defined standard and the compiler could compile the program to many forms of machine code for different models and modes of computer. Interpreted Languages have the added benefit of allowing the programmer to debug their program at a more granular level where programs could be inspected line by line before translation (compilation and then execution).</p> Byte code such as Java byte code can be interpreted or compiled just in time (JIT) whereas the program is running, it is also translating the byte code into machine code. However, this additional workload has a performance toll on the program.</p> High Level Programming Languages</h2> High-level programming languages reduce the learning curve and frustration that comes with debugging a program as the syntax and grammar of the language are much easier to understand for the reader because it is based on a more natural approach to human interpretation. However, the benefits can cause programs to be compiled in a way that does not optimize performance or utilize capacity fully because the language could be interpreted in a way that the programmer did not intend or was not aware of.</p> However, the development of High Level Programming languages allowed for much more rapid development than its predecessors which meant performance hits to compiled machine code programs did not exceed the increased development performance (The programmers were able to do their job easier, which made the programs better) in the 1950s.</p> Example Early High Level Programming Languages</h3> FORTRAN (Formula Translation)</li> COBOL (Common Business Oriented Langauge)</li> ALGOL (Algorithmic Language)</li> LISP (List Processing)</li> BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Instruction Code)</li></ul> Sometimes called the Capslock Programming Languages.</p> Programming Languages could be classified by their approach to programming paradigms such as statements or methods, functions or object-oriented. Most modern-day programming languages are fit for general purpose.</p> How Much Does My Car Cost Per Mile? Unknown — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 I thought its time I put my GNUCash Data to good use and worked out how much I spent on fuel. I loaded up a simple Cash Flow bar chart in GNUCash and selected my expenses column for Car>Petrol and voila.</p> Monthly petrol costs since 2017, highest at £167, lowest £10. Apparently I did not buy any petrol in July - Also checked this. Total expenses from 01/01/2017-01/01/2020 £2,659.79.</figcaption></figure> If you are astute you may have also noticed there are additional 'fixed' (varies annually/monthly) costs to running a car such as tax, insurance, maintenance and depreciation but I have chosen to eliminate these costs because I would like to explore the benefits of buying another car. We can use this graph based on the last 3 years to estimate this car, my 1998-1999 Vauxhall Corsa costs £73.88 monthly (excluding this month from the data)</p> My Car</figcaption></figure> So How far does £74/month get you?</h2> Good Question, I've always used my car when I've needed it. I have little reason not to use it. I've used it to commute to University, School and Work and on days out. It's my main mode of transport is what I'm trying to say.</p> Unfortunately, I don't keep the history of my car's odometer, however, I can use the mot history of my car to estimate the £/per mile. Using the mot history, which has the date my car was taken in for MOT for two different dates recorded in the MOT history, one in 2017 and one in 2019, we can determine in that time I did 19,205 miles so roughly 6.66k miles a year.</p> We can then use this 19,205 miles, which have around 1 year, 11 months between them to get (74*23) £1,702 expenditure during that time, which compared with the actual data gives £2,051.23 (over £300 diff, 21%) gives us a fairly low confidence, however we can use this to estimate my cars cost per mile on fuel alone is around £0.106 per mile. 10p per mile (2051.23/19205) or 740 miles per month, give or take 20%. That's 24 miles per day! </p> My Submission for /r/badUIbattles February "Dating and Relationships" Unknown — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 </figure> Thought I'd post </a>a quick one because I was bored. It uses Visual Studio 2019, WPF and that's it. There's very little business logic behind the whole thing.</p> :)</p> TTFN, I don't live in Dewsbury. I don't even think I've been there.</p> Inside a Western Digital Blue Hard Drive Unknown — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 I thought I'd share pictures I took when I took apart a 250GB dead hard drive.</p> Rest in pieces my WD2500AAKX </h4> I got this hard drive as part of a Dell Optiplex 780 and used it as a server for my internal network. It worked great until it wouldn't boot. I checked on it and sure enough, it was stuck in ubuntu server boot recovery. I tried to recover it but I think I did more damage than good. I decided to move to a Windows computer and tried to recover the data with Recuva which didn't do anything because it couldn't pick up the disk, so then I moved to TestDisk which was able to see the drive and partitions but never got past profiling the disk. So then I decided to take it apart.</p> The hard drive in the Dell Optiplex 780</figcaption></figure> First I unscrewed all the screws, there is another screw holding the read/write head under the label.</p> </figure> </figure> After that I took it apart a little more, it has one platter internally and one big old magnet which I kept.</p> Well, I've let the magic smoke out now.</figcaption></figure> Interestingly there seems to be a metal piece on the bottom and side of the hard drive which I think is for easy destruction. CrystalDiskInfo said it had 29202 hours on it and 2875 power ons, nearly exactly the same as my ST2000DM001-1CH164 T2B hard drive. The smart data also had warnings for its Reallocated Sectors Count.</p> It's in the bin now. Thanks for reading.</p> Customer Focus in Business Unknown — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 Understanding that a customer has needs when using a good or service can allow a business to identify marketable opportunities for increasing profitability or maximizing revenues. For a large portion of customer focus, its about communication.</p> </figure> A customer focused approach can be adopted by many aspects of a business, such as; </p> Sales</li> Management</li> Location</li> Customer Service</li> Marketing</li>Growth and Extensibility</li></ul> Many customers will have different needs and goals and there are many aspects to a business that may need to change to adopt a customer-first approach, but the payoff is;</p> High Customer Retention</li> Long Term Commitment</li> Greater Profitability</li>Greater Customer Satisfaction</li></ul> However, adopting such an approach may also have some negative business consequences;</p> Increased Spending</li> Increased Overheads</li> Increased After-Sales spending</li> Immediate responses and on-site negotiation</li> Lower Profitability</li>Harder Automation or lack there-of</li></ul> Providing a Customer-Focused Approach to Sales</h2> Giving the customer what they want is paramount to ensuring a customer-focused approach. Customers usually can appreciate a hands-off approach to getting things done and are usually willing to pay extra for it. Providing a service that is better than the competition or providing greater pre-sales support increases, for example, through online-chat or in-person representation allows the business to increase their potential to close a sale and provide the customer greater satisfaction in their choice.</p> There are many ways to provide a custom approach to sales;</p> Offer a product that is superior to competition - If your business is able to deliver a product better than the rest, you can capitalize on its potential to increase the customer's satisfaction.</li> Use Marketing that drives the customer toward package solutions - providing a complete service, rather than a means to an end will allow for greater satisfaction, and as a by-product greater opportunities for increased added value.</li> Guide the customer - Inform the customer of any regulations or licensing that they may need, arrange to set that up for them as part of the service.</li> Offer tertiary products that complement their purchase.</li> Provide Pre-Sales service to ensure the customer is satisfied through demonstration or information.</li> Understand the customer's stated clear needs and objectives to provide a product they would be satisfied with.</li> Know when the customer is ready to talk, and when they aren't.</li> Exceed the customer's expectations.</li> Develop relationships that the customer values.</li> Offer solutions to suit the needs and concerns that the customer may have before purchase.</li> Don't be passive. Engage with the customer</li> Ensure customers receive what they ask for and gauge success</li></ul> Offering a way for the customer to reflect their satisfaction, through survey or metrics will allow a business to identify where they achieve, exceed or disappoint the expectations of the customer.</p> Providing a Customer-Focused Approach to Management</h2> A large part of Customer Focus for management staff and management, in general, is providing proper training for staff to fulfill the needs of the customer above and beyond their expectations,</p> Management shouldn't be a roadblock between the customer and the sales staff. Provide a framework that can be followed such as a budget or develop routine customer stories.</li> Provide training to ensure the sales staff know what isn't allowed.</li> Use appropriate means of communication, don't push for sales.</li> Have measures in place to prevent abuse, A case study about continental found on average the lowest value customers whose flights were delayed were receiving the highest compensation.</li> Know your market segment and the needs of the customers, if a customer does not care about your values as a business, you need to change to be competitive.</li> Provide staff with a view to the customers' interests and an incentive to stick to it.</li> What is the best way to collect customers' responses and respond to issues?</li> Coordinate your teams as a group with clear ground rules and goals but don't alienate the customer</li></ul> Providing a Customer-Focused Approach to Location</h2> When a customer wants a product or service, they may be willing to pay more than the going rate for convenience, more-so due to the new market for app-based food deliveries and same-day online shopping. Having the customer see your storefront when they need to is a perfect situation for both parties.</p> Many businesses also opt to help the local community and sponsor community projects.</p> References;</p> The Quest for Customer Focus</a></li> Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions</a></li></ul> My Echo Dot broke and I'm kind of mad about It Unknown — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 I got an Alexa in 2016 as a birthday present and I used the thing almost daily! We ended up with 3 in the house, one in the Kitchen and two in different bedrooms. I also installed a Sonoff smart switch in the ceiling light in my bedroom which meant I could easily turn off the light right from the comfort of my bed (using sonoff-tasmota</a>). It was great until one day my £50, 4-year old 2nd generation echo dot stopped working.</p> I went into my room and said 'Alexa, turn on the light' and was met with blunt silence. I looked over at my echo dot and it had its blue "I'm working, leave me be" blue light with single white light rotating around it, I walked over to it and after a considerable amount of minutes (7 or 10) I decided it had been this way for a longer-time than it should have been and was stuck in a boot loop or something, I opted for a switch-it-off-and-on-again approach. It booted into its solid blue bootloader, and then sat there spinning its blue and white light again in silence.</p> I left it for hours to no avail, I tried resetting it by holding down its mute and volume down buttons and nothing. I've tried all manner of combinations of button-pressing, uber and volume down with mute, all at once, a combination of one another. I gave up after about an hour of pressing and pushing buttons on it and decided that it was a software issue and would not wake up from its blue spinning trance.</p> I decided to search online and can't find anyone with the same issue, there seem to be a few people who used the wrong power chord but I'm not one of them and I tried a new led and power-brick anyway. I posted on amazon's digital devices forum and was met with standard troubleshooting that as I expected, but followed with optimism, did not work. </p> I also briefly looked at seeing if I could re-image the echo using fastboot, I knew it ran android but after reading online and trying for myself (uber and usb to PC, echo showing a green light) I saw that the echo is fairly locked down and not able to be accessed this way.</p> Which is where we come to why I'm mad. It's for two reasons. In the first generation echo dot there was a physical and separate reset button that if I were able to use on the second generation echo dot I'm sure would allow me to hard </strong>reset the echo dot, but because the thing is stuck in some software upgrade or something, its only good as a bad police light, a paperweight, landfill.</p> And the second reason I'm mad is not allowing me to do this with another PC, ADB and Fastboot I've only used a few times but allowed me to extend the lifetime of my devices and customise them to my heart's desire.</p> You let me down Amazon, now I have to get up and turn off the light like everyone else.</p> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yoy5Psmse4 </div>My Echo Dot 2nd Generation</figcaption></figure> Writing a Requirement Specification Document for a Software Project Unknown — Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 </figure> When a problem or solution requiring software is conceived it is essential that the software project is properly conveyed to the software house, agency or project staff creating the software. When constructing the document there are defined standards that the SRS may be structured to follow, such as IEEE Std 830-1998</a> which has been superseded by IEEE Std 29148-2011</a>.</p> The document may also be written by the customer should the client choose to do so as it may provide more control of the specifications required in the project.Simply a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) could be titled ;</p> This is what the customer wants the software to do.</p></blockquote></figure> Introduction</h2> The introduction should indicate the expected behaviors of the software as clearly as possible detailing the processes, activities, interfaces, and tasks required by the software. The introduction can be muddied if the software is not already clearly conceptualized or thought out or is to be built onto existing software if the requirements are not understood by all parties. It may also be necessary to indicate the expected life cycle, phase-out period and maintenance required to maintain the performance and usability of the software. Users may also be considered.</p> Purpose</h4> An SRS document may state the purpose of the software which could be considered an ultimate end-goal of the resulting project and consider the project a failure if not met. It should conclude with affirming that this document specifies how the software should be designed, developed, tested and implemented where applicable. If the purpose is to improve the speed of current business processes then make it appear in the purpose section, if the purpose is to improve the usability of the current software used by staff then include it in the purpose section as well. If the software is also supposed to do something not included in the purpose or easily justified by this section, then it can be hard to justify why such a feature should exist in the project.</p> Scope</h4> The scope of the document is to provide a description of what the document specification includes, such as use cases and requirements. Some of the program may be in multiple documents so the scope is necessary to reduce overlap between projects.</p> System Overview</h4> System Overview provides a description of the context, function and requirements of the software project.</p> References</h4> References should indicate if the software is somewhat pre-existing, any references made in the document and references to appendixes should also be included too.</p> Overall Description</h2> The overall description is the second section of the SRS document.</p> Product Perspective</h3> A product perspective is a detailed outlook of what the program should appear like to the users of the system, some software projects may be completely transparent to users,</g> if so then the product perspective should outline the interfacing between other software components that make it so. </p> The overall description should not be vague, it should provide justification as to why the functions of the program are required.</li> The overall description should detail crucial cornerstones of the program and interfaces that exist with the hardware or software.</li> Some of the programs may be pre-existing which will require the project interface detailed and easily readable to be understood.</li></ul> The Description should have six sections,</p> System Interfaces</strong> which the user may interact with the system or the system may interact with other systems.</li> User Interfaces</strong> which the users may interact with which may include the frequency of their usage and the intuitiveness of the design.</li> Hardware</strong>. Including the frequency of use of the hardware, considerations to the longevity of the hardware and ability to update or dispose of the hardware.</li> Software</strong>. Including external interfaces, naming conventions.</li> Communication and Telecom </strong>both in interfaces software to software and to the user.</li> Memory</strong>. Including minimum requirements.</li> Operations </strong>and processes that the program may perform real-time or batch, transaction or otherwise.</li>Adaptations </strong>and the ability to configure the system. For open source or high-security systems, this section may be larger than private or closed source software due to the need to ensure that it is secure or can be maintained or made depreciated quickly.</li></ul> Design Constraints </h3> What are the limitations of the software?</g></li> What</g> might the software fail to perform at?</li> What are the limitations of the programming language if selected?</li> How might this delay the project if risks arise?</li> What are the limitations of the users' ability?</li> What training will need to take place in order to use the software effectively?</li> What does the software not do?</li>What happens if a user does not use the software as intended?</li></ul> In most aspects of software engineering, there are simply parts of human nature and failure modes or edge cases that simply cannot always be mitigated, in such scenarios it is important to outline what steps your software has taken to make these issues not slow the productivity of the software and ensure that the system runs as intended part of this may be detailed in test cases written in the appropriate section.</p> Product Functions</h3> Product Functions should as best as possible describe the function of the program and how the modules of the program if any will work together with the interfaces of the system to produce the software's desired functions.</p> The aim of the section is to break down the large characteristics of the program into more readable and manageable sections that can be delegated out to a team or read to an individual clearly without much overlap to avoid confusing what the program is designed to accomplish and what each function does.</p> The functions should be organized and listed so that they may be read for the first time and understood effectively.</li> The section may include graphical sections or UML detailing how the program may operate.</li> The validity of the input.</li> Sequence diagrams or how the program may pass data between functions.</li> How the program accounts for abnormality.</li> Common input examples may be a good way of explaining the function to the reader and providing a sample of what the programmer should accomplish on each function.</li> Sequencing.</li></ul> User Characteristics</h3> When a user may use the system either from time to time (i.e. infrequently), once or many many times it is important to detail this information in the user characteristics section and account for this in the software, if the methods used to do something are contrived or confusing it could lead to increased mistakes or data mismanagement further down the line and increase the need for normalization or reconciliation of information.</p> User Characteristics should detail the factors that affect each user</a> and provide use cases for each user, it may also be ideal to detail overlapping functions that each user may use</a> and diagram where appropriate.</li> It also may be applicable to detail why each user may need a function of the program.</li></ul> Specific Requirements</h2> The specific requirements should detail all of the requirements of the clients, the user and the software itself. It should provide suitable detail to enable the software to be written clearly and tested effectively. It should be stated for each requirement which user the requirement is for and if applicable that the test case corresponding to the requirement should be satisfied through cross-referencing other parts of the document.</p> The requirements should be clearly stated to prevent later mistakes or edge cases, poorly written requirements or poorly designed functions may cause the program to be unstable or possibly unsuitable for use. Proper error handling should be given to most aspects of the programs requirement and how it operates to meet the requirement.</li> Vagueness or Failings in test cases may allow for requirements to be deliberately misinterpreted, such as "The program must be fast and easy to use" may be considered easy to use for the programmer or tester, and therefore a suitable statement that the requirement is met, but not for the user who may not understand the inner workings of the software and therefore lack the knowledge to use the software effectively as much as the programmer testing the requirement, it may be a good idea to allow the users to try the functions using agile development and adapting the program accordingly.</li></ul> The final part of the document should include the appendices </strong>and the index</strong>.</p> Fixing an Accenta/Optima Alarm Power Failure Troubleshooting Unknown — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 A long time ago our alarm box died and I thought it was time we diagnose an fix the issue.</p> DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COPY IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. CONTACT AN ELECTRICIAN OR ALARM INSTALLER.</p>We will be opening a delicate box with potentially live mains power and could cause damage to yourself or the panel.</cite></blockquote> Accenta Home Alarm Control Box (left)</figcaption></figure> As you can see, although our isolation switch is set to 'ON' the power light on the alarm box is not illuminated. This may be because,</p> The battery in the alarm has died.</li> A fuse in the alarm box has blown.</li> There is a fault with the incoming power to the alarm box.</li> There is a fault with the main board of the alarm box.</li></ul> We know that there is no fault with the existing setup because the alarm used to work, so we can start to diagnose our four potential issues. I'll also teach you how to reset your panel.</p> Opening the Panel</h2> This step is the easiest but can be daunting for some. Remember, safety first. We will be dealing with a panel that may be receiving mains voltage.</p> Accenta / Optima alarm panel tamper switch </figcaption></figure> When we open the box, there is a small spring that pushes against the door, this little spring ensures that any burglars who attempt to open the panel, trigger the alarm. As our alarm is not working, nothing will happen but if the alarm does sound, then it may be a sign that your panel does not have a power issue, consider resetting your alarm. Unscrew the two front facing screws. Note that from here on out, experienced competent people should continue.</p> Accenta / Optima alarm control box with bottom section removed </figcaption></figure> Now that we have taken the bottom section off completely, we need access to the top of the main board as well. There is a fuse we need to test in the top half of the alarm panel so we're going to remove the top half as well, this bit is just as easy as the bottom half, but there is a speaker attached to the housing, we can remove the speaker by unscrewing the terminals or do what I did and simply let the top half dangle by its wires (lazy but effective).</p> Accenta / Optima alarm control box completely opened</figcaption></figure> Testing the External Power Supply to the Box</h2> (If you are following along and have an Optima remote alarm panel, you may need to find a box similar to mine, but it does not have any controls or lights - its also likely that your remote panel is not illuminated and the screen is off if it is a power issue.)</pre> Power Light Not Illuminated</figcaption></figure> Firstly we need to test that the incoming power supply is working, this is where our AC Voltage tester comes in (fear not if you don't have one but do have a voltmeter).