Visit blog.benjojo.co.uk → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2015 – Sep 2025
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I recently found some USB devices on eBay (Epiphan VGA2USB LR) that could take VGA as input and present the output as a webcam. Given that I was keen on the idea of not needing to lug out a VGA monitor ever again and there was claimed Linux support I took the risk and bought the whole job lot for about £20 (25 USD).
If you have just/as of late gotten an email about your keys being revoked, this is because of me, and if you have, you should really go through and make sure that no one has done anything terrible to you, since you have opened yourself to people doing very mean things to you for what is most likely a very long time.
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frustrating reason to have to get rid of something is that drivers stop being made for devices.
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that it’s now common to see more than one of these every year), or April Fool’s Day, and some of them are pretty great. Here are some of my favourites:
Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having context in regards to what is actually being run by the CPU.
BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the ISP to ISP interactions and is now a very fundemental part of the internet.
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
It’s an established fact on the internet that we have ran out of IP(v4) addresses , and we are starting to see the pressure on obtaining IPv4 space. For example if you want to get a /24 block from RIPE NCC when you sign up as a member, then you are currently looking at a 2 month wait for a recycled IPv4 /24 block .
Border Gateway Protocol is the de facto protocol that directs routing decisions between different ISP networks, and is generally known as the “glue” that holds the internet together. It’s safe to say that the internet we currently know would not function without working BGP implementations.
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out.
I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches.
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and this post (EvE) as a crash course on how BGP works).
The internet is big. Really big . You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the /22 you got as a LIR was big, but that’s just peanuts to the internet.
EvE online is a fascinating game. It’s one of the few MMO’s that only have a single “server” to log into, meaning everyone is playing on the same logical world. It’s also had a fascinating set of events that have happened inside it, and also remains a very visually appealing game for what it is:
[Warning: Those who can’t stand EDM/dubstep, oh boy do I have bad news for you in regards to this blog post]
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…
The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents.
While the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea were/are currently beefing on Twitter about who should destroy the world first, North Korea was also causing me some personal frustration on data quality.
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), your disk array controller, or volume manager. However there always seems to be some critical machine in my life that does not fall into these…