Damo - Articles

GPD Pocket 3 Cellular Module

TL;DR : I made an LTE/Cellular module for the GPD Pocket 3. If you’re here thinking “where can I buy one?!” feel free to skip all this and just skip to the bottom !

Retrofitting Mains Outdoor Lighting

During the wettest months of last year, we started suffering some nuisance tripping of the earth fault protection devices at home (called Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupters - GFCIs - in the US and Residual Current Devices - RCDs - in the UK). When these devices trip and disconnect the power, it normally means that current is leaking away from the live conductors (that’s Line or Neutral) somewhere…

5G Home Broadband

A few weeks ago I was browsing around our big four mobile phone operators’ websites checking the progress on the UK’s 5G rollout. I was quite surprised to see a good region of coverage in my local area on Three ’s website. Three offer some very reasonable SIM-only unlimited data plans, and don’t charge a premium for 5G service; so this was probably the most desirable network to offer service.

Dealing with Cellular Broadband CGNAT

Building an LED Matrix Driver

I’m lucky to have friends working in the electronics industry in various different capacities. Through them, I’ll occasionally get hold of some unwanted/rejected/surplus boards or components that would otherwise just end up in the WEEE bin. It’s always nice when one of these lands on my desk that I think “hey! I could do something with this!” . Recycling!

Fun with Flip-Dot Displays

I recently acquired a flip-dot display .

eBay Nightmares

I recently had a horrendous experience selling an item on eBay. In this post, I wanted to write up my feelings about how I think eBay has failed to retain the balance of safety for both buyers and sellers.

Building a Thermal Camera

Thank you to everyone for the fantastic responses to this post. The comments section below now contains quite a bit of information from readers building their own thermal camera based on this post. Thank you also to readers who have offered to write translations of the post - I’ll post the links here as people send them.

Security of Self-Hosted Devops Tools

Sentry is an error/log aggregation platform. It offers lots of really great functionality for exploring errors generated by your applications. If you haven’t given it a try yet, I really recommend it. The guys behind Sentry offer a hosted solution or, like myself, you can self-host if you wish.

Dump Your Router

After building my home server , I decided to restructure my network around my newly-obtained hardware. I fancied having a crack at replacing my ISP-provided router with a PC-based one, as well as replacing the Wi-Fi component with a more reliable one.

Dynamic Conferences with Asterisk

I recently had a play with conference calling in Asterisk. It’s pretty easy to use the built in applications in combination with the asterisk-extra-sounds sound libraries to produce quite a professional feeling conferencing system.

Building a Home Server

Since I do more playing around with different operating systems, services and applications than ever these days, I’ve found myself using lots of storage and lots of virtual machines.

DIY HomeKit

HomeKit is a new -ish feature in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. It allows you to control various types of devices (called Accessories ) from your iOS device.

Namecheap DNS Hijacking

A few days ago, a former client of mine contacted me and informed me that a user of their website had reported seeing pornographic (!!) advertisements and content while visiting the site. Immediately, I suspected that the site might have been compromised somehow, and gingerly visited it in my browser. Everything looked perfectly fine. I checked a few pages, logged in, even checked the…

The Strategy Pattern with Symfony

Typically, the Strategy Pattern lends itself well to situations where we have a number of processes or algorithms (or strategies ) that we can select from at runtime based on some criteria.

Cisco 7942 API/XML Application Hacking

I came across a few Cisco 7942 IP Phones a while back. Typically, these aren’t that much use as they usually come with the Cisco SCCP (Skinny) firmware flashed, meaning they’ll only work with the proprietary Cisco CallManager software (or with Asterisk using the skinny channel driver, but that’s something else…).

Hackintoshing

Recently my Mac Pro died. It seems to have developed an issue that causes it to eat graphics cards (that’s a whole separate post right there).

Moving On

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here - it’s incredible (and slightly depressing) how entering the working world seriously takes away your time and motivation.

Stopping Piracy Like a Boss

Piracy is something I really don’t care about that much. Unless it affects me. Then I get slightly mad. I don’t steal content myself - the vast majority of music I own is ripped from my own CDs, or purchased online. I’m not a big TV person, or a big gamer, or a big movie-watcher for that matter - but when I do partake, I purchase.

Building a Laser Show

Lasers have always fascinated me. I love the colours, the power, sometimes the danger, but also the beautiful things you can do when you combine them with some simple optics and mechanics. A ballpoint pen spring with a tiny mirror glued to the top produces some fascinating oscillating patterns when you shine a simple laser pointer at it - imagine what you can do when you introduce digital control…

IR over IP

If you remember back to my post about the hellish time I had with the CCTV DVR I set up last summer, you’ll remember how eager I was to expand the functionality and climb over some of the obstacles created by the awful software that comes loaded on the boxes. In that vein, one thing I’ve been meaning to do is get one of those IR repeater things that allow you to control such appliances from a…

A little demo of Aperture Size

This is a short post; just something cool I made while getting to know my new camera and lens. I thought it makes a great example of the effect of varying aperture size on the photograph.

