Welcome to my digital home! There are lots of articles you might find helpful buried in this site on topics such as modifying an Alfa Romeo 159, rebuilding a Lotus 7 (Robin Hood 2B), not to mention a ton of stuff on technology in general. It’s all here somewhere, so use the search function or navigate using the menu structure. if you want to talk, reach out via the contact function, I usually do answer!
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GeneralSo many people use the term “Digital DJ” and rely on CDJ’s to make them sound good. Personally, if you can’t make Vinyl work, you need to go back to basics and earn your stripes.
Don’t get me wrong, i understand the simplicity of the CDJ’s and the obvious sound benefits of CD, but they are just too clinical.Related Images: [...]
RH2B Build DiaryBy far the biggest fix that needed to be handled was the suspension. The ride was crashy, wooden and showing its age. I knew this when I bought it, and it was always on the cards to be sorted before summer, so I got stuck straight into it in the spring. After ordering a ton of parts (bushes, ball joints, bolts and not least a shiny new set of GAZ adjustable Coilovers) it was time to get dirty!
The old suspension
This was no small task. Starting at the back of the car, the original sierra setup was in use. separate shock and spring, with a few spring spacers in to stop it hitting the frame! That needed to go and be converted to coilovers so I spoke to KitSpares, the company that originally made the RH2b (Great British Sports Cars) and got some advice. Fortunately they made a conversion kit for this which was essentially a couple of metal brackets so i bought the parts and set to work.
Parts required to convert the rear end.
It was remarkably easy to do and took no time once I had everything stripped down and prepped. For the most part, the longest time was spent prepping materials with paint and rust proofing everything that was looking worse for wear. All exposed metal was either painted, or treated with BitHamber Hydrate 80, my favorite rust proofing agent!
BitHamber Hydrate 80 doing its thing!
Once everything was prepped, cleaned, hydrated, painted and ready, it was a simple assembly to get it looking like new!
Fresh and sporty!
Once the rear end was all sorted out it was onto the front end. This was the real mess. Old Spax coilovers with paint chipping off while everything else was hand painted in what looked like textured hammerite! and I do mean everything, bolts, bushes, the lot!
Not a pretty sight!
Along with some interesting choices in paint came an interesting choice in bush modification. The suspension used circa 1990 Vauxhall Astra bushes, but the builder had litterally hack-sawed them shorter to get some caster adjustment. The result was a messy mix of jagged bush, spacers, washers and well…. shit.
This was not going to do at all so it all came off and was stripped back to bare metal before being sprayed in Auto-K Black Calliper paint. I love this paint because it self levels, requires no primer or top coat, is resin based and hardens. Its ideal for metal bits like suspension IMO!
Complete OSF suspension setup stripped back to bare metal (this was not fun to do!)
Painted and ready for assembly!
Once painted I installed new bushes, new track rod ends as well as new upper and lower ball joints. This was what was needed to get the feeling back in the ride and sort the old girl for many years to come!
Painted, refreshed and looking like new!
Along the way, I replaced far too many bolts that were not the right size or spec which was slightly concerning. Why you would use a mild steel M8 bolt when it should be a stainless 8.8 M10 I have no idea, but when I found it wrong, it got put right!
Of course the 3D printer came in handy along the way. Firstly to print some custom designed flexible mounts for the cycle wings to stop them rattling, and then to print some custom bolt caps with a Lotus 7 logo in. I mean, if you can, you should right?
Flexible Cycle wing mounts printed in TPU
Some of the many Bolt Caps I printed in ABS
All in this particular modification / improvement has taken me just short of 3 months, but that’s mainly because I took my time and made it right!
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GeneralI have decided to plan my new musical platform in advance this time, rather than the usual method of buy something, expand on it, realise its not up to the job and then replace it. This essentially means that I am going to spend a great deal of time on google deciding something, then finding a better version of something and so one, until I eventually bite the bullet and invest.
What I have at this stage is a premise and an outline set of requirements. The premise is simple, go fully digital, but retain analogue controls. The outline components are as follows:
A powerful PC/MAC + Essential Apps such as Ableton Live
A High Quality Multi-channel sound card
A midi trigger device
A Good quality Mixer
A Sampler/Effects Unit
Now, its actually possible to have all of the above in a single box, and in fact, many solutions exist for sub £250, but to be honest, its just not going to give me the flexibility and expandability that I desire. What I want is complete fluidity in the solution so that I can expand upon for many years, giving me not only multi-channel mixing, but the real-time remix capability that I desire
So where next?
Well, I already have a decent mixer (DJM600), a powerful PC (Multi-Xeon Monster) and Ableton, so the most important piece and crux of the system is what I need to acquire first. This would be the multi-channel sound card! I have had a look around and found many options, but this one seems to be the best by a mile:
Motu Ultralite MK3
This unit has all the features I could need, from 192Khz sample rates, through to 6 channels of input and 10 channels of output to give me as many feeds as I could possibly deal with! The spec list goes on forever on this thing, which is why it can command a £500+ price tag. But if I am going to invest, this is the way forward.
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LiveMixesIts been a long time coming, but here it is… a fresh mix on a totally new rig, so excuse the flaky mixing 🙂
https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabawoki_Rolling_House_Beats_15082009.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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RH2B Build DiaryI was hoping when I rebuilt the suspension that the brakes were ok. Well they looked ok, and the car seemed to brake fine so I didn’t think I needed to do anything to them until the winter. Well, turns out that they were a little less than perfect and caused an MOT fail!
According to the Brake test, there was a 46% difference between NSF and OSF, whcih was a bit of an issue! I am a little unsurprised though as during the suspension rebuild, suspending a caliper on cable ties and occasionally knocking it off was more than likely to have upset a 15 year old braided hose! The fix was simple, rebuild both callipers with new seals and pistons, put new brake lines on, and flush the whole system.
Calliper Rebuild Kit
First up was a “Bigg Red” Calliper rebuild kit, cheaper than expected, coming in at £27 delivered! This gave me a new set of seals and a new piston for each calliper. The pistons that came out were pitted so a rebuild kit that included pistons was key. While the callipers were apart is was an ideal time to spray them with my favourite Auto-K Calliper paint, so I set about doing that. While the wife was out one day, I took advantage of the oven and decided to cure the paint to 200c (needed for the paint to harden) off the car and before I rebuilt everything.
My version of a happy meal
Before paint, I put the pad carrier in a vice and filed smooth all the pad glide surfaces to remove many years of corrosion and paint. After I painted them again, I removed the overspray with a file on this area and before putting the pads in coated the entire slide area in copper grease.
Filed pad glides
The new braided lines were supplied by GBS through Kit Spares, and again, were great value for money. A full set (4 lines) was around £60 delivered, which considering they were branded Goodridge and very high quality, is excellent Value for Money. I have only installed the front lines for now as the rear callipers were fine, but i’ll do the rear end in the winter!
Braided lines
The brake fluid was old and had lots of corrosion in it. When I flushed the system through the furthest calliper tons of black floaty bits came out. I am pretty sure this fluid had been in the car for several years! It took about 1.5l of fluid to fully flush & bleed the system, but boy was it worth it.
The final product went back together very easily and an MOT retest showed perfect front brake bias so I cant argue with that! Another job I wasn’t expecting ticked off!
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InfoSecSo much has been said, good and bad, about GCHQ’s recent release of a cipher to the community. Simply a publicity stunt or well designed honey-pot? No one will ever really know, but what you don’t know is that this was an example of seeing a good idea and then totally cocking it up.
Let me start by saying these are my own words and thoughts and in no way reflect the opinion of my employer, or those organisations I am associated with.
A year or so ago, I got involved with the UK Cyber Security Challenge, which, as far as I am concerned is a good organisation, doing the right thing for the industry and those that want to be a part of it. I put a lot of my own personal time and resources into it for free, and make my employer give even more time, resources and money to the cause as well. Since I got involved with the UKCSC I have been providing them with simple on-line code breaking challenges, though my own devious thought processes and those of the many experts far better than me, that I have the pleasure of employing. We do these little challenges, typically on a quarterly basis, as well as to “support suitable and worthwhile endeavours”. One such endeavour happened recently, specifically, the London Conference on Cyberspace, hosted by the FCO. As was the usual manner for these things, I got a phone call from one of the UKCSC directors on a Friday evening asking if we could pull together a cipher for the event the following week, of course, I said we would be able to and engaged the collective grey matter of a couple of my team. The caveat to this request was that the cipher needed to somehow include GCHQ, the FCO, the UKCSC and of course my own companies brand. As such, I devised a simple 2 stage approach that would allow me to sufficiently bring together the brands and get the exposure each organisation wanted.
The cipher itself was a union jack (in keeping with the event) hosted on the FCO conference site, with a series of logos on the flag itself. It was uploaded as a PNG file and had a binary string in the middle of the flag. The binary string easily translated to a goog.le shortlink that took you to a holding page on one of my sites that had each of the organisations logo’s and a message saying thanks for playing. What was less obvious and in fact the real challenge, was that the flag actually had two binary strings embedded onto each other in such a way that if you played with the colours you would see a series of 0’s that were in fact 1’s and vice versa 🙂 This decoded to a different goog.le link that took you to a random page on a paste bin style site, where there was an ascii art pumpkin with some cipher text in it. The cipher text required a key to decrypt, and the key was hidden as a html comment in the other page that you went to if you only found the first shortlink, so to complete the entire task you had to visit both short links, and pull it all together.
It was a simple little cipher that around 100 or so people played and 3 people got right. I put the low turn out down to the last minute nature of the engagement and lack of major press coverage, but, it was still a lot of fun to pull together, and if you cant have fun in your work, what’s the point?
So, what does all this have to do with the GCHQ Cipher I hear you ask? Simple…
When my team and I developed this cipher for the event I was liaising with the guys at GCHQ careers to ensure they were happy with what we had done and that we had hit the relevant targets for them. In short, they “absolutely loved the cipher” and “thought it was a brilliant idea”.
