Deliveroo watches you while you eat

tl;dr Deliveroo sends your browser movie titles with food puns as it tracks your activity.

The online food ordering platform Deliveroo, like many (most?) online platforms, monitors you as you interact with their website. It’s not really a secret that behavioural analytics (or “big data analytics”) get gathered from our time online, but is rather what we’ve come to expect of online companies who seek to extract, leverage and monetise the data generated from our interactions with their services.

It won’t surprise anyone to know that Amazon actively uses customer behaviours in real-time to affect the …

in Tech · Fri 22 April 2022

Updating the BIOS on a Supermicro Motherboard

Supermicro provides BIOS upgrades for its motherboards and some particular models’ upgrades require the use of a DOS-based environment to be applied. If you’re reading this, you’ll already have noted that the README supplied with the upgrade .zip file isn’t overly helpful on getting set up with a suitable environment to safely run the BIOS upgrade. Likewise, if you’ve tried to actually run the included FLASH.BAT file, you’ll probably have found it doesn’t quite work. Hence, these instructions to guide you.

1. Before we get started, bear in mind that flashing your BIOS …

in Tech · Sun 17 January 2021

Travel Hack: Cheapest Australian Airport Transport Options

Australia is an expensive place to travel - well, at least in terms of services attached to airports. For some reason, Australia loves to jack up the prices of everything at an airport like food, drinks and of course transport when trying to get to the airport or escape it. Even though the CBDs of our cities are fairly close to their respective airports (Melbourne is one exception), the privatisation of train links sees the costs stay high.

So how does one break the cycle of having to pay over AUD$18 to get from somewhere like Brisbane Airport to the …

in Travel · Sat 15 December 2018

VDSL Modem in Bridge Mode: How does it work?

In networking terms, a Bridge is a way in which multiple networking interfaces (physical or virtual) can be made to function as as if they were a single network interface. In general terms, this is how clients associated with a router on both wired Ethernet and wireless can communicate together. In my specific case, I have a VDSL modem which is configured in bridged mode and plugging into my Turris Omnia router to enable the Turris to connect to the Internet.

With details scarce online about exactly how this black magic works to allow my Ethernet-only router to connect to …

in Tech · Sun 02 September 2018

How to buy alcohol at Costco without a membership (in Hawaii)

There’s a variety of anecdotal information online about whether it’s possible to purchase alcohol or liquor from membership-based stores (such as Costco) in the United States if you don’t have a paid membership. Some sites quote federal, state or local liquor licensing laws as to why it isn’t possible for “alcohol clubs” to exist or similarly vague or unreferenced sources.

Having recently travelled to Hawaii, I wanted to test these ‘theories’ out for myself and see whether I could get a good deal for something to take back home as my duty-free allowance.

My research took …

in Travel · Sat 09 June 2018

Ordering a Turris Omnia in Australia (2018 pricing)

The Turris Omnia is an amazing home router. Not only did it start from humble beginnings from a crowd-funding campaign but it’s open source, has a huge community and supported by CZ.nic, the association responsible for domain names the Czech Republic.

I won’t wax lyrical about the benefits of the device as you can discover that for yourself, but rather I’ll tell you how you can order one of these if you happen to live in a country where the the resellers don’t ship to. The devices are sold through Amazon.de and various other …

in Tech · Wed 31 January 2018

Can’t change Apple ID email address? Try waiting 30 days

Like it or not, Apple plays a critical part in the app-based economy these days. Part of this is having an Apple Developer account in order to release apps to the App Store™️, and in order to get an Apple Developer account you need an Apple ID. In order for the Apple ID to be able to become an Apple Developer account, it needs to be considered to be “over 18”, even if it’s a company account and a Date of Birth makes no sense whatsoever. This is where I got stuck.

Let’s say you don’t realise …

in Tech · Tue 02 January 2018

Resolving an NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED error in Mozilla Firefox

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and occasionally I’ve found that certain resources (typically JavaScript or CSS files) may fail to load because of an error NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED, which is displayed in the console. For me, this is rarely seen, though I’ve experienced the issue a few times on Trello.com and another on our corporate website CMS. This has the effect of preventing whatever that resource was from loading, so in the case of CSS it won’t display and in the case of JS it won’t run. On Trello, this resulted in a fully broken …

in Tech · Tue 21 November 2017

iMessage and Google Talk not working on macOS High Sierra (10.13)

I recently upgraded my computer to macOS 10.13 and found that my iMessage (in Messages.app) wasn’t working entirely and that Google Talk in the same app would only receive messages and not send.

Starting with the Google Talk issue, that’s an easy one. Apple has removed “official” support for Google Talk from Messages.app but they’ve clearly left the code in place that allows your old account to login, connect and actually receive messages, but helpfully added a dialog that says “Your message could not be sent. Support for the targeted service Google Talk has …

in Tech · Wed 04 October 2017

Static sites, continuous deployment and HTTPS with Netlify

I’ve been doing a variety of things pertaining to web security in recent weeks and one thing that’s been gnawing at my brain is the fact that my blog could still only use insecure http:// because of GitHub Pages. My blog’s content was using GitHub Pages for its serving and gh-pages really hasn’t been seeing a lot of love - that I know of - since its inception a few years back, especially since the development of concepts like Let’s Encrypt with free SSL certs for the web.

I felt I probably should have taken a more …

in Tech · Sat 24 December 2016