It’s that time again where the big project that is Farset Labs is in need of another Director, and I thought this was as good a time as any to give my personal take on why I think it’s important to bring in more “Direction”, as well as a little “behind the scenes” perspective on how the position actually operates. My relationship with Farset is a long and close one, but this time I’m speaking not as the charity, just me. ...

So today is my last official day in the University of Liverpool office. Time for a bit of reflection. This is a self indulgent “For the sake of history and my bad memory” post so feel free to skip it. It’s just over two years since I left Belfast, and in those two years, life got weird(er). TL;DR for my own benefit in years to come: Worked for DSTL for a while on autonomous maritime systems Went to the Bournemouth Airshow Studied FPGA programming at Cambridge Coordinated a Raspberry Pi Outreach programme between Farset Labs, W5, and Digital Circle (along with the inimitable other Andrew; Mulholland) Spoke at TEDxBelfast and the All Island Innovation Conference Built a green field network research lab from scratch (it’s still not finished) Joined the Liverbeards Contributed to a joint project using atomic clocks for submarine location Went to GDC in San Francisco as part of an InvestNI organised Trade Mission Visited the Microsoft and Google campuses in SF Visited Noisebridge (and didn’t get involved in any drama…) Presented some research at Stanford Played with the Intel Galileo Went to Prague Got my first paper rejection Met the Queen, Prince Phillip, the Duke of York and a load of interesting entrepreneurs at Buckingham Palace Participated in VC negotiations and biz dev for a small tech firm Spoke at Ignite Liverpool (The video doesn’t do the animations justice…#cringe) Drank my way around Manchester with a load of beards Secured funding for a Farset Labs Raspberry Jam outreach programme Saw Dylan Moran Live Presented at a defence conference Attended a death metal gig in a suit Lost my passport and poster on the way to present at another defence conference… Took part in the Worlds Biggest Catwalk Presented at TrustCom in Helsinki Played glow-in-the-dark-haunted-house-mini-golf as part of what goes down in history as the most random night of my life… Was named Liverbeard “Beard of the Month” (well, I was leaving, they had to give me it sometime… :p ) Participated in a mayoral discussion on smart cities Got the most unheard of submission extension Finally got rid of a collection of “joke” twitter accounts I’d wired up to IFTTT ages ago and forgotten about… (Sorry QUB…) Got a trim from barber-to-the-stars, Cutthroat Pete Entered and won my first “food challenge”; a hot-wings challenge (and didn’t cry about it afterwards), also earning my second consecutive Liverbeard-of-the-month-status. Discovered far too many awesome bars in Liverpool Made some amazing friends I won’t be able to get rid of for the rest of my days Managed too many Undergrad, MSc and MEng projects That’ll do. ...

About 6 months ago now, I had the pleasure of getting Phil Herron to talk at the Farset Labs PyBelfast group about his work in GCC/Cython fron end optimisation work, which was simultaneously waaaaay over my head and really interesting. I’ve been a ‘Python Primary’ software engineer now for about 5 years, in web-dev, infrastructure monitoring, data analysis, and scientific computing, with some esoteric stuff involving small-vector linear algebra optimisation on GPU CUDA, Matlab bridging with Octave / Oct2Py, and distributed state systems. But somehow, I’ve managed to dodge hardcore Cython. ...

TL:DR: Setting up Observium to perform autodiscovery with dynamic DNS, and sample snmp configs to manage Linux servers This week I’ve taken a ‘break’ from the academics since I nearly killed myself sorting out some research for TrustCom (Fingers crossed), and I’ve been engrossed in redoing the network here in our University of Liverpool research lab. Good network and system monitoring tools are hard to come by, especially for free and with decent OSS tendencies. ...

Update: I got asked to do a simplified version of this post for the University of Liverpool, it lives here (Backup) I’m technically in a third year of a PhD, and most of the time, when someone asks me what it is I’m actually doing, I fluff it and say something about “autonomous submarines” or “collaborative autonomy” or “Emergent properties of communities” or something similarly vague. In the spirit of setting the record straight in a less-academic way, I thought it’d be worth while to edit a presentation I recently made to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last month in Stanford and make it a little more digestible. ...

So I did a TEDx Belfast, and had loads of fun (as you can probably see). Check out the rest of the playlist here, and I highly recommend fellow Dalriad, Leon McCarron’s talk on adventuring, Tony Gallagher’s discussion of the benefits and future of shared education, and definitely check out two talks that must have been spying on my preparations; Lisa McElherron talking about dissidents, and Charo Lanao-Madden on the power of changing perspectives. Thanks go to Davy and everyone else involved in running this great event! ...

Starting in May 2012 (a few weeks after we ‘opened’) I set up an eventcam in Farset Labs, and I don’t think I ever officially explained it… Well, first off we were using a Microsoft Lifecam that was kindly donated by Josh Holmes. This was wired up to an even-then-ancient Asus Eee 7001, wired with power and network, and left in the roof. That was about it. The Linux motion utility was used to drive the camera and after fiddling with motion’s many many options, I settled on this config file to strike a balance between dropping boring frames when nothing was happening but to also maintain ‘day night’ cycle more or less realistically. ...

<rant> There was a post on r/Belfast today from someone moving to Belfast looking to make a decision on where they wanted to live. As any sane person would (who doesn’t drive), they wanted to find somewhere close to public transport routes, or to decide to go further out of the city for cheaper but still be able to get into work/school/uni/college/etc. I’m moving to Belfast and trying to find somewhere to live. I don’t drive so I’m looking for places close to public transport, but I can’t seem to find any proper maps with the routes laid out. Translink’s site has some route maps which look similar to a tube map (http://www.translink.co.uk/Documents/Services/metro/Metro_schematic2.pdf[1] ), but without knowing the streets or surrounding ares I’m struggling to piece the routes together from names alone. For Dublin I can use something like http://hittheroad.ie/[2] to see the routes mapped out properly, but i can’t seem to find anything similar for Belfast. Does such a thing exist? ...

There’s several very valid tutorials and guides around about getting Ubuntu, Debian and Mint to automatically update and upgrade, but they don’t do much explaining/checking. This is a short post filling in the gaps I observed. Get the package sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades -y Enable the package scheduler File Being Messed With: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades Log File Being Watched: /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log I’ve got no idea why this isn’t automatic; possibly that in other environments, you only want security level upgrades to core system components rather than updating all regular applications. (Not doing this left me scratching my head for a while wondering why the logs kept saying No packages found that can be upgraded unattended when apt was telling me something completely different. Anyway, put the following into a new file named above. ...

This is an approximate transcript from my July 2018 talk at Digital DNA’s AI NI Community Panel on wether the use of AI in defence and surveillence was inherently evil Yes, It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I completly forgot about it, sorrynotsorry Hello folks, I’m Andrew Bolster, most everyone calls me Bolster. And nobody calls me Doctor. I’m a Data Scientist at Alert Logic, a cyber security firm based Texas but with a research office in Weavers Court where we monitor, analyse and identify malicious and suspicious internet activity, protecting thousands of companies with advanced sequence and pattern matching sensors deployed across the world. ...