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Welcome to my digital home! There are lots of articles you might find helpful buried in this site on topics such as modifying an Alfa Romeo 159, rebuilding a Lotus 7 (Robin Hood 2B), not to mention a ton of stuff on technology in general. It’s all here somewhere, so use the search function or navigate using the menu structure. if you want to talk, reach out via the contact function, I usually do answer!

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GeneralNative Instuments – Traktor Scratch This is the final choice and the result of much deliberation and research. It would seem that for the most part its a two horse race, Serato vs Traktor. I’ll give you the highlights to make it simple. Serato is very very stable, easy to use and generally a rock solid solution to mixing MP3’s. Traktor has less reputation for stability but so many more features and possabilities when it comes to taking your music to the next level. This is best domonstrated bythe release of traktor 3.2 and its ability to mix 4 sources in the same interface! this means you could have 2 x decks + two other input sources all up at once mixing through a 4 channel mixer, when used with the Audio 8 interface. It was this feature that won it for me. With this I can utilise Ableton Live like it was another deck, and have a 4th source as something like a standalone sequencer, drum machine or other random piece of electronic excellence. Now all I have to do is save my pennies and actually buy one! 🙂Related Images: [...]
RH2B Build DiaryBy far the biggest fix that needed to be handled was the suspension. The ride was crashy, wooden and showing its age. I knew this when I bought it, and it was always on the cards to be sorted before summer, so I got stuck straight into it in the spring. After ordering a ton of parts (bushes, ball joints, bolts and not least a shiny new set of GAZ adjustable Coilovers) it was time to get dirty! The old suspension This was no small task. Starting at the back of the car, the original sierra setup was in use. separate shock and spring, with a few spring spacers in to stop it hitting the frame! That needed to go and be converted to coilovers so I spoke to KitSpares, the company that originally made the RH2b (Great British Sports Cars) and got some advice. Fortunately they made a conversion kit for this which was essentially a couple of metal brackets so i bought the parts and set to work. Parts required to convert the rear end. It was remarkably easy to do and took no time once I had everything stripped down and prepped. For the most part, the longest time was spent prepping materials with paint and rust proofing everything that was looking worse for wear. All exposed metal was either painted, or treated with BitHamber Hydrate 80, my favorite rust proofing agent! BitHamber Hydrate 80 doing its thing! Once everything was prepped, cleaned, hydrated, painted and ready, it was a simple assembly to get it looking like new! Fresh and sporty! Once the rear end was all sorted out it was onto the front end. This was the real mess. Old Spax coilovers with paint chipping off while everything else was hand painted in what looked like textured hammerite! and I do mean everything, bolts, bushes, the lot! Not a pretty sight! Along with some interesting choices in paint came an interesting choice in bush modification. The suspension used circa 1990 Vauxhall Astra bushes, but the builder had litterally hack-sawed them shorter to get some caster adjustment. The result was a messy mix of jagged bush, spacers, washers and well…. shit. This was not going to do at all so it all came off and was stripped back to bare metal before being sprayed in Auto-K Black Calliper paint. I love this paint because it self levels, requires no primer or top coat, is resin based and hardens. Its ideal for metal bits like suspension IMO! Complete OSF suspension setup stripped back to bare metal (this was not fun to do!) Painted and ready for assembly! Once painted I installed new bushes, new track rod ends as well as new upper and lower ball joints. This was what was needed to get the feeling back in the ride and sort the old girl for many years to come! Painted, refreshed and looking like new! Along the way, I replaced far too many bolts that were not the right size or spec which was slightly concerning. Why you would use a mild steel M8 bolt when it should be a stainless 8.8 M10 I have no idea, but when I found it wrong, it got put right! Of course the 3D printer came in handy along the way. Firstly to print some custom designed flexible mounts for the cycle wings to stop them rattling, and then to print some custom bolt caps with a Lotus 7 logo in. I mean, if you can, you should right? Flexible Cycle wing mounts printed in TPU Some of the many Bolt Caps I printed in ABS All in this particular modification / improvement has taken me just short of 3 months, but that’s mainly because I took my time and made it right! Related Images: [...]
