Author archive: Joel Richards

Joel Richards
October 22, 2010

Vintage Photography #2

As a partly related post to the blog post vintage digital photograhpy a more recent project of mine has involved converting an large format, plate camera lens (~1895-1910) to be used on a Canon EOS body.

Joel Richards
October 20, 2010

Website vulnerability scanning tips

If you view your server logs, you may occasionally notice hits to obscure pages on sites that don’t exist, for example URLs like:

/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php
/PSUser/ 
/login_outasp

Over a few months I have been gathering these requests for compilation of a list of common URLs that are typically used in vulnerability scanning.

These URLs are hit on an automated basis by bots looking for scripts to exploit (for example above, it’s looking for phpMyAdmin). If you run a server with any third party scripts, particularly those using PHP & ASP as these are the most common you should be aware that there are regular hits to most sites looking for exploitable scripts and should take measures to prevent this.

Joel Richards
October 10, 2010

Garmin Edge 705 Data Recovery with DD & XML

After recently taking part in a race across Scotland, using a Garmin GPS device (Edge 705) I had around 12 hours of GPS data which unfortunately seemed to get corrupted during the ride.

The device was properly displaying the data on the unit, but Windows, OSX and Linux were all failing to read the data, prompting to format the device which would remove all the data.

After contacting Garmin support they said the device was no longer readable, had to be formatted and loaded with the firmware again even though the data was still intact on the device.

Read more | 7 comments
Tags: gps, garmin, gpx, data, recovery, 705, edge

Joel Richards
February 17, 2010

Outside the office

Recently some of us from Kyan have been heading to Craggy Island indoor climbing centre after work for a bit of social exertion.

Pictured below, Gav & Phil tackling a couple of the variety of routes of the evening.

As unfortunately there’s no pub at the top of the walls, which could provide a good incentive for completion.We usually end up down the road at “The Drummond”: http://www.thedrummondguildford.co.uk/ for a pie & a pint (if they’re on the menu).

Joel Richards
October 07, 2009

Mame Arcade Cabinet

A recent lunchtime project of ours at Kyan has been refurbishing and upgrading an old Arcade Machine.

After finding an old and broken RM Video cabinet on eBay, originally running Football Champ, we removed the old components and put in some new controls attached to a Mini-PAC USB controller. Once the various cosmetic upgrades were finished, we attached the Mini-PAC to the Linux machine running MAME.

More photos can be found in the Arcade Machine Flickr Set.

You can follow @kyanarcade on twitter to see new highscores.

Joel Richards
January 25, 2009

Vintage digital photography

I recently bought a canon d2000/kodak dcs520 off ebay, the 3rd model Canon digital SLR, released in 1998.

With just under 2 megapixels, it can’t compete with even the cheapest DSLR nowadays with resolution, but build quality it’s great.

The 350D next to the DCS 520.

Dpreview described it: “it’s the Jaguar of the digital photography world where all else are Fords”

Author archive Joel Richards