Mark Hansen

Security

2FA for .nz Domains

There aren't many .nz domain name registrars supporting Two Factor Authentication.

Terminal

An Argument for Auto-Starting Tmux

changing the default from tmux opt-in to opt-out has cumulatively saved me days of time over the last few years

TP-Link VR1600v Router Doubled my Ping

This is pretty weird! I'm writing this up in case others are struggling with this, so something comes up when they Google what's wrong. The TP-Link Archer VR1600v Modem Router

Automating Mac Maintenance with Ansible

I run a bunch of software on my Macbook. I'd like to keep that software up to date and patched, so it doesn't have security vulnerabilities. Trouble is, I install it from lots of places: Random websites (for the most part)Homebrew (for most

Air Quality

Ansible for Raspberry Pis

During the recent Australian bushfire season, I'd been administering four Raspberry Pis around the house for air quality monitoring. The usual progression of sysadminning automation followed: SSH'ing in and running commands by handGradually making shellscripts for some common tasksCopy/pasting the shellscripts to set

Cyling

Sydney Cycling Communities and Maps

With so many people picking up cycling lately, I thought I'd write up the resources that I've found over the years that have helped me. When I started I was

Air Quality

Review: Kaiterra Laser Egg Air Quality Monitor

I bought a Kaiterra Laser Egg Air Quality Sensor from their international store for 148USD, or 225AUD. PortabilityIt's great that you can charge it up and take it around the house. I'm looking forward to using this to find gaps in our home's sealing.

Visualizations

My 8-year Attempt to Automate NZ Wireless Map

The almost-decade-long process I went through trying, and failing, to automate updating the data shown on NZ Wireless Map.

Air Quality

Building a Raspberry Pi Home Air Quality Sensor

In Part 1: Build or Buy, I discussed the various pre-built Air Quality systems you could buy: sensors connected to databases that allow you to graph the data coming out.

Air Quality

Indoor Air Quality Sensor: Build or Buy?

Australia's on fire, and smoke is inundating our cities and homes, causing terrible air quality, often over 10x hazardous levels. I'd like to measure how bad the air quality is

Visualizations

NSW Executor Fees Visualisation

or: bargain-hunting, even beyond the grave When setting up a will, you must nominate an executor to distribute your assets. It's a nontrivial task with some legal liability, so it seems most common to nominate an organization to do it for you. There are

Book Review: First They Killed My Father

Loung Ung, First they Killed My Father, 2006. 238 pages. Before travelling to Cambodia, I wanted to learn a bit about their recent history - what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime. This book was highly recommended as a memoir of someone who lived

Losing the Arms Race

Another month, another headling-grabbing bug: "Patch ASAP: Tons of Linux apps can be hijacked by evil DNS servers, man-in-the-middle miscreants" - The Register "Patch now! Unix bug puts Linux systems at risk" - InfoWorld "Extremely severe bug leaves dizzying

Read-along: Berkeley DB

In this post, I read along with the 1999 Berkeley DB USENIX paper. Berkeley DB as a tiny (175KB) embedded key-value filesystem-backed database. Berkeley DB lets you associate byte-string keys to byte-string values, with no practical limits on the size of these keys or

Visualizations

A Visualisation of Your Last.FM History

Today, I'm launching Scatter.FM, a new visualisation that shows Last.fm users how their listening habits change over time. If you've been a Last.fm user for any length

Visualizations

A New Map of New Zealand's Wireless Networks

Mt Te Aroha Antenna Mast (Photo Credit: Joel Oughton) I've just launched a new visualisation: a map of New Zealand's terrestrial Radio/Wireless network. It's a map that draws lines

Hamilton's Bridges in Fog

Lights have been attached to the Bridge St Bridge, and they look amazing in Hamilton’s signature thick fog. The fog’s usually pretty thick, but it’s even thicker along the banks of the Waikato River, which these bridges cross. I got a

Visualizations

Visualising the New Zealand Government Budget

I never used to care about the government budget. Every year, I'd see a storm of Budget stories on the news, and I wouldn't understand any of the numbers they were throwing about. $50 million cuts to education. $2 billion for fibre broadband. $200

iPhone as Numberpad

I made a simple HTML5 iPhone app that displays a numeric keypad. My laptop doesn't have a numberpad, and I needed one for some of Blender's keyboard shortcuts. I was about to buy a USB numeric keypad, when I thought: If I call myself

Fog @ Waikato University

Hamilton gets heavy fog at night time. It plays with the lights at the university, turning downward-facing lamps into bright cones of light, turning spherical lights into ambient glowing orange, and turning groups of streetlights into aurora. UPDATE June 2011: I took some more

Ice vs Water

We were dancing at a club, it was busy, and I was overheating. So I asked for some water - but what they gave me was 90% ice, topped off with water. It did an awesome job at cooling me down. Later on, I

JavaScript

Optional Parameters in Javascript

2020 Update I wrote this back in 2010, and JavaScript has evolved a lot since. Since ES2015 (ES6), it's far simpler to define optional parameters to a function: function connect(hostname = "localhost", port = 80, method = "HTTP") { ... } // uses defaults for all