InfoSecSo much has been said, good and bad, about GCHQ’s recent release of a cipher to the community. Simply a publicity stunt or well designed honey-pot? No one will ever really know, but what you don’t know is that this was an example of seeing a good idea and then totally cocking it up. Let me start by saying these are my own words and thoughts and in no way reflect the opinion of my employer, or those organisations I am associated with. A year or so ago, I got involved with the UK Cyber Security Challenge, which, as far as I am concerned is a good organisation, doing the right thing for the industry and those that want to be a part of it. I put a lot of my own personal time and resources into it for free, and make my employer give even more time, resources and money to the cause as well. Since I got involved with the UKCSC I have been providing them with simple on-line code breaking challenges, though my own devious thought processes and those of the many experts far better than me, that I have the pleasure of employing. We do these little challenges, typically on a quarterly basis, as well as to “support suitable and worthwhile endeavours”. One such endeavour happened recently, specifically, the London Conference on Cyberspace, hosted by the FCO. As was the usual manner for these things, I got a phone call from one of the UKCSC directors on a Friday evening asking if we could pull together a cipher for the event the following week, of course, I said we would be able to and engaged the collective grey matter of a couple of my team. The caveat to this request was that the cipher needed to somehow include GCHQ, the FCO, the UKCSC and of course my own companies brand. As such, I devised a simple 2 stage approach that would allow me to sufficiently bring together the brands and get the exposure each organisation wanted. The cipher itself was a union jack (in keeping with the event) hosted on the FCO conference site, with a series of logos on the flag itself. It was uploaded as a PNG file and had a binary string in the middle of the flag. The binary string easily translated to a goog.le shortlink that took you to a holding page on one of my sites that had each of the organisations logo’s and a message saying thanks for playing. What was less obvious and in fact the real challenge, was that the flag actually had two binary strings embedded onto each other in such a way that if you played with the colours you would see a series of 0’s that were in fact 1’s and vice versa 🙂 This decoded to a different goog.le link that took you to a random page on a paste bin style site, where there was an ascii art pumpkin with some cipher text in it. The cipher text required a key to decrypt, and the key was hidden as a html comment in the other page that you went to if you only found the first shortlink, so to complete the entire task you had to visit both short links, and pull it all together. It was a simple little cipher that around 100 or so people played and 3 people got right. I put the low turn out down to the last minute nature of the engagement and lack of major press coverage, but, it was still a lot of fun to pull together, and if you cant have fun in your work, what’s the point? So, what does all this have to do with the GCHQ Cipher I hear you ask? Simple… When my team and I developed this cipher for the event I was liaising with the guys at GCHQ careers to ensure they were happy with what we had done and that we had hit the relevant targets for them. In short, they “absolutely loved the cipher” and “thought it was a brilliant idea”. …a few weeks later, they had their own. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am aware I don’t own the rights to developing cipher/code breaking challenges to identify talent in the community, but I have been doing it long enough to know that you have to get the “pitching” absolutely perfect to the targets. By this I mean, there is no point in creating a cipher/challenge that would tax the most senior pen tester in the market when your using it to find talent to fill a job that pays £20K or so, in fact, this is the reason the ciphers we develop for the UKCSC are not that difficult. What these challenges do/should do is require the player to demonstrate some core requirements such as R&D/basic scripting/coding potentially, ability to think creatively etc, and then entice them in through layers of difficulty to a point where they are genuinely interested and engaged. This approach lets us target the college/university/entry to employment band of the industry and find the real talent in it to bring on board and then develop. So, in summary, GCHQ, nice try but don’t give up your day jobs, and next time you want some help finding talent to help protect the nation, just ask, we are always happy to help. Related Images: [...]
