If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.
The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.
The theremin uses the heterodyne principle to generate an audio signal. The instrument's pitch circuitry includes two radio frequencyoscillators set below 500 kHz to minimize radio interference. One oscillator operates at a fixed frequency. The frequency of the other oscillator is almost identical, and is controlled by the performer's distance from the pitch control antenna. /The performer's hand acts as the grounded plate (the performer's body being the connection to ground) of a variable capacitor in an L-C (inductance-capacitance) circuit, which is part of the oscillator and determines its frequency.
Over the years I've been tempted to buy all sorts of ridiculous things from sites such as Recycled Goods and eBay and, for various reasons such as lacking enough room (and spousal approval) to get a rotovap setup going in the kitchen, I've managed to restrict myself to a few small, reasonably sane acquisitions. Other people, for example, Connor Krukosky, not only laugh at temerity such as mine but go big with hardly a second thought.
A couple of years ago, at the age of 18, Krukosky who has what we'll call "a passion" for collecting and restoring vintage computers, spotted a posting on a mailing list announcing that an decade-old IBM Z890 mainframe was being sold by Rutgers University and the bidding was at a measly $100. Krukosky was immediately interested and bid, winning the beast for the handsome sum of $237.39.
Five years ago, Stéphane Côme, the founder, chairman, and chief technology officer of LCS Technologies, a consulting firm specializing in Oracle database wrangling, decided that he wanted to give back to the community and that his focus should be on inspiring children to get involved with computers and software. Côme told me he started off by establishing a Meetup group to teach children and their parents through hands-on technology projects:
I opened the Gearhead Toolbox to see what I hadn’t covered and, wow, there’s a lot in here so, today, let’s pick out a few Raspberry Pi-oriented goodies …
Tonido Server is one of those gems that’s been around for a long time but doesn't seems to have got the love it deserves. Using this feature rich system you can build your own personal cloud service running on various Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, as well as macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, and Windows Phone, and on multiple architectures including x86, PowerPC, MIPS, and, for your Raspberry Pi pleasure, ARM.
In this issue of the Gearhead Toolbox I’m covering dashboards and visualizations. There are an incredible number of products and services in this domain and today I've chosen three particularly interesting projects ...
Web-based information displays such as dashboards, have become a popular way to present summaries of complex data and in this issue of the Gearhead Toolbox I have two killer JavaScript libraries for creating and editing diagrams, and another equally great library for creating gauge displays. Enjoy ...
Welcome to the first opening of The Gearhead Toolbox. There are so many really amazing tools and services appearing these days I’m going to start regularly posting a selection from the Toolbox to make sure you know what’s hot. In this, the first installment, we focus on static web site generators and hosting.
StaticGen, choosing a static web site generator
There are lots of web publishing frameworks and a design that’s become extremely popular is static web sites. The rationale for sites built this way is that they are simple to host (there’s little or no server side configuration required) and compared to products like WordPress they present no attack surface making it trivially easy to secure your content from hackers. On top of that, without the overhead of running databases and tons of supporting backend code, static web sites are really fast so you’ll get better SEO ratings!
Long time reader and old friend, Jim Sterne, recently wrote to me with a question:
Dear Gearhead,
I'd like to start publishing a newsletter about a specific area of interest, using the latest in feeds, bots, scrapers and content management organizers to make things as automated as possible but still being able to keep my eye on what gets posted, emailed, tweeted and projected directly into the corneas of avid, would-be readers.
On February 19th, this year, Susan J. Fowler, a software engineer who left Uber (I don’t have to explain what Uber is, do I?) to work for Stripe (okay, I’ll outline what they are: Stripe has been described as “the PayPal of the mobile era”) blogged about her experience of working at Uber. She outlined a nightmarish corporate culture of poor management, backstabbing, dirty politics, and negligent human resources, along with apparently endemic and rampant sexual discrimination and harassment.
Email is great; it’s transformed business, enabled geographically dispersed families and friends to stay in touch, redefined news distribution, transformed sales pipelines … the list of good stuff about email is endless. But, as many people have discovered to their cost, keeping control of your email account requires effort, effort like not using dumb, easy-to-guess passwords, and making sure your email hosting service is reliable and not, for example, Yahoo or AOL. And these issues aren’t anything like new, recent discoveries; we’ve all known for over a decade where the risks lie … well, all of us except, apparently, for the government.
