Rob the Geek

Category: Misc

  • Managing Behaviour & Technology – A Night with NEAL

    I’ve just arrived back from an evening session on “Managing Technology and Behaviour @ Home” run by Andrew Cowie, Heather Eccles and Alan Curtis from NEAL (Northern Education Access Loop). I surprised myself by enjoying the session, it wasn’t that I personally learned anything technical, it was all about the presentation of the material which was simply […]

  • Tweaking the Home Network – pfSense Firewall [Part 3: Monitoring Your Network]

    Now that pfSense is connecting through your home LAN and serving addresses to the ‘Teenage Subnet’, we need to do some further tweaking to make sure we can keep our semi-hostile network safe as well as keeping an eye on our network traffic usage and what our users are accessing. Install Packages Filtering Traffic

  • Credential Security …again

    So, with another major collection of user credentials being uncovered (and reported in the mainstream media), there is a slight increase in interest in people, their data, and the credentials they use. For those who may not yet have caught up with the news (or those reading this in the future and wondering which massive credential theft I’m referring to), this is the uncovering of the work done by ‘Cyber Vor’ who managed to snare around 1.2 billion (yes, with a B) unique user credentials.

  • This is water

    A bit of a deviation from my standard fare of techy news and opinion, but I’m bundling this under “Community & Social” – I think it fits well. This video gave me pause for thought… It’s a well produced, visually engaging excerpt from an address to graduates in 2005 by novelist David Foster Wallace. Sadly, […]

  • Standing on the Wall

    Today I was discussing the recent work by the New Zealand Police in bring a number of people up on charges for their part in an international pedophile ring. While I’ll save you from the details (you can do your own reading using this article as a starting point), some of the alleged offenses are […]

  • Technology and Recreation – a recipie for AWESOME

    For gadget geeks like myself, there’s always been an opportunity to mix technology with what we do when AFK (away from keyboard). My first heart monitor watch *had* to be imported because no one in this country was selling the IR receiver (connecting through a DB9 (serial) cable no less.. for the more normal, serial […]

  • Social Scams and Why They Work

    Over the last week, as New Zealanders begin to change their jandals (flip-flops / thongs) for shoes, I’ve noted a significant increase in the number of “warnings” being posted in my social network feeds. This is not uncommon and it’s not unique only to my network of contacts as these articles point out. Now, for […]

  • Expiring Passwords

    Today there was a question pitched by one of the guys at work as to why we bother having such things as a password expiry / enforced change. My answer (in true Rob fashion), rambled a little (ok, a lot) but I’ve consolidated it below and made it generic to suit anyone facing the same […]

  • ASUS Garmin A10

    I got one of these phones when they first came out – they were pretty awesome back then, however over time they have been orphaned on older, vulnerable iterations of Android and they simply don’t have what it takes to be a primary device any longer. Because of this – I’m currently looking to root the phone and install upon it a modified ROM which will give me *just* what I need to turn this into a useful device for sitting in the car.

  • Authenticating Users – The Struggle to Raise the Bar

    Interesting quote from an article that I was reading this morning: “When creating a patient portal that provides access to electronic health records, healthcare organizations must educate patients about the need for authenticating their identities, says Sharp HealthCare CIO Bill Spooner. […] Spooner notes that some patients have complained that the authentication method for its […]