.m3u8 files are effectively playlists for video content designed to be played on a mobile device. They also allow seamless switching between high and low resolution video files for when your 3G connection speed varies.
The easiest way to play m3u8 files is to open them on a browser on your iphone or android device. It is also possible to play them through safari using the following html:
<html>
<video src="http://yourserver.com/playlist.m3u8"></video>
</html>
Either way you have to serve the video over http using a web server. You cannot simply drag it into your browser.
Tuesday, 22 October 2013
Thursday, 17 October 2013
Why password security requirements hand the advantage to the hackers!
Most of you will have come across a variation of this message at one point in your life:
"The password you entered doesn't meet the minimum security requirements."
Every 3 months the security policy on my work email forces me to change my password. This is understandable, but it can't be the same password as any previous passwords you have had, it has to have 8 characters or more including lower case, upper case, punctuation and at least 2 numbers
A simple password to remember could be:
'the cat walked down the road and sat down'
This is a 41 character password which would take hackers years and year to break even though it is so simple for the human mind to remember.
Of course this would not pass the security policy so this needs to be changed to:
'The cat walked d0wn the r0ad and sat down!'
This is now impossible to remember so the user has two choices:
Either write the password down somewhere totally insecure.
Or make an easier password:
'passw0rd1!'
This password is only 9 characters and passes the security policy tests without a problem. That said according to https://howsecureismypassword.net/ it would take 344 days to break this password whereas the 41 character password would take 479,245,873,413,199,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years
Obviously I have no idea how to say that number out loud but it's billions of times more secure.
This is a cry for help to all systems administrators: Get rid of these ridiculous security policies. If you require a certain length password that is fine, but the rest of the policies at utter nonsense.
Please share this post if password policies have **** *** *** (annoyed you).
"The password you entered doesn't meet the minimum security requirements."
Every 3 months the security policy on my work email forces me to change my password. This is understandable, but it can't be the same password as any previous passwords you have had, it has to have 8 characters or more including lower case, upper case, punctuation and at least 2 numbers
A simple password to remember could be:
'the cat walked down the road and sat down'
This is a 41 character password which would take hackers years and year to break even though it is so simple for the human mind to remember.
Of course this would not pass the security policy so this needs to be changed to:
'The cat walked d0wn the r0ad and sat down!'
This is now impossible to remember so the user has two choices:
Either write the password down somewhere totally insecure.
Or make an easier password:
'passw0rd1!'
This password is only 9 characters and passes the security policy tests without a problem. That said according to https://howsecureismypassword.net/ it would take 344 days to break this password whereas the 41 character password would take 479,245,873,413,199,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years
Obviously I have no idea how to say that number out loud but it's billions of times more secure.
This is a cry for help to all systems administrators: Get rid of these ridiculous security policies. If you require a certain length password that is fine, but the rest of the policies at utter nonsense.
Please share this post if password policies have **** *** *** (annoyed you).
Thursday, 12 September 2013
How to buy bitcoins in the UK
Four months ago I started a website called QuickBitcoin which allows users to buy bitcoin in the uk. Using the UK's faster payments system we are able to reduce transaction times down to an average of only 10 minutes.
Running the site has not come without it's share of problems. Unfortunately accepting paypal or other reversible payments system simply doesn't work as scammers can pose as customers and initiate chargebacks as soon as they have the Bitcoins. Currently Paypal always sides with the buyers as their dispute staff have not been trained to inspect the Blockchain for evidence of a transaction.
This means that the only forms of payment we are able to accept are those which are much harder to reverse, therefore removing our risk, but also removing all the security layers from our customers. How are customers expected to blindly send us a bank transfer without knowing if or when they will receive their coins?
Building this trust is a slow process. We are as open as possible about who we are and how we operate, but often receive questions about how they can trust us. I guess it all comes down to reputation. Getting that first buyer in took a long time, and now there is a steady flow of customers, but most are still a little skeptical.
You can't really blame people for being skeptical what with all the bad press that Bitcoin has had. I for one am convinced that Bitcoins or another similar currency have a large role to play in our future.
Running the site has not come without it's share of problems. Unfortunately accepting paypal or other reversible payments system simply doesn't work as scammers can pose as customers and initiate chargebacks as soon as they have the Bitcoins. Currently Paypal always sides with the buyers as their dispute staff have not been trained to inspect the Blockchain for evidence of a transaction.
This means that the only forms of payment we are able to accept are those which are much harder to reverse, therefore removing our risk, but also removing all the security layers from our customers. How are customers expected to blindly send us a bank transfer without knowing if or when they will receive their coins?
Building this trust is a slow process. We are as open as possible about who we are and how we operate, but often receive questions about how they can trust us. I guess it all comes down to reputation. Getting that first buyer in took a long time, and now there is a steady flow of customers, but most are still a little skeptical.
You can't really blame people for being skeptical what with all the bad press that Bitcoin has had. I for one am convinced that Bitcoins or another similar currency have a large role to play in our future.
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
3D Printer more Reliable than 2 Dimensional Counterpart!
Today I'd like to share a frustration I've been having and I'd be interested to know if anyone else is having a similar experience:
My 3D printer is currently churning away for about 20h a day. It costs around £500 and hums away in the corner and churns out my orders in top quality PLA. Current reliability is somewhere around 99.9%.
When I come to posting the prints to customers I print off postage labels with my 2D printer. The printer is around £100, and only 2 months old and prints about 3-4 pages a day. Every time I print there is a paper jam and I have to restart the printer after every single page. Current reliability rate is around 1-2%.
Oh the irony! I guess I'll be buying a new 2D printer then... Anyone else got this issue?
My 3D printer is currently churning away for about 20h a day. It costs around £500 and hums away in the corner and churns out my orders in top quality PLA. Current reliability is somewhere around 99.9%.
When I come to posting the prints to customers I print off postage labels with my 2D printer. The printer is around £100, and only 2 months old and prints about 3-4 pages a day. Every time I print there is a paper jam and I have to restart the printer after every single page. Current reliability rate is around 1-2%.
Oh the irony! I guess I'll be buying a new 2D printer then... Anyone else got this issue?
Sunday, 28 April 2013
Botqueue is amazing at queueing reprap prints and managing botfarms!
A while ago I posted about BFQ - my design for a Bot Farm Queue to manage my printers for me:
http://hughht5.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/how-to-control-multiple-3d-printers-bfq.html
graphmastur kindly told me about Botqueue.com which is very similar to the design I proposed and is now very reliable. The open source software is being worked on almost everyday by Zack Hoeken and other commiters and any bugs you raise are quickly sorted out.
I have been using botqueue for probably 99% of my prints since mid february and have had almost no issues with it. The only time I haven't used it was when I tried to print a 100MB STL file of a statue which was too big to upload to botqueue.com
As you can see on their stats page I am their biggest user with my trusty printrbot taking the lead:
http://www.botqueue.com/stats
I am about to add 4 more printers to botqueue which may increase my lead, but competition aside people really should start using it more. Its a great tool once your printers are set up perfectly and just work every time.
The printing process is now much simpler. I can upload either an STL file or a gcode file to my botqueue account. If I upload an STL it will be sliced with my default settings. When a printer becomes available the next job on the queue is downloaded and the printer starts again.
I've just persuaded a friend to start using Botqueue as he normally prepares files in his bedroom then walks downstairs with an SD card to start the prints in his garage. With a simple webcam (which Botqueue supports) he can now start prints from his room and watch on the webcam if anything goes wrong.
http://hughht5.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/how-to-control-multiple-3d-printers-bfq.html
graphmastur kindly told me about Botqueue.com which is very similar to the design I proposed and is now very reliable. The open source software is being worked on almost everyday by Zack Hoeken and other commiters and any bugs you raise are quickly sorted out.
I have been using botqueue for probably 99% of my prints since mid february and have had almost no issues with it. The only time I haven't used it was when I tried to print a 100MB STL file of a statue which was too big to upload to botqueue.com
As you can see on their stats page I am their biggest user with my trusty printrbot taking the lead:
http://www.botqueue.com/stats
I am about to add 4 more printers to botqueue which may increase my lead, but competition aside people really should start using it more. Its a great tool once your printers are set up perfectly and just work every time.
The printing process is now much simpler. I can upload either an STL file or a gcode file to my botqueue account. If I upload an STL it will be sliced with my default settings. When a printer becomes available the next job on the queue is downloaded and the printer starts again.
I've just persuaded a friend to start using Botqueue as he normally prepares files in his bedroom then walks downstairs with an SD card to start the prints in his garage. With a simple webcam (which Botqueue supports) he can now start prints from his room and watch on the webcam if anything goes wrong.
Nozzle Jam
My Printrbot has been chugging away quietly printing products in the corner and until last weekend it hadn't had any issues for months. Then some of my printer suddenly stopped pushing enough filament through and the quality degraded.
It came at a good time for me as the prints are still usable, but not good enough to sell and I have therefore had time to print the parts for my next few printers.
As I started investigating I tried all sorts including changing the hobbed bolt but none of it worked. It was when I couldn't push the filament through by hand that I realised the ubis hotend was jammed so I simply took the nozzle out, put the temperature up to 230C and extruded about 50cm of clear pla filament through. It started out being full of bits of what I assume was black ABS in it although I'm not sure. As I kept extruding the extrusion became more and more clear. I then replaced the nozzle and it was easy to push through by hand so I put a print on.
It's been perfect ever since!!
It came at a good time for me as the prints are still usable, but not good enough to sell and I have therefore had time to print the parts for my next few printers.
As I started investigating I tried all sorts including changing the hobbed bolt but none of it worked. It was when I couldn't push the filament through by hand that I realised the ubis hotend was jammed so I simply took the nozzle out, put the temperature up to 230C and extruded about 50cm of clear pla filament through. It started out being full of bits of what I assume was black ABS in it although I'm not sure. As I kept extruding the extrusion became more and more clear. I then replaced the nozzle and it was easy to push through by hand so I put a print on.
It's been perfect ever since!!
Sunday, 7 April 2013
Lucky Escape on Reprap 3D Printer!
This morning I woke up to a nicely finished print, except 1 small thing:
Somehow one of the wires to my fan got caught in the print. I know my wires were loose but this was unexpected!!
For anyone who cares the print finished fine, only the fan stopped working but it wasn't really needed on this print.
Somehow one of the wires to my fan got caught in the print. I know my wires were loose but this was unexpected!!
For anyone who cares the print finished fine, only the fan stopped working but it wasn't really needed on this print.
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