I don’t know about you, butduring the 2016 election I was fairly surprised when the Democratic National Committee email system was hacked after which the email account of John Podesta, the DNC chairperson, was hacked. You’d have thought that the folks who manage IT for these people would have known the risks and done more to minimize exposure but when simple phishing and malware intrusions that should never of happened and which went undetected were successful, then you have to wonder where the disconnect lies.
The Raspberry Pi Zero, priced at $5, has been, to say the least, a hit. Launched in November 2015, the Zero is a tiny (65mm by 30mm by 5mm) stripped-down but well-featured single board computer with a 1GHz ARM11 core, 512MB of RAM, mini-HDMI with 1080p60 output, and a 40-pin GPIO header that's pin compatible with the A+, B+, and 2B models. The problem with the Zero was connectivity; with only a single micro USB port you had to add a USB hub to connect keyboad, mouse, Wi-Fi dongle, and so on making the total cost far less attractive.
To answer this issue, the Raspberry Pi Foundation just released the latest member of the RPi family: The Raspberry Pi Zero W which adds 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support. It also includes the CSI camera connector that was added to the revised Raspberry Pi Zero board. All this for just $10.
I just binge-listened to an outstanding podcast, LifeAfter, which, without giving too much away, is about artificial intelligence and its impact on people. Here's the show's synopsis:
When you die in the digital age, pieces of you live on forever. In your emails, your social media posts and uploads, in the texts and videos you’ve messaged, and for some – even in their secret online lives few even know about. But what if that digital existence took on a life of its own? Ross, a low level FBI employee, faces that very question as he starts spending his days online talking to his wife Charlie, who died 8 months ago…
I've been writing about the Raspberry Pi, the Internet of Things, and supporting technologies for some time and here, for all of you RPi aficionados, is my list of related Gearhead posts in reverse order. Enjoy ... and to get early warning of a new Gearhead post, sign up for my newsletter.
//m.banksfrench.com/article/3174268/the-gearhead-raspberry-pindex.html#tk.rss_gearhead
物联网外星人吃了我的笔记本电脑
Tue, 21 Feb 2017 04:56:00 -0800
马克·吉布斯
马克·吉布斯
To misquote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the Apple Genius Bar, but that's just peanuts to space.
And out there, in the vast reaches of the cosmos, continuously streaming towards Earth are what are called cosmic rays which are protons and atomic nuclei theorized to come from both supernovae explosions and probably the centers of galaxies. The earth is continuously bombarded by these alien particles which, in turn, collide with the atmosphere and generate a whole range of secondary particles including neutrons, muons, pions and alpha particles.
When you get involved in the actual wiring of networks, one of the things you find yourself checking over and over is whether Ethernet ports are actually live along with do they connect to DHCP, is the Internet visible, and so on. Typically you’ll grab your laptop, plug it in and run a few tests but while this works, you might describe it as “sub-optimal” because how often have you tried to do exactly this in a ceiling void? In a cramped comms cupboard? Somewhere in the bowels of a rack? In every one of those situations it’s just time consuming and annoying to have to fiddle around and juggle with your laptop. The Netool network port analyzer aims to be a better tool for doing exactly this.
Some time ago I wrote about the Ring doorbell and concluded, as I wrote in a subsequent review of the company’s Stick Up Cam, that “While I liked the product conceptually, the startup lag (the time between detecting movement and when recording begins, usually a delay of a few seconds) is long enough that fast moving people like the Fedex guy can come and go before the device starts recording” and I lamented the so-so video quality.
“You’re going to put that in your office, aren’t you?” So quoth my beloved when I assembled and fired up the Nanoleaf Aurora lighting system in our living room. I understood her point. As lighting solutions go, the Nanoleaf Aurora isn’t exactly subtle in design and in operation as colors flow and change across the various panels it can be a little, well, dominating. That said, speaking as a card-carrying nerd, I love it! Check it out:
As you can see, the Nanoleaf Aurora could be part of the set of “Lost in Space”, so unless your house looks like something from the Jetsons, you may find you have a stylistic conflict (and possibly significant other conflict) to deal with.
//m.banksfrench.com/article/3165413/nanoleaf-aurora-smart-lighting-for-the-nerd-set.html#tk.rss_gearhead
家科技乐视Le Pro 3 echo;Android智能手机绝对值得考虑
2017年2月4日星期六14:23:00 -0800
马克·吉布斯
马克·吉布斯
It takes a brave company to attempt to gain a serious foothold in the U.S. smartphone market given that the dominant players are so massive and entrenched but that apparently wasn't a concern of LeEco when the company launched its products at the end of 2016. And rather than just selling smartphones, LeEco’s market approach is to become a lifestyle brand and claims that:
LeEco seamlessly blends devices, content, applications and distribution in a first-of-its kind ecosystem. This innovative approach puts extraordinary experiences in the hands of millions of people all over the world.
