First Day Back ...

Today was my first day back at uni, which was surprisingly rather fun.

I didn't have much to do in the way of work, as I only had a single tutorial in the afternoon, which turned out to be a big chat in the new "ubuntu lab" which has replaced the "sun lab" at long last.

Ther rest of the day was spend wandering town, visiting greggs for some early morning food and a cup of tea. Who knew greggs sold tea? They even sell bacon sandwiches! So much has changed in the world of greggs since I have been out the country.

We had a quick jolly to halfords, which was livened up by the epic shop for car cleaning products, under the watchful eye of the sales assistant.

Failing

This week has seen a couple of fails for me, the most prominent of them was the failure of my Ubuntu installation and then my Windows installation.

For some reason I noticed bits of my panels had gone missing and things weren't working quite right. Since Ubuntu doesn't take long to install, I opted to go for a reinstall which took me about an hour and a half to completely reinstall, update and install and configure all of my applications. Essentially returning my Ubuntu installation to the same state before the failure.

No sooner had I got Ubuntu back up and running did my Windows installation die on me. This could be easily fixed by simply repairing the MBR, however I am well overdue a clean install, which I have now been forced into.

I have yet to reinstall Windows, primarily because I am lazy and it currently has nothing to offer to me that Ubuntu can't do, other than my games. I will probably get round to doing it tomorrow whilst repairing the soon to arrive "dead" laptop that fell over while installing Vista SP2.

The big question is, which will take longer? The installation and reconfiguration of Windows XP or trying to repair Windows Vista?

Lego Mindstorms Safe Cracker

I was talking with a friend recently about the need for physical device security.

This then strangely lead onto cracking safes, which resulted in pondering whether or not it would be possible to design, build and program a Lego Mindstorms device to crack a combination safe.

I then did a bit of research and found that his has already been done in python using an arduino and a few other electronic bits.

Assembly wise, the device would be fairly simple to construct. The main issue would be turning a wheel accurately enough to be able turn the combination lock a single number either to the left or right.

My proposed method of attack would be simply brute forcing the combination, to test this I would obviously need to have something like a four digit code using a fairly limited range of digits so that the number of possible combinations is not insanely high.