</p> VoltAlert Wand</figcaption></figure> Using this wand we can see if there is power coming into the alarm. (If you don't have one of these and are following along at home, you can set your voltmeter to AC or ṽ and place your black lead into the COM jack and red lead into the VOmA jack and when we open the alarm panel later put your test leads on the incoming supply chock block above the transformer, using the left brown and blue wire screws)</p> Place the wand near the incoming mains wire, if the wand sounds and flashes, congratulations. We have determined that the alarm panel is receiving power to its transformer.</p> </figure> If there is no power, consider using a voltmeter as explained above to verify. If there is still definitely no power then a fuse may have blown in the isolation switch or the ring main RCD may have tripped, so consider diagnosing if they are the issue.</p> Testing the Alarm Battery</h2> If you think that the Accenta / Optima alarm has stopped working due to a battery failure, we can test the battery by connecting test leads to the battery terminals on either side of the battery block or on the battery directly, you will need to turn off power to the alarm so that we don't get the feed in voltage from the board. Do not put your voltmeter test leads in the red highlighted section. Make sure to set your voltmeter back to measuring DC voltage if you set it for AC earlier. Place your test leads on both screws on the green highlighted area.</p> Alarm Panel Power Block</figcaption></figure> If you don't get a reading or a low reading (3V or less) then your alarm battery may have ran out because of power failure. If your battery reads ~12V then it is a good indicator that your alarm panel is faulty and will need to be replaced entirely, but I would suggest you check the fuses before doing so to verify.</p> Testing Fuses in the Accenta / Optima Alarm Box</h2> If you have verified that the incoming power is working and your alarm battery is depleted then a fuse is a most likely cause of the alarm failing.</p> To test the fuses, you need to set your voltmeter to continuity mode and then test each side of the fuses contacts. Make sure the power is switched off before and during testing any fuses. If any are blown, replace like for like.</p> Accenta / Optima alarm panel fuse locations</figcaption></figure> The fuses are as follows, from left to right; -</p> RKP or Remote Keypad</li> Internal Speaker</li> Bell / Strobe</li> Battery</li> Transformer</li></ul> Resetting the Accenta / Optima Alarm Panel</h2> To reset the alarm panel, remove power to the panel and short the SET output to the left PA input terminal. Then turn on the alarm and allow it to power up completely. After a few seconds, you can then switch off the alarm once again and remove the shorting wires. Make sure to replace any wires previously installed and then power up the unit again, the default 0123 code will now have been restored. Beware in doing this, you reset any zones, such as fire zones will have been reset.</p> Tracking My Position all the Time Unknown — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 I have a long standing interest in monitoring my daily doings, I previously thought about putting a GPS tracker in my car, a good idea for both tracking my position and also checking to see if it has gone walkies (is stolen). I decided against doing this a while ago due to exams and lack of time to set the whole thing up. But I did decide to have a crack at this idea later with my phone.</p> The way I chose to go about this power hungry task was to use an app like IFTTT to record my position to a spreadsheet. But then I heard about owntracks, a purpose-built app for tracking your position. After setting up the owntracks</g> server, MQTT and owntracks</g> recorder. I now have a pretty good way of determining where I am at one time or another and have been using it for about 6 months. </p> My phone is a OnePlus 3 and as I said the app is fairly power hungry. Currently owntracks uses ~39% of my battery's capacity</a> based on 1 day 1 hour uptime. Although this seems fairly high I have accepted it as a fair compromise untill I can finish another GPS project I have in the works.</p> Here's my experience of such a setup so far,</p> Battery usage increased significantly to a point where some users may not find it acceptable.</li> I had to turn off battery optimization and advanced battery optimization or else the app would stop.</li> The app does not always capture my location all of the time, sometimes it may be a few hours before it reports a significant change despite being in move monitoring mode or significant changes mode.</li> The performance and recording of positions in the app isn't as good if the app does not have internet access all the time, so if data is switched off in my phone, the recording of the position isn't as good as if it were on all the time, sometimes there can be large gaps where there was no internet access where it drops out.</li> My use case was for later analysis of the data, not realtime.</li> Owntracks recorder is not very featured but it does the job.</li></ul> </figure> Exporting GnuCash Data to PowerBi Unknown — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 Some things are better if you do them yourself. I mainly did this project</a> to keep a running ledger of the changes that I would need to keep track of the account balance data.</p> GnuCash is great, but when I export my accounts data the CSV file isn't easily translated with power-query automatically. I decided that because I need to keep track of my transactions, this problem was best suited with a little program to calculate my net inflows and outflows using a python program, I also decided halfway through the project that I wanted to hook it up to my graphing backend, a silly idea - but a fun one to see my spends go up and down. I decided that I'd publish it here so that in the future I would find it a lot easier.</p> Traditionally if you wanted to export GnuCash data from CSV to PowerBi, you'd be better off using their inbuilt power query, however, I wanted to implement a ledger system, something that I don't think can be accomplished directly in PowerBi</g></g> without some scripting</a>, and in the future I want to be able to change platforms if I need to because I no longer have a licence for PowerBi</g> or want to use something else like excel or free equivalents like Google Sheets. I reckon that if done properly Google Scripts could make everything run automagically from an upload, but I don't have my reports ready yet for that to happen.</p> # Extracted from here https://github.com/aidancrane/GnuCash-CSV2CSV-for-PowerBi/blob/master/convert_to_powerBI.py import csv from re import sub from decimal import Decimal import time # If we only want the transactions values, set this to true and they will print to console, they do not save to accounts_out.csv! numbersOnly = False # Anyone thats not me will want this to be false, this is used to show the transaction data on a live graph I use for scratching around with. smoothieChartEmulation = False sessionCookie = "39494goodluckguessingthispartlololol213232expiresanyway" # Leave this here so that Notepad++ and Atom auto-suggest it. # Date,Account Name,Number,Description,Notes,Memo,Category,Type,Action,Reconcile,To With Sym,From With Sym,To Num.,From Num.,To Rate/Price,From Rate/Price if (smoothieChartEmulation): import requests # Negative Numbers are bracketed when exported from GNUCash so we need to fix that for the float data type. def convert_if_negative(number): returnNumber = str(number) if ("," in returnNumber): if ("(" in returnNumber): returnNumber = returnNumber[1:] returnNumber = returnNumber[:-1] returnNumber = returnNumber.replace(",", "") returnNumber = 0 - round(float(returnNumber), 2) returnNumber = str(returnNumber).replace(",", "") if ("(" in returnNumber): returnNumber = Decimal(sub(r'[^\d.]', '', returnNumber)) return (0 - round(float(returnNumber), 2)) return returnNumber # open accounts.cvs, our exported file. with open("accounts.csv", "r") as csvIn: reader = csv.DictReader(csvIn) entries = [] runningTotal = float(0) # Save for row in reader: if (row["Account Name"] == ""): pass else: runningTotal = runningTotal + float(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."])) if (numbersOnly): print(str(round(runningTotal, 2))) else: if (smoothieChartEmulation): payload = {'random_graph': runningTotal} r = requests.get('https://dash.infinityflame.co.uk/dash/flex.php', params=payload, cookies={'PHPSESSID': sessionCookie}) print(str(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."])) + " Description: "+ row["Description"] + " Account Balance: " + str(round(runningTotal, 2))) entries.append([row["Date"],row["Description"],row["Category"],str(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."])),str(round(runningTotal, 2))]) # Save what we care about to our new csv for power BI with open('accounts_out.csv', mode='w', newline='') as csvOut: titles = ["Date","Description","Destination","Transaction","Account Balance"] writer = csv.writer(csvOut, delimiter=',', quotechar='"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL) writer.writerow(titles) for transaction in entries: writer.writerow(transaction)</code></pre> I used python because it's quick to debug in Atom and I know it well. The way this snippet is used is to export an account from GnuCash, then use this program to output the final CSV to be taken in by PowerBi</g>, I've chained these steps together. The final result is stored in accounts_out.csv.</p> Thanks!</p> Opening up my Tile Mate Unknown — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 Bluetooth trackers are a great addition to anyone's cluttered key chain, Last year I got a Tile Mate as a present. A nifty little key-chain Bluetooth connected sounder for when I loose my keys, or when I loose my phone</a>.</p> So far given oneyears</g> use I have maybe used it seriously to find my phone 2 or 3 times, it works very well for it. Anyway</g> now that I've had a years</g> use, the Tile app decided they wanted more money as the battery was getting low. Interestingly enough in the newest versions of the Tile Mate</g> the battery is replaceable, however in this version (replaceable or not) the method to open the case is rather destructive.</p> The Tile Mate Main board, front and back case housing. </figcaption></figure> Forgive the image, it was rather late at night, As you can see there was a replaceable CR2025, so changing the battery was as simple as replacing it with a battery I had spare. I wonder what '62' means?</p> </figure> I couldn't get the data-matrix to scan on my phone app unfortunately</g>, but the board is very pretty and its</g> clear a lot of thought has gone into keeping the size small. I like the little Pogo pins on the right for the piezo on the lid and the little pcb</g> antenna. Also featured, the timing crystal oscillator, microprocessor and what looks like a version number for the board.</p> </figure> Anyway, then I put it all back together nice and snug inside its now fairly tarnished case and used some 5-second-fix glue to glue it back together and jobs-a-gooden, almost. It seems like the message on the app still persists.</p> Anyways, I'm still happy with it, it's served its time and I think I've broken it a little too much to replace it again. In the future perhaps with the latest version, tile could offer some sort of slot so that the battery can be replaced a little less destructively (or maybe I did it wrong, oops). Nevertheless I don't advise doing it yourself. TTFN, Aidan.</p> Cya later, Mate.</p> Business Processes Re-engineering Unknown — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 When a business grows and adapts it often requires a lot of overhauls, both physically and digitally. Processes that previously worked or were effective for purpose are no longer so. Because of this a business will re-engineer part of its business processes to adapt.</p> Reasons Why a Business May Adapt its Processes</h2> A business may change the way it functions for many reasons,</p> The business is expanding and it's old process needs to handle the additional capacity or machinery.</li> The function the old system used to serve has been superseded or removed from the business process as it is no longer required.</li> The business is being merged or acquired by another and duplicate processes need to be removed or increased and vice versa.</li> The process currently being used is not dynamic enough to be useful anymore or is causing issues.</li> A process is failing or is not always effective.</li>The current process has too many avoidable errors.</li></ul> Reasons Why a Process May Need Changing</h2> A business may change it's processes for many reasons, such as ; -</p> Improve the speed of operation.</li> Improve the customization or dynamic of a process.</li> Improve the continuity or compatibility to connect the process to other processes.</li> As a reaction to changing legislation, laws or consumer complaints.</li> Improve the efficiency of a process.</li> Improve the operating cost of a process.</li> Improve the output or capacity of a process.</li>Improve the working capital investment</a> in a process.</li> Improve quality of a product.</li> Change the product.</li></ul> Re-engineering a process not only requires identifying a change but enacting that change can take a lot of steps to complete, especially for products in areas that are heavily reliant on compliance and conformity, such as electrical appliances or medial tools.</p> Improving Efficiency Caveats</h2> Changing a business process can be risky and should have appropriate risk analysis in place where processes are crucial to the business process or jobs.</p> Many businesses re-engineer their processes simply to ensure that their product or products match demand. Overhauling business processes may not be financially viable if the number of defects or failing products outweighs the cost of replacing the machinery or software process.</p> Improving the speed of a process may make the process faster but the business may also want to change the system implemented, such as using a batch process system where the job can be completed as part of a 'batch'. Having many batches however can lead to greater working capital on complex components or products and can mean that if there is a problem with one then it is likely that the whole batch is also going to fail. Batch processing can also make quality control and quality assurance much harder and more expensive to enact.</p> Information Systems in Business Unknown — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Many large businesses such as manufacturers or suppliers, factories or distribution centres have many Information Systems set up and designed to handle the large quantities of processes involved in conducting their function.</p> Large Information Systems</h3> Some businesses are so large that their processes may require information systems to handle day-to-day business processes. One such example is order processing. Businesses with large order systems or large quantities of products to manufacture may only handle order processing through information systems.</p> One such information system used in a logistical setting is one that would be used to record inbound goods. Physical product businesses for example need to record incoming raw materials or ordered products to process them and turn them into a product. Without a centralised information system it can be very hard to keep track of stock levels, although maintaining the whereabouts of goods used by the business can be useful but in the real world some of these goods can go missing, be wasted, damaged or arrive having already being damaged. This is why information systems must be able to handle losses and inform stock keepers when the product is becoming depleted and must be re-ordered especially on systems that involve Kanban </a>or Just in Time</a> systems. This is one such example of where information systems must be able to handle all scenarios that an employee will encounter.</p> Examples of Business Information Systems</h3> Business information systems have different requirements throughout the various departments;</p> Human Resources</strong> must be able to use information systems to handle processes such as,</p> Employee Payroll.</li> Employee Performance.</li> Hiring and Job Roles.</li> Staff Records and Employee Contracts.</li> Holiday Management and Illness.</li> Training Programs.</li> Attendance and Absenteeism.</li>Staff Disciplinary Records.</li></ul> Senior Management</strong> may not always use information systems as their roles may be too strategic or sporadic to construct an information system, however they may have daily or even business cyclic tasks such as,</p> Monitoring performance of the business or business processes.</li> Maintaining customer relationships through relationship management software or CRM.</li> Assess generalised performance of a store or business through warehouse management software or employee performance.</li> Make strategic decisions about business processes by using sales data or reporting software.</li> Identify problems with processes or business cycles.</li>Generate Reports for Sales, Product Development or Manufacturers.</li></ul> General Management</strong> may use information systems to,</p> Distribute work to employees.</li> Identify problems with processes or business cycles.</li> Monitor Employee clock-in times.</li> Monitor Employee processes or performance.</li> Record Paying Hours or Overtime.</li> Action directions from higher up.</li> Discipline employees.</li> Correct or Normalise Data on the System.</li> Query or edit the database.</li>Prioritise.</li></ul> Employees </strong>may use information systems to,</p> Action Jobs tasked to them.</li> Query a database.</li>Create orders for customers.</li></ul> Some of the advantages of using an information system </h3> It may aide the speed a process in a business can be completed as all of the data needed</a> is centralised and managed in one place.</li> The information system may enable employees to manage large orders or information as a batch.</li> The information system may be able to prioritise important jobs on the system.</li> Mistakes could be identified by the system and prompt the user to rectify it.</li> The system may improve or identify bottlenecks in the business process.</li> The system may allow for customers to interact with it directly and therefore reduce the time it takes for a business to fulfill a customers desires.</li> The system may be compatible with other systems through an API which can link systems together.</li></ul> Some of the disadvantages of using an information system </h3> If the system is custom or highly specialised making changes to it can be hard or expensive or slow.</li> The information system may be slow which could frustrate users.</li> The system may not have all the features an employee desires or,</li> The system may not allow some of their users to change data that they need to change.</li> The information system may not be suited for its use case.</li> Employees may have preferred the previous method or may not be it savvy enough to use the system.</li> The system may be designed in such a way that mistakes become a problem.</li> The system may be abused by employees for gain. (clocking out early, marking work as completed when it isn't)</li> If it breaks a business may not be able to function if they are reliant on it.</li>If it breaks it may corrupt data that may be unrecoverable.</li></ul> Custom Information Systems </h2> And there are many more examples of businesses using information systems. Many of them my abe trivial or bespoke, however there are programs designed to make information systems at a higher level than writing a program for them, One such example is Microsoft Access.</p> Many businesses will use Microsoft Access or custom programs to create their data and manage company process. Added advantages of using a custom program</strong> is that the company may use a single program (or a single database) for a large business process are,</p> Having a custom program allows the business to construct the data they wish to use when they need to, such as recording information that other companies</a> may not.</li> Using a custom program may allow for the business to create specific access control levels.</li> Customisation like company logos or specific company colors or themes.</li> Many Many more...</li></ul> </p> Gigabit and More on my Home Network Unknown — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 In a recent pursuit to have the fastest speeds possible at home, I have started to upgrade and replace a large section of my home network.</p> Ensuring That My Network Runs Fast at its Core</h3> Barring the routing technologies at home the most crucial part of my network is my server, an old Dell Optiplex 780 salvaged from an office clear-out it now spends its days hosting my media, files and applications. One of the first things I did was replace all of the cabling around my network. Most being CAT5 the fastest speeds possible were only 100Mbps, this was a noticeable bottleneck when I checked iPerf3 as the switch its connected to, the router and my PC were all gigabit connected and clearly an oversight on my part. Replacing the cable from it to the switch instantly jumped the speed to gigabit. Yay!</p> Getting Rid of Old Hardware</h3> Another decision I made was to remove some of my old hardware that was no longer up to the task of Gigabit+ speed. That for me meant swapping out a dumb switch capable of 100Mbps max for a new 8 port gigabit one, oddly I bought the 100Mbps one for £10 and sold it for £14 on Ebay so I guess theres money in old switches.</p> I then replaced its cables too and viola, 1 Gbps throughput on the whole wired network!</p> What does the future hold?</h3> After looking at transfer speeds between my server and PC, I think the next step is to replace the Optiplex and my PC, as they are now at the point where their age is starting to be a performance problem, although they remain somewhat performant at their daily duties they are both starting to age poorly with the increasing demand from myself for hosting my projects.</p> I also want to try SFTP+ but I don't yet have the SSDs or Hard-drives to necessitate it.</p> My Meraki Home Network Unknown — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Cisco Meraki MR18</figcaption></figure> If you have ever wanted to use WiFi reliably in your own home, most homelabbers</g> and computer enthusiasts</a> will eventually learn that using consumer equipment to achieve fast speeds and low ping can be a route that many take in vain, whilst mesh networking appliances look promising for home applications, the ever vast expanding market of power-line networking adapters and WiFi range extenders have lead consumers astray and often leave them unhappy with their network performance due to patchy and inconsistent behavior caused by devices looking for the 'strongest' signal despite it not necessarily being the fastest or most optimal.</p> Having an ISP issued router has never put me off fiddling before, having being</g> issued a Netgear WNR3500L V2 it wasn't long before I decided to flash Tomato on it and leave Netgear Genie hopefully forever.</p> Having moved on with my life I quickly became unhappy with the performance of the WiFi and decided it needed sprucing up a little bit, running two routers on two sides of the house were becoming tiresome due to patchiness and being connected to one side of the house while at the other requiring</g> manual adjustment. It was time to buy something enterprise to set-and-forget. Alas enterprise comes with a hefty price tag.</p> Rather than going mainstream and buying something like Ubiquiti or MikroTiK</g>, popular routers with the home lab community. I decided to take a different approach to save a buck. Having flashed firmware on many devices in the past, such as Arduino, ESP8266s or even other routers I decided to get my hands on the enterprise CISCO Meraki MR18, a subscription model router with a hefty price tag at the current time of £308.38 for a three-year license. Would I be paying that? Absolutely not.</p> I picked one up off eBay for a fairly high market price of £17.99 which came with a wall bracket and no plug or license. Why so cheap compared to the £308.38 price tag? Well, it turns out Meraki are giving them away free to anyone who sits through their webinar, and once the license runs out it's my understanding that they essentially become paperweights. Once it arrived I fired it up just to see what it used to be called and see if I could get a hit on WiGLE's database to see where this thing came from, unfortunately, 0 hits means my best guess is that it came from somewhere around Aylesbury, UK. The location of the Ebay E-Recycler the SSID was generic "Guest Access" and "Staff Internet".</p> Once I cleaned up the router it looked brand new, the power cable I got from my drawer of many cables and began to study the thing, the brushed aluminum backing had the screws hidden behind rubber feet, an easy adversary I had the thing open in no time.</p> Big RF Shields :)</figcaption></figure> I particularly like the bendy lightpipe for the RGB leds.</p> </figure> The UART pins were neatly placed and populated with pins at the top of the AP and easy to flash with.</p> </figure> I decided to opt for flashing OpenWRT on to it, basically because at the time they were the only ones supporting this particular device and it would only really be acting as an Access Point, with my Tomato router doing all the hard work.</p> Thanks for reading. Enjoy this picture of my neighbors cat.