I recently wrote an extractor for HP server AHS files, which are essentially archives of server health data that can be used by HP to help diagnose issues.

I'm sitting here in my hotel room in Auckland, having driven a long way today - but I'm not tired. I've just connected to the hotel's free WiFi, which gets me thinking about a hotel I stayed in about 10 years ago in Brisbane, where I found that all the hotel's documents were accessible on an open SMB share on the wireless network. Hmmm, I wonder what the security's like here.

I've purchased a few knock-off Lego Star Wars kits from AliExpress over the last few years. They're cheap, and fun to build.

I used a Raspberry Pi and old flatscreen monitor to build a picture frame. The images are Demotivators, and they're loaded by Kodi as a screensaver.

The warning light for the airbag on my Fiat Marea started lighting up, indicating a problem with the airbag. I read up on the issue, and found that it can be a problem with the wiring, and that once triggered the light would continue to illuminate until the fault was cleared in the onboard computer.

There's a lot of fun to be had with sticky googly eyes.

At CoderDojo we walked the kids through building an AR sandbox.

I built a Philips Ambilight clone for my Sony TV using WS2812B LEDs and an ESP8266 controller. The ESP connects to the WiFi network, and Kodi sends updates on which colour each LED should be via UDP to Hyperion running on the ESP. I'm impressed with how well this worked over wireless.

I recently bought a second-hand IT-100 IT In A Box from TradeMe for NZ$180 - a bargain, as they retailed a couple of years ago for about US$1,500. The IT-100 is made by EmergeCore Networks, and is basically a PC in a small box with a Wireless card (802.11b), 2 NICs (one as a 4 port switch), a parallel port and 2 USB ports.

This was a fun hack, although unfortunately I don't have many decent quality images of it. Myself and a friend, Dave, spent a couple of hours glitching a cheap second hand Yamaha keyboard.

My friend Gordy helped out for my skeptical podcast by building a stand for the microphone arms.

My desktop PC has 4 NVidia Quadro NVS 290 PCI-E graphics cards. They're not great, but three of them were free, and along with a whole bunch of free monitors (1280 x 960) from a work customer I managed to put a six screen setup.

I've managed to fix a few NVidia 8000 series devices that suffered from bad solder joints by heating the chip until the solder reflows. I used tin foil to protect the rest of the device from the heat, and heated with both an oven grill and a heat gun.

I have a server at home dedicated to media. It holds media files for TV shows and Movies, along with associated metadata, and also has several TV cards. Some of the TV cards are for DVB-S satellite TV, and to decode them I needed to be able to read my Sky card:

My first web server was a 233MHz Pentium PC squeezed into a small Pizza Hut pizza box.