GeneralWell, its been a while, but after nearly a full year of ownership I thought I would share my thoughts…….. I bought a pair of Rokit RP6G2 Limited Edition (Yellow) Speakers nearly a year ago now and after a lot of use I can confirm they are truly an awesome sounding set of speakers. The honesty of the reproduction is not sacrificed to provide a “decent” sound from multiple digital sources. In fact, they sound just as good playing an Mp3 encoded at 192Kbps as they do outputting a raw track from Ableton, yet do not loose the accuracy or quality required to pick out the levels and sound scape….. truly an accomplishment. The acoustics of your room is of course a variable…. I had them initially in a small room and that increased the low frequency response ten fold, vs now, when I have them in a much larger room, where the bass is sacrificed somewhat, but not to the extent that its a problem I might add. If money was no object (and they are on my Christmas list), the icing on the cake for these speakers is clearly a KRK 10S and the acclaimed ERGO system. The addition of these items would make the overall sound from this configuration truly something to be reckoned with. Related Images: [...]
Alfa 159This post covers the exterior lighting modifications made to my 2008 Alfa Romeo 159 TI. If you are interested in the interior LED conversion guide, click here. This modification can be completed as a single project or as a series of smaller projects as the cost of components is still quite high due to some of the LED types in use. If you do choose to split the project I would suggest separating the turn signals / Indicators, Numberplate lights, sidelights and rear clusters into stand alone projects. For an alternative approach to upgrade the “Third Brake Light” at position 9, click here to see the Cylon Project. Each topic area is collapsed below for your ease of navigation so either “Show All” or Expand each sub-topic as needed:   The parts you need for this conversion are as follows: 4 x Type 380 (1157) RED 13-LED Superlux [BAY15D,380,1157,P21/5w] 12v (Positions 5,6,7&8) 1 x Type 382 CREE Q5 12V/24V HIGH POWER LED BULB for the reverse light (Position 8 ) 1 x Type 382/P21W 5W CREE Q5 RED LED BULB for the fog light (Position 6) 2 x CANBUS Type 501/W5W/T10 24 LED Bulbs for the front side lights (Positions 1&2) 2 x CANBUS Type 501/W5W/T10 4 LED  Bulbs for the numberplate lights (Position 10 ) 4 x BAU15s 7507 Q5+12SMD=7W Brake/Signal Light 150° LED Bulbs Amber/Yellow PY21W for the front and rear indicators (Positions 1,2,5&7) 2 x 5 SMD LED AMBER ORANGE INDICATOR SIGNAL TURNING SIDE LIGHT BULB T10 W5W 501 for the side repeaters (Positions 3&4) 11 x 50w 10 ohm Aluminium clad wire wound resistors 2 x 25w 47 ohm Aluminium clad wire wound resistors 2 x 330 ohm 0.6w metal resistors Lots of wire & plenty of heat shrink wrap 10 x Red Scotch clips 8 x Red 3mm male spade terminals 8 x Red 3mm female spade terminals Estimated Cost: £170-200 Required Tools: Soldering iron Solder Flux paste Helping hands Hot glue gun Pro-Tip: You can remove the need to solder as well as reduce the overall effort if your prepared to increase your spend to buy the resistors pre-made from ebay. The example increase is DIY=£2 for a pair, whereas on ebay that would be £7-10 for the pair.   “CAN Bus” Most modern cars make use of numerous computers within the vehicle all connected through something known as a Controller Area Network or “CAN Bus” for short. One of these computers is typically dedicated to looking after the internal electronics such as dials and gauges etc as well as the lighting circuits, in the Alfa its called the “Bodywork Computer” or “NBC” and one of its jobs is to make sure that if a bulb blows, you are warned when you get into the car with a friendly picture of your car and a warning symbol showing you which bulb has blown. This is a great feature, but unfortunately, it works against you when your swapping a traditional filament bulb for a new style LED replacement. The reason why is that a traditional bulb illuminates by putting a voltage across a metal element, essentially shorting out the circuit, causing it to heat up and emit light. This process creates a reasonably high load, measured in amps. LED bulbs work completely differently, essentially, they produce light by pushing electrons around inside a solid semi-conductor, which is a much more efficient process that creates significantly less load. This is where the problem comes! The bodywork computer puts a small amount of electricity on the bulb circuit to test that it has a connection and that the filament has not blown, so when you swap your old filament bulb for a LED one, you get one or two issues. The first issue is that the bodywork computer thinks the bulb has blown and lets you know, the second is that the small amount of power