Until recently I had heard of security flaw finding competitions and websites and assumed they were only for the hacker elite. As someone who spends his days creating software I’d not really looked in to them, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to find anything that hadn’t been found before. However thanks to a bit of serendipity and some great people working on support I managed to report a security vulnerability and earn myself some money through a website called Bugcrowd as well as getting an extra bonus for finding the issue during OWASP Bug Week 2014.…

As you can probably tell from this blog, I go to a fair amount of hack days and coding events in London. I like these events as it gives you a completely open playing field to work on pretty much any project you like and use any tools and languages you want. Unlike regular work where we have technical debt, paying customers and Gantt charts. While talking to people in the office at Fivium, the company I work for, about these events sometimes people show an interest and come along, as Matt and Stephen did with Music Hack Day 2013.…

Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related. I have been before, as I’m sure you all remember from last years blog post Transcribertron is the name of the software I worked on with a couple of Fivium colleagues for London Music Hack Day 2013.…

Back in October 2013 I went to Battlehack along with 3 colleagues (Ben Basson, James Atkin and Aled Lewis) from Fivium. The hack day was initially advertised in early 2013 and when we signed up in March they hadn’t even figured out a venue. But the lure of a genuine metal battle axe and a possible $100,000 top prize was enough to make the early registration worth it. We went in not really knowing what the requirements for hacks were; there wasn’t much information on the site apart from making “something for your city”.…

Hacked.io was a London based hack day I went to in July, along with 500 other developers, artists and general creative people. The event was one of the biggest of its type that I’ve been to before. It was held at indigO2 in what was once the Millenium Dome. There wasn’t any general aim like other hack events I’ve been to, Music Hack Day / Accessibility Hack, instead it was more of a “Make whatever you like, as long as it’s cool” atmosphere.…

CPU-S is the first project I have re-written from my old website for this new one. The original version was created on a whim after having a module on my course at Loughborough University in my first year. When going over basic CPU internals and architectures our lecturer, Dr. Daniel Reidenbach, came up with a simplified, idealised CPU and accompanying system to help illustrate his points over the course of the module.…

What is/was a Chumby anyway? Chumby was an open source hardware project by Andrew “bunnie” Huang (mostly known as the MIT student who made his own hardware to help crack the original Xbox security) that was meant to put all the great promise of the web right by your bedside or on your desk. It was an ARM based linux box with a 3.5" resistive touch screen, decent speaker, WiFi, Accelerometer, microphone and flash support.…

Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related. Barbertron is the name of the software I worked on with a friend for London Music Hack Day 2012. It’s software that takes in audio and (tries) to make it sound like a barbershop quartet.…

Last August I went along to the London stop on the Adobe Create the Web Tour at the Vue cinema in Leicester square. The day was mostly filled with Adobe showing off their new web-focused tools and techniques aimed at creating content for a modern web. Basically no Flash or action script but a slew of Javascript, CSS and HTML5 instead. The event was well organised and pretty much all their new tools impressed me and inspired ideas in my head about how I could find uses for them in my workflow.…

Well, after many years of planning and talking about it I’ve finally started moving my online presence from the old palmnet moniker to the new palmr name. The old palmnet.me.uk site has served me well, though it has been through many styles over the years. Initially from 2004-2006 is was a horrible mass of static black pages with white text, flash intro files with blaring music and even bravehost widgets.…