The GCSB is advertising for two positions at Waihopai station (spy base) outside of Blenheim. The following positions are available: Database Administrator and ​Computer / Communications Technician. The funny thing is they added a little code cracking puzzle to the job advert. You will see the following hexadecimal code on the pages. You can convert it to Ascii and then apply a Ceasar Cypher where you shift the numbers by 13 and you will get the following:

On special request from my dear mother I designed a quick fill funnel. My mother makes her own kombucha tea and she does this in 5 litre glass jars. These are fairly heavy so when the time comes to bottle it she would like to transfer it into bottles as fast as possible. Most ends on funnels are fairly small and don't provide a way to let the air out when  using it. So I designed the following funnel so that it just fits the bottle and that it has an unrestricted way for the air to escape when you pour the kombucha in. 

The files if  you want to print our own can be found on thingiverse. 

Both live streams are back online and will run daily between 11am and 2pm. The short time frame is because I don't want them to drain the batteries too much and conserve data. 

If you are interested in in how this was done you can read my blogpost about configuring the streams here.

On my last day of the Christmas holiday I did a quick run to the repeater station. Some time ago someone had forcefully repositioned my cameras and damaged the mounts in the process. Afterwards not much force is required to change the angle again and a few months back one of the cameras had slightly moved again. Probably a possum has climbed over it. I took the mount apart and added a O-ring the the ball mount housing to take the slack out. I might experiment some more with youtube live. Maybe run it for 2 hours every second day to not drain the batteries too much and consume too much data. keep an eye out on the cameras here.

It is always interesting checking the signals from town that my 2010 MacBook Pro can pick up. These include 2G and 5G so not everything can be assumed as interference since I use 5G equipment. It also doesn't include signals that use proprietary protocols that the MacBook that recognise and it doesn't show signals wit hidden SSID's. It's always makes me wonder why some places reach so far which such signal strength when they only need to cover a small area. For example: why am I picking up motels and hotspots on my laptop 1.6km away? When will they use enterprise hardware with multiple access point working together to get the coverage instead of one or two high powered sources that spill RF interference everywhere. 

I will try one day to do a RF scan with my Antenna network. Because of my current configuration I would have to do that at times that nobody will be using it because it will take the. network offline and carrying out these tests.