@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

ben

@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk

I'm Ben and I'm rubbish at writing bio's.

I'm a general geek, who's core skillsets boil down to trouble-shooting and reverse engineering.

I mostly talk about #Tech, #Monitoring, #SoftwareDevelopment, #Privacy & #Security

If you want to send messages encrypted with PGP, you can find my key in the links below.

My Toots auto-delete after a month (https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/opinion/arguments-for-and-against-auto-deleting-mastodon-toots.html)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

> The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
>
> But the error count is much higher once an someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive.

Sorry, do the Met think 1 in 33,000 is a good failure rate?

That's abysmal even before you get onto the false positive rate or before you look at outcomes and realise you may incorrectly deprive someone of their liberty

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-69055945

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

started offering in my area.

It sounded quite tempting until I looked closer at their terms.

Residential packages:

  • 24 month contract
  • price goes up a tenner a month if you roll off the end
  • Use of their router reqd

If you want a static IP, or to put the router in bridging mode, you need a business pkg, which are all symmetric, so cost a good chunk more.

I'd be paying more for less.

I think I'll stick with @aaisp and wait for Openreach to get FTTP rolled out round here.

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : hangs on opening

After years of working perfectly for me, my text editor up and broke on me.

Spoiler: The underlying issue was actually a mount, turns out KATE walks the filesystem on launch, even if not opening a file

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/kate-sits-on-a-loading-wheel.html

ben, to Smoking
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

My last cigarette was 6 years ago today

Feels like a lot longer, though I still periodically find myself fancying one - particularly if there's time that I need to kill.

I don't think that'll ever go away though.

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/stop-smoking.html

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

My inbox isn't just elite, it needs enunciation

Yeah, I should probably have a clear out

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New post: Spending an Afternoon in the Sizewell Control Room Simulator

I'm a bit late in writing something, but @popey, @8none1, @sil got to spend an afternoon in the operations training centre at B power station

T'was an awesome afternoon

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/an-afternoon-in-sizewell-b-control-room-simulator.html

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : Plugging a heater into an extension lead, what could go wrong?

We had a 2kW heater plugged into a multi-socket lead which ultimately failed.

I took the lead apart to see what exactly had gone wrong.

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/plugging-a-heater-into-a-switched-extension-lead-what-could-go-wrong.html

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New Post - Ex-Owner Wants To Walk Our On His Own

Bonnies old owner got in contact last weekend to ask whether we'd be open to him taking her for a walk around town for an hour.

We replied and said that we weren't comfortable with this, which resulted in some fairly grumpy pushback.

In this post, I put my thoughts in order a bit.

I'm curious to hear whether there's anyone who would have allowed it?

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/aita-for-not-allowing-my-rehomed-dogs-ex-owner-to-walk-her.html

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : News Stopped Syncing My Feeds

In which one of @neil's old posts accidentally DoS'd my feed reader

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/nextcloud-news-stopped-updating-some-of-my-feeds.html

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New #Blog: Automating a #HotTub with #homeassistant

We recently got a wifi-enabled hot tub. Some enterprising soul had already created a HA addon to work with it, so I set about implementing #observability, #automation and #alerting.

Amongst other things, it now starts heating automatically if there's plunge pricing on #octopusenergy Agile

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/automating-our-hottub-with-home-assistant.html

#homeautomation #grafana

ben, to fediverse
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : Adding a Fediverse Comments Box to a Site

This documentation details adding mastodon-post (by @DavidDarnes) into a static site generated by the Nikola in order to link back to discussion in the

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/embedding-a-mastodon-comments-box-in-a-nikola-site-template.html

ben, to thinkpad
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Gotta love the web...

Littlun's wont power on or acknowledge a charger. Searching to make sure there's nothing I missed when I found a page that gives the following troubleshooting steps:

  1. Check cable for damage
  2. Do a power reset
  3. Update the battery driver
  4. Update your BIOS
  5. Switch to a Chromebook

It's like they wrote 4 steps and then went "ah, you're fucked mate"

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : Syncing notes to on

My obsidian vault is synced into but the android app kept letting me down and not keeping my phone's version up to date.

