At the end of 2023, I wrote about how I had used a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as a machine to remotely turn on and off a media server that I had in my house. The idea being that it was unnecessary to have it on 24/7, consuming electricity when I was asleep for much of that time.
While I had a nice little web app from which I could trigger the start up and shut down I always wanted to be able to do it using voice commands via Alexa. Today I finally got round to doing that … Read the rest
Every year, over on my personal blog, I write a round-up post covering what I have done during the year. This includes books read, films watched steps taken etc. What it has never covered are my creative endeavours which would be my developments over at Github and my blog posts.
I sort of assumed that there would be stacks of stats in the WordPress dashboard but no if you want that you have to install Jetpack and get the nagging messages asking you to upgrade. These stats are very similar to what you … Read the rest
It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.
While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest
I have been asked how to use my php2Bluesky library without having to install it using Composer. Given that this is a common request I thought that I would document it here.
Before we get into the specifics of using php2Bluesky without Composer let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of using Composer. Feel free to skip this bit and go straight to how to use php2Bluesky without Composer!
Using Composer to install a package has several advantages over manually downloading the code and requiring it. Composer automates dependency management, … Read the rest
I have been looking for a way to track my sleep habits, and given that I love a good gadget, I thought that this might be the way to go. Initially, I tried wearing my Apple Watch in bed, but I found it uncomfortable and the results didn’t seem very accurate, so I gave that up. Then, I was listening to The Rest is Politics podcast, and Rory Stewart was waxing lyrical about his Oura smart ring, and I thought now that might just be the answer.
If you’re Rory Stewart being paid £1 million a year for your … Read the rest
I always struggle when I am ready to push my first commit to a new repository and always end up with errors, so I thought I would document the process here as an aide memoir for me and, hopefully, others will find it useful too.
These instructions are for when you have already got a folder of code that you want to commit for the first time to git. The first thing to do is to create and setup your .gitignore file. This tells git which files to exclude when uploading. Things to include here are config files with … Read the rest
If you’re not a Spotify user, as I’m not, then all the self-congratulatory Spotify Wrapped posts at the end of each year can become quite wearing. It’s not that I don’t listen to music; it’s just that I don’t consume it through streaming. I’m an old-fashioned, physical music kind of guy, and I have lots of vinyl records.
What I thought if I could have my own version of Spotify Wrapped? Enter…
My music media collection is all catalogued in the online service Discogs which also has an api. In fact, it was this that I used this … Read the rest
There was an issue raised recently on my php2Bluesky library pointing out that the dimensions of images weren’t being passed and so they weren’t being displayed on Bluesky correctly. On investigation, I found this to be correct, but because of the way the code was currently implemented, I couldn’t fix it. The library needed to have control of the upload of images in order to get the dimensions and currently that wasn’t the case.
The history of php2Bluesky is that it started as a series of functions in a larger side project I was working on. I … Read the rest
In addition to this blog and my personal blog I also maintain a Williams Racing fan site at https://williamsdb.com. In fact, this is my longest running site having first gone live on 6th May 1996. As you can imagine this has gone through a number of itterations over the years and the latest makes extensive use of a results database called Ergast.
About a year ago the maintainer of Ergast announced that he was going to discontinue updating it at the end of 2024. To be honest, I don’t blame him as it … Read the rest
In my last post I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Monitor and how it is a great solution for working with your Raspberry Pi. However, as great as the Pi Monitor is sometimes it is a bit of overkill or too big to carry around which got me to thinking about other ways to access you Pi.
Why would you want to choose one of the following? Well, they require little or no extra hardware, are cheap to implement and run, and have the added benefit of the possibility of remote access.
Here are three other methods which you might … Read the rest