I keep recommending these two podcasts to people so I thought I would put together a short list of the episodes I found most interesting lately.

Embedded.fm is a podcast dedicated to the many aspects of engineering. They talk about the how, why, and what of engineering, usually devices.

Some of my favourite episodes.

http://embedded.fm/episodes/190 – Interview Matt Godbolt about his awesome Compiler Explorer.
http://embedded.fm/episodes/140 – Interview with Andrew “Bunnie” Huang famous for his Hacking the Xbox book and his Novena open source laptop among other things.
http://embedded.fm/episodes/162 – Interview with Alan Yates from Valve, tons of info on the HTC Vive hardware, lighthouse and how it all works.
http://embedded.fm/episodes/205 – Interview with Addie and Whisker from the Toymakers about badge making, hardware hacking and other stuff.
http://embedded.fm/episodes/193 – Interview with Owen Anderson talking about clang and LLVM

The Amp Hour – Is an Electronics focused podcast done by Chris Gammell and Dave Jones (of EEVBlog fame).

#325 – An Interview with David Kronstein (Tesla500)

#294 – Live from Serbia with Mike Harrison

#336 – An Interview with Bunnie Huang (2nd)

#308 – An Interview with Samy Kamkar

#303 – An Interview with Dmitry Nedospasov

#265 – A Security Update with Michael Ossmann

#318 – Impedance Matching with Michael Ossmann and Dmitry Nedospasov

Something odd is going on with YouTube not working with Afrihost‘s ADSL service. It appears to have something to do with the local YouTube caching servers. Clips will often only playback at 144p or 240p and never at 480p or higher, considering that YouTube has become my main source entertainment this is a problem.

This is a quick and simple workaround that sets up a SOCKS proxy on a Linux machine hosted outside of South Africa. I’m using a Digital Ocean (Referral link that gets you $10 credit if you sign up) Linux VM running in the US.

On the VM you just need SSH running, nothing else and on your PC you need to be able to make an ssh connection from the command line.

On Windows I used the GIT Bash Shell as I had it installed and it includes ssh (You could probably do this with Putty or something similar.) and on Linux I just run the command below from a prompt.

ssh -D 8080 -CqN youruser@vm

All this will do is accept connections on your local machine on port 8080 and forward them through to the VM.

Now open your browser (I like using Firefox for this as the proxy settings are separate from the system ones in Windows) and set your socks host to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 8080.

I find this works best with YouTube when using the Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) on your local machine.

This solution seems to work reasonably well and allows me to watch the videos that don’t want to work, obviously it does add additional overhead to the connection so its not ideal.

Please forgive any errors, this was posted using WordPress for Android on my tiny little phone.

Sometime over the next few days Stuff.za.net will be moving to a new home. Nothing too much should change, I hope…

Dale