In this post, I talk about using to handle syncing between Android and Nextcloud

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/syncing-notes-to-obsidian-android-with-nextcloud-and-foldersync.html

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New #blog: Heating with Electricity instead of Gas

After we had #solar installed we also moved onto Agile by #octopusenergy

This winter, rather than using bottled gas for additional heating, we used electric heaters - this post talks a little about how we approached it, some issues we encountered and the result.

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/heating-with-electric-instead-of-gas.html

#homeautomation #homeassistant

ben, to solar
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

I've gotta say, I continue to be quite disappointed with the quality of our inverter - or at least, the firmware running on it.

We have a scheduled grid charge between 00:00 - 06:30.

This morning, the battery was full at ~04:30, so stopped charging.

In the ensuing 2 hours, the battery (presumably) went to sleep and the inverter didn't realise and so didn't wake it.

Getting it out of that state was a PITA

ben, to Blog
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : has an Honesty Problem

In which (with the inadvertant help of ) attempt to try and screw me out of nearly £500 after someone in Amazon's delivery chain stole our order

Note: I'd greatly appreciate it if people could boost the ever-living hell out of this one to try and stop the next victim from happening

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/opinion/amazon-parcel-contents-get-stolen-and-then-amazon-tries-to-keep-payment.html

ben, to Amazon
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

So it's now about a month since said they'd issue a refund for the Xbox their delivery driver stole.

They issued a QR so that I could return the box full of snickers.

Still no refund - in their web interface, the date for the refund to be issued just keeps drifting further out.

Talked to CS, because it's a higher value it can take a month for them to approve (and then still another 14 days to issue).

Utter fucking shambles

ben, to Youtube
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Cheeky fuckers.

have deployed Javascript that delays video load if the user is using

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/

ben, to Amazon
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Some absolute fucking cunt has stolen my item - this was supposed to be an Christmas present.

Their one-time-password system really isn't fit for purpose, all it's actually doing is marking parcels as being worth the risk.

ben, to bot
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

In the last 90 days, my SSH has wasted 13 years of time

Some of the connections that escaped during that time had been stuck in there for 6 weeks.

China remains the individual top source of bots, though (based on those escaping) US and Russian bots tend to stick for the longest.

The spikes visible in the graph seem to be primarily driven by Chinese bots

ben, to ubuntu
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Why the fuck are the install instructions now suggesting you install on using ?

I don't particularly like the experience of using snap on a , I sure as hell don't want that on a server.

acme.sh it is then

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Fun fact: if you fuck up the only entry in .ssh/config you get some very confusing behaviour

$ cat .ssh/config
Hostname gitlabssh.home
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitlab.key

What would you expect this to do?

ssh myserver.example.com

It'll open a SSH session to gitlabssh.home.

That first line should be

Host gitlabssh.home

The directive HostName is valid, but overrides the destination connection name. With no "Host" before it, it applies globally.

That was mildly confusing few minutes.

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

ffs... One of the phones in our house is a Motorola G7.

It's never liked our main wifi network, so has lived on the guest network.

For various reasons that needed to change, so I had to dig into it.

It connects, claims there's no internet, disconnects, reconnects and repeats.

All other devices are fine. I can see it (successfully) resolving the Google connectivity check domain etc. Turned off 5Ghz wifi, same issue.

Finally found the issue earlier

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

New : Messing around with the based

In which Bing berate, abuses and even endorses me as well as putting me into some national publications.

Also... a poem....

Some of it wasn't even the result of

TW: profanity and references to adult content

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/playing-around-with-bings-ai-chatbot.html

ben, to random
@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk avatar

Ok, so Bing's AI Chatbot came up with a new tagline for my site for me.

It's a bit grandiose... but I like it

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • modclub
  • DreamBathrooms
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • ngwrru68w68
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • cisconetworking
  • JUstTest
  • ethstaker
  • tacticalgear
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • Durango
  • rosin
  • Leos
  • normalnudes
  • anitta
  • cubers
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •