Paul Fawkesley: Engineer, founder, maker 🛠

Liberating Free Knowledge - Countering Government Censorship on Wikipedia I went to this session and learned a bit about how Wikipedia detects and responds to censorship.

Wednesday was stimulating, exciting, then overwhelming, but excellent.

Day two of the Internet Freedom Festival was intense.

This week I’m in sunny Valencia, returning once more to the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF).

This post documents how I moved from Dropbox to self-hosting a “private cloud” using Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi in my home.

Thanks to the Bitmask session at the Internet Freedom Festival 2016 for starting me off thinking about this.

This post describes ways that I’ve hardened my development machine against attackers, without restricting my ability to do “risky” activities like run other people’s code.

On Friday I played with the Network Rail Train Movements data feed.

*One of my resolutions for 2016 was to make an effort to write up my “hack days” the 20% time I’ve been trying out for the last six months.

I recently wrote an email to a friend with a little (unprofessional) guidance on setting up a Limited company.

This was originally posted on the NHS.UK Alpha project blog.

I’ve just parted ways with a friendly and interesting bunch of people - exactly what I’d expect from a Barcamp crowd.

I’m on the way to Thinking Digital and getting excited about what sounds like an incredible event.

This seems to come up a lot - is it a PGP key or a GPG key, and what’s OpenPGP?

Last time we talked about the importance of protecting your primary secret key as, if stolen, an attacker could take over your entire GPG identity.

In the last post we talked about public and private, or secret, keys.

Public-key or “asymmetric” crypto is a cunning piece of maths (which I happily don’t understand) that’s at the heart of GPG.

Cryptography, or crypto for short, offers myriad benefits far beyond writing secret messages.

A few weekends ago I went to Bar Camp Manchester - my first one.

I recently returned from Slovenia, where I’d been surprised by the amount of open wireless hotspots around.

I love the concept of Freecycle - you’ve got something you want to get rid of, so you offer it for free on the condition that someone comes and collects it.

At Sea Level Research we deploy to Heroku staging then production from Jenkins, with automatic database backups & migrations.

NHS Care Data Update [19th Feb 2014]: NHS Care Data has been postponed for at least 6 months - huzzah!

At the heart of my last project MinuteMate was the ability to programatically retrieve billing information from my Vodafone online account.

You may remember a few months back I launched a new site - minutemate.co.uk - which helps you to monitor your mobile phone usage and alert you if you’ve overspent your monthly minutes, texts and so on.

I love hot food so a grow-your-own chilli plant kit was a great present to receive last Christmas.

Resolving merge conflicts in Git can be a pain - I always find I need to see the common ancestor to understand what’s going on with the two conflicting versions.

Arduino turned out to be the perfect match for JF Machines Ltd, a manufacturer of industrial digital printing machines.

Context: I’ve just spent every spare hour of my life for two weeks working on a product, and yesterday evening I launched it.

Using Pathogen, Syntastic and flake8 The PEP8 style guide for Python is great - if you aren’t already using it, I strongly recommend it, especially if you’re working with others.

I recently learned that the new Arduino Due shares a processor architecture with the board I used for my Masters robotics project back in 2009.

If you’ve ever had to deploy Python on Windows you’ll know it’s a headache.

I finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi this Christmas, long overdue I appreciate.

Beneath the Surface: An Introduction to Information Hiding It’s been three months or so since I moved to Liverpool and I’ve had recently the pleasure of discovering DoES, a coworking and maker community.