James Stanley

Nightdrive

Encrypted email is still a pain

Today I sent an email to somebody who specified that he "prefers GPG mail". I didn't have any GPG set up, so I just sent a normal email, which worked perfectly well. But it made me look in to GPG, and this is what I learnt...

Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.

Librem 5: First Impressions

The Librem 5 does not run Android or iOS, it runs a proper Linux operating system ( PureOS , derived from Debian). There are hardware kill switches for the baseband modem, the camera and microphone, and WiFi and bluetooth. The phone's main selling point is that it doesn't spy on you.

Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns?

I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books. The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed , and of the ones that I checked, none…

Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service

SMS Privacy is available as a Tor hidden service, and it turns out ~10% of users actually use it that way. This post details what I found when somebody created a phishing site of my Tor hidden service.

Should you wash your solar panels?

I have a small solar farm and the panels have got visibly dusty. Is cleaning them worthwhile? How much difference does it make? Let's find out.

Tractor

The electric tractor is finished! I have been working on this on and off for about 6 months. It is a toy for children (and me) to drive around the garden.

I made a mechanical keyboard with 3D-printed switches

The keyboard is done! This is basically the result of what I've been working on for the past 2 months, which has involved 3 iterations of testing machines, over 100 printed switches, and now finally a keyboard that I can type on. Unfortunately it is not a very good keyboard, but you can't win them all.

Home 3D metal printing: first results

A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.

Someone used my IPFS gateway for phishing

At 02:43 this morning, I received an abuse complaint email. It was sent by PhishLabs to DigitalOcean, and DigitalOcean forwarded it to me.

I made a macro keypad with 3D-printed switches

Latest on the 3d-printed keyboard switch project: I've reached a switch design that I think is probably reliable enough, and I've put 3 of them together to form a macro keypad just to see how it all goes together before I commit to a full keyboard. I don't have a number for how many presses the switch lasts, other…

The story of Max, a real programmer

This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…

Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU

I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.

Hacker News is more interested in Bitcoin when there's a bubble forming

You might have got the impression that there are a lot of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News lately. With SegWit set to activate in the next few weeks, and Bitcoin Cash likely to fork off on the 1st of August, I took a look at Hacker News' relationship with Bitcoin over the past years.

Towards a Better Pythagorean Cup

There was an article on Hacker News the other day by David Richeson entitled Make Your Own Pythagorean Cup . A Pythagorean cup is a cup with a built-in siphon. Supposedly invented by Pythagoras, the cup functions just like an ordinary cup as long as it is only filled to a certain level. If anyone gets greedy and tries…

Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people

I was looking on the DuckDuckGo search results for "anonymous bitcoin sms" today, just to see what was out there. My SMS Privacy was the top result, as expected. But the second result was new to me:

How to accept Bitcoin payments without running a full node

Accepting Bitcoin payments for an online service can be daunting at first (I worked out how to do it, for SMS Privacy , a couple of months ago). What I describe is not the only way to accept Bitcoin payments - it's not even the best way to accept Bitcoin payments - but it works for me. And it might work for you, too.

Interesting features of John Harrison's sea clocks

I recently got to see John Harrison's sea clocks at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I recommend visiting if you get the chance. This post is about some of the interesting things I observed.