used to perform the test is actually enough to gently illuminate the LED, so it always stays on and never switches off, even when the ignition is off! In order to fix this issue you need to use more power than you need to actually run the LED so you need to add resistance to the circuit to absorb and use extra power and simulate load. Exactly how much resistance you need is a mathematical calculation known as “ohms law” which takes a number of variables and tells you how much resistance, measured in ohms, you need to add. When you add resistance to a circuit it creates heat as the excess power is turned into heat energy to be dissipated. For this reason its important to make use of a large wattage resistor (wattage is the measure of a resistors heat dissipation ability) so that you don’t either burn out the component or even worse, create a fire hazard. For each of the bulbs I have used, I have first measured the amps that the original filament bulb runs at, and then the amps that the replacement LED runs at to determine the correct resistor to add. For most of my replacement LEDs I have needed to simulate around 1.2amps of additional load, which was achieved using a 50w, 10 ohm aluminium wire wound resistor, however for the two side repeaters I only needed to simulate around 0.3 amps, so I used a 47 ohm, 25w aluminium wire wound resistor. In this case, because the ohms was higher and the load to simulate was lower, I was able to use a smaller wattage which reduced the actual size of the resistor. As a point of note, every bulb in the 159 except the reverse light and the third brake light, has a CAN-BUS sensing circuit on it, and as such, will need to be replaced with a CAN-BUS capable LED or have additional resitors added to that circuit.   Front Clusters The front clusters can be quite difficult to work with as, depending on your engine, there may not be much room to work. As mine is the 2.4 JTDM engine, I have the least amount of room so small hands, patients and a high tolerance for pain are required. The 24LED sidelights require a small modification to them before they are installed as, despite being sold as “CAN Bus friendly”, they do not simulate enough load for the Alfa to be happy with, as such, additional load, all be it a very small amount, is required. The modification requires the addition of a 330 ohm 0.6w resistor to each bulb so that when it is installed, the computer is happy that the bulb is not blown. I achieved this by soldering the LED directly onto the bulb as per the following images. Once the bulbs are ready to be installed, the next job is to prepare two of the 10 ohm 50w resistors for the front indicators. This is done by soldering around 6-8 inches of wire onto either terminal of the resistors, heat shrinking the exposed connections, and then putting scotch blocks on the end, ready to be attached to the wires inside the headlight.       The installation process is fiddly and generally very annoying but essentially for the sidelight, follow the eLearn guide below: For the indicator, the following eLearn guide shows you how to change the bulb, however, in addition to this, you need to scotch clip the resistor to the two wires connecting to the bulb holder and place it somewhere inside the light unit once complete. In general I use a heat transfer sticky pad to affix the resistor to a suitable surface to stop it moving around:   Rear Clusters The rear clusters are by far the most involved and require the most effort. They are split into two sections per side, one fixed to each wing (Potions 5&7) and two fixed to the boot lid (Positions 6&8). As each light unit contains a number of bulbs to replace its easier to make a “loom extension” that sits in between the original connector and the light unit and adds in the extra resistors in bulk for the bulbs. As such the light units at Positions 5 & 7 require 3 x 10 ohm , 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistors each, while the light unit at Position 6 requires 2 x10 ohm , 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistors and the light unit at Position 8 only requires 1 x10 ohm, 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistor. For Position 8 it is easier to just scotch clip a single resistor into place over the “tail light” connection, as this is the only live circuit that makes use of a CAN Bus check signal. The Reverse Light does not have any CAN Bus checking (we will assume because you would notice!), and despite the type 1159 dual element stop/tail bulb being used in this position, only the tail element is wired up. I assume this was a “design feature” to save you carrying two different bulb types for the rear, although I find it quite stupid personally. Position 8 wiring is illustrated below: Position 6 requires two resistors installing and as such its easier