Smart Home: Rebuild

In this post, I build a highly available Kubernetes cluster.

History & Why

Back in 2019, I was one of the early adopters of running Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi, when ARM support finally came available in beta. And even got a few mentions on places like Stackoverflow [1] [2]. You can read the original article.

After six years of successful operation, with only a minor rebuild around 2022, there were a few motivations to upgrade…

QCON London 2023: Paving the Road

My fifth year attending QCON London, a conference focused on knowledge-sharing high-level emerging trends and best-practices in software engineering, featuring many world-leading organisations and subject-matter experts. And this year did not disappoint, with the evolution of paved roads.

Smart Home

Automated lighting, hoovering, heating, energy management and information. A combination of off-the-shelf and hand-cranked code running on a Kubernetes cluster.

Mostly completed in December 2019, and tweaked throughout 2020 and 2021.

Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster

In this article, I setup:

• A Kubernetes cluster using the new Raspberry Pi 4.
• Kubernetes Dashboard.
• Ingress using NGINX.

Many articles already exist for older Debian distributions and Raspberry Pis, so hopefully this updated set of steps helps others save time.

My Food Hygiene Ratings

My hobby Android and iOS app to allow users to find hygiene ratings of establishments (restaurants, bars, shops etc).

QCON London 2019

I got the opportunity this year to attend the QCON London conference, ran my InfoQ, and would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested or working in the software engineering industry, that’s proficient with technical language and subjects. Most talks were aimed at a general wider audience, from engineers to CTOs, with abstract high-level material, rather than getting too down and dirty with the technicalities of specific languages or frameworks.

Splunk Alerts on Slack

For those using log tools such as Splunk, you can setup alerts. These will run queries every so often and trigger actions when conditions are met e.g. count of events surpasses a threshold.

This post is about pushing those alerts from Splunk to Slack. When an alarm is triggered, a JSON request is made by Splunk to a URL you provide. This gives the benefit of your own customisation of messages.

Defcon 25

Burner phone? Check. Laptop wiped? Check. Few WN722N adapters? Check.

It was that time of year again, where the InfoSec community got together in Las Vegas for the world’s largest hacking conference, with an estimated 25,000 people, for three day of: talks, hacking and drinking.

Parrot Manager

My side project for the last few months.

A simple cross-platform modern password manager, with the ability to synchronize a password database over SSH and make automatic backups.

Moving to Jekyll and AWS

Recently I have transitioned my website to be statically generated, using Jekyll, and moved hosting to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Not only does it load faster, due to being distributed around the world using AWS CloudFront, but it but it’s easier to maintain and reduces the potential to be attacked. And costs less!

The Importance of Captcha & Free Pizza!

During October 2016, Papa Johns held a competition to promote their Papa Rewards system, whereby users could enter an e-mail and potentially win Papa Reward points, or receive a £10 discount.

University

This page contains a summary of my achievements whilst at the University of East Anglia, studying Computer Science.

Hacking the Nandos Pong Game

As apart of a promotion between the 1st of September until the 31st of October 2012, the game allows students to win Nando’s Gift Cards worth £600 - with three of them up for grabs, hence £1,800 of value. To win the prize, one must simply play the game and fill-in their details, with three random people selected by the closing date. I was sent this game by a friend after telling him that Adobe Flash games in competitions are often poorly written or/and secured, with him asking me to prove my point with this game.

First Place in UK National Web Design Competition

I competed in the WorldSkills web design national final in 2010 and 2011. This would initially start as an internal competition in colleges, with the best website of each course level submitted to WorldSkills for selection in the national final.