A story of when abandoned tech gets assimilated for undesirable purposes. AKA when I inadvertently created a massive open spam proxy. (Although in fairness I can also now say that I have created a site that was creating literally thousands of hits per minute… which is pretty huge.)

Let’s start with some excuses

(Warning: large amount of, shall we say, “scene-setting“.)

I don’t claim to be a web developer. Or certainly I don’t claim to be a very good one. Despite what some of my friends and family may think, it’s not what I do for a job. I know a little bit about a little bit but I am miles behind what some of the bigshots can do with the web nowadays.

Update: 06/01/2022

Just tried this all on macOS 12.0.1 (Monterey) and it was all fine. The only difference was that (a) Homebrew moaned that Xcode was out of date, so that needed a 12gb update, and (b) Powershell moaned about using stuff from an untrusted repository. In the end I trusted PSGallery by using:

Set-PSRepository -Name 'PSGallery' -InstallationPolicy Trusted

In fact the only real issue was the horrific shade of yellow that the highlighting decided to use for cmdlet names!

A vaguely tech-related philosophical-ish thought-piece.

Tedious irrelevant tech challenge #7582: I still buy music. On physical media. CD mainly.

Tedious philosophical quandry #29: are streaming services eroding our emotional connection with music?

I don’t know why I still buy physical media. The economics of it don’t really make sense when compared with all the kool-kidz streaming stuff that is available nowadays. I can buy one album for around a tenner. I can buy a month’s streaming service of near-infinite music for around a tenner.

In true form for this blog of documenting obscure things that will be inconsequential to 99.999999% of normal people, here’s (yet) another.

My — well-documented on Twitter, but as yet undocumented here — fallout with Drift Innovation’s Ghost cameras led me to emergency buy three GoPro Hero Session cameras - 1x Hero 4 Session and 2x Hero 5 Session.

The form factor of these diminutive cameras is highly appealing compared with the bulkier form of similar. You can really achieve a stealth cam thing.

A quick video showing how to replace the rear foglight customer on a BMW Mini.

Well this was a “fun” little technology frustration. We wanted to get the Disney+ app on our Sony Bravia 4K HDR television - specifically - the Sony KD-55XD8005. By all accounts, Disney+ is supported on all Android-based televisions and ours is Android.

Have heard from plenty of other people who have done it with no problem. Even someone, who lives nearby, with the exact same television - it installed fine. The only difference we can find is that I’m on a slightly different (newer) firmware edition: mine is PKG6.6575.0259EUA against his which is PKG6.6545.0255EUA.

This is a long overdue (and tedious) write-up of my experience of custom-building a router table.

(Clarification: router as in r-OW-ter table as opposed to r-OO-ter (i.e. the box you get from your ISP for your home Wifi. The pronounciation is annoying, especially for someone who works in computers. Anyway.)

My closer associates know that I am a mostly clueless wannabe woodworker with more tools than knowledge. I have more saws than you could care to name, let alone actually find a constructive use for.

Recently updated to macOS Big Sur. I’m not sure why I do this sort of thing quite so freely… I always naively assume everything will be OK. And so far, Big Sur vs Catalina is just a bit nightmare.

I’m sure there’s a huge amount of “don’t like change” in there but there are many things that are annoying the crap out of me with Big Sur. Calendar notifications for one. Gah.

But anyway, one real issue I have had was with VMware Fusion. I was previously on v11.something and when trying to launch a VM got greeted with “Host OS does not have enough physical memory to launch this VM” which was a complete load of bollocks. After a quick Google, it was evident it was a VMware incompatibility issue - Fusion 11 will not run on Big Sur and you must upgrade to VMWare 12. Yay. $100 later and I have Fusion 12 and… things are still broken. Main issue is that trying to start a VM results in a bunch of error messages… these seem to get resolved by changing the compatibility level of the VM…. but even then, starting the VM ends up in a black screen.

The scenario is: SharePoint… open in Windows Explorer is working great and then mysteriously, BOOM, it no worky no mo.

\\server\DavWWWRoot\etc is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

A device attached to the system is not functioning.

Except it does worky on other places, even in the same site. Screams of permissions issues…. but it’s not.

Not much intro needed to this one. Have recently binned our monstrous VMWare ESXi host in favour of a single monstrous Windows Server 2019 and within a matter of nanoseconds of doing a requirement came in that needed a VM building that would allow us to easy test some Java-y / Tomcat-y / MySQL-y stuff and rather than jump the hoops of doing this in Windows, figured an Ubuntu-y type machine would do the job, and rather than faff with VMWare decided to give Hyper-V a bash.