…a few weeks later, they had their own.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am aware I don’t own the rights to developing cipher/code breaking challenges to identify talent in the community, but I have been doing it long enough to know that you have to get the “pitching” absolutely perfect to the targets. By this I mean, there is no point in creating a cipher/challenge that would tax the most senior pen tester in the market when your using it to find talent to fill a job that pays £20K or so, in fact, this is the reason the ciphers we develop for the UKCSC are not that difficult. What these challenges do/should do is require the player to demonstrate some core requirements such as R&D/basic scripting/coding potentially, ability to think creatively etc, and then entice them in through layers of difficulty to a point where they are genuinely interested and engaged. This approach lets us target the college/university/entry to employment band of the industry and find the real talent in it to bring on board and then develop.
So, in summary, GCHQ, nice try but don’t give up your day jobs, and next time you want some help finding talent to help protect the nation, just ask, we are always happy to help.
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LiveMixesOldschool Hard House from the archives
https://dev.jabawoki.com/mp3/Jabawok_02122000_Hard_House.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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LiveMixesIn honour of the legend that is Deadmau5 this mix is dedicated to his work and the awesome sounds that result from it.
01) Toca Me (Deadmau5 mix) – Fragma
02) I Want You (Deadmau5 mix) – Carl Cox
03) Afterhours – Deadmau5 & Mallefresh
04) Hey Baby – Deadmau5 & Mallefresh
05) Harder Better Faster on Drugs – Deadmau5 vs Daft Punk
06) Dont You Want To Feel (Deadmau5 mix) – Drugstore Era
07) Finished Symphony (Deadmau5 mix) – Hybrid
08) Tiny Dancer (Deadmau5 mix) – Marco Demark Feat Casey Barnes
09) Longest Road (Deadmau5 mix) – Morgan Page
10) Super Skunk (Deadmau5 mix) – Noir
11) Cherry Twist (Deadmau5 mix) – The Crystal Method
12) Dirty Sexy Club Music (Deadmau5 mix) – Filter Freq
13) Burn (Deadmau5 mix) – Prime 33
14) No Pressure (Deadmau5 mix) – One Plus One
15) God Is A DJ (Deadmau5 mix) – Faithless
https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabawoki_Strictly_Mau5_04042011.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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LiveMixesA multi-part Electro Pop Mix for the masses 🙂
01. David Guetta – Memories (Bingo Players Remix)
02. Klubbheads – Kickin hard (DJ Solovey Remix)
03. Desto – Crazy (Lindberg And William Remix)
04. Snap – The Power (DJ Pomeha Remix 2010)
05. Gubellini vs Pain feat Darook Mc – Shake It Up (Javi Mula Remix)
06. Sabien And Alim – Naughty Feat Jerique (Shahin Remix)
07. Loleatta Holloway – Ride On Time 2010 (Bruno Ramos & HytraxX Mix)
08. DJ Eako & Morelly feat. Omega Brown – I Can’t Stop (Steel Mix)
09. Queen – You Don’t Fool Me (Dj Denis Rublev & Dj Natasha Baccardi Remix 2010)
10. Andrea Paci feat. Michelle Weeks – Big Mama (Elektro Mix)
11. Crookers Feat. Miike Snow – Remedy (Magik Johnson Vocal Remix)
12. Axwell – I Found You (DJ MikeY 2010 Remix)
13. Robbie Rivera feat. Fast Eddie – Let Me Sip My Drink (Chuckie Remix)
14. Topmodelz – Have U Ever Been Mellow (Rekoilz Electro Remix)
15. Niels Van Gogh And Emilio Verdez – Black Is Black (Club Mix)
16. Soul Puncherz – Speakerz Bumpin Loud (Filthy Rehab Remix)
17. Shadow Stars – Desintegration feat. Sergei Khovanksy (Mario Ochoa Remix)
https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabawoki_Electro_Pop_Part_1_10082010.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Generalok, I have had an X25 deck stand for years now, and it is actually quite good. Its stable and well put together, and of course, holds enough of the basic equipment to keep you up and running. Of course, as I expand my setup, I have come to basic realisation that what I need, is actually a simple flat surface. So me, being me, I opened up visio and knocked this up:
….essentially it is 2 sheets of 8ft x 4ft, 3/4″ mdf cut into a number of shapes and sizes, screwed togetehr resulting in two vertical podiums, each wide enough to take a 19″ rack mount perfectley, and a worksurface 2meters by 750mm, big enough for plenty of equipment. the whole thing stands 600mm high, which is the same height as your kitchen sink! so its ideal to stan infront of for long periods of time. If anyone is interested I’ll post up the 2 x cutting guides for the mdf sheets so that you can make your own. To put it into perspective. you can buy somthing similar, but inferior at www.htfr.com for well in excess of £130. The total cost for my version, which is bigger and better, is £30, yes 2 x sheets of mdf from B&Q at £15 per sheet. for the sake of an afternoons work, i know which one i would do!
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