to build an extension for that connector than actually scotch clip them in place. The extension looks like the following and is attached to the shell of the car using heat transfer sticky pads for optimum heat dissipation into the vehicles shell:     These rear clusters are accessed for this upgrade as per the following guide: Positions 5 & 7 are both the same with a three resistor unit required. The following images show the unit and the installation:       Whenever I have installed a loom extension I have coated the connections in hot glue so that they cannot come loose during driving conditions and I have used the sticky pads to secure the resistors on top of the metal surround for the light unit for optimal heat dissipation into the body shell.. The bulbs and loom extensions are then installed through the normal bulb change procedure:   Side Repeaters The side repeaters have a limited amount of space to accommodate a bulb and as such the overall size of the bulb is an important factor. The chosen bulb is as large as the unit can house and also makes use of a multi-SMD architecture to provide a good directional light output. Aside from changing the bulb, additional resistance is needed to simulate the missing load of the original bulb. These resistors can be mounted in the engine bay, and cables run through the wing to join up with the side repeaters, where they can be scotch clipped to the existing wiring and then covered in ample amounts of insulation tape to avoid any moisture getting into the joins:    I used heat transfer sticky pads to stick the resistors to the top of the suspension pillars and ran the cable through the seem at the top of the wing down through to the side repeater hole for ease. This was a remarkably easy process and required only limited “fishing” for the cable. Removal of the side repeater is a very simple process as per the following eLearn guide:   Number Plate Lights The number plate LEDs are a simple swap of the original W5W type bulbs for the 4 LED versions. The 4 LED versions have been chosen for two primary reasons, firstly, I do not want it to be brighter than the original bulbs and secondly, the bulb housing do not have any built in reflectors, so its important to have the LEDs pointing the right way. The chosen bulbs satisfy these criteria well and provide a good light output. The upgrade is simple and the eLearn guide is below: The finished product looks like this:      Third Brake Light The third brake light employs a 10 x filament bulb light bar plugged into the back of the reflector unit, so to complete the LED conversion this is going to need to change. To do this, you will need to make a replacement bulb as no “off the shelf” direct replacements exist. I have built one called “The Cylon” which runs each LED individually and has some cool effects, but if you just want a simple LED replacement you can try  the following approach. (warning, I have not done this so it needs verifying). You will need to get 10 x 5mm round high power red LEDs with as wide a viewing angle as possible, like these, but do your own research to find the best ones you can. Once you have your LEDs you can use an on-line LED wizard to figure out the best way of wiring them up and what resistance you need to add. This will give you an output like this: All you then need to do is remove the third brake light from the car, get out your soldering iron and hot glue your LEDs directly into the back of the reflector:    Once the glue is dry, make the connections as shown in the diagram, solder up all the parts and run about 18 inches of cable from the new unit to a “2 pin header row” that can be used to make a plug:    The completed unit can then be installed back into the car. There is no CAN Bus issues on this circuit so the light will just work like the original.   The complete/finished product is better displayed as a video and as such you can watch this one I made of the complete conversion: Related Images: [...]
GeneralHere is the Dilema. Do you want performance, versitility or cheap? I go with performace, and let skill do the versitility bit. Here are some of the ones I have seen and a couple I have used: Stanton Final Scratch Not available these days unless its second hand, I had a Mk1 version, USB connectivity and the Software was only stable on a MAC, even then, a little tempremental! Serato SCRATCH Recentley borrowed one of these of a mate, and I have to say I was impressed, easy to use, stable, even on Vista! and quick response from the USB hardware. Native Instruments AUDIO8 DJ I am itchin to get hold of one of these, it looks pretty impressive and ticks all the boxes in terms of functionality, Firewire interface so it should be spot on for scratchin, and based on the latest version of Tractor FS, so again, proven technology. Related Images: [...]
