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Some thoughts on Storytelling as an engineering teaching tool
Every week at work on Wednesday afternoons we have the SRE ops review, a relaxed two hour affair where SREs (& friends of, not all of whom are engineers) share interesting tidbits that have happened over the last week or so, this might be a great success, an outage, a weird case, or even a thorny unsolved problem. Usually these relate to a service ( Read more... ) -
Building new pods for the Spectracom 8140 using modern components
I've mentioned a bunch of times on the time-nuts list that I'm quite fond of the Spectracom 8140 system for frequency distribution. For those not familiar with it, it's simply running a 10MHz signal against a 12v DC power feed so that line-powered pods can tap off the reference frequency and use it as an input to either a buffer (10MHz output pods ( Read more... ) -
Transport security for BGP, AKA BGP-STARTTLS, a proposal
Several days ago, inspired in part by an old work mail thread being resurrected I sent this image as a tweet captioned "The state of BGP transport security.":
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Custom output pods for the Standard Research CG635 Clock Generator
As part of my previously mentioned side project the ability to replace crystal oscillators in a circuit with a higher quality frequency reference is really handy, to let me eliminate a bunch of uncertainty from some test setups ( Read more... ) -
Custom uBlox GPSDO board
For the next part of my ongoing project I needed to test the GPS reciever I'm using, a uBlox LEA-M8F (M8 series chip, LEA form factor, and with frequency outputs). Since the native 30.72MHz oscillator is useless for me I'm using an external TCVCXO (temperature compensated, voltage controlled oscillator) for now, with the DAC & reference needed to ( Read more... ) -
PoE termination board
For my next big project I'm planning on making it run using power over ethernet. Back in March I designed a quick circuit using the TI TPS2376-H PoE termination chip, and an LMR16020 switching regulator to drop the ~48v coming in down to 5v. There's also a second stage low-noise linear regulator (ST LDL1117S33R) to further drop it down to 3.3v, but ( Read more... ) -
Making a USB powered soldering iron that doesn't suck
Today's evil project was inspired by a suggestion after my talk on USB-C & USB-PD at this years's linux.conf.au Open Hardware miniconfUsing a knock-off Hakko driver and handpiece I've created what may be the first USB powered soldering iron that doesn't suck (ok, it's not a great iron, but at least it has sufficient power to be usable ( Read more... ) -
Charging my ThinkPad X1 Gen4 using USB-C
As with many massive time-sucking rabbit holes in my life, this one starts with one of my silly ideas getting egged on by some of my colleagues in London (who know full well who they are), but for a nice change, this is something I can talk about ( Read more... ) -
On programming languages
One thing people might be surprised about my job is that although I'm in network operations I write a lot of code, mostly for tools we use to monitor and maintain the network, but I've also had a few features and bug-fixes get into Google-wide (well, eng-wide) internal tools. This has lead me to use a bunch of languages, quite probably more than ( Read more... ) -
Why I care about the NBN
First of all, yes I'm a general Greens / Labour supporter so it's not surprising that I like the NBN. I work in a tech field (specifically datacomms) that also generally supports the NBN. I have plenty of reasons to support the NBN from those, but here's the "how it affects me" ones ( Read more... )