</p> </figure> Transitioning from Google Map Editor to OpenStreetMap Unknown — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 After using Google Maps for quite a while, I enjoyed areas that had buildings populated on the map, Google does a very good job of this, however since Google Map Maker closed, I felt somewhat disenfranchised with their mapping system, It became a lot harder to edit their maps and the experience is just not as good as Map Maker was.</p> A Google Maps screen capture of my neighborhood.</figcaption> </figure> Then one day I discovered OpenStreetMaps and the simplicity of their map editor filled the hole in my heart that Map Maker left. I found that Open Street Maps iD editor</a> was both friendly to use and better than Map Maker, the iD editor had a much more intuitive interface and the wiki made the transition generally easy and enjoyable.</p> An Open Street Maps screen capture of my neighborhood.</figcaption> </figure> As with any change, there was a little bit of a learning curve but the wiki was informative and allowed me to transition from my amateur interest in the topic of cartography into a full-blown contributor to the eco-system. I also have started using the JOSM</a> editor a little and have found that its tools have made contributing much easier for bulk operations and mainly use the iD editor for tidy-up or casual map corrections or contributions.</p> Why Open Street Map?</h2> Contributing to a closed system like Google maps was never really a problem for me using my local knowledge to correct open times and add photos to locations, but once I discovered Open Street Maps, I sort of feel like there's no going back. There are a lot of reasons I like Open Street Map, Its Open, the maps can be used in any application, the license only requires that OSM is credited when your application is public. (Copyleft Attribution-Share-Alike</a>)</li> Its used in a lot of applications that I use already, updating the map on OSM will improve those applications too. :-)</li> Editing polygons seem to be a lot easier than Google Map Editor.</li> Using an Open system would be preferable over something that in the future could potentially become a closed source or paid for.</li> </ul> I intend to update my local area, as Open Street Maps relies on community contributions it is apparent that it has not been updated in a while. Watch this space. Woodmansy, Beverley UK Weather Current Temperature and Humidity Unknown — Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Hey Thanks for checking out my project, or discovering it organically!</p> Whats the weather?</h1> This page shows the output of my outdoor box DHT22 Temperature sensor, powered by two 100w solar panels it can sometimes run out of power, especially late at night on miserable days. The data is updated in 15-minute intervals based on three samples. The data is monitored and transmitted from an esp8266 to my web-server, which is then logged in a google spreadsheet and then published here, only the last 500 entries are kept in the chart, which makes the whole chart 15 hours long. The data on this chart can be better viewed here -> Link</a> </iframe> The data on this chart can be better viewed here -> Link</a> </iframe> If you would like historical data, please contact me.</h6> Reliable internet connections. Are they a reality in Britain yet? Unknown — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Most would say no. However, the recent increase in consumer spending on reliable mobile and the domestic internet has led the development of new infrastructure, innovation, and government subsidy. The increased value of fast and affordable internet is no doubt due to the increase in cord-cutting and streaming options available to the consumer.</p> However, there are still issues in rural broadband areas where internet connections are limited, spotty or oversubscribed and need infrastructure investment in order to improve. The biggest issue could be the degradation and limited ability of domestic subscribers to ensure a reliable connection, many using dated routers, cables and positioning WiFi access points where there are many obstacles such as walls, corners, and doors making the signal weaker and less effective and often situated at one side of their home, rather than in the centre or where the WiFi is being used. Many new routers are combating this problem by using more antennas and user-friendly configuration wizards or combating the problem entirely by using pre-configured settings from the supplier or ISP.</p> Another problem may be the proximity to the exchange, as most subscribers in rural areas find their connection vastly slower compared to that of locations nearby, once again showing a performance drop that could be improved by moving away from copper to more effective methods of transmission, such as fiber.</p> It is however clear that the infrastructure as a whole has vastly improved and is much more capable as it was, mobile network connectivity has also improved to handle the data needs of modern apps and streaming websites as per the March report.</blockquote> The issue as the report </a>outlines is, however, meeting the demand of mobile business subscribers and providing affordable internet options to consumers. In my opinion, the use of ADSL2+ and DOCSIS 3.1 is not as much of a step in the right direction as fiber, even if it means limiting the speed available to the subscriber to segment their pricing structure. Source</a>, written by me in 2017.</p> Hull University Timetable to Google Calendar Unknown — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 EDIT: The university has removed this facility :(</h3> Getting your iCal Link for your Timetable</h3> To add your Hull University Timetable</a> iCal feed to Google Calendar, or equivalent calendar to use on your phone or other devices copy the link below,</p> webcal://calendars.hull.ac.uk/tcs/Stucal.asp?p1=201700500</pre> replacing the 201700500</code> with your student ID found on your lanyard.</p> Adding your Scientia Timetable to Google Calendar</h3> Then open Google Calendar and click the plus symbol highlighted in red like below.</p> Then click From URL</code> and paste your link in. It should appear almost instantly. You should then see the new calendar appear that you can then set up notifications and colors to suit your needs.</p> Adding your Canvas Calendar</h2> You can also add your canvas calendar which has your deadlines on by going to this link</a> and then adding the link in the bottom right the same way we did above, you should now have all of your calendars in one place!</p> Note that this does not synchronize your mail.hull.ac.uk calendar which you may receive emails with invitations through, and you can't because you will see this message that prevents you.</strong></p> I am not</strong> associated with Hull University, they're good guys.</em></blockquote> Adding a Virtual Host to Apache Unknown — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Preamble</strong></span></h2> The beauty of hosting your own web server and having root access to your machine is the ability to run whatever you want on it. One great example of this is running virtual hosts in apache, which allows you to run multiple websites on the same server. What you can run as a virtual host is fairly unlimited so long as the clients can resolve the address to your web server, be it URL, IP address or even special use domain names if you so desire (though the last one I do not recommend). When setting up Virtual Hosts it is important to realize that as websites will run on a single server, If one website goes down, its very likely that the others will go with it. Additionally, when a server is not configured correctly or securely when a client connects to the server they may not see what you intend or may see the default apache page.</p> Place your website's files in the folder /var/www/root/infinityflame.co.uk</code> replacing my domain name with yours and setting the correct permission on the directory.</p> Method</strong></span></h2> There are multiple ways of configuring apache virtual hosts, such as IP-Based Virtual Hosts, which allow you to apply different rules to connections based on the originating or outgoing interface. And the most popular and most used method of Name-Based Virtual Hosts. Adding a virtual host to apache is very simple once you get used to it. In the folder/etc/apache2</code>, there are the following files, or there should be; sites-enabled</strong>, sites-available</strong></em>, mods-enabled</strong>, mods-available</strong>, conf-enabled</strong> and conf-available</strong>. The folder for adding virtual hosts in is sites-available</strong></em>. You can also add .conf</code> files to sites-enabled</strong>, but in doing so using a2ensite</code> and a2dissite</code> (commands used to enable and disable virtual hosts) no longer work as intended.</p> Navigate to the folder/etc/apache2/sites-available</code> then make a file called the name of your first website, such as infinityflame.co.uk.conf</code> or dashboard.infinityflame.co.uk.conf</code> as an example, you can technically call these files whatever you desire, but as you add more websites this folder can become cluttered and hard to navigate if not named efficiently. You can make these files using the touch command or nano. Once you have created the file, open it with your desired text editor and enter the following, replacing the necessary options with the ones you need.</p> <VirtualHost *:80></code></p> DocumentRoot /var/www/root/infinityflame.co.uk</code> <Directory "/var/www/root/infinityflame.co.uk"></code> Options FollowSymLinks</code> AllowOverride All</code> allow from all</code> Options +Indexes</code> </Directory></code> ServerName infinityflame.co.uk</code> ServerAdmin aidan@infinityflame.co.uk</code> ServerAlias www.infinityflame.co.uk</code></p> CustomLog /var/log/apache2/infinityflame.co.uk-access.log combined</code> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/infinityflame.co.uk-error.log</code></p> </VirtualHost></code></p> Once you have replaced the options with the ones you used, such as the DocumentRoot</strong>, ServerName</strong>, ServerAdmin</strong>, ServerAlias</strong>, CustomLog</strong> and ErrorLog</strong>. You can save it and start to enable it by doing a2ensite infinityflame.co.uk.conf</code> and then service apache2 reload</code> to reload apache, you should then be able to navigate to your website in a browser, so long as the registered address is pointing to the correct server.</p> Adding More Virtual Hosts</strong></span></h2> Once you have added one, its time to add another, then enable that one using the same command, you should now be able to navigate to the appropriate website from the browser automatically. If the server doesn't have an appropriate virtual host server name or a user connects via an IP Address that hasn't been defined they will connect to the first one defined in the output of apachectl -S</code>. Additionally, if a user connects to a port that isn't 80 they will not be able to connect to the Apache server as the server won't be listening on the port. Note that there should now be symlinks to the websites you added in the sites-enabled</strong> folder that go back to the files we made earlier.</p> Adding SSL</strong></span></h2> As websites move to secure areas it is important to have SSL on most modern websites. Fear not, although this requires some extra configuration it is nothing that we can't handle. Open your website's configuration file again and add a new virtual host below, <VirtualHost *:443></code></p> SSLEngine on </code> SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3</code> SSLHonorCipherOrder on</code> SSLCipherSuite "ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS"</code> SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/infinityflame.co.uk/cert.pem</code> SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/infinityflame.co.uk/privkey.pem</code> SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/infinityflame.co.uk/fullchain.pem</code> DocumentRoot /var/www/root/infinityflame.co.uk</code> <Directory "/var/www/root/infinityflame.co.uk"></code> Options FollowSymLinks</code> AllowOverride All</code> allow from all</code> Options +Indexes</code> </Directory></code> ServerName infinityflame.co.uk</code> ServerAdmin aidan@infinityflame.co.uk</code> ServerAlias www.infinityflame.co.uk</code></p> CustomLog /var/log/apache2/infinityflame.co.uk-access.log combined</code> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/infinityflame.co.uk-error.log</code></p> </VirtualHost></code></p> Replacing the configuration options relevant to the ones you use, as I use LetsEncrypt's certbot the configuration is made easier by having a standard location for all of the Certificate and Key files that you can copy if you do too, replacing the domain with your own.</p> Removing or Disabling a Website</strong></span></h2> To remove a website or disable it use a2dissite infinityflame.co.uk.conf</code> and then reload apache using service apache2 reload</code>. This removes the symlink from sites-enabled so that the website is not loaded on startup. Growing Tomatoes to harvest in the same year! Unknown — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Over my exams I began growing tomatoes from seed and would monitor their progress as a creative outlet as I took breaks from study, the seeds I used for my first batch were gardeners delight, as they seemed the best fit for my plant bed, and with it being February it seemed the optimal time to grow them, as the harvest months would be July to October, I decided to try to get a first year batch by accelerating the growth of the seedlings as much as possible.</p> To start with, I used a simple tray filled with topsoil which in hindsight was a bad idea, as it would have been better to use potting soil or something with more nutrition as I believe that In using topsoil it made the plants have thin roots and wispy stems at the base of the plant. The first few days were good, keeping the first batch damp germinated the seeds quickly.</p> Then, once the seeds started to grow, It was time to accelerate growth and they grew much quicker and healthier with a consistent outdoor sun.</p> Once they became too big to fit under the window, I moved them to the bed, I moved the first batch, and then the second a few weeks later, when I was sure that they could survive the outdoors. Sorry for the bad picture, but it's the only one I had taken. I also gave them some plant food which you can see is the little balls to the edge of the plant.</p> Overall this year's crops should be good tomato wise, and I'll keep you posted on the results. I think some of my biggest mistakes were over-watering and over feeding the plants made some of the leaves edges yellow and dead, which quickly disappeared after they were moved into their new permanent home but definitely something I wish I had been a little easier going with them.</p> The tomatoes are now secured in their own plant bed, which previously was the home of some unsuccessful corn and lettuce.</p> October update; Tada!</h1> Aspects a business should consider in corporate strategy Unknown — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Corporate Strategy</h2> The way a company's managers should manage a company should largely be down to the business plan. However there are often external factors limiting a companies business, they may choose to solely benefit shareholders, but practically and legally they must provide some benefit to their employees and their customers to remain socially responsible and have a strong positive public relationship to remain profitable. An umbrella corporation may often have to make strategic decisions to combat potential problems well in the future. In the show Silicon Valley</a> (external) the senior venture capitalist spends a lot of his time studying sesame seed markets in Myanmar and Brazil in order to profit in the future, this example (although fictional and a little overplayed) is a small look into the world of ensuring that profits are maintained and some of the crucial detail that must be taken into account.</p> The ability to assess the viability of consolidating corporate strategy is not only about turning a profit, but is also about financial and shareholder relations, the capability and flexibility of dynamic and slow moving markets, the technical ability of the employees and manufacturing capabilities as well as cost, the people and manpower involved and the risks undertaken at every stage.</p> Ensuring that a business has a strategic plan ensures that the company has direction and vision, companies that fail to innovate or differentiate could get left behind or never reach their true potential. A business must define the scope of its operations, how it defines its goals, then how it plans to achieve them, and finally, evaluate. Companies that fail to find a suitable corporate strategy could be left behind and not identify important challenges ahead of time and their current states failings such as their branding or vision.</p> Aspects a business should consider in corporate strategy.</h4> Brand appearance, awareness.</li> Internal Culture</li> Market Segmentation</li> Product, Pricing, Placing, Promotion</li> After sales</li> Research and Development</li> Growth Strategy</li> Human Resources</li> Product and Market Innovation</li> Technology</li> </ul> There are many techniques that businesses use to maintain a strategic advantage, such as Porters strategic matrix</a> (external) and Ansoff's matrix</a>. Factors Influencing Demand Unknown — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 A Demand and Supply Graph</h4> Factors Influencing Demand</h2> This article serves to supplement the article Influences for Supply and Demand</a>, that I wrote a while ago. For a more general overview of supply and demand, I suggest visiting there first. Demand has many factors that influence a market, such as;-</p> Changes to the prices to substitute products, such as cheaper products available online or at discount stores could reduce the sales of a premium product or product range.</li> Changes to the availability of complementary goods or changes in the price of complementary goods, such as two large luxury opposing ice cream companies.</li> Disruptions to the supply chain of competitors, such that their prices or other aspects change.</li> The incomes of customers could rise, causing customers to choose superior or premium products, similarly, they could fall and choose less or inferior products, Especially prominent for Elastic products or Luxury Items.</li> Advertising could increase consumer interest or make the product more noticeable to customers or potential customers.</li> Branding or PR could be used more prominently or advertised. Recently companies have opted for using social marketing or guerilla marketing, as it can be more successful or noticeable since ad-blockers and the fall of cable TV and TV Advertising have made it harder to reach consumers.</li> </ul> </li> Advertising or Branding of other competitors products could also potentially boost your own profits, especially if the product is generic or seasonal.</li> Changes to consumer incomes.</li> </ul> The demand for a product or service may also depend on the demographics of the product, if it is aimed at older people and the area is a student town, finding customers may be more difficult than other locations. External Shocks, such as the economy or new technologies that make the product or service obsolete could also negatively affect the products demand if a business fails to innovate or adapt to change.</p> Corporate Social Responsibility's Advantages and Disadvantages Unknown — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a companies attitude toward respecting the effects that the company may have on things like, the environment, their workers, and the political landscape. Companies may opt to be socially responsible in order to remain positive in the eyes of their customers, this can be difficult for businesses that are fundamentally bad for aspects of society, such as oil or paper companies for the environment.</p> Corporate Social Responsibility</strong></p> Some companies may take some strategic steps to ensure that they are to some effect, marketable or otherwise... socially responsible.</p> Some companies may simply take the philanthropic approach, and sponsor a charity or fundraise a cause. According to the Directory of Social Change</a>'s 'The Guide to UK Company Giving', in 2013, £658 million was given to charity and £369 million was given in 2014. However, the top 25 charitable companies donated 68% of this figure, companies such as Lloyd’s Banking Group, Tesco, and Shell.</li> Some companies use more sustainable resources, such as changing packaging, Switching their resource procurement to more sustainable or conflict free markets.</li> Some companies have co-operatives with their suppliers to ensure that their products' profits are spread evenly among each chain of the products manufacture, distribution, and retail. Or may simply distribute shares of its company to its employees.</li></ul> Advantages of Corporate Social Responsibility</strong></p> Having a socially responsible company is marketable and attractive to consumers and buyers.</li> Positive Publicity for positive behavior.</li> Companies are less likely to be singled out or face action from pressure groups or disgruntled consumers.</li> Products are seen as high quality from consumers, even if the product may be inferior from other means.</li> Retention of current employees is more likely if the company treats them well.</li> The brand of the company appears stronger and more attractive to consumers.</li>Regulation and Authoritative Bodies are less likely to take interest in controversial practices.</li></ul> Disadvantages of Corporate Social Responsibility</strong></p> There is a greater expense in the manufacture of products if they need to be replaced.</li> There is, therefore, an increase in cost and a decrease in contribution from products.</li>If there is a mistake or products are made without renewable sources, for example, they may need to recall some of their products to ensure consistent quality and credibility in their own CSR program.</li></ul> Companies that are more socially responsible are most likely going to benefit from it, however, if the cost of doing so takes a big hit on productivity</a>, then it may be difficult to convince shareholders.</p> </figure></div> Branding and Promotion in Business Unknown — Sun, 11 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Branding and Promotion allows a business to present itself in an identifiable way to the consumer that allows them to leave a slight lasting impression of their existence that should aide repeat purchase or identification of their qualities.</p> Types of Business Promotion</h3> Advertising</strong> - The most common way of increasing brand coverage is through advertising, because of the potential reach and scale of platforms advertising is available on it is very easy to meet the metric a business desires</a>, this also has become more easy to segment further by having online advertising to deliver ads on a uniquely measurable and quantifiable scale, whereas before the amount of impressions and effectiveness of the adverts was not individually classifiable in the real world, using online advertising changes the game as advertisers are able to segment the market down to the age, location and interest.</li> Promotions</strong> - Offering promotions allow a business to make itself more noticeable to the consumer as they will see the promotion as a deal, and then associate the product and brand. Promotion may also increase brand awareness by sponsoring a stadium or event, that allows them to receive some of the publicity that the stadium has with it.</li> Direct Marketing</strong> - Marketing to the customer directly through more orthodox methods, such as telemarketing or shopping channels, typically requires a lot of sales cost and sometimes isn't always effective expenditure, whereas advertising or promotion is more effective at reaching consumers as they are able to form their own opinions, rather than have one forced upon them.</li> </ul> Benefits of Strong Branding</h3> Having a strong brand enables a business to sell to their consumers consistently as consumers will actively recognize and seek out their brand. A strong brand is identifiable, recognizable, aspirational and flexible. Having a strong brand should enable a business to sell its added value effectively to customers, provide the brand with the ability to charge for the brand at a premium rate</a> and have a reduced price elasticity of demand; enabling them to sell to customers even though there are competitors.</p> Building a Strong Brand</h3> Building a strong brand can be hard to get right. Having a Unique Selling Point allows the customer to differentiate their brand from the others, having something other than a generic product allows the business to market on that principal and build their brand on its effectiveness to the consumer.</li> Using Advertising should increase coverage of their brand and make it recognizable to potential customers.</li> Sponsorship enables businesses to build a positive relationship with their customers, sponsoring a racing event, for example, presents a positive relationship for customers who watch the race, and need one of the sponsor's products.</li> Social Media and Online presence allow a business to be seen from the internet. Viral Marketing and Guerrilla Marketing allow a business to sell its products, often without the need for expensive advertising budgets. However, this tactic can often be hit and miss.