nice weather (for the most part)
amazing views of Snæfellsjökull
went to the lifting stones place
lighthouse and breakwater
first woman to give birth in north america - gudridur thorbjarnardottir
stopped at amarstapi for a look around
cliffs and features iwth holes in them
mirror lake
Borgarnes and The Settlement Centre - hour-ish audio tour that led us through a light history of the settlement of Iceland.
Also covered some of Egil’s Saga.
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Woke up a little later at Helluland, had breakfast and saw the horses again.. this time with a better warning so I was able to catch them running up the hill.
Today we spent quite a lot of time on dirt and gravel. Something normally a little hairy - but when you add snow, rain and a complete lack of any kind of shoulder on any road - it really adds to the challenge. Our faithful steed rose to the challenge time and again, with always-on 4x4 lock enabled I had plenty of power and grip. Twice I found that the road was actively disagreeing with the direction I wanted to go - and had no trouble returning us to the appropriate direction with a minimum of fuss.
[Read More]Woke up in the Skutustadir Guesthouse, warm and dry. Outside everything was spectacularly snow-covered.
Breakfast was delicious, with locally grown and caught food, including some home made sheep pate!
Across the road, I ran up the side of one of the Skútustaðagígar psuedo craters, caused by gas explosions when boiling lava flowed over the wetlands.
The Goðafoss (Icelandic: “waterfall of the gods”) are quite spectacular.
In the year 999 or 1000 the lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði made Christianity the official religion of Iceland. According to a modern myth, it is said that upon returning from the Alþingi, Þorgeir threw his statues of the false idols (Norse gods) into the waterfall.
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Today we needed to get from Egilsstadir to our accommodation in the Myvatn region.
Of course, the weather had an opinion as to how that was going to go… and we hadn’t planned to deal with heavy rain, snow or driving wind - let alone all three at once.
RMB bought me some Hristerta - which is sponge cake, soaked in something sugary, covered in rice crispies, then covered in caramel and chocolate. The bag had soaked through with oil of some sort by morning tea, and it was utterly sugary. Just what I needed for the drive.
[Read More]Late start because we only had a few hours drive
what a few hours drive
viking cafe for the amazing (though cloud-covered) views of vestrahorn and the Viking village movie prop for the film that never was.
it was pretty sad to see the place just falling apart - and the construction leftovers just left to leak into the environment.
met some SCAdians from the states who brought garb because they’d heard about the place Cian and Tatiana from Calontir, recently stepped down as B&B for Coeur d’Ennui.
[Read More]quick stop at Fjaðrárgljúfur, a lovely little gorge near the guesthouse
drove back to Vik
joined the Arctic Adventures ice cave under the volcano tour - Katla caldera.
with stephan, the 17 year old driver, his first day on the job
not really, he was spectacularly good at what he did - found new and interesting ways to throw the vehicle around
oh, the vehicle?
this.
The first planned stop for the day was Seljalandsfoss. It was fun to scramble over the rocks and we only got a little wet.
It was annoying to get a shot of these steps without some soggy tourist ass in the way, but here’s me doing my best. They were surprisingly grippy, given they were worn smooth and not flat in the slightest.
Standing behind the falls was truly spectacular. The amount of water coming over them even at this time of year when there’s no snow melt is incredible, and it was impossibly fresh tasting out of the air.
[Read More]Huawei configuration file decryption turns out to be quite easy. It’s just XML in AES-CBC
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Key | 3E4F5612EF64305955D543B0AE350880 |
| IV | 8049E91025A6B54876C3B4868090D3FC |
| Mode | CBC |
CyberChef is super easy for this
Dump the file in, get XML back out!
To encrypt ready for usage, just reverse the step.
Or if you’re stupidly lazy, click here
A long time in planning, it’s finally here - EuroTrip 2018!
The rough explanation is 37 days away, nearly two weeks in Iceland, then the rest doing a lap of Eastern Europe. Being from Australia, we can’t just do a merry jaunt to Europe, hence the extended plans.
The flights were… as to be expected. Brisbane to London via Singapore, with a six hour stopover. I sleep on my stomach typically, so I just don’t sleep on flights. Not helpful when you’re in transit for two days! :) The lovely Premier Inn Heathrow Terminal 4 was welcome place to lay our heads for 24 hours or so until the flight to Iceland.
[Read More]Crass, I know, but it’s part of my charm. We run load balancers for our proxies and we need to monitor they’re working, so we make requests through them out to the internet. I was doing some checking one day on “top utilization by user” and found that the monitoring account had been… rather hungry.
Turns out, we were doing a full GET request to two news sites, for every time a proxy appeared in a load balancing pool, from each of the load balancers.
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