The BSidesNCL Programme Has Landed Your mission briefing is now available-packed with talks, tinfoil hats, and just enough chaos to make it unforgettable. Check the website, plot your course, and prepare for orbital engagement. The countdown has begun. Explore mission online www.bsidesnewcastle.org

Lazynets. The crappy film Speed 2 (1997) had this device being used through a D-Sub connector to hack the ship. We've been trying to work out whether this was a PDA from the period or just a non-functional prop. It's the wrong shape for a Newton, could be a Palm. Any ideas?

We're thrilled to announce our Keynote speaker for BSides Newcastle - @tautology.uk Strap in for the journey "From Sputnik to James Webb: satellite comms (and security?). Ready to join the mission? Launch sequence begins here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bsidesncl-... #bsides #InfosecCommunity

Conjugate the verb after me: I can't parent my kids You must do something about it He/she/they are accessing porn We are in trouble You all must suffer intrusion into your life because of it They must be saved

what a load of nonsense! Public wifi is reasonably safe! Airports are even more because they have more CCTV than you can imagine and armed police. people get pwn3d via phishing and malware/infostealers.... #WIFI #Insanity

BSides NCL is preparing for liftoff, & we need you in the command module. Join us as a volunteer & help us complete our mission. Sign up: forms.office.com/e/AtUdjV13xr Mission Date: 27th Sept 2025 Launch Site: North East Futures UTC Newcastle No prior volunteering experience required

Over the weekend messing about with data has produced me this little overlay for Google Maps which shows the Domesday86 data for each D-Block. Abused vibe coding and spent too long learning about how the Domesday86 laser disk worked.

I tried vibe programming for the first time this weekend. If you can describe the problem it makes it very easy to rapidly prototype software. In two hours after a few twiddles and some minor gaslighting from Gemini, I had a basic working output that I can build on.

Hey Cyber Space Travellers. Our CFP is still open. Get that talk out of your head and in front of our wonderful audience. Be it Security focused, Space themed, or something completely different (Sidetracked Squirrel Talks), we want to hear from you. www.papercall.io/boncl25

Explanation of my silliest abuse of technology yet. (Though it could have been Mariokart, it wasn't as there's no decent non-emulator verison of Mariokart on WIndows) www.pentestpartners.com/security-blo...

This is very similar to what I did my final project on for my degree. The pain is real!

This is the demo I was working on, the largest controller for SuperTuxKart ever?

Spent an hour trying to find out why the sprog's Junior Parkrun results came out in the weird US date format. IMO it was due to bad assumptions by my browser and the Parkrun website. If they'd just use ISO 8601 dates it would've simplified everything! tautology.org.uk/blog/2025/05...

It's rare when you feel dirty entering a city's boundary.

Quick blog from me about the Rockchip bootloader process.

Oh come on scammers, this isn't even trying...

Further diggings under the attic room floor lead to this big old wabbie nest. Prybar for scale.

Well, I've finally relaunched my MZ-80A website: mz-80a.com Still some work to do on it really but wanted to get it out there as the main site has been down / under construction for absolutely ages now.

How did we recover programs from Whirlwind I, one of the first mainframes, from dozens of boxes of unscanned and barely-indexed cartons of materials stored at the Smithsonian? By creating a brand new assembler and simulator.

A script that I wrote a while back for converting black and white pngs to the sharpscii used on the Sharp 8-bit range of computers. It's not perfect, but can give a good baseline for someone more artistic to manually manipulate.

The BBC Micro was a multi-core computer. They just didn't tell anyone! A test mode accidentally triggered in 2020 revealed the existance of this second core, with its own instruction set and ROM, the ability to bypass the firmware, and may have revealed some 50-year-old corporate espionage...

More random crap found under the floor in this house (in an en suite I'm taking out). The bundle of cable is cut off cable just abandoned. Under there was wallpaper, plasterboard, cables, one double gang socket, one ancient junction box and other detritus. Lazy sparky.

Experiments in reading Sharp MZ tapes. Hacked a quick script up to convert a WAV file copy of a tape and extract all the included files as .mzfs including checksums. It works quite well, but is very slow.

How Light Guns and Light Pens Work and how to program (and not) for the #Amiga youtu.be/SjBjQC768Cw

"Prohibit publishers irrevocably disabling video games they have already sold" Please sign this! If a single player game needs a server, on ending support for the game, the publisher should either patch the game, or release the server. Period. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...

I'm nonbinary. I applied for a Gender Recognition Certificate. My application was granted, but I've had to sue the UK to try to get it issued. I've spent about £100k out of pocket already. I'm expecting another £100k in costs for my appeal, which is being heard next week. rya.nc/m4

Explain your username. I went to my first LAN game, and was told I needed a handle. I type a rude word into the name field, accidentally transposing the middle letters. Years later I cleaned it up a bit, keeping the mispelt first sound, and gave a nod to my software engineering lecturers.

Spent the day with work colleagues. Was discussing old computers and one of them stated that his dad had just taken a compaq portable III to the tip! I was left physically twitching.

OK, I should not have looked at the code for my old 1995 WardRound app for the #Psion Series 3a, because now I'm forced to go through it, tidy it up, document it and update an app that NO-ONE uses, even though it's pretty good, though I say so myself...

Was trying to do some more reverse engineering of BBC games. First I had to rebuild my UEF loader Ghidra extension, as the bloody build requirements change for each version of Ghidra. github.com/tautology0/U...

Just submitted my first CfP for a few years. Still not certain someone wants to listen to me talking about stuff I don't know enough about.

A battery inside a chip package is an interesting design choice!

Your building's PACS can be vulnerable to card cloning. Our Warren recently shocked security professionals by cloning a badge in minutes, right before their eyes. His blog post covers five checks to help prevent cloning: www.pentestpartners.com/security-blo...

Lazy nets. I'm trying to improve my code review workflow. What I'd like is a tool similar to Zotero or Mendely but for code. Where I can load a bit of code and then select a chunk and write a free text note about it. It should not effect the original file. Any ideas?

One of my blog posts got published in Archive magazine for RISC OS (with permission). It's only taken 30 years for me to get published in print media... www.archivemag.co.uk

Hey Bluesky, do me a favour would you? Share this article far and wide so everyone can find out how UK home builders get away with murder and why we need to do something about it. news.stv.tv/east-central...

At least I think that’s what it is. Anyway, here’s the !StarChart app that I wrote to explore the galaxies and plan routes, and the !ComEditor for cheating. Which I didn’t, BTW. Elite the hard way... though with a Marconi Trackball, which actually is the easy way with ArcElite!

A follow up to my blog on bypassing the copy protection on ArcElite, in this one I look at how the manual words are encoded and how to create a lookup for them: tautology.org.uk/blog/2024/11...

Setting up a custom domain on the account was even easier that modifying yourself on the fediverse. Just needed a DNS record, I didn't even need DNSSEC. So I'm expecting the usual suspect to tell me I'll be hacked now.

I grew up on these streets

Tautology recently wrote about cracking the code protection on the MZ-700 game “Nuclear Wargames” : tautology.org.uk/blog/2024/02...

I have just accepted my degree offer, so have now got a BSc (hons) in Astronomy and Planetary Science after five years of part time study. So if you want to learn something, just do it, it may not turn out to be the right subject for you, but you'll never know 'til you try.