</li> Emotional Marketing can be used to target the emotions of a customer, by playing on the nostalgic or romantic side of individuals for example.</li> </ul> </li> Seasonal Marketing can be used to reach customers during festivities and events.</li> </ul> The Design Mix Unknown — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 The Design Mix consists of three components, often arranged in a triangle,</p> Aesthetics</strong> - How the product looks.</li> Function</strong> - How the product performs its task.</li> Economic Manufacture</strong> (Cost to Produce) - How much it costs to produce the product.</li> </ul> Examples of paradigms the Design Mix</strong>, Aesthetics</h3> Maintaining a good product image that will appeal to customers is only one small portion of aesthetics, one must also consider consistency and differentiation. A product may be very aesthetic but may have shortfalls when it is used or may have a much lower profit margin than other products of lesser quality. A product like a smartphone that is top of the line may look and feel better than its competitors, however if it has a small processor that cannot perform tasks to the same standard as other phones on the market, it may be left behind when other competition sacrifices some of their aesthetics for performance, such as a camera bump or metal case for use as an antenna for better reception. Typically when a product is made, Aesthetics are one of the first considerations, whilst also factoring in cost. Function</h3> An Ink-jet printer is much less functional than a modern day laser printer, however for most people, all they require is at most a few family photos, therefore a cheap, and a possibly unreliable printer would be more preferable than an expensive laser printer. Additionally, most people would much prefer a non-consumable product over one that requires a refill or maintenance if the products are functionally similar, with the exceptions being things like coffee machines, where it is much quicker to have it made from a capsule.</p> Therefore the functionality of a product and its associated cost must also be considered.</p> Economic Manufacture</h3> A company that wishes to sell its products must do so at a profit, selling highly functional products with aesthetic appeal may move a lot of orders, but if the business does not cover its break-even cost it may struggle to expand. Design Mix Triangle</h2> A Design Mix Triangle can be used to show the struggles between the relationship of each corner, a product may be functional and aesthetic, but not economical to manufacture. Changes in Response to Social Change</h3> Concern over limited global resources</li> Reducing Waste</li> Reusing Materials</li> Recycling</li> Reducing Consumables</li> Ethical Sourcing and Management</li> Fair Trade</li> </ul> Factors Influencing Supply Unknown — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 A Demand and Supply Graph</h4> Factors Influencing Supply</h2> This article serves to supplement the article Influences for Supply and Demand</a>, that I wrote a while ago. For a more general overview of supply and demand, I suggest visiting there first. Supply has many factors that influence a market, such as;-</p> The availability of raw materials.</li> The time it takes to process a set, batch or quantity of stock, like aged wine or hard sweets.</li> Disruptions to the distribution chain of competitors, such that their prices or other aspects change.</li> Natural Disasters utility supply issues or storage issues.</li> Advertising could increase consumer interest or make the product more noticeable to customers or potential customers and cause a shortage due to unforeseen interest or popularity.</li> Branding or PR could be used more prominently or advertised to cause similar consequence.</li> New Machinery or Technology could make the production of items much less time consuming or much cheaper such as new methods of batch processing.</li> A monopoly may artificially limit the availability or raise the price or perform anti-competitively.</li> Automation could speed up production and therefore increase availability.</li> Government Subsidy or Tariffs could increase or decrease supply in a domestic market. A subsidy devised to increase sales in a companies domestic market could raise consumer interest.</li> A company may be forced to maintain a domestic market orientation as shipping externally may not be competitive due to tariffs.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> The overall effectiveness of a product is readily available to be supplied by manufacturers depends on consumer interest, the availability of raw materials and the lead time it takes to produce a product. Agricultural products may be much harder to maintain during droughts or other natural disasters as they take the time to grow naturally and no amount of investment can speed up the process much more than what people are willing to pay for.</p> Preventing Misuse of Data Between Tenants and Landlords Unknown — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 All companies must abide by the data protection act, and as such have strict rules to follow to ensure that they do not leak sensitive client or otherwise information which could be deemed insecure or negligent.</p> For my example, we will use a property lettings company to illustrate where policy may be implemented. External Policy Implications (Data Protection Act)</h3> A company that lets, sells and rents houses will have many types of information that they will keep in their database, for example; Their landlord customers data</h4> Personal Details (Name, Bank details).</li> Address of the property they live at.</li> Address of the property they are selling or letting.</li> Contact details of for maintenance contractors.</li> Letting Agreement.</li> Tenancy Agreement and permissions.</li> </ul> Their lettings customers data</h4> Customer details (Name, Bank details).</li> Address of the property.</li> Conditions of their contract.</li> How long they have lived at the property.</li> </ul> These are just two sets of multiple tables a letting company may keep about agreements between tenants and landlords. The data protection should first prevent the following; Information about the landlord being given to the tenant without the landlord's permission, if the landlord has requested that, for example, their address is not shared with tenants.</li> Tenants accessing the database to view other tenant information.</li> The public accessing the database.</li> The public being able to change the database.</li> The data is not kept for longer than needed.</li> The data is not backed up.</li> Proper access control restricts access to the information.</li> Data is not shared with other parties. (see Internal Policy Implications for exceptions)</li> The data is obtained lawfully. Stealing or asking for information about a customer's data should not be tolerated without their consent.</li> </ul> These are just a few examples of the principles of the data protection act</a> that prevent the data being used unlawfully. In addition it should also not be the responsibility of the landlord to hold information that relates to the property lettings company, This falls under keeping data secure</em> as it could be argued that data that is not held by the company but is crucial to the agreement is the responsibility of the letting company, as if there was to be a dispute between the tenant and the landlord, it would be hard to retain the information if the landlord has the only copy.</p> Additionally, data that is old or outdated should be deleted or updated, if a lettings company was to retain information of past customers, if they were to face a breach, they could worsen the damage if the data leaked was harmful to a past customer.</p> Internal Policy Implications</h3> In addition to the data protection act preventing the direct breach of client data, the computer misuse act should prevent the unauthorised access to systems that are publicly available as it is necessary that the property lettings company take the necessary precautions to ensure that the data is kept secure from anyone except those are permitted to see it through some form of access control. Landlords are however allowed to pass the names of clients on to third parties so long as it is to ensure that proper billing addresses and such are directed to the client accordingly.</p> It is not appropriate to provide a landlord with a tenant's references without first contacting the tenant that they (the lettings company) wish to do so.</p> Landlords cannot disclose to the public tenants who are in arrears as this is information about individuals, this can only be provided to tenants or anyone who is responsible legally for the tenant.</p> In general, landlords should make clear to tenants when they sign the tenancy when and how their information will be given out.</a> Information about a tenant should be considered very personal and in cases where the data is needed to be disclosed in an emergency, it should be given out only with proper consideration for the law.</p> Assessing Company Value Unknown — Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 When individuals are interested in purchasing, investing or working with a company it may also be a good idea to assess it's financial status, using public information available through government sources, two documents can allow proper assessment. A statement of comprehensive income and a statement of financial position.</p> </h3> Statement of comprehensive income</h3> A statement of comprehensive income is a usually detailed report listing the inflows and outflows of capital of a business. They often include exceptional expenses and net profit for a business and subsequently can be difficult to follow but should provide a good understanding on how a business functions through the financial year. Statement of financial position</h3> A statement of financial position outlines the inventories, assets and equity a business has at the end of a year or season. It may also help to identify where most of a businesses cash is being spent or held in assets. What are the benefits of these documents?</h3> A statement of comprehensive income will help to identify the basic operations of a business, for example the yearly turnover. A company that makes more turnover than another, however may not be financially better or worse however as it can depend on how the money is used, fortunately there are many equations that can help us to define a standard for these figures that we can use to compare between businesses or yearly statistics. Gross Profits</h4> Gross profits allow us to determine how much profit a company makes after selling it's products, this is already better than revenue as it shows that a company may be making a lot of revenue, but may be spending it all on sales. It is usually defined in the statement of comprehensive income</em>. Gross profit is Sales Revenue - Cost of Sales</strong></em>.</p> This figure is useful, but can be more effective when coupled with a percentage, as it is would allow us to compare for example previous years income, as below, it is for this reason we use the Gross Profit Margin</strong> to calculate a percentage.</p> Gross Profit Margin is (Sales Revenue - Cost of Sales) ÷ Sales Revenue</strong></em>. Higher is better.</p> Business</th> Gross Profit</th> Gross Profit Margin</th> </tr> </thead> XYZ Telecoms</td> $470,000</td> 51.32%</td> </tr> AB Telecom</td> $460,000</td> 79.92%</td> </tr> AT TEL</td> $430,000</td> 30.10%</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> As you can see from above the company XYZ Telecoms</em> makes more money than AB Telecom</em> however it is much more inefficient in it's spending and therefore could reduce the cost of it's sales to get higher returns. Note that although AB Telecom</em> makes a higher Gross Profit Margin it does not</strong> make more money. Here is a breakdown of another Telecom company Telecomatic</em> and they spend roughly 40% of their Revenue on sales, and therefore have a gross profit margin of 60%. In other words, if 40% is spent on sales, the company keeps the other 60% barring any other costs, like fixed costs. Revenue</th> Cost of Sales</th> Gross Profit</th> Gross Profit Margin</th> </tr> </thead> $100,000</td> $40,000</td> $60,000</td> 60%</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Using gross profit and the gross profit margin is advantageous because it; Enables you to calculate if spending on sales is too great.</li> Identify which company is better at sales spending.</li> Enables to identify if year on year a businesses spending on sales has been successful or not.</li> If there are two company chains, in two different locations with similar sales revenue, if they were to use different methods of advertising the sales profit margin would allow you to determine the best method based on the higher percentage.</li> </ul> However it does not; Account for exceptional items or income.</li> Account for Fixed costs, such as machinery rent or leasing.</li> </ul> Operating Profits</h4> Operating Profits are the next step of a businesses true income, operating profit accounts for overheads (expenses) that a business has to pay in order to function, expenses like factory ownership or employee pay and should easily be very close to a businesses true profit for the year if the business is new or homogeneous in nature. Operating profits however do not account for or should not account for; Exceptional expenses, like purchasing new facilities or machinery.</li> Assets a business may hold of value.</li> Creditors.</li> Financial income or company dividend.</li> </ul> Operating Profit is calculated by Gross Profit - Overheads</strong></em>. Operating Profit Margin is calculated by (Operating Profit) ÷ Sales Revenue</strong></em>. Yell Tell</th> This year</th> </tr> </thead> Sales Revenue</td> $848,100</td> </tr> Sales Expenditure</td> $298,100</td> </tr> Gross Profit</td> $550,000</td> </tr> Gross Profit Margin</td> 54.20%</td> </tr> Expenses</td> $130,000</td> </tr> Operating Profit</td> $420,000</td> </tr> Operating Profit Margin</td> 28.30%</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Net Profit Margin</h4> Lastly, for the comprehensive income sheet, the Net Profit Margin will show the overall effectiveness of the businesses expenditure. And represents how much raw profit a company makes based off its revenue, to put this into perspective its how much money is profit when multiplied by the turnover, so if a company's net profit margin is 17%, and they turnover $1m a year, the company will have $170,000 unconditional capital left over at the end of the year barring complications. The Net Profit Margin is calculated by Profit for the year ÷ Sales Revenue</strong></em>.</p> Critical Path Analysis Unknown — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Critical Path Analysis has ties with corporate strategy and human resources. It enables a business to gain a competitive advantage by effectively planning their time to pursue a goal. This can be especially important when they are trying to be first to market or when the process requires a lot of routine steps. It is also relevant in the computing sector and neural networks.</p> Detailing the steps involved can help to create a better picture of the complexity of a project. To do this, Critical Path Analysis Diagrams are used to break down the project into stages. Each stage is made up of nodes, and each node is made of three numbers, the nodes are the circles in the image above (there are two) and have a path between them, Each path has the project that will be completed on the top and the time on the bottom.</p> Each node has a number on the left half, the earliest start time on the top and the latest finishing time on the bottom.</strong> Some diagrams also denote the direction of the path, however, it usually starts on the left, and ends on the right.</p> Some Critical Path Analysis Diagrams can become complex and take a long time to complete, some stages may also require few or many steps to complete, it is for this reason that Critical Paths are also shown on a diagram.</p> In the diagram above, there are four nodes and therefore more work to be completed, however having a top and bottom section has so far proven redundant. It is only when there is an alternate path that these nodes become useful.</p> We can now see that having the latest finish time has meant that the project now cannot be finished until the ninth day as the task 'Air Transport' Requires a longer time period than the other tasks. This is why the fourth node now reads '9' on the latest finish time. Additionally, there is now dashes along the Critical Path</strong> as this task must be completed in order for the project to remain on time.</p> Critical Path Advantages</h4> Finding the critical path of a project allows a business too; Conduct better contingency planning as they can see clearly where projects have the potential to get held up in the process and aren't slowed down due to failures in the system.</li> Optimize</a> workflow</a> for employees as they will be able to better manage the time they need to complete a task, should a task have a long lead time, the task could be delayed without affecting the progress of the project, for example, a node having a quicker 'earliest start time' than other tasks.</li> Allows a job to be completed in the shortest amount of time possible.</li> It can help to reduce risk on projects that have complex time dependencies.</li> </ul> Critical Path Disadvantages</h4> However, it does not account for the likelihood of failure of a task where it was poorly planned from the beginning.</li> It does not account for the fact that a project may eventually have stages that need changing as time progresses or situations change.</li> It depends on the accuracy of the projects predicted time-scale.</li> It may not account for other factors like cost or trade-off.</li> Resources may not be as flexible in the long term as previously planned.</li> </ul> Calculating Probabilities Using The Confidence Interval Formula Unknown — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Confidence Intervals can be used to estimate the population mean from a sample mean and finding a confidence interval can be calculated by using this formula;</p> Symbol</td> Property</td> </tr> </td> Mean of the sample</td> </tr> </td> Standard score</td> </tr> </td> Standard deviation squared (variance)</td> </tr> </td> Number in sample</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> The Standard Score can be calculated by taking one away from the probability dividing by two and then adding the probability back to the answer and using the table to calculate. So for example, a probability of 95% would be, Of which is found by using percentage points of the normal distribution.</p> </a></p> Using a Confidence Interval of 95% would allow you to assume that you are 95% confident about your results and that there is supposedly a 5% area of doubt where the samples are uncertain, It is important to consider this factor when conducting a conclusive statement.</p> Why Establishing Proper IT Development is Important for the End User Unknown — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 When a project is at its initial planning stages, it is important that the communication between the customer and the IT system’s creator is maintained to ensure that the project is what the customer wants and needs, that the project meets the customer's requirements and at the same time a list of requirements is drawn up for the customer to confirm, In doing so it ensures that the customer and client have a consistent idea of what the project will do/how it will function. In doing so, errors are less likely to snowball and problems are identified before they are greater than an idea.</p> Having an open dialogue during development also allows the customer and IT member to have a good understanding of the requirements of the user and what the user is not interested in, this is especially important for systems where the customer will not be the main user for the system, otherwise problems that the customer did not identify may crop up at later stages, which could be costly and time consuming to rectify in non-common IT systems (unlike common IT systems</a>, where a fix may be easier).</p> Some projects are started and never completed because many projects do not have realistic deadlines, fail to identify the needs of both the customer and the user. fail to identify the needs of the client, are too expensive or are beyond the ability of the person or team making the project happen.</p> Why effective ICT teamwork is essential to the development of a successful project.</h3> Effective teamwork ensures that every IT member works to their strengths and that they all have a clear idea of what is expected of them and what they need to do next, what others are doing and what is the end result, this ensures that the project is consistent for the end user and customer and works effectively. Failing these crucial steps may mean that some aspects may need to be repeated, the project may not be completed on time or the overall effectiveness of the project is not as good as it could have been. Developing a project also requires following and leaving rigorous documentation for future development of a solution.</span> Factors that influence the success of an IT development go beyond catering for the end user.</h3> Two factors that are relatively important when developing a project are 'effective focus of individuals resources and skills' and 'e</span>ffective time scaling and delegation of tasks'.</span> Effective Focus of Individuals resources and skills ensures that a network manager is not programming the frontend of an application, although he may be able to ‘give a good go of it’ he or she will not be as good as the front-end developer, especially so if the developer has had consistent immersion with the topic.</span></p> Effective time scaling and Delegation of tasks ensures that complex problems are not given too little time to work them out, some problems may also require a long time to work out, so need ample time, additionally if a project, like designing a website takes too long. Then other tasks toward the end of a development may not be completed.</span></p> Failing to identify the needs of a client may mean that a project is incorrectly understood and could features are mis-implemented or do need meet one of the clients requirements. This could result in numerous users having to resort to time-intensive ways of working around this task or not using the solution. Additionally systems that are not implemented without proper documentation can delay fixing problems.</span>Some problems may also be that developers did not account for backing up the system, so when a project has a failed implementation or data is not backed up when upgrading a system, the data could be deleted due to poor redundancy steps.</span></p> The Cheap Raspberry Pi Security Camera Unknown — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is the community that works to create really great projects. I have setup a Raspberry Pi B looking out my windows. It faces the front door so can see anyone coming down the street and toward the door. I had a couple cheap $2 webcams lying around so I set them up looking out the windows. The total cost of the entire setup is about $10, minus the cost of the Pi itself, I also think that the Pi is a little underpowered for the task as occasionally the thing will stop working after several weeks, the camera still records the video, but the web-interface has to be reloaded in order to get the thing working again.</p> Overall, I'd say that this project was ineffective for its purpose because unfortunately, the cameras would not record movement accurately enough, and sometimes would record several hours of minimal movement. An IP camera would likely be more cost-effective and better suited for the task, the Pi I used was simply underpowered to monitor two webcams and crashed after about 2 weeks of working continuously. Viewing the files showed that although it captured movement and video, some were corrupt, glitch or only captured about 3 usable frames. It did, however, show a good live view of what was going on outside the house, with about a 4-second delay.</p> Overall I would say that a Raspberry Pi as a webcam security camera on the cheap is not a good idea, the main contributing factor being that it was not able to keep the program running and often would save garbage to the SD card. If I were to do this again I would not use two for definite as it simply did not work effectively enough to actually increase security, It would often record trees moving for hours and sometimes one camera would freeze up entirely.</p> Common ICT Systems in Industry Unknown — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Many Common ICT Systems have different functions, of which they have names. All businesses, schools and organisations will often require some computer system, even registration or time management. However often these systems are financially concerned and for that reason are often automated.</p> Legacy Systems</b></h2> Maintain the older applications for customers who still use them. They are maintained until they become depreciated and service systems that are older or out of date. It is likely that this system has been used for a long time and it would be impractical to upgrade without replacing it being expensive, disruptive or not worthwhile. Financial systems may keep their systems records for significantly longer amounts of time than other departments to monitor progress etc.