InfoSecSo here we are again, a few months on, and just when so many were licking their wounds after the last infection, along comes another. Guess what, if you had your eyes shut my sympathy is not going to be that forthcoming! Malware has come along way since its anarchistic pre-pubescent   beginnings, and is now a fully fledged teenager, displaying all the fire, passion and unpredictability you would expect from one. Once upon a time, you could be sure your malware was simple in its intention, written by an unorganised person or persons, with the typical agenda of notoriety or malicious damage. Although bad, quite easy to deal with. Modern malware however is a whole new ball game. Written to order, with a menu of “features” available from stealing data to placing a sleeper inside the system, all with standard issue mass infection mechanisms anti malware detection programming, the latest in self defence techniques and with the underlying drive of a typically well organised or at least very motivated source. Yet despite this significant step change in what we are seeing as the attack, as a world of experts I am still not seeing a change in the controls, strategies or defence tactics of many organisations. This I find astounding. How anyone who is considered a responsible person in an organisation can sleep at night thinking that a firewall and a few layers of Anti-Virus is going to cut it as the total form of protection is seriously miss-informed. Equally, those companies out there pedalling the silver bullets of the security world ” ultimate anti-malware solution (TM)” are doing nothing but compound a problem that will continue to evolve and get more sophisticated. The simple fact is that ANY malware solution on the planet today from any vendor works on the same detection methods. They look for something they have seen before or something that looks like something they have seen before and block it, It’s that simple. And for that reason alone, you cannot rely on that control alone as the only form of defence. Equally, the firewall and all that other perimeter based paraphernalia you invested in, don’t get me wrong, all well and good, but its not going to stop this stuff. Why? Web 2.0, Social Networking, Unified Communications, Chat, Mail, you name it. Any medium of communication that can facilitate the transfer of a file, and that includes just good old browsing of the web, will bring malware to your door, invited in so to speak, through all that perimeter protection, and straight to the desktop. The truth is, the only way to protect yourself against this stuff is to stop thinking it’s “the good old days” and get with the times. The only way you’re going to stand a chance of surviving one of these incidents is by thinking about the entire control landscape and how they interact with each other. A good model for this is Defence in Depth as that provides a very good method of visualising the controls at each layer of your environment and allows you to map attacks through the controls to see if they would be successful or not. This simple visualisation strategy can bring value beyond your wildest dreams, giving you the opportunity to stop, think and adjust what you’re doing, justify investment, demonstrate control and rationalise spend. All very important concepts for the times. There is a world of products, vendors control choices and equipment with pretty flashing LED’s on it. The only way to figure out which ones will help you is to understand what you have, what you need and why. Related Images: [...]
LiveMixesWell, it’s been a long time coming, but until today, there has always been a reason not to. Recently, I managed to cobble together my old Stanton Final Scratch V1.1, and sure enough, the old girl worked a treat. So here is the result. The first mix of 2008, and although I am obviously a little rusty, its not too shabby! (Appologies to any listeners, there is a small low level hum you pick up during quiet moments due to the old laptop I am using. The next mix will have this fixed) Enjoy! https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/DJJD__Dirty_House__16072008.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Related Images: [...]
General…what is it about working from home that makes life so much easier? I treasure my days in the “home office” as they give me opportunity to catch up on all that has evaded me for so long! I find at least 1 day a week keeps me ahead of the game and on top of the workload. Related Images: [...]
Alfa 159Before I even started this project, I spent quite a lot of time figuring out potential box sizes and planning the acoustics of the project. The overall goal was maximum SQ & Power balance with the least boot space loss possible! No mean feet to achieve. I opted to retain the stock OEM head unit rather than go for an after-market double-din one as I wanted the overall look and feel of the car to remain normal, while improving the audio characteristics and overall frequency response. In order to achieve this I made use of an Audio control LC2i active, line level converter. A unit from the USA that is very special and literally takes speaker level outputs up to 400W RMS and then runs them through a series of electronic clean-up routines to get a perfect line level out for the sub-woofer, than can also be controlled by a remote gain control, and a perfect 2 channel full range output for a mid amp (to be utilised in a further project). This unit combined with an Infinity KAPPA Perfect 12 VQ (M3D) sub-woofer and an Alpine MRV-420 amplifier I already had was all I needed to put a little boom back into the boot! ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″] Related Images: [...]

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