Grabbing YouTube’s Thumbnail Image

November 28, 2025 | Comment

Sometimes there are simple solutions to life’s little problems. I had a need to get the thumbnail image associated with a YouTube video. I spent ages mucking around in the browser code inspector trying to work out how I could achieve this without much success.

Turns out that there is a simple, repeatable way using YouTube’s built-in thumbnail URLs

Get the Video ID

Every YouTube video has a predictable thumbnail URL, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Go on, click it, you know you want to!

So generically this is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

And in our example above the ID is dQw4w9WgXcQ.

Get Images

… Read the rest

Exporting WordPress Posts to Day One

November 1, 2025 | Comment

For this month’s “12 Apps in 12 Months” challenge I decided that I wanted to try and import my WordPress posts into the Day One app. Given that Day One is now owned by Automattic who also “own” WordPress I was surprised that something like this didn’t already exist as an option within the app.

Into the Unknown

As a local app, albeit one with cloud storage and syncing, there isn’t an API for Day One. Instead there is a CLI which you can use to create new entries from the command line. This was the approach I took to … Read the rest

Storing Data in a PHP Project

October 15, 2025 | Comment

Over the last year I have been reevaluating how and were I store the data for my projects. Traditionally I have added a new database in MySQL for each but I thought that was a bit overkill for some of the smaller, single user, projects that I was working on.

There are several options for storing your data, but each comes with its own trade-offs in setup time, performance, and scalability. Here I look at the ones I have used in my prejects — flat files, SQLite, and MySQL — and see where each one shines (and where … Read the rest

Payment Security, Greek Style

October 8, 2025 | Comment

Handheld chip and pin machines aren’t as universal as I thought they were. On a recent trip to the States, I found that it is still much more likely that they will take your card away to some dark corner to produce you a paper receipt, no doubt cloning it in the meantime!

In the UK that almost never happens but the vast majority of restaurants will come to the table with a machine these days, demanding payment before you’ve even seen this bill!

While holidaying in Greece earlier this year I found in a number of places where not … Read the rest

Using bookshelf – a reading list manager

October 2, 2025 | Comment

Yesterday I wrote about my latest project — bookshelf. Today, I am going to show you how to use it. This post assumes that you have already downloaded the code and got it up-and-running.

Table of Contents

Views

bookshelf has a number of different views to satisfy the different groups using it.

All Books

The main view (Home) is straight list of all your books which can be filtered by author, title, … Read the rest

bookshelf – a reading list manager

October 1, 2025 | 1 comment

As I have stated previously, I read more than the UK average (40% of Britons haven’t read or listened to anything in the last 12 months), but I get books faster than I can read them. This means that I have a backlog of books waiting to be read. I wanted somewhere that I could record all my books and have a priority list of those that I wanted to read next.

Therefore, for this month’s “12 apps in 12 months” I present bookshelf – a reading list manager a place where you can manage all your … Read the rest

Escaping a Frozen SSH Session

September 19, 2025 | Comment

If you use SSH regularly, you’ve probably seen this: you’re happily connected to a remote server, then you close your laptop or lose your network connection. When you open it again, your terminal looks stuck. You press keys, nothing happens, and eventually you get something like:

client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe

Until that timeout kicks in, the session feels “locked” and you can’t type anything useful.

Fortunately, there are a few simple tricks to escape frozen SSH sessions without waiting around.

Use SSH’s Built-In Escape Sequences

OpenSSH has a special escape character: ~ (tilde). It only works if … Read the rest

Home Assistant – Bus Stop Times

September 1, 2025 | Comment

As I have stated in previous posts I am currently trying to get my head around Home Assistant and Dashboards in particular. I am slowly working up to having a dashboard display on an old Android tablet.

I decided that I’d like a project that could show how Home Assistant could be used for more than simply turning on and off the lights, and what would be useful to me would be a display showing a list of the next bus arrivals at our nearest stop.

I found that our local bus company, Reading Buses, has an api that provides … Read the rest

Adding a New Card to a Home Assistant Dashboard

August 21, 2025 | 1 comment

Now that my Home Assistant devices are set up and working reasonably well, my focus has moved to building out a dashboard that has the elements that I want to see rather than everything that is shown on the Overview tab.

This post takes you through the steps to create a new dashboard and populate it with two different types of cards.

Create a New Dashboard

If you try to edit the existing default dashboard you will be presented with the following message – basically you cannot mess with the default dashboard and so you have to create your own.… Read the rest

Not all Zigbees are created equal

August 15, 2025 | Comment

I said in a previous post that I had been getting into Home Assistant/automation and you should expect more posts – and here is the first!

Baby Steps

My introduction to home automation was, like many others I suspect, via the IKEA TRÅDFRI range of blubs and plugs. In order for these to work you needed a hub which joined them all together and allowed you to control them via an app. These devices all worked over the Zigbee protocol and worked well. Then, IKEA took the decision to discontinue the TRÅDFRI range and replace them new devices using the … Read the rest