</span> Back office systems</b></h2> Maintain the business itself. They are situated elsewhere from the front-facing aspects of a business and whose role it is to keep the business working effectively. A back-office system resides in a 'back office' and as such doesn't usually interact with any customers. The goal of back office systems like finance and IT is to service the other departments of the business and keep the business running effectively.</span> Day-to-day working systems</b></h2> A transaction processing system</b> A system that manages and maintains the records of transactions and payments, they crucially have to be up-to-date at any time. Often on large-scale systems, this can be difficult to keep accurate, so caching is used.</p> Document approval workflow</b></p> A Document approval workflow system ensures that a document is suitably acceptable to carry out a procedure by going through the necessary stages from person to person, the way that the workflow works to ensure that the document is compliant with any standards or higher-up individuals before the aim of the document is carried out.</span></p> Document management system </b></p> A Document Management System allows for the distribution and long-term archiving of documents that are to be held long term.</span></p> Management Information Systems</b></h2> A MIS allows a manager of a department to oversee and manage the use of a system without having to obtain the information manually, it collects and maintains the data from systems in order to allow the manager to perform a task, It also allows them to see side-by-side a comparison based on previous data for example.</span> Enterprise Resource Planning Systems</b></h2> Enterprise management tools allow businesses to effectively coordinate staff and assets to complete business projects and task to a deadline and manage day to day running of systems such as a Gantt chart. Often enterprise systems can encompass many business operations from stock management to re-ordering, transit, delivery, management and season planning. Some business locations may be run completely centrally where business operations of a franchise are handled entirely by the main offices.</span> Customer Relationship Management Systems</b></h2> Customer relationship management systems allow businesses to track the status of a customer and their relationship with the company, similar to a ticket system it allows them to identify when they need to contact a customer about an expiring contract or maintain effective communication between an employee and customer.</span> Decision Support Systems</b></h2> Decision support systems guide employees on how to handle a task based on set data that they have to evaluate to reach a conclusion, sometimes these solutions can be convolutional so a decision support system allows them to make the right choice.</span> E-commerce systems</b></h2> An e-commerce system allows them to track the online progress of an online sale and provide a front-end shop for customers to browse and a back end stock management and sometimes other facilities like AB testing.</span> Using Government to Control Multinational Corporations Unknown — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Multinational Corporations have a great influence on a lot of people, this is beneficial because it provides jobs and increases GDP, trade, and economy, however it does mean that businesses have a great deal of power, which when coupled with factors like political influence, pressure groups and the media can make a company very powerful, able to control potentially thousands of jobs and staff wages.</p> Common Pressure Influence</h3> Pressure groups, though not always an insider in government can have a great deal of credibility in preventing the control from multinational corporations. Pressure groups may also incorporate radical action and anti-corporation tactics, such as driving slow through London streets or protesting on a runway. However, Pressure Groups tend to focus on the ethical activities of organisations over preventing monopolies or unfair business practices, however, there are exceptions, the majority of this work is undertaken by unions.</p> Consumer action by boycotting products, spreading awareness on unethical factors or irresponsible activities can make a product less profitable or cause a business to re-think its stance on a particular product or practice, however, this form of activism can sometimes have no effect on the performance of a product due to its massive success or meager opposition.</p> Using Government to Control Multinational Corporations</h3> The Government is arguably the most important factor in controlling MNC's, from maintaining fair work arrangements, breaks, pay and holiday to preventing global price fixing and implementing transnational tariffs to protect local business and economy, the government to some companies could be seen as enemy number one. It is necessary to control MNC's to manage their growth and influence in a country. Similarly a multinational may move abroad to save money on things like manufacture, however, this is bad for local jobs, it may increase profitability for an MNC. For this reason, it is sometimes probable that a government may subsidise the company to prevent it moving abroad.</p> </figure></div> However some massive MNC companies have profits each year greater than entire country GDP's, this could be seen as a failure of the government to control its businesses. Finally, although MNCs need control they do provide massive benefits to a country in trade</a>, prosperity and GDP that make them worthwhile today.</p> Access Control in Daily IT Organisation Tasks Unknown — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 Many Businesses use IT to manage their accounts, documents and decision-making. It is, therefore important that Access Control be implemented in Organisations to prevent unwanted modification or prying eyes from being able to commit computer crimes, such as the ones outlined in the Computer Misuse Act. Using Access Control can prevent these people and operational staff from being able to modify information that otherwise is not their place to edit. Some common implementations of Access Control could be limiting the information available to a customer about Transaction Processing Systems or Management Information Systems not allowing Managers access to manufacturer prices.</p> Access Control in Strategic, Tactical and Operational Management</h2> In order to implement these features a common method of maintaining strict control is through a permissions model, where it is outlined to the computer what permissions a login has access to, such that they are able (like a file system) to edit, read or write a file or piece of information. Here are some common examples of Access Control; A Supermarket Employee is not able to alter the price of products.</li> A Manager is not able to create new users for a MIS (Management Information System).</li> A DSS (Decision Support System) is not able to commit to a higher level of privilege without presenting documentation proving that that decision is possible, a good example of this could be a bank requiring an account number to confirm that the account is active before allowing the employee to make changes or a support agent requiring a pin from a customer before being allowed to view the customers details.</li> </ul> The three levels of control is a common (but not de-facto) model for systems management, however often these levels of tasks can become obscured by other factors. These tasks can often be divided up among IT departments in formal organisations, such as 'Ops' and 'Licencing'. The use of Access Control can be used to coordinate effective ICT teamwork on large projects and in other departments</a>, such as accounting.</p> Management in the Scale of Organisations Unknown — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 The IT of an organisation can also </a>depend on the scale of its operations. Traditionally licences for software are based on the number of staff using the systems, even small organisations can have 50 (or more) staff members and still be classed as a small organisation. Generally, smaller organisations will have an informal structure and confined to a single site. Whereas Medium organisations may have a more formal procedure which adopts policies and organisational structure to ensure that systems are maintained and compliance is met where necessary. A large scale organisation may have IT as one of the core responsibilities of the organisation as it is likely that some locations may be off site or long distance where remote access is vital. They may also rely heavily on WANs and expanded LANs to ensure that their systems are accessible across the sites available.</p> Management Styles</h3> Because large and medium size organisations need a leader or manager, they may adopt one of four management styles, the use of these management styles allows the business to maintain contact with its employees. Autocratic</strong>, where a clear authority is established and decisions are only to be made by strategic or tactical individuals, operational staff may have relatively little power compared to the other management styles however, it may mean that staff may not feel demotivated if something goes wrong because they are not as involved in the organisation compared to the other leadership styles.</li> Democratic</strong>, is where management is taken by 'vote' of opinion and is useful when undertaking projects and allows people with specialisms such as networking and database design to cast their opinions and thoughts on a project.</li> Laissez-faire</strong>, is where management takes a smaller role and workers are expected to perform as they are needed and let their own ideas and creativity work to the task they are needed for, this should produce more individual work and is not always ideal for companies that do not require more than simple repetitive tasks.</li> Paternalistic</strong>, is where management will use a paternal view of management and only get involved when needed or when feedback is requested, this has the added advantage of giving the workers both freedom and encouragement, but when help is needed they aren't far away. Additionally, this gives management the ability to delegate tasks and establish authority without appearing autocratic.</li> </ul> The management of an organisation can greatly depend on the scale and urgency of the work involved in managing IT. Organisations that also have to follow a lot of compliance, such as government offices must also maintain those constraints effectively.</p> Ansoff’s Matrix in the Development of Corporate Strategy Unknown — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 What is the Ansoff Matrix?</h4> The Ansoff Matrix, developed by Igor Ansoff is a planning tool that can is used to help a business to determine what strategy the business uses by using the quadrants to determine how best to grow organically. 'Existing' categories often carry lesser risk than the 'New' categories as they will likely require greater capital investment for example.</p> </p> Market Penetration</h4> Market Penetration is the least risky option in most cases because it most likely does not require much more than the other categories, This can be used when a business would like to expand whilst minimising the risk involved. The aim is to target existing customers and sell more existing products through things like promotion and marketing. If the product is successful then the business may sell more products to existing markets by opening new stores, an online shop or making their appearance more apparent by opening more outlets in an area. Using this method business can better calculate what their customers want based on past sales data from other locations within the market.</p> Product Development</h4> Product Development is much more resource intensive as it will require innovation and the cost in terms or research and development associated with it will be much greater. However, it will most likely mean that the business has the first-mover advantage and can market its products to existing markets. This, however, could have its downfall as there is most likely greater loss if it does not work out, this can also be problematic as it is sometimes the strategy that failing business model companies undertake. It also may become exhaustive if products are not innovative </a>enough to maintain customer numbers.</p> Market Development</h4> Market Development is where a business changes its market strategy to bring its existing products to new markets, this could be through opening new stores abroad or far away from its domestic market. This could also be through e-commerce, by changing pricing, by changing quality or even changing its brand to localise the products it sells in an area or country.</p> Diversification</h4> A business may diversify its products or brand in order to open up to new markets and new products, this may be organically by opening a new type of store or buying out another, Or changing its entire product range, an example of this would be new 'vape' shops opening as they respond to the death of the cigarette market as smoking becomes a social taboo.</p> Information Needs in Organisations Unknown — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 The Needs of An Organisation</h3> Most organisations have similar information needs, such as retaining a stock quantity, a short description of the product etc. Therefore many organisations can utilise off the shelf systems, examples of these systems could include; Supermarket Checkout Software,</li> Timekeeping and check in software for managing staff hours,</li> Task Management.</li> Communication Software.</li> </ul> A lot of businesses; for example in the telecommunications industry, will most likely use Asterisk for managing and delegating calls to staff around the organisation.</div> </div> Similarly, any company that has a website will most likely have Apache or Nginx to host their website, these are very limited examples but should give you an example of the variety of software available to organisations.</div> The reasons that companies use these particular systems may vary however, they are relatively low maintenance compared to systems that they would have to develop themselves. Additionally, the cost of these systems can be significantly less as some software can be rented or managed through Saas (Software as a service) systems.</div> The Variety of Systems Available</h3> Organisations also have different informational needs from sector to sector, for example...</div> A Car Manufacturer's part list.</li> A Bank's Customer Database.</li> A Wholesalers Stock Quantity.</li> </ul> These businesses rely on completely different information about their systems. Their goals and objectives as businesses vary. The Scale of Organisations</h3> Additionally, because systems are so different... when a company undergoes a merger, it may be very disruptive to merge systems, especially ones that are updated very quickly, an example of this could be the askMID database, this system monitors the Insurance status of vehicles on the road in the UK, they claim to have over 10,000 edits an hour, therefore if they needed to merge their database, it would be important that the data was continually updated. It is also likely that the variety of the data available makes spotting mistakes harder to identify, so having a way of logging changes would be vital. We now run Let's Encrypt for our SSL. Unknown — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Hello,</h2> Previously, we used SmartCom's SSL certificates</a>, however now we have moved to Let's Encrypt. I did this for a number of reasons; Ease of use. Previously I would have to update the sites SSL certificates automatically. Hopefully now, through the use of certbot, I should no longer have to do that, if it works.</em></li> The certificates are installed automatically. Unlike Smartcom, this is laborious and takes a long time as I have to do it so often.</li> </ul> Now that the task is automated, I hopefully should not have to do it anymore, which was Let's Encrypt's intention. In addition to being easy to do, they also have a lot of support and community forums that make it much easier to get things done, previously, I had no experience installing SSL certificates on Apache and the process took me a good few days to understand, having the process not only automated but also easy to follow, made it much easier to do. It also allowed me to check my certificates on SSLlabs and still receive an A. Their emphasis on being free, open and automated made them the ideal choice for me and I will be porting all of my applications to this authority. As with this website, keeping it up is my top priority, keeping it active... not so much. I am also working on ChatBox, so I will have an update as and when I have finished working on that for this year, I am very happy with the progress this summer holiday has allowed me to take up and I have decided that soon I will be refreshing all of my server instances to give them a fresh start, so there will likely be an update on that too.</p> Thanks, Let's Encrypt! You Rock.</p> If you read this and would like more updates on the status of the website, be sure to comment.</em></p> Influences for Supply and Demand Unknown — Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Businesses work on a complex demand and supply based method of producing products and services.</p> Supply is the quantity of a good or service that a producer is offering to supply into the market</li> Demand is the quantity that the customers are willing to buy at a given price over a given period of time</li> External factors, such as income or environmental or ethical change may mean that a product is no longer viable, smoking for example is no longer as profitable as it was as people no longer smoke as much as they used to. Influences may be out of the businesses control.</li> </ul> You may notice demand is present in the what influences the demand section, while it would not be a good idea to present it in an exam, I thought it worth including at the bottom as it technically does effect demand, as people may buy a product to own one before everyone else. Promotion is also a very broad term, this also encompasses things like fasion events, tastes and Economy also includes factors such as income.</p> Supply and Demand Competition</h2> Supply of a product can generally be negated, as long as there is demand there will usually be a supply. Some mass markets, such as commodity items are often very unchanging and can have extremely thin margins to drive out competitors, this is known as a price war and can sometimes be more destructive to business profits than good as the product becomes devalued by the low price and people become unwilling to pay for the prices needed to pay for the product, however, this can sometimes improve the rate of the moving average as it forces businesses to increase their prices, usually at the same time to a higher-than-original value.That is one example of a price strategy (price war). If there is no demand for a product, then there most likely will be no supply, as producers are not interested in creating a product that will not sell.</p> A Supply and Demand graph shows the relationship between the two, the graph can be altered by shifting either to the left or right, depending on whether you want to increase or decrease either, just remember that,</p> Left is less...</blockquote> So by shifting either to the left, you are decreasing them. A handy tool for showing equilibrium. Business Pricing Strategys Unknown — Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 When businesses want to compete with competitors, they may use one of numerous methods in order to encourage the sale of their products.</p> Psychological Pricing</h2> Psychological Pricing involves selling products and services at prices that people wrongly assume they are cheaper than they are, an example would be selling a product for £1.99, the aim is that the potential customer would often round down, and assume that the price of the product was £1, rather the fact that it is much closer to £2. Highly effective for large purchases, such as holidays, as the rounding amount is much larger.</li> A study by Marketing Bulletin showed that over 60% of prices in advertising materials ended in a 9.</li> A further study also concluded that a lot of customers base what price the product is worth on the left digit, so would assume a product is less than it actually is.</li> When a set of prices are listed, it is often displayed with the higest price first, this is because it sets the perceived value of the rest of the products, and lower priced products are therefore considered higher value.</li> </ul> Some customers may not fall for the pricing strategy and could result in lost revenue as the business could have charged for the full perceived amount, and the impact of physiological pricing other than sales data is hard to quantify (not that sales data isn't a good metric, however because the theory is mostly psychological the business cannot reliability take estimates) Penetration Pricing</h2> Penetration Pricing involves selling a product for a low price at the start of its product life cycle, the aim of this is to improve sales as customers will take advantage of the low price, after the customers have repeat purchased and familiarised with the product and brand, the business will start to raise the price of the product, the aim of this being that the new customers will continue to buy the new high price product. This allows a product to gain market share quickly.</li> This allows customers to become familiar with a product and brand.</li> </ul> Some Customers however may not be willing to pay the higher prices. Price Wars</h2> Some businesses will compete to get the lowest price, and thus engage in price wars, this is beneficial to the consumer as it means that they always get the lowest price however businesses find that they may overall loose revenue. This means that the consumer will have a lower price to pay, however they may find that businesses may start to not stock products that are too competitive as they simply cannot compete.</li> Competition may become reduces which may be damaging in the long run.</li> </ul> Price Skimming</h2> Price skimming involves setting a high price to maximise profits of a particular product, this is most common in technology markets where the demand for products can be extremely lucrative. Price skimming only works on new product releases</li> Price skimming can work effectively where early adopters are excited to own the product.</li> </ul> Loss Leaders</h2> A loss leader is someone who sells below the normal price point in order to bring in customers for another motive, such as them browsing other parts of the store or to drive out competition. Market Research Unknown — Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 When conducting market research businesses need to take risks and may be uncertain on the performance of those risks, however market research allows businesses to minimize the risk.</p> Market research in a dynamic market can be difficult as it can be hard to gauge what is an acceptable metric and one that will not change or become inaccurate. Businesses invest thousands in trying to calculate what the next big trend will be and even more in advertising.</p> Selling Products is the ultimate goal for market research, however it may allow a business to better define its product for market</li> Dynamic markets can provide access points for rapidly growing start-ups</li> Markets can be dominated by Oligopolies, Monopolies or have low demand, which can mean that a business will struggle to set-up there</li> Market research could be very expensive for a business and it has many pitfalls and benefits</li> </ul> There are a number of techniques that businesses can use to identify if they should set-up a business. Competitor Analysis, anything that allows a business to know what the otherbusiness competing are up to is competitior analysis.</li> Crime Levels, Crime can ruin a business so it is important that a business is in a safe loaction, a jewlers in a poor area won't do very well.</li> Average Wage, wages could contribute to the staffing levels available for the businesses.</li> Footfall, people who walk past the business.</li> Client Need, Some business may setup new premisises as a client has created a demand.</li> Overhead, a rented building with too high overhead may not be viable as a solution.</li> Start-up Cost, some businesses cannot create a start-up without initial funding, especially if their project has great risk.</li> Population/Target Market, local area business may not be able to set-up a business because the demand is so low.</li> Public Opinion, some people may not like the idea of a business setting up in a particular area.</li> Local Economy, the local area may not be affluent enough.</li> Building Space, some business premises may not be large enough.</li> </ul> Some Market Research Techniques</h2> Businesses can use multiple techniques to find out these aspects, such as: Internet</li> Survey</li> Observation</li> Landlord Conversation</li> Questionnaire</li> </ul> Market research does have limitations,</p> You cannot constantly keep asking the same customers</li> You cannot ask some questions</li> Data could be inaccurate</li> It is expensive</li> It is not always your own data</li> It product idea could be stolen</li> The market could be fast changing</li> There could be leading questions or biased interviews when asking individuals</li> </ul> Stock Control and Resource Management Unknown — Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Just In Time is a lean production technique, It involves ordering a product right as it is about to run out, but before the business has to stop manufacture, this allows a business to work effectively when creating a product that requires a lot of parts and accessories.