January 2016

I’ve been giving a Nintendo Game Boy Color a bit of a cleanup for Mum, although there are a couple of problems to sort out before it’s much use for anything. Switch it on, the power light flickers briefly and then everything goes dead. Bit of a showstopper! After having... Continue reading

First up, a little information on the PlayStation modchips and programmers I was experimenting with around 2016. A lot of this came from educated guesses, forum posts, things I read on the internet of all places, and my own trial and error. Probably shouldn’t be taken as gospel! ;) Programmers... Continue reading

Ahhh, Angry Birds! I managed to get myself into the top 220 players on the iPad rankings. Quite an exciting achievement back in the day, especially with so many people playing the game! There’s no actual gameplay footage in this one, just a look at the rankings. But don’t disappear... Continue reading

Those Minecraft villagers were always after emeralds. Emeralds, emeralds, emeralds! Unfortunately, I didn’t have any, so I decided to flood their town instead. And just for good measure, I unleashed a bit of lava on them too. Entirely reasonable behaviour, wouldn’t you agree? All this nonsense was played on the... Continue reading

I had a go at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on the original Sony PlayStation. This one came out in 2002, by which point the PlayStation 2 had already been around for a couple of years. The poor old PlayStation was getting on a bit, but you wouldn’t necessarily know... Continue reading

I had a look at Lunatic Dawn on the NEC PC-FX, and what an interesting little system that is. The PC-FX was NEC’s successor to the PC Engine, arriving around the same period as the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Unfortunately, NEC wasn’t particularly interested in giving the machine a... Continue reading

I spent some time playing Mega Man 4 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I must say I was rather impressed by how good it looked. We’re still talking about an 8-bit console here, but the colours and artwork are so nice you’d almost think it was something a little... Continue reading

Kirby’s Adventure might just be one of the nicest-looking games I’ve seen on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Released towards the end of the NES era in 1993, it really shows what developers could do once they’d had a few years to get comfortable with the hardware. Just look at the... Continue reading

I had a go at F-15 Strike Eagle on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and decided the only sensible way to review a game about fighter jets was with a scoring system made entirely of eagles. How many eagles? Well, that was something I worked out as I went along! The... Continue reading

I played Batman: Return of the Joker on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I was rather impressed by what the developers managed to get out of an 8-bit console. The graphics look lovely, particularly the backgrounds and clouds that give everything a surprising sense of depth. Of course, being one... Continue reading

It has recently occurred to me that being a full-time student (and unemployed) has really stopped me from having any disposable income like I had previously while employed full time. Ahhh, being a student gives you all the “freedoms” of working without the pay day at the end of the... Continue reading

This one has always been tricky for me, remembering which Raspberry Pi was running which version of Raspbian / Debian. Two handy commands from this period were: lsb_release -da and: hostnamectl They overlap a little, but they are not exactly the same thing. lsb_release focuses on Linux distribution information, while... Continue reading

Part 14 - Testing the Waters Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Tor v2 onion-service setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using these commands on a current system. Time to get some content onto the web server. In this setup I could use... Continue reading

Part 13 - Generating a Vanity Onion Address Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Tor v2 onion-service setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of this series as current guidance. Back in 2016 I used Shallot to generate a vanity onion address... Continue reading

Part 12 - Preparing Website Directories Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. For multiple onion services in this historical setup, this is where I prepared separate... Continue reading

Part 11 - Configuring HTTPS (SSL) Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. This was the HTTPS route I was experimenting with in January 2016: OpenSSL created... Continue reading

Part 10 - Configuring Tor Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. Stop the Tor service from running while we tinker. sudo service tor stop Remove the... Continue reading

Part 9 - Configuring Apache Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. Formatting warning: The VirtualHost, Directory and IfModule boundaries below have been recovered from a 24th... Continue reading

Part 8 - Installing Tor Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. To get Tor up and running we need to install it with the following. sudo... Continue reading

Part 7 - Hardening Apache and Secure Shell Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. Next up we harden Apache and OpenSSH for the glass is always... Continue reading

Part 6 - Installing Samba Server Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. We need a way to gain access to the files on the Raspberry Pi... Continue reading

Part 5 - Installing Apache 2.4 HTTP Server Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. For a clearnet site hosted behind your home router’s NAT, forward TCP... Continue reading

Part 4 - Hardening Your Pi Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. Hardening, important for the sake of reducing attack vectors! First off we’ll create a... Continue reading

Part 3 - Setting a Static IP Address Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. As we are using this Raspbian Jessie image, both sudo and Nano... Continue reading

Part 2 - Image Raspbian, Basic Settings and Updates Archive note: This page documents the January 2016 Raspbian Jessie setup. Read the compatibility and security warning in Part 1 before using any of these commands on a current system. The Jessie image used here had the old default pi account.... Continue reading

Historical guide: This 14-part series documents the Raspberry Pi, Raspbian Jessie and Tor setup I used in January 2016. The original preamble was marked as an incomplete draft. Debian 8 Jessie is obsolete, Tor retired the v2 onion-service system used here in 2021, and Raspberry Pi OS, Apache, Samba, SSH... Continue reading

I’ve been sorting through some of my Sega collection and getting a Mega-CD Model 1 ready to pass on. It’s paired with a VA4 Mega Drive Model 1, and I’ve decided to install a region-free BIOS while I’ve got everything apart. Unfortunately, programming the thing has been giving me all... Continue reading