Digging into DVRs

During the summer holidays, my friend and I installed a CCTV system at my home just to improve the general security. I had to take a dive into the world of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders). I found that, like most product genres, there is a distinct line between quality, branded products and budget unbranded or vaguely-branded products. I didn’t fancy spending upwards of £300 on a DVR, so I went for…

Exploring the 433MHz Jungle

I’ve reignited my interest in radio technology as of late (unfortunately while I should be revising for second year university exams - hey ho). This all kind of came about after playing with the Xbee modules I’ve been using with the Arduino prototyping platform that I’ve started playing with recently - they’re great little modules that abstract away the complexity of radio modulation and provide…

b2bFront

Ok, so for anyone who doesn’t know what b2bFront is, here’s a quick synopsis:

The duplicity of iParadigms LLC and TurnItIn

I am a careful writer. Not in the sense that my writing isn’t scattered with spelling errors and misuse of punctuation; but in the sense that I am careful about where I source my facts and how I attribute them. I have never been on the wrong end of the plagiarism stick, never accidentally, and certainly never deliberately - if I can’t do the work, I’ll chew on the failure that comes with that…

Brainfuck Revisited: Turing Machines

At the risk of attracting too much attention to the reoccurring use of the “ f ” word on my blog, I have decided to pursue yet another BF-related project.

Damo in NYC - Part 3

I have just returned from the closing awards ceremony of the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2011 here in the wonderful city that is New York. I can’t even begin to describe how much of a rush the last week has been. I have met some amazing people, made some great friends, got some excellent networking done, seen some incredible projects and ideas put in to action and I can’t wait to have an opportunity to…

Damo in NYC – Part 2

I’m here! Currently sat in the Internet Café in the Marriott on the 5th floor typing a blog post after a long day touring the massive city that is NYC. But before I start on the wonderful sights and sounds of the city, there’s some competition news to share…

VM167 Prototype: SMS on Open

For some reason I decided today to make a system to drop me a text message when the door of my bedroom is opened. I started off thinking about how this could be done - I didn’t fancy hacking a mobile to send a text particularly, I wanted more of a computer controlled solution. While I was thinking about the more complicated aspects of my sudden unexplained desire to make my room high security I…

Damo in NYC - Part 1

In just two days time I’ll be heading out to New York City with my good friends from university Sam Van Lieshout and JP Lacerda . We are the UK finalists of the Microsoft 2011 Imagine Cup and we’re heading out to compete in the world finals in New York this week!

Scantronic 9651: Cracked?

The Scantronic alarm panel + keypad I mentioned in my previous post have now arrived! I have hooked up power and a backup battery and the kit seems to work great - right away I got down to investigating the mysteries of the keypad protocol that I introduced in my last post on this topic.

Scantronic 9651 keypad/PC interface idea

One of the various bits of rubbish I’ve got hanging around is an old Scantronic 9651 keypad (actually a Scantronic 930). For the uninitiated: Scantronic is a range of security alarms manufactured by Cooper Safety. In the security installers industry, they tend to be branded by individual companies that do the actual install jobs; for example, my control keypad is branded by ADT.

K8055 iOS Bridges Burning

If you’re a regular reader, or you’re unlucky enough to have read a post in which I blab on about things that I like to code, then you’ve probably read about my app to control the Velleman K8055 USB Experiment Interface Board with an iPhone or other iDevice.

Development: b2bFront

Recently I’ve been working on a replacement for the ageing Coyote-Sports web setup. It’s served us well since I started writing it in 2007 at the tender age of sixteen. The system has grown and become a horribly tangled mess of PHP, Perl, C++ daemons and API calls. It still runs well, but modifications and fixes are getting particularly difficult, and a few months ago I started to make some…

I want a bike

So this is getting a bit long in the tooth now. I’ve been solidly procrastinating for almost 3 years and true to my form, I’m doing nothing really* substantial to make any of it happen.

iOS + DMX

In August of last year, I wrote some software to tie together Velleman’s K8055 board and iOS running on iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s proven to be a success and I’ve sold over 300 copies of the app since I shoved it on the app store. It’s had quite a big impact, and one of the best things about it for me has been reading the emails from my users about how they’re using my software. I’ve had people…

Interests of the moment: Radio et al

So I thought I’d start a category to contain all the random crap I that seems to drift in and out of my interests list. It could prove to be amusing and I’m sure someone with a lot of time on their hands could generate some sort of tag-cloud versus time style graph further down the line that will prove deeply embarrassing to all parties involved. Onwards.

Long time no see

So it’s been a while since I last published any thing on Damow.net. In fact the domain has been out of my control for quite some time, it was squatted by the usual what you want when you need it gang shortly after I did my usual trick of failing to renew it a year or so ago. In any case I suppose I felt like writing down some of my thoughts and ideas and I’m interested to see if anybody will…