</p> </figure></div> Raw Materials</td> Work in Progress</td> Finished Goods</td></tr> Bought from suppliers</p> Supplier may not be able to meet demand</p> Supplier could not raise prices</p> Used in assembly or as ingredients</p> Parts for assembly</p> </td> Not Sellable</p> Costs business money to make into product</p> May be a slow process</p> Wine</p> May cost staff hours if long time delays i.e. building houses</p> </td> Needs moving for social events</p> Christmas Gifts</p> </td></tr></tbody></table> This table shows the disadvantages of holding stock at different levels of the stock control process.</p> Why hold stock?</h2> Fundamentally holding stock allows production to take place</li> To satisfy customer demand</li> As a precaution against delays from suppliers</li> It allows efficient production</li> It allows for seasonal changes</li> It provides buffer between production process</li></ul> Main influences on Stock</h2> The need to satisfy demand such as demand influxes or lower commodity prices.The a need to manage working capital, stock control for example could mean a product is depleted without being replaced.Risk of losing value, such as the stock market price. Food and vegetables such as flowers may also decrease in value over time.</li></ul> Low stock levels</h3> Lower stock holding posts.</li> Lower risk of obsolescence.</li> Less capital tied up in stock. So the business is more liquid.</li> Consistent with operating on lean production.</li></ul> High stock levels</h3> Production is always fully supplied so there are never any delays as the product never runs out.</li> Potential for lower costs by ordering in larger quantities.</li> The business is better able to handle unexpected changes in demand or the need for higher output as they will have the stocks available.</li></ul> The Bank of England Unknown — Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 The Bank of England sets the base interest rates that the rest of the UK banks will follow, doing so allows them to control the UK inflation rate, which therefore allows them to dictate how much spending and saving occurs.</p> A high Interest rate, will mean that savers will prosper as their savings will mature and eventually have more than what they started with.</li> A low interest will mean that individuals are more likely to spend and therefore the economy will improve as the pound will strengthen against other currencies.</li> </ul> Businesses are more likely to buy large quantities during low interest times as the products will be cheaper, this also means that they can save on storage costs as the loan repayments will also come with less interest rates, proving a better investment than ones bought during a boom. Above is a large graph that shows an example of an exchange rate, as you can see a Recession,Bust and Recovery are marked on the graph, during that time several stages will occur that aim to bring the economy back into normality, or a strong pound.</p> On the second period the beginning of the Recession</strong> occurs, at this time businesses will start to notice a drop in profits, and consumers will notice an increase in prices, this is where the UK has entered a recession, additionally unemployment will likely increase as businesses have to recover costs and plan for a rough time ahead. To try to aviod this, the Bank of England will lower the interest rate to try to improve spending.</p> During the Bust</strong> Period, Businesses that are luxury, high value and extravagant expenses will do poorly as potential customers are spending the money they have , business costs on warehouses and factorys however will decrease as the loan repayment percentage return is reduced. The Bank of England will keep the exchange rate low so that customers spend their money to boost the economy.</p> Then, the UK economy should improve and businesses will start to see more money flowing threough the tills, this is probably because The Bank of England has started to raise interest rates. This is beneficial for the savers, as their money will go further than before, having a higher interest rate, and the spenders who owe loans will see that the repayments for their loans will increase again. This is called a Recovery </strong>or Boom</strong>.</p> What actually is Marketing? Unknown — Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Marketing is Anticipating, and satisfying, customers wants and needs, efficiency and profitability, Marketing includes</p> Market Research</li> The Marketing Mix</li> </ul> What is the purpose of Marketing?</h2> To make profit, essentially by improving sales</li> To remind the customer of your product through promotion</li> To see what the customer wants by offering their product</li> To link the product to the brand and create a brand association</li> To communicate and offer competition to other businesses (to compete)</li> </ul> There are two types of business orientations, Business to Business</strong> where businesses sell products to other businesses, such as tools, office equipment and building supplies. Business to Customer</strong> is more noticeable to individuals as it is more prominent and most common. Marketing begins by setting a goal or objective that defines what the company wants to achieve, and when it hopes to reach these goals.</p> They then create a marketing strategy, to outline how they will bring in what they wanted to reach their objective.</p> What defines a Market?</h2> A market is anywhere that brings together buyers and sellers with a view of exchanging goods and services. The location can be physical, national global, physical or electronic</a>. A niche market is a small or select group of a larger market. Niche markets generally have a smaller cohort of customers interested in the product, however some businesses sell their products at a high price to compensate for lost sales.</p> Market size is the total volume or value of all sales of a particular group of products. Market growth is the percentage change in market size over a period of time. Market share is the percentage of the market achieved by one firm, or brand, or product.</p> Markets can be dynamic, which means they change quickly or stable, where any change is fairly small. Dynamic markets are becoming more and more common as technology advances to new greats, incorporating new techniques mean a business can become obsolete.</p> How Customers Associate Quality with a Brand Unknown — Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Within any business there are multiple factors that a customer can imprint on to recognise a brand and associate with quality. Businesses can use the customers intuition to their advantage, targeting on the key aspects of a quality product in order to maximise return. Here is a list of the common points a business can tailor in order to maximise their revenue;</p> Profitability</strong>, Businesses must decide how much profit each product or service should undertake, whether it be a large return or a small one. Customers may be willing to buy a product purely on its premium price point.</li> Customer</strong> Service</strong>, Businesses may wish to place the quality of their product on par with the quality of its customer service. Poor customer service could reflect badly on a quality product and vice versa.</li> Competitiveness</strong>, Businesses may wish to use pricing in order to undercut the cost of its competitors. Businesses may also want to take on new locations and footfall in order to maximise profitability.</li> Supply</strong> Chain</strong>, Business may cut costs and use cheaper suppliers, however unethical or environmental considerations could be overlooked and come back to haunt businesses later.</li> Reliability</strong>, A product that is unreliable or prone to failure may mean that customers look elsewhere for new products, defined obsolescence could damage the perceived quality of the product as well, If it were to fail after a certain time because of a weak part, customers may feel frustrated having to buy new ones.</li> Brand</strong> Image</strong>, For some customers a brand could be vital to what product they purchase, If a brand is damaged, it could affect the sales of businesses massively. Some businesses may also struggle to maintain a positive reputation if the business specialises in cheap services, such as transport or hotels and may not be too affected by bad publicity as the cheap price point means the demand for the product does not change (it is inelastic).</li> Quality</strong> Control</strong> could also mean that products are of a constant high quality and should in tern allow a business to work effectively on producing high quality products for the consumer, who will hopefully repeat purchase. Kaizen and Total Quality Management can allow a business to excel at creating a quality product that is lean and high quality as it forces the product to be a standard that the business expects and what the customer wants.</li> Brand Awareness</strong>, A customer who does not know a product exist may not buy it, additionally any customer who recognises a product may choose to buy it over a generic product because of it. Advertising and promotion can artificially create the connection between the customer and the brand of trust and safety in a product, that this is the product they should buy.</li> </ul> Capacity Utilisation Unknown — Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Capacity utilisation within a business can be easy or hard to calculate, for a printing shop, it is easy to calculate how many sheets they can produce per hour for example and in a metal fabricators, it is easy to calculate how many sheets of metal they can produce per hour, however for a company that has varied demand, it can be very hard to predict how much the business should utilise its capacity, a clearly noticeable example would be an understaffed restaurant, although they have staff working the shift, it is clear that they did not account for the demand that the customers require.</p> Capacity Utilisation = Actual level of output / Maximum possible output x 100</code></p> Productivity = Total output / Number of workers</code></p> Capacity utilisation should never be at 100%, as this could mean that if something were to fail, the business may not be able to fulfil the orders, Companies may choose to ask multiple 'what if?' questions that may indicate if the business may want to reconsider its utilisation levels. What if the employment rate fell?</li> What if workers were too highly skilled?</li> What if forecasts are not conservative?</li> What if costs increased?</li> What if minimum wage increased further?</li> </ul> The Impact on EU Trade Imports and Exports vs Capacity Utilisation</h2> For UK Businesses, there is a handy acronym when working with exchange rates, SPICED</strong>. ' strong pound imports cheap, exports dear '. This applies to any companies in the UK who may wish to export or import goods from elsewhere. If the UK were to leave the EU, the cost of imports/exports could be greater/lesser depending on the trade deals we could secure with countries.</p> Specialised workers would find it harder to move freely into the UK.</li> Tariffs are not imposed in the EU, tariffs could cost businesses money, however it could be argued that they increase competition.</li> The Common Market could potentially be lost.</li> The work ethic of some foreign national employees could change.</li> </ul> These factors could all affect the overall capacity utilisation of UK companies. Advantages and Disadvantages of Capital and Labour Intensive Production Unknown — Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 In Business, production generally has two techniques;</p> Labour Intensive Production</strong> aims to use a large workforce to complete work by hand, this usually employs a lot of people to create a product. Some products may be seen to have more value if they were manufactured by hand.</li> Capital Intensive Production</strong> aims to create a product using as little people as possible, the process could be entirely or partially automated and can sometimes be used to assist individuals in manufacture, such as a custom robotic factory worker that moves parts of a product to assembly, or a robot that screws in multiple screws at once. The aim of these tools is to make the job simple or quicker than manual labour, in order to product multiple product in a given time. Production machinery may be very expensive, but aims to be cheaper than labour intensive production in the long run.</li> </ul> Labour Intensive Production</h2> Labour costs are higher than capital intensive production, however they can vary. If the task is simple then automation may not be necessary. Labour Intensive production will generally have lower running cost than capital intensive production, as workers will perform most of the tasks. Firms can benifit from access to low-cost labour as the job will likely be low skilled.</p> Businesses can benefit from premium pricing for 'hand crafted' goods.</li> There is generally better quality if it is not a fast process.</li> Labour costs can be lower if businesses hire on temporary contracts. Individuals will not need to operate specialised machinery.</li> Some businesses can use a flexible workforce to make sure that locations are staffed efficiently.</li> Labour Intensive production allows for improvement easily compared to capital intensive production.</li> Observation is easier.</li> Lower Break-even output</a>.</li> Labour intensive production is often associated with low tech repetative processes.</li> </ul> Capital Intensive Production</h2> There is generally a better consistency than manual labour.</li> Businesses can loose competitiveness as they are stuck in the same production technique.</li> Machinery may become obsolete.</li> You can't make businesses such as a restaurant or hotel capital intensive as customers may feel that their stay was devalued by it.</li> May generate resistance from labour workforce when implementing.</li> Kanban systems are easier to implement</a>.</li> There may be a greater loss if there is a fault.</li> Programmed machines do not loose skill and there is no skill shortage for machines.</li> Potentially High labour costs if individuals need to maintain complex machines.</li> Firms can benefit from access to long term financing.</li> Labour is more specialised so individuals are good at their job.</li> There is usually longer term benefits.</li> Robots do not require pay.</li> Costs are mainly fixed.</li> There is therefore usually a higher break-even output</a>.</li> </ul> Kanban Systems in Lean Manufacture Unknown — Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Kanban systems</a> in business allows them to effectively manage their stock internally, essentially for businesses that require large amounts of stock, such as small parts, screws or trolley-based workstations, they will likely use a Kanban system to effectively manage their stock. A typical Kanban asset tag will have the item description, part number and sometimes will include the cost of the unit, should the business want to try to regulate the use of the item.</p> What is the purpose of Kanban?</h2> A Kanban system ensures that employees always have access to the tools they need and JIT systems can be implemented easily.</li> A Kanban system also allows a business to measure the amount of parts that they do not use when producing a product, and may be able to go to a smaller or higher quantity when ordering.</li> The tag system can also work with a three bin system, one on the factory floor, one in the re-stock room, and one at the supplier. This ensures that the bins are always stocked.</li> This system can also link in with other elements of lean production</a>.</li> Defective products never make it to factory floor as they would not be stocked by the stock control system.</li> Some implementations have plates with the items needed laid out so workers can simply pick up the tools they need and assemble to product without having to move or find the item.</li> Some implementations also have the production line move along at the pace of the ordered quantity, making staff work harder to keep up with the product. (usually for production lines like planes or cars)</li> </ul> Kanban Asset Tag</h2> Some businesses use the Average cost per unit to judge their effectiveness and efficiency, as Kaizen systems recommend 'Continuous Improvement' the average cost per unit provides a metric for them to calculate if they are more or less efficient.</p> Total production costs in period / Total output in period (units) = Average cost per unit</code></p> The rise of E-commerce (electronic commerce) and M-commerce (mobile commerce) has made the re-ordering process of these parts much more accessible for a company. What is the Role of the Entrepreneur? Advantages and Disadvantages of Corporate Think Tanks Unknown — Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 What is an Entrepreneur?</h2> An Entrepreneur is someone who sets up a business, who is willing to take risks, in the hope of reward. An Entrepreneur may either succeed or fail at their own personal objectives, or may find that through divorce of ownership, they loose control of a business they started. Essentially an entrepreneur is someone who is willing to take risks. The type of business an entrepreneur sets up may depend on the goals that they want to achieve. Not everyone wants to make money, some people may have other goals, such as individuals who want to make people feel better. Examples would be medical apparatus, some people invest lots of money into medial apparatus, cancer research or rehabilitation centres to help people who need it.</p> Some businesses have insider entrepreneurs, who work within a business as though they were on their own, with the resources of the business they are able to accomplish more than they would alone, and therefore they and the business profit from that. Examples would be Eduardo Saverin</a>, although he is an entrepreneur, he briefly worked with Facebook in order to accelerate their growth. He is an example of an Insider Entrepreneur.</p> Insiders allow a business to setup a corporate think tank</strong>, that allows them to come up with ideas through blue sky thinking</strong> and creative thinking</strong>.</p> Advantages and Disadvantages of a Corporate 'Think Tank'</h2> An objectivised think tank may not actually produce any good ideas, although they may seem good, they may not be possible due to financial or time constraints. Examples would be features on software development, it may be good to have a certain feature, but it may not be possible to implement. (See SMART) This may also lead to income constraints, as time is invested in producing these ideas, it can take lots of their time to do research and development.</li> It also means the entrepreneurial roles they should be doing are put aside. Examples would be excessive meetings or wasting employee time waiting for information.</li> </ul> </li> They may be all over the world, and may have never worked together before, so the ideas could vary and the results could be poor.</li> A think tank relies on a good reputation or ideas may never take off from the ground. Research into pointless topics could be expensive.</li> Having a think tank requires experts who may cost a lot of money. CTO's and CFO's could have a good reputation and cost a lot of money to get a project off the ground for start-ups.</li> It also requires trust, as some employees may not be willing to bare the blame for a failed project.</li> Employees may not be motivated to do blue sky thinking or may not want to help the business earn profits that they do not get a part of, salary can de-motivate employees.</li> A gap in the market may be hard to find. Especially Saturated Markets.</li> Think Tanks can also be Cheap.</li> Loyal Customers may be able to contribute to Think Tanks, examples would be the hospitality industry. Surveys and Questionnaires could shed light on what customers really want.</li> There can be high financial risk.</li> </ul> Be SMART</h2> There is an acronym that can help when dealing with think tank blue sky thinking. SMART! Specific. Vague. Broad topics can not make much sense. Making a website 'pop' isn't a good way of asking a web designer to improve a website.</li> Measurable. It can be useful to collect statistics or data before taking a calculated risk.</li> Achievable. Some goals may not be possible because they are not what a company is about.</li> Realistic. Some goals may not be possible because they are too optimistic.</li> Time-frame. Some goals may not be possible because of the manpower a business has.</li> </ul> Sources of Finance Unknown — Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 What are Sources of Finance</h2> </figure></div> There are three different sources of finance, Short Term, Long Term and Medium Term. The most popular way of attaining funds for a business is through equity (money flowing into the business) with over 39% of businesses using this method, examples of this would be retained profit or capital from shares.</p> Short Term (30 days or less) </td> Medium Term (less than 6 months) </td> Long Term (6 months+) </td></tr> Sale of assets, selling business assets, such as product stock or vehicles. Overdrafts Lease-Back, Selling company property, then leasing it back. similar to rent to own, however the business owned it previously, but sold it to use the cash. This is usually very extreme and would only happen when a company is becoming insolvent. Sometimes can be longer than 30 days. Sponsorship, sometimes sporting companies can sponsor businesses. Trade Credit, retrieving goods and delaying payment for up to 30 days, usually this is enough time to sell the finished product, so prevents bad cash flow. Debt Factoring, Selling debt to companies, for less than its worth, allowing them to chase up debtors.</p> Can be instant Could be cheaper than perusing the debt. Could generate a bad reputation if they are harsh.</p> Short Term Sources of finance usually are less than they are worth, and usually allow a business to continue trading and prevent insolvency.</p> </td> Family Loans, does usually not require payback for a long time. Returns can also be small. Donations Crowd Sourcing Government Grants Leasing Collateral.</p> </td> A Bank Loan Stocks and Shares Personal Finance Venture Capitalists Business Angels</p> Generally they come to a business, rather than the other way around. Generally they do not inter-fear with the business. They may not want payback.</p> Floatation</a></p> requires $50,000</p> Mortgage Debentures/Bonds</p> Very Long term Usually a significant amount of money Fixed rate of interest Reduces Collateral Interest is payable Companies may have invested interest</p> Retained Profit</p> You have to have money to make money. May cause insolvency Needs time to re-build prevents investment in other areas</p> </td></tr></tbody></table> Sources of Finance in IT</h2> Some Sources of finance can be de-facto, because it is easier. examples would be the IT industry, it is easier to lease IT equipment because it can allow for no capital outlay, meaning that they do not have to pay in full to have the equipment, but can pay in instalments.</p> Peer-to-Peer Funding is also becoming increasingly popular, whereby companies borrow money from large businesses and cut out banks to save cost on interest.</p> Lean Production Techniques Unknown — Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Lean production methods such as Kaizen and Kanban allow a business to motivate staff to use less waste and treat resources as a finite resource.</p> Lean Production for Expansion</h2> Most businesses that are doing well consider expanding, when they do they need to use more effective methods of production in order to survive, this means cutting cost on waste and optimising lead times and output. Lean production is about continuously checking that the business processes are as fast as possible. Just In Time</strong> - Just In Time (JIT) requires a good relationship with suppliers who are going to deliver when you need them, this saves on storage cost. This also means that a business will have better cash flow if they can tie this together with trade credit.</li> Total Quality Management</strong> - In TQM, Each Item is checked for consistency and to meet standards, although it may be expensive and time consuming, it could mean that the business has less waste.</li> </ul> Businesses may want to consider increasing machinery capacity or staff work overtime during expansion. Walking, waiting time and bad quality are eliminated or minimised in a lean production. </iframe> Lean Production Techniques</h2> Pull (Kanban)</strong></p> Products are made to order, when they are ordered.</li> Businesses only order new stock when it is needed.</li> Items are only bought when they are needed or in demand.</li> Essentially Pull is JIT (Just In Time).</li> There is a reduced amount of leftover resources as products are made to order.</li> </ul> One-piece flow</strong> One item is produced at a time, so there is not confusion in manufacture.</li> The flow of production becomes highly predictable and focused.</li> One product is made at a time, so production could be slow.</li> Large objects may only be made one at a time.</li> Batch ordering may not be possible, so businesses cannot take advantage of economy of scale.