Pretty ambitious stuff but perhaps not surprising as LeEco is notable for being aggressively innovative and their product lines include televisions (the company acquired U.S. television manufacturer Vizio last year), headphones, speakers, chargers, phone covers, and there’s the LeEco Super Bike (with built-in fingerprint sensor ID and a waterproof touchscreen Android display). But wait! There’s more! They’ve even showcased a high-tech, self-driving concept car.
So, in the last installment of this series on the messaging protocol MQTT, we installed the Mosquitto MQTT broker. Now we’ll test it which we’re going to do on the same machine that Mosquitto is running on. First, you’re going to need to install the Mosquitto client tools:
sudo apt-get install mosquitto-clients
Now, let’s run Mosquitto from the command line:
root@deb-01:/home/mgibbs# mosquitto 1485602498: mosquitto version 1.3.4 (build date 2014-08-17 03:38:31+0000) starting 1485602498: Using default config. 1485602498: Opening ipv4 listen socket on port 1883. 1485602498: Opening ipv6 listen socket on port 1883.
The Mosquitto broker is now listening on the standard MQTT port, 1883, for both IPv4 and IPv6 MQTT requests. Next, open a new terminal window and enter:
//m.banksfrench.com/article/3162746/internet-of-things-messaging-part-3-testing-mosquitto.html#tk.rss_gearhead
物联网物联网消息传递，第2部分:mosquito to MQTT代理
星期二，2017年1月24日11:52:00 -0800
马克·吉布斯
马克·吉布斯
MQTT is a messaging technology for machine-to-machine communication that’s lightweight and relatively simple to implement on pretty much any device. In my first post on MQTT I covered the basics and background of the protocol and threatened to follow up with a discussion of Mosquitto, a free, open source MQTT server (the MQTT developers no longer call them “brokers”) that’s one of the most widely used messaging platforms in the Internet of Things world. Being a man of my word, here goes …
The Mosquitto broker (apparently the Mosquito developers and MQTT developers do not see eye-to-eye on terminology) is part of the Eclipse IoT Working Group, “an industry collaboration of companies who invest and promote an open source community for IoT.” Mosquito currently supports MQTT versions 3.1 and 3.1.1 and support for the proposed MQTT v5, which introduces scalability and protocol improvements is under way.
In case you haven’t come across the term, the “HAT” part of Cluster HAT, means that the device implements the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Hardware Attached on Top system for add-on hardware. The Foundation’s 2014 blog post announcing the standard explains:
We’ve all been there: You’ve got tons of unstructured or semi-structured data to sift through and like any savvy nerd, you know that doing so handraulically is against all that is good and holy [queue “Mission Impossible” music]. Your problem, which you have to accept, is how to efficiently and effectively automate the extraction process. As an old hand on the digital ship you’ll probably turn to a tool you know well such as grep, that good ol’ workhorse that implements regular expressions. Say you want to find all of the IPv4 addresses in a text file. You might resort to using:
Apparently Santa thought that Raspberry Pi users deserved something special this Christmas because there, underneath the digital Christmas tree, was the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s x86 port of its Debian + PIXEL Linux desktop environment designed to run on pretty much any hardware even old, pensioned-off gear. Lovers of horrible backronyms might have rejoiced at the name PIXEL which is derived from “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight” but as clumsy as the name’s derivation might be, the PIXEL distro is way cool and a seriously good idea.
PIXEL is a highly modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment on Debian “Jessie” and was originally released in September 2016 but only for Raspberry Pi boards. This Christmas release now allows you to run PIXEL on most X86 devices including many machines that are veritable antiques.
< p类= >“slideCredit”形象的< a href = " https://www.flickr.com/photos/120586634@N05/24037216652 " rel =“nofollow”=“平等”类=“slideCreditLink”目标> <跨类=“slideCreditText”>加雷斯Halfacree / flickr
< p类= >“slideCredit”形象的< a href = " https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/NASA_Success.jpg " rel = =“平等”“nofollow”目标关于Raspberry Pi家族的单板计算机(除了设备本身)，最值得注意的事情之一是他们激发了令人难以置信的创造力。学生，制造商，科学家，工程师，你能想到的，都在建造最令人惊叹的数字机器，在这第一轮中，我收集了一些著名和令人兴奋的例子，人们正在做什么。