Category: Tech News

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IOS 27 / WatchOS 27 pre-release – Walkie Talkie

Now that the public Beta of iOS27 has been out a while, I have pushed the 27 updates to my phone, watch and TV. So far the only noticeable update has been the removal of the WalkieTalkie App from the Watch. Not a massive loss, but was useful when running to call out live updates to fellow runners in the group if spread over a course, or when shopping with the family to coordinate when separated.

I have not yet noticed any improvements to Siri, but unclear if the backend has been switched over to Google yet and I don’t use it that often anyway.

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FreeBSD 15 r10 is out

I suspect we are now seeing the benefits of Project Glasswing and Anthropic Mythos bug hunting / security vulnerability detection with yet another incremental release to FreeBSD 15. This time 65 packages needed updating to move from r9 to r10, but as I am now using packages versus ports, it was much quicker to patch and reboot to get the latest protections in place.

Not to be left out, Anthropic released a sanitised version of Mythos, named Fable 5, which is meant to be a sandboxed version of Mythos, that won’t allow blackhats to subvert for deploying malware.

Bottle of Mythos Lager
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Lights, Camera, Action

Have been busy with the house and adding additional garden/external lighting and then automating with Tapo S210 light switches so they can all be turned on remotely, or in case of the Garage light, as soon as the door opens.

It was mostly easy to swap over the original light switches, but the depth of the control unit on the switch, as it needs to accommodate two AA batteries meant with the curl of electrical cables coming into the pattress box it was all a bit tight. A quick check of Amazon and some 10mm spacers allowed the cables and cover to be fitted snuggly and now they are set up for both Tapo, Alexa and Apple HomeKit to control. The S210 need a Tapo hub, which is also the Matter bridge into HomeKit to function but now means the entire family can control them too.

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FreeBSD 15

I have been very slow to migrate content to the new replacement server, to the point I should already look at new low power spec hardware as so much has moved on in recent years. Given I had not yet promoted my replacement server to production ready, I took the plunge and wiped it back to a clean install of FreeBSD now that its been released so that future updates/upgrades are not degraded by trying to use ‘legacy’ versions of OpenSSL or PKG management.

The other key upgrade for me is DMA – the Dragonfly Mail Agent to replace SSMTP, this is more suited to a hobbyist install like myself and allows me to use GMAIL as my mail transport simplifying email setup.

I am also going to trying installing Lumina as the native desktop again as the new hardware has a dedicated Graphics Card and it maybe handy to be able to run some apps from the GUI rather than CLI only

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Busy with updates – FreeBSD 14.3

Finally found some time and upgraded both servers to 14.3 and trying to establish a stable baseline of installed apps like Apache, MySql, PHP, Perl, and Samba so I can easily port the remaining services over to the “new” server and retire the older one before it expires.

Setting up a new Wifi SSID for the older devices meant the Washing Machine, and cycle computer now connect easily and the Cameras appear to be more stable.

iOS 26 dropped last month but with no real massive technical changes, but now waiting for a new iPhone 17 to see Apple Intelligence live and in action as current iPad and iPhone are too old to benefit.

Its been quite a successful month with just the iKettle left to fix, but this seems to be an issue with the App or backend server as I can see its connected to the Wifi fine and can ping it fine, and I don’t seem to be the only one with issues with the smarter.io kettle range.

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Perl updated to 5.40

so that means another forced updated of everything built with PERL. Not sure why /usr/ports/UPDATING keeps pointing us back to 2023 when they could just post the postmaster commands to update from the last default version to new default version… heyho.

portmaster -o lang/perl5.40 lang/perl5.36

portmaster -f `pkg shlib -qR libperl.so.5.36`

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Cyber Security Certifications

Often get asked which Cyber Security courses are worth doing. Well there is an absolute plethora of different courses available to suit relevant backgrounds. A colleague found this and it look pretty useful

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Alexa+ – Alexa on Steriods with AI

Amazon are adding new powers existing Alexas over the coming weeks and months.
More details here

Question is how much privacy will be sacrificed for the enhanced functionality. Scant detail on the original product launch blog.

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Domain Name Mismatch – Your site is insecure

I don’t know if Apple, and Google upped the ante, or I had not noticed before, or the SSL tools on the server had not kept updated, but I started getting warnings that my site was not secure. Letsencrypt has done a pretty good job for the last 5 years so I was confused as to why suddenly now , the browsers no longer liked up. Even harder now that MS Edge do not let you easily view the full cert.

A quick test at SSLlabs confirmed that the SSL for farcorfe.org.uk was all ok, but the sub-domain of www.farcorfe.org,uk was the actual issue. The SSL cert had not been validated for the www redirect.

Some quick Googling found this page – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41097696/letsencrypt-certificate-for-www-and-non-www-domain with the required Certbot commands to add the www to the cert and a restart of Apache got the issue fixed.