</li> Standardise manufactured components.</li> </ul> Takt</strong> Takt is how fast a product is manufactured to meet demand.</li> It allows a business to balance work to achieve a continuous flow.</li> Continuous Improvement > Kaizen says 'Continuous Improvement' through self reflection.</li> </ul> No Defects</strong> Products with defects must be fixed before being allowed to go on to the next stage of production.</li> Rate of production is improved, as the rate off success is near optimal.</li> Products with defects may still have been able to sell. It means waste could be higher than before.</li> Products could also be higher quality.</li> </ul> Lead time is the time it takes for a customer to receive a product after ordering it. Zero based budgets</strong> are are when budgets are reviewed without reference to the previous budget. Normally this does not happen, however it is growing in popularity, as it usually results in lower costs.</p> Liquidity Ratios Unknown — Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 There are different ratios that are used in business. A current ratio is a formula that shows the relationship between what the business has payable, and what they have as liquidity. It may be easier to think of current liability as current payables.</p> Formulas for Liquidity Ratios</h2> The formula for the current ratio</strong> is Current assets / current liabilities = current ratio</code></p> The current ratio shows if the company has enough potential cash to pay any debts that they owe. The current ratio is usually based off of a year and should be above or between 1-1.25, below this number would indicate that the business does not have enough cash to pay off its debts. The acid test ratio </strong>is a stripped down version of the current ratio. It uses the most liquid assets. Why does it use the most liquid assets? The acid test ratio uses liquid assets, such as cash, receivables and short term investments, as they can be turned into cash instantly to pay off debts.</p> Cash + Short Term Investments + Receivables / Current liabilities</code></p> Working capital is the money used in a business for day-to-day processes, The formula is Current assets - Current liabilies</code></p> Liquidity Ratios are another planning tool that a company can use to ensure that they are liquid, this is particularly useful for companies such as a bank, where their main asset is money, they can be sure to maintain a constant positive ratio. A company that deals with large amounts of stock, such as a supermarket or online shop, may be able to have a poor acid ratio as they have plenty of assets that are liquid, and can usually sell as soon as they need to.</p> </p> The current and acid tests may be stored on a business balance sheet</strong></a>, which is a statement of the assets, liabilities and capital of a business at a particular point in time, It will detail the balance of income and expenditure over a given period and is sometimes presented in large business annual reports.</p> Business Failure Unknown — Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Businesses just starting out have a generally low rate of success, 50% of businesses fail within the first two years. Some of the common causes of business failure are avoidable, however there are some examples that businesses may not predict.</p> Could Leadership Cause Business Failure?</h2> Leadership in a business is vital to its survival, but failure to identify where they need to straighten up and fly right again could mean that a business is left behind, unable to correct it's course. Loss of Control</strong>, Just short of divorce of ownership, an owner unable to make effective and authoritative decisions could mean that a business could start to lack innovation or a competitiveness that every business needs to get an advantage over competition. At the same time, an owner making too little decisions could also mean a business effectively has no leader, which in small business could be the difference between growth and decline.</li> Overtrading</strong> could see a business go into liquidation, it is important that a business can fulfil its promise and deliver too customers and HMRC, if a business does not identify when it needs to have some liquid assets or a financial cushion, it could loose out on future repeat purchases. Bad leadership could be the root cause of overtrading, however poor management and/or communication could also make overtrading the determinate factor. Machinery breaking may also mean that overtrading orders that they can no longer fulfil could cause massive cash flow problems for a business</li> Ineffective Expenditure</strong> could mean that a business could go quick. Inability to manage finance and good investments could see even the largest business fail. Even if a business does not invest in merit-less research and development, a lack of innovation or diversification in their products could also see them fail as a result. </strong> Poor cash flow could lead to insolvency.</li> No profit made</li> Margins are too high, not enough return.</li> No Inflows, Product is not developed effectively.</li> Pressure groups prevent business from making enough money or attract too much of a negative stigma.</li> Interest rates mean business cannot afford premises.</li> Business unable to move product as price is too high because ingredients are too expensive.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Business can also fail if they do not have enough profit,companies that can't expand due to financial and logistical restraint, greed and overheads being too high could mean that a business is unable to continue trading. Key Terms</h2> Business Administration - A management firm (usually accountants) come into a business in order to improve spending and save a business from collapse.</li> Liquidation - Selling assets to cover costs. Usually as a last resort to pay debtors.</li> </ul> Common Business Failure</h2> Financial</h5> Minimum wage has increased (living wage)</li> Economy is bad (or not favourable)</li> Inadiquate Finance</li> Majour Bad Debt</li> Inadiquate shareholder capital</li> Employees are not getting paid, so stop working</li> Greed or Theft</li> Dominant sales from a now dead source</li> </ul> Non-Financial</h5> Legal and Social Change</li> Consumer Protection Laws</li> Poor Management</li> No Interest in Business</li> Poor Idea</li> Poor Execution</li> Poor Tourism/Footfall</li> </ul> How Long Will my Phone Battery Last Before it Dies? Unknown — Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Defined obsolescence has gotten a hold of me again, I will have to purchase a new phone, as my old one is about to expire! I have had my phone for about 2 Years, I recieved it in the summer and It was fairly new at the time, being released in August 2014, My little HTC Desire 610 has been through a lot. It's had 2 screen protectors, 2 cases and been across 3 networks. Now that It is aged, I have since rooted it and install android Lollipop it has had a new breath of life, However It's quite slow as a daily driver and I think I will need a new one soon. The battery cover on the back cannot be removed and only the SIM card and External Memory can be replaced. How Unfortunate. But It got me wondering, How long will my phone battery last before it dies.</p> Some people wonder how long their phone battery will last before it dies, before it basically doesn't hold a charge and it's battery life is no longer able to last a day.I however know that answer, my phone will die on approximately Saturday, December 24th 2016 at 8:20 am, as at this point it will no longer hold a charge. How do I know this? Let me explain...</p> Data Collection</h2> Firstly, I needed to collect data to predict when my phone was degrading in battery life, I decided that the easiest measurable metric would be when my phone was plugged in. Because I would usually do this when I got in from home, It did not require me collecting any data as it could all be done automatically. I know this isn't the most precise method for multiple reasons, such as I may not always plug my phone in at the same time, the phone may not always record the results (as you will see) and the percentage when i plug it in is not an accurate assumption of health. However my findings did show a trend that shows the battery is degrading at about 0.000109% every minute, which gives me 7 and a half months to buy a new one. Recording the Results</h2> To record the results I used Google Drive and IFTTT to note down the percentage charge at the times the phone was disconnected and reconnected from power. It also recorded the charge type, such as USB,AC or an external Battery. This could potentially also alter my results as the percentage increase would vary over different mediums of charge, so I eliminated all but AC power, as this was always from the same plug and USB lead. So, How did I calculate how long will my phone battery last before it dies? The recipe I used is nearly identical to this one</a>, I made one for it being plugged in and one for it being unplugged. the data ended up looking like this.</p> Date and Time</td> Status</td> Battery Percentage</td> Power Source</td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:19PM</td> Unplugged</td> 41</td> </td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:19PM</td> Charging</td> 41</td> AC</td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:33PM</td> Unplugged</td> 50</td> </td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:34PM</td> Charging</td> 49</td> AC</td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:37PM</td> Unplugged</td> 52</td> </td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:39PM</td> Charging</td> 52</td> AC</td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:44PM</td> Unplugged</td> 56</td> </td> </tr> March 11, 2016 at 04:45PM</td> Charging</td> 56</td> AC</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> As you can see at this time I unplugged the device multiple times over 25 minutes to read emails and texts or whatever showed up on my phone. I was interested in this, so charted the occurrences of a date and time, and found that I had unplugged and plugged in again my phone four times in 1 minute at maximum, and had unplugged and plugged in my phone over 249 times. Here are the occurrences, excluding dates where I did not plug in my phone as although it would contribute to how long will my phone battery last before it dies, it did not trigger the app. This also got me wondering how many times a day I unplugged my phone, If you look at the data, It shows that, for example, on the 20th of February, a Saturday, I unplugged my phone 16 times.</p> It seems that for about a week during march I was unplugging my phone a lot, and I can't really see a connection, I was at school on the 11th, I guess I must have been heavily using my phone over that period. The more perceptive of you will have noticed that the entire month of April is omitted, that is because the data was not recorded as I had been logged out of the IFTTT app, I did not realise until later when I re-enabled it, Having the empty months would alter the data so I have removed them from the results. Perhaps I shouldn't worry how long will my phone battery last before it dies and instead how long the connector will last.</p> So How Long Will My Phone Battery Last Before It Dies?</h2> This graph shows every event recorded, including when I was not recording the phone being plugged in, It clearly shows, using a linear trendline, that there is a decline in the battery percentage. Which shows my phone's average battery percentage when being plugged in, when it reaches 0%, which I have decided is to be a dead battery, in 336101 Minutes, or 5602 hours. Coincidentally, It dies on Christmas Eve, the perfect time to be gifted a new phone ;).</p> The Working Capital Cycle Unknown — Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 The working capital cycle is a proportion of a businesses working capital that is used to allow a business to operate normally, it is the funds required by a business in order to continue trading efficiently. Without a business being able to calculate how much working capital it needs in order to operate, then it may find it hard to continue to function, the working capital cycle involves anything from inventory and supplies, to production and storage. Without proper working capital, it could lead to business failure</a>.</p> The Working Capital Cycle</h2> The working cycle has limited use as a single planning tool, however when combined with multiple tools, it can provide a very powerful overview of what a business works with month, to month. Just because a business has inflows of $1m each month, it does not mean that they make $1m profit. The working capital cycle will also allow a company to identify any ways of keeping a positive cash flow through better trade terms as well. Each 'stage' of the capital cycle has multiple costs associated with it. Just because a product needs to be stored, does not mean it has not cost, there may be refrigeration cost, it could be perishable, it may need a security guard to look after the facility, the lights and electricity around the building all need to be paid for. It is important that a customer receives the product as soon as it is made, as it means that overall there is less cost associated with the product, additionally for products like clothing and fashion accessories or technology, the longer it is stored could also mean that its value is decreased as it goes out of fashion.</p> Over trading could also mean that a company may not be able to pay for the process to be completed using its normal working capital and may have to secure new funds for the time being until the debt is paid after they have sold the product.</p> Factors Affecting Sales Forecasts Unknown — Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Sales Forecasts are charts and graphs, equations and educated predictions that allow businesses to predict future sales with a degree of accuracy.</p> Consumer Trends - People being proud of bargains and discounts. sales forecasts become harder to predict when consumerism changes.</li> Economic Variables - Recessions, Booms and Recovery.</li> Competitors Actions - loss leaders and pricing strategy may try to undercut you.</li> Digital Music for example, as become harder to predict as people have found new ways to obtain it illegally.</li> Fashion Items have an unpredictable life span.</li> </ul> Businesses use a range of forecasting tools to make forecasts No single technique is reliable, but having multiple will allow you to better predict the future</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Using sales forecasts may be useful but having data that is unreliable could mean that the forecast is not accurate. Making forecasts that are too long into the future could be considered extrapolation</strong>. Extrapolation is cheap, although inefficient it gives a fixed perspective of what to expect which is better than nothing.</p> Planning for the worst allows companies to expect and anticipate failure. Very successful stable products cannot predict when sales will fall as their product is likely very price inelastic and customers are used to the product's taste or function that changing it could make customers unhappy with the product. 'Many financial measurements which are useful and valid in static situations are strategic traps in growth situations.'</p> </h2> Failing to predict sales forecasts correctly</h2> Failing to accurately predict sales forecasts may mean that a business could fail. Working capital is cash that is spent on the business, liquidity is not. Having a lot of working capital does not necessarily mean you are liquid. You may also have; Contingency Finance (A financial Cushion)</li> Credit Periods yet to expire</li> An active Working Capital Cycle</li> </ul> That must be paid before you consider any additional finance as liquid that you can spend on anything. Additionally when a business is in liquidation</strong> whereby they have had to cease trading there is still things that have to be paid off, and unfortunately for some employees, this may be unfair as it could mean a business cannot afford to pay them because they do not have the funds. The Tax Office must be paid, to cover the business from litigation.</li> Shareholders must be paid dividends and the value of their shares.</li> Employees must be paid their wages.</li> </ol> Some Key Terms</h2> An Income Statement - Measures the business performance over a period of time, and may allow them to determine where forecasting was over-optimistic. It shows a companys revenue and total spending over a given period of time.</li> A Statement of Financial position is a snapshot of the business assets.</li> A Cash flow statement shows cash flow sources over a given period of time. It shows exactly how much a business has received and spent.</li> </ul> What is Break-even analysis useful for anyway? Unknown — Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 What does Break-even calculate?</h2> Here is a Break-even chart. It represents a 24 day period. y = cash, x = days</figcaption> </figure> Break-even is when a business is not making any losses or profit, seen in the chart above at 11 days. It can be seen that the yellow total costs line, is the same angle as the variable costs line, plus fixed costs. It also can be determined, that the blue shaded are represents the magin of safety</strong> as after that all costs are paid.</p> What is Margin of Safety?</h2> The margin of safety is how much additional units you have sold in a given period. For example, in the graph below, we are on our 18th day. On this day we have spent approximately $680 since day 1, and by day 18, we have made $1040 revenue, so our margin of safety is $1040-$680= $360, however margin of safety does not work in money</em> </strong>so we need to convert it back to units, so if each unit sells for $10, then our margin of safety is</strong> 36 units</strong>.</p> What is Break-even useful for? (Advantages and Disadvantages)</h2> The point at which you aren't making any losses or profit.</li> It allows you to identify problems you may face with cash flow on new investments, for example; Investing in a more expensive warehouse may not be financially viable, as the investment would create a small margin of safety.</li> Increasing variable cost may make break-even harder to achieve.</li> </ul> </li> It allows a business to 'relax' it's workload after it has reached it's margin of safety, as it no longer needs to cover costs. Everything made past the break-even point is profit.</li> It may allow an entrepreneur</a> identify where they may want to take risks.</li> It also allows an entrepreneur to identify when a theorised project is not financially viable.</li> It focuses on what output is required before a business reaches profitability</li> Helps management and Finance providers better understand the viability of a risk or business idea.</li> It does not cater for potential changes in the moment</li> Unrealistic assumptions that everything stays the same.</li> It is more of a planning aid, than a decision tool.</li> </ul> However there are limitations</strong> of the chart, as it does not allow you to anticipate economy of scale, changes in fixed cost or demand. The most important factor that it allows you to calculate is the point that you aren't making any losses or profit. How is Break-even calculated?</a></h2> Break-even Output = Fixed Costs / Contribution per unit </pre> Contribution per unit = Selling price per unit - Variable cost per unit or Contribution per unit = Contribution per unit x Number of units sold</pre> Common AS-Level Business Studies Equations Unknown — Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Here is a list of routinely forgotten equations for Business Studies, make sure to memorise them.</p> Equations</h2> Total Contribution</strong> =</code></p> Total revenue - Total variable cost</code></p> Contribution per unit</strong> =</code></p> Selling price per unit - Variable cost per unit</code></p> or (for total contribution)</code></p> Contribution per unit x Number of units sold</code></p> Profit</strong> =</code></p> Total contribution - Fixed cost</code></p> Break-even Output</strong> =</code></p> Fixed cost / Contribution per unit</code></p> What do they mean?</h2> Contribution</strong> is useful for a business to be responsible for a range of products, it allows them to calculate how much money they make on a sale.</li> The Break-even</strong> charts (and equation) is a tool that allows you to show total costs at all possible levels of output or demand from zero to maximum capacity. Break-even is not given in money, and should be the amount of units sold.</li> Profit</strong> is money made, not taking anything into account other than fixed and variable cost.</li> Contribution per unit</strong>, is just total contribution</strong> per unit. So to get it, divide by the amount you sell of a product (or use the other formula). Don't confuse this with break-even.</li> </ul> When calculating using these equations it is important to consider external factors. Such as extrapolation</strong> or economic variables</strong> that could be changing the data. However you may not get questions like this in the exam. Sometimes four mark questions may ask about productivity. For example, these questions do not want you to describe the formula, they may want you to state it. But make sure to stick to the 'because, leading to, therefore and such as' structure. Otherwise you may not be answering the question correctly.</p> Break-even output is easier to consider it as the fixed costs divided by the contribution per unit, like so. If it costs $500 in rent, and you get $1 for every candy bar you sell, you need to sell 500 candy bars. Because $500 / $1 is 500 not</strong> $500.</p> Remember that break-even output is never given as money. Remember also to consider confidence intervals may mean that the data given is not accurate, as well as the accuracy of the data you have received.</p> Remember that the information you have may be hear-say and not 100% accurate, things may change. The variable cost of items may raise, or lower. Total contribution may not be accurate if the business sells multiple products at different prices. Make sure to base your equations off all of the information available, don't take short-cuts.</p> "Revenue is vanity, Profit is sanity, Cash is King!"</code></p> Remember, its not percentages or ratios that businesses put in the bank, it's dollars. credit</a>. So think about how valuable the data you have actually is. Make sure you understand the numbers! cash flow shortages can be negated with better trade terms. Having predictable cash flow is preferable, so make sure that you mention it.</p> Trade-offs and Opportunity Cost Unknown — Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 What is Trade-offs and Opportunity Cost?</h2> Trade-offs are choosing one thing over another, if you choose to invest in paint over pencils, your opportunity cost, is that you can no longer colour with pencils. This is a poor example, so lets look at some real data so we can get a good understanding of what opportunity cost is really about, and for that we need an example. Nails and Hammers LTD</a>.</h2> A company, called Nails and Hammers LTD</a>, produces hammers and nails, they have a good reputation, but are not really known, they also manufacture their hammers cheaply and therefore some of them are not exactly to the highest quality. in their first year, they only sell 100 units, this is barely enough sales to keep the business going, so they decide to invest in one of two strategies. Investing in Machinery, in order to produce better quality hammers, or Invest in Advertising, to get the word out about their Hammers and Nails. They decide that they will spend $300 dollars in the second year and see how it goes. They do their market research and come up with these two graphs. It can be seen from these graphs, that investment in advertisements will produce more sales than investment in machinery, therefore investment in Advertising is the way forward for Nails and Hammers LTD. This is called a trade-off, without the graph, it wouldn't be known which is better for sales until the second year had ended. The same investment of $300 produced more sales. Lets, look at more data.</p> Opportunity Cost</h2> Opportunity cost is essentially what you could have won if you had invested in something else, if you can only learn piano or tennis, and you choose piano, the opportunity cost is that you could have learnt tennis. Let's take our previous example, and pretend that we invested in the lesser option, Machinery, we can see that we didn't make as much as we would have if we had invested in Advertising. The opportunity cost in the third year would have been 200, because the investment in advertising, produced 700 sales, minus our 500 sales.</p> Garbage in Garbage Out Data Unknown — Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 When you signup for a website. You enter your information (or data). You don't always get it right and could miss a box or spell your own credentials wrong (garbage), this data in an ICT system is very important that it is minimised. There are numerous ways that this can be accomplished.</p> Data must be correct</h2> In order to have an accurate IT solution, your data must be correct, otherwise users may find your solution hard to use. It is important that you minimise GIGO through thorough data validation</a>. Garbage in Garbage Out</h2> When you enter data into an ICT system it is vital that your data is accurate, valid, </strong>and up to date</strong>. This can be accomplished though input validation. When you enter data, it should be of top quality</strong> it is vital that GIGO does not occur</strong>. GIGO is garbage in, garbage out, and refers colloquially to the fact that whatever you put into an ICT system, such as garbage, is what you will get out. This is because ICT systems are designed to preform the task that they were designed for, and doing tasks that aren't what they are supposed to do, will inevitably produce garbage as computers work by logical process</strong>. An example of this would be putting an email address in a phone number box on contact information, and when ringing someone, the call does not connect, because it cannot ring an email address.</p> To stop this sort of thing from happening you must read instructions, follow tutorials and understand the implications of what you are doing, otherwise you could corrupt</strong> your data.</p> Data should be accurate, up-to-date, reliable, complete, correct, designed for purpose</strong> and when entered, it should be paramount that it follows these principles, otherwise your it solution could produce frustrating results that the user does not expect. Make sure your data is accourate by forcing users to enter it correctly.</p> Advantages and Disadvantages of a Public Limited Company Unknown — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 What is a Public Limited Company?</h2> A Public Limited Company is a business that has decided to offer it's shares on the public stock market. The Stock Market is where anyone can invest in a Public Limited Company. These are usually high value, large businesses that can have massive profits, and offer dividends to those who invest. In order to become a Public Limited Company, PLC, you need;</p> At least two directors.</li> A Secretary</li> And you must float at least $50,000 shares on the stock exchange, to become a PLC.</li> </ul> Unlike other businesses</a>, a PLC is often owned by a board of directors, that dictate the decisions of a business. PLC's must also pay Dividend</strong>, which is money that the investors receive from the business, determined by their share value. As PLC's have external influences, they also fluctuate in value and therefore can loose money. Some businesses owners also find that they can loose control. Being a PLC can bring in more capital and make the business more known publically on the sock exchange. For contrast, to become a Sole Trader. All you have to do is contact HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) and every year fill in a self assessment. An LTD must send a Memorandum of Association and Articles of Association. For this reason it becomes a lot harder to do so and often people will employ a Secretary. To be a PLC can take lots of time and can sometimes not be possible for companies with a very bad image. Companies also may struggle if they are unreliable or have seasonal traits, such as a manufacturer of Christmas gifts.</p> Advantages of a Public Limited Company</h3> Having Shares will fund expansion, allowing the business to grow.</li> This also raises company profile.</li> The business can raise a lot of capital because there is no limit for shareholders to invest.</li> Shares are transferable, so investors can split profits.</li> You can get input from investors.</li> Investors may try to grow the business, through things like discounted advertising, if they own part of another business.</li> </ul> Disadvantages of being a Public Limited Company</h3> There could be a possible loss of control, as people may find that shareholders own over 50% of the shares, entitling them to the ownership of the business. This is also known as a divorce of control.</li> Shareholders may have other plans to maximise profits over social and ethical goals.</li> Share prices could collapse.</li> There are a lot of legal formalities.</li> Fluctuations in share price could make a company worthless overnight.</li> PLC's are hard to maintain. As they are usually large, often everyone has their own ideas.</li> Some companies may be overvalued.</li> Some do not have $50,000 worth of shares to float.</li> </ul> A PLC is usually for large companies. Small businesses will not always expect to grow, Corner shops for example, will not grow beyond what is possible due to the local footfall. Therefore PLC's are often global businesses. Understanding Different Business Types Unknown — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 There are many business types of organisation, these all have their advantages, so it is important to know which is better for which task, otherwise a company may find some aspects harder than they should be. The main business types are;</p> Business Types </h2> A Sole Trader </strong>is a business owned by an individual, It can have many employees. Common sole traders could be corner shops or man-with-van businesses.</li> A Partnership </strong>is a business owned by two or more people (usually up to 20), the ownership of the business is split between them. A partnership may be a small manufacturing company or some large accountancy firms have larger quantities of partners.</li> A Franchise</strong> is a business that is owned by a franchisor, and the licensing to use the brand name is given to the franchisee to sell products under their name. Common examples would be fast food restaurants or garages.</li> A Private Limited Company (or 'LTD') </strong>is a company that offers shares, but does not sell them to the general public. Generally they will have either small amounts of capital, or very large amounts. The size of the business can vary, and can be a multinational company or a medium sized business.</li> A Public Limited Company (or 'PLC') </strong>is a company that sells it's shares on the stock exchange, allowing members of the general public to invest capital into the business.</li> A Co-operative </strong>is a business set-up to serve the public, and may have ethical goals, over profits and sales. Some supermarkets work in this way.</li> A Social Enterprise </strong>is a business who's money goes toward a social goal(s). Examples would be a company supporting people with an illness or disease.</li> There are also Lifestyle Businesses </strong>who's owners work as part of their lifestyle. This can depend on the characteristics of the entrepreneur</a>.</li> </ul> Most of these business types operate on two different types, Limited Liability</strong> is when only the Business assets can be taken to recover debt. Limited Liability is where the owner is protected from any trouble the business suffers, and vice versa.</li> Unlimited Liability</strong> is when the business is not protected from such problems, and if the business were to get into financial trouble or insolvency, then the owners assets could be taken as a circumstance.</li> </ul> An LTD (Private Limited Company), must send a Memorandum of Association</strong> and Articles of Association</strong>. To receive a Certificate of </strong>Incorporation</b> and Limited Liability. Becoming I</strong>ncorporated</b> means that the company and the owner are seen as two separate entities legally. To be Unincorporated</strong>, would mean that the business and the owner are seen as one legal entity.</p> Limited Liability</strong></td> </tr> Advantages</strong></td> Disadvantages</strong></td> </tr> The owner is not responsible for the debts of the company.</li> The business is not effected by the owners problems.</li> Sole traders may find it easier to secure trade credit as it is checked against your credit rating.</li> </ul> </td> The owner has to pay Corporation Tax</strong>.</li> It usually takes time to register.</li> There may be additional cost as the owner may have to hire an accountant.</li> The owner may face troubles moving profits or assets from the company to him.</li> It may be harder to secure good trade terms with suppliers as they may see the company as a potential liability.</li> This means your business type is Incorporated</strong>.</li> </ul> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Advantages and Disadvantages of Types of Processing data Unknown — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 When data is processed there are multiple methods of processing data, there are several types that all have individual Advantagesand Disadvantages.</p> Batch, Interactive and Transaction Processing</h2> Batch Processing</h3> </td> Batch Processing is when data is processed in 'batches' (groups) </p> Advantages</h4> Batches mean that the processdoes not require human interaction</strong>, this allows the system to be automated and means that it can be left running</strong> for multiple sessions at a time, that could potentially last a long time</strong>, This type of processcan also allow for custom processing</strong> 'jobs'. Which means that the data can be suited to fit the needs of the user, for example, a bank wants to process a large quantity of bank statements, with a temporary notice at the top, they would be able to customize the 'job' to be processed with the new notice.</li> They can take a long time to process and may require multiple hours to complete, they may also require multiple retrys and query's, so being able to compute data in batches means that all thenecessarydata can be</strong>consolidated</b>for the job.</li> Batch processing also means that the data can be run at low points</strong> when there is little load on the system.</li> </ul> Disadvantages</h4> Using'big data' can take a lot of computing power and can take a long time, and could still process GIGO. (garbage in, garbage out) Stopping batches may cause the system to corrupt the data involved and the system it is using may exhaust the resources of the machine, causing the process to fail.</li> Batch processing could include anomalies that may not have been accounted for, for example when someone had filled out their name on a form as 'Mr Davies' when the form only required 'Davies', the result could be that a letter that has been batch produced 'Dear, Mr Mr Davies'.</li> The Batch processcould mean that users receive incorrect information until their data has been processed.</li> Data must be accurate to prevent GIGO.</a></li> </ul> Examples : Mail merge, Bank Statements, Mass Emails, Game World 'chunks', Video Rendering.</p> </td></tr> Interactive Processing</h3> </td> Interactive processing is when a system performs processes as it is being used. </p> Advantages</h4> When playing games, only the crucial information that requires being rendered or physics that need applying to objects need to be processed, allowing for a smoother gameplay. This may also be considered a disadvantage as it can break the immersion of the game when textures are rendered poorly or objects do not have their expected physics, such as objects that do not fall to the ground, or signs do not render their text fully and appear blurred.</li> Websites can check that reservations are not double booked as users place their orders, usernames can be checked for availability as they sign up, emails can be parsed for validity.</li> Websites such as dominoes can start to create an order, before the customer has even completed their order.</li> Video Viewers can set the quality of a video, or it can be done automatically, while the video is playing.</li> </ul> Disadvantages</h4> Interactive processing cannot take place on very taxing processes that require a lot of computation.</li> Interactive processing may not be possible until the process is completed</li> Interactive processing may mean that data could become corrupted, such as pausing a rendering video or deleting data that is open by other processes in place.</li> Online Shopping could offer discounted prices are out of date as the offer has expired, but was already added to the customers basket.</li> </ul> Examples : Online Shopping, Video Rendering, Video Live Streams, Booking Seats.</p> </td></tr> Transaction Processing</h3> </td> Transaction processing is mode one at a time. </p> Advantages</h4> Transaction processing is fast and efficient, and the data can be updated quickly and securely, booking a seat on a flight and in a cinema ensures that your seat is not double booked</strong>.</li> Effective for high traffic websites and concerts where there is high demand for a product</strong>.</li> Transaction processing means that customers do not withdraw funds they don't own</strong>.</li> Transaction processing often means that the system can prevent two events happening at the same time</strong>.</li> </ul> Disadvantages</h4> Transaction Processing requires the transaction to be completed before it is accepted, therefore there can sometimes be considerable wait times before a transaction is complete.</strong></li> Transaction processing means that the system must always be available during operating hours, therefore when a system goes down, there can sometimes be great repercussions.</li> </ul> Examples : Banking, Stock Control Systems, Booking Systems.</p> </td></tr></tbody></table> The use case for each type can vary, however most have set types that work best for the solution, so it is important to know which one is bet for a solution, or you could run into issues.</p> Data, Information and it's Differences Unknown — Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Data itself is valueless, however when provided with context, it becomes valued, a database contains lots of raw information, and therefore it would be extremely hard to interpret anything from it, for example here is a table from a database:</p> Yes</td> Blue</td> 5</td> 100</td> No</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Without context, its information means nothing, it could mean anything. It is abstract, however when combined with some context, it becomes useful and can be useful. Andrew has completed his homework</td> Yes</td> </tr> Andrew's school house color</td> Blue</td> </tr> Andrew's last test score</td> 5</td> </tr> Andrew's highest test score</td> 100</td> </tr> Andrew is real</td> No</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Now that we have provided this table with some context, it makes more sense, this is the difference between information</strong> and data</strong>. Information is data that has been given meaning. Although it is odd to keep data about a fictional Andrew, it is funny to think that within this website, data is stored that will contain Andrew's table, and only when this page is read will it make sense what the purpose of this information is for. Data is anything from numbers and letters to characters or metadata, it may be inputted into a computer through a form or another computer system.</li> Information is data with context, it makes sense. It becomes information once you are familiar with what it is referring to.</li> </ul> An ICT System is something that provides information, automation, data or computation to a user. Some examples of an ICT System are: A School Website.</li> A video rendering server.</li> An online picture editor or gif creator.</li> A fire alarm system.</li> A sprinkler system.</li> </ul> ICT is visible everywhere and can be extremely beneficial to society, you reading this website is the result of hundreds of ICT systems being monitored by individuals called System Administrators</strong> or Sysadmin for short. Short of the simple systems that keep the website running, there is also the bigger picture systems, such as the time management servers, update servers for the OS of the website and your own computer, Record and bill systems checking that the server is paid for, Website analysis systems indexing this website on Google and other search engines, Security and Antivirus checking your router for bad traffic and even ISP systems, ensuring that your and this end of the connection is working, and if any of those systems were to fail, catastrophic consequences could occur. Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Unknown — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 An entrepreneur must have a certain set of skills in order to be successful and lead them to a more prosperous life.</p> Some positive characteristics can be just important as some negative ones, without them they may be unbalanced and blinded by the possibility of success.</span></p> Do what you enjoy </span></h2> It’s fundamental that you are happy with what you do or a lack of motivation can be reflected over your work. Don’t accept jobs that are too demanding as they can lead to a lack of motivation.</span> Be motivated and enjoy what you do</span></h2> Without motivation and drive you are bound to fail, without drive, you won't get anywhere and could struggle financially because of a lower clientele reflected in your work</span> Be good at what you do</span></h2> Take pride in your work and make the best of a bad job at the worst of times, keep motivated and anticipate failure. Failure to understand may lead to a possible loss of clientele and sales, not being able to provide for your clients is unprofessional.</span> Be charismatic</span></h2> In order to win clients a leader must be able to negotiate, delegate and understand clients. Otherwise they may lose possible clients. Someone who is unable to woo clients may struggle and be left behind, leading to a loss of sales and a damaged reputation.</span> Be a leader</span></h2> An entrepreneur must be able to delegate and lead a group to success as going alone could lead to failure. If an entrepreneur cannot lead their team, they may struggle to produce what is required.</span> Be a problem solver</span></h2> An entrepreneur must be able to solve problems, anticipate issues and look out for possible obstacles, without the foresight required be an entrepreneur. Reluctance may be your downfall and lead to failure.</span> Six things ICT Provide Unknown — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 ICT is used globally, and has multiple points that are useful to it.</span></p> Fast Repetitive Processing</b> allows companies and individuals to process large quantities of data at once and quickly, repetitive tasks allow for people to make personalised and tailored reports and information, things like bank statements can be processed rapidly overnight at low points in the day. New technologies mean that they can perform complex calculations quickly and effectively.</span></p> Vast Storage Capacity</b> means that IT systems can store larger quantities of data in smaller form factor, large businesses are able to store large quantities of data and programs are able to actively process larger quantities of data such as virtual machines or hypervisors. Additionally It has allowed for free services to store files for free, using ad supported media.</span></p> Improved search facilities</b> have allowed for people to lookup information and files instantly and obtain key information effectively, such as facts and simple calculations through Google and other search engines. Additionally It has allowed for data to be collated together, such as viewing reports and files over a period of time or created by a specific editor. Doctors, for example are able to lookup a patient's details on a computer instantly, rather than go through paperwork and personal information, they are only able to see what is necessary, this allows for additional security and customisation with reports.</span></p> Improved presentation of data</b> allows for tailored reports, statistics, graphs and files. Customisation has allowed business to tailor their products and software to their customers based off the data obtained. for example, a coffee chain is able to gain knowledge of their best selling drinks based off sales data and survey information, additionally they are able to combine independent data that would otherwise not be combined, such as weather and sales. It also means that it is easy to understand for someone who does not have a great understanding of a topic.</span></p> Improved accessibility</b> means that information is available in a variety of formats and has allowed for people to access their data anywhere in the world, previously data was only accessible at one location, but by connecting to the vast internet, consumers as well as businesses are able to take advantage of fast connections and information in order to overcome logistical problems such as storage capacity and even uptime through online hosting, additionally people are able to utilise single peripherals on multiple devices, such as a printer or scanner. Additionally programs are easier to use and accessible to people with special needs.</span></p> Improved security </b>has meant that files and programs are safe from third party transit prying eyes and nefarious use, data can be almost impossible to access without the right information and can be stored in ways that mean that it is not possible to decrypt remotely. It has also allowed for networks to be open to multiple tiers of people, from guests to teachers accessibility is only available to those who need it and useability is not compromised.</span></p> Simulating a phone combination brute force Unknown — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 If a malicious individual were to steal your android or iPhone, plug in a device to emulate a keyboard and have it test every single pass code possible, it would take a while, using the following tutorial, you can calculate the time It would take to do so.</p> Firstly, you need to grab Python</a> 3.4.3, or you can probably use the version you have installed. Next we need to create the code.</p> Firstly we need to import datetime</code> to convert the guesses into time it would have taken, we also need to write down what the combination is, for this example, it will be '3502'.</p> import datetime</code> combination = "3502"</code></p> print (" [Info] Starting")</code></p> Then we need to add a guess and how long has passed while performing a guess, as it takes time to enter the numbers into the device, we will simulate this as well as 1 second.</p> guess = "0000"</code> seconds_taken = 0</code></p> def addsec(seconds):</code> global seconds_taken</code> seconds_taken = seconds_taken + seconds</code></p> I could have added the seconds section into the code directly, but adding as a def allowed me to edit it if I needed to, now that we have done the basics, we need to start guessing, there are 10,000 possible combinations, thats combinations such as 0001, this is problematic as leading zeros will not be carried over into integers in python, we can fix this using .zfill(4), which will add the leading zeros back into the guess, allowing us to compare it with the actual combination. This also means that we can convert the guess back into an integer in order to see if we have exceeded our limit. We also need to add a second for a combination guess.</p> def addsec(seconds):</code> global seconds_taken</code> seconds_taken = seconds_taken + seconds</code></p> while int(guess) <= 9999:</code> addsec(1)</code> if guess.zfill(4) == combination:</code> print (" [Alert] Combination guessed, combination is " + combination)</code> break</code> else:</code> guess = str(int(guess) + 1)</code> print (" [Info] Guess is now '" + str(guess).zfill(4) + "'")</code></p> Finally, we need to convert our result into a time, we can do this by dividing our seconds_taken (which is coincidentally the number of guesses if you add one for '0000') by 5 (because it takes 5 guesses before a penalty), and then tuning that into an integer, rounding down and then multiplying by 300, to simulate 5 minutes lockout. then we combine penalties_incurred and seconds_taken, to get the time it takes to guess the combination (in seconds), then use that to convert into an hh:mm:ss format, using datetime</code>.</p> penalties_incurred = int(seconds_taken / 5) * 300</code> time_taken = (str(datetime.timedelta(seconds=(penalties_incurred + seconds_taken))))</code> print (" [Finished] The combination would have taken '" + time_taken + "' to brute force. (h:m:s)")</code> print (" [Finished] You would have had to wait for " + str(int(penalties_incurred / 300)) + " lockout session(s)" )</code></p> What have we learnt?</h2> There are 10,000 possible combinations.</li> For my combination, it would take 6 days, 30 minutes to guess.</li> </ul> On an Android Device, It would take over 2,000 lockouts to guess every combination.</li> It would take 7 days, 1 hour, 26 minutes and 40 seconds to guess every combination.</li> It would take 8 hours, 28 minutes and 20 seconds to guess 500 combinations.</li> It would take 50 minutes and 50 seconds to guess 50 combinations, with 10 lockouts.</li> </ul> On an Apple Device*, It would take 1666 lockouts to guess every combination.</li> It would take 5 days, 21 hours, 36 minutes and 40 seconds to guess every combination.</li> It would take 7 hours, 3 mintes and 20 seconds to guess 500 combinations.</li> It would take 40 minutes and 50 seconds to guess 50 combinations, with 8 lockouts.</li> </ul> *However, apple wipes their devices after 11 bad combinations, to avoid this, the combinations would have to be entered correctly after the sixth try in order for the apple device estimates to be correct, which defeats the purpose of brute forcing, for that reason apple devices are much more secure, however there is potential for data to be deleted accidentally. This simulation is flawed because,</p> It does not take into account combinations greater than 4 digits</li> It does not take into account cumulative waiting times</li> It does not take into account device combinations that don't involve numbers</li> You could increase the number of digits allowed in order to calculate your combination, for example if it was 67890, replacing the 13th line with 99999 would allow you to calculate it.</li> </ul> Here is the full code extract,