Customer Support BS

June 18, 2025 | Comment

If you contact customer support, literally any customer support, with any technical issue, depending on your device, you are likely to be met with one of the following responses:

  1. Turn it off and on again (any piece of hardware)
  2. Clear your browser cache (any web app/site)
  3. Delete and reinstall it (any mobile app)

In their defence, those in customer support would say that this solves 90% of issues, but it is annoying that these are the first things offered up, and they’re not happy if you tell them that you’ve already done them.

Of course, many more issues could be … Read the rest

COLMi Smart Ring – an Update

April 9, 2025 | Comment

Not so long ago, last January in fact, I wrote about the COLMi Smart Ring, the smart ring that you can pick up on Aliexpress for about fifteen pounds. In my conclusion I wrote that “I like the design of the ring, but the quality of the finish shows where cost savings have been made to keep the price down.” Now, less than three months later, I am back as that has proved to be highly accurate.

The picture above shows my R06 smart ring after three months of use, and below it an unworn one. As you … Read the rest

Moving a WordPress Install to a New Domain

March 26, 2025 | Comment

Over the years in both my professional and personal lives I have had to move WordPress sites to new homes that required changing the domains. This has led me to develop a set of instructions that I use successfully every time I migrate.

The first warning I should give is that what follows is not the only things you have to do but it is a decent starting point.

Updating the Database

The second warning is that here be dragons. The following requires making direct changes to the WordPress database which could lead to your site no longer working. … Read the rest

RWOL from Alexa

RWOL from Alexa

February 10, 2025 | Comment

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

jolpica2ergast F1 Database Updater

January 2, 2025 | 1 comment

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.

And then it was gone

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

Remote Connections to a Raspberry Pi

December 31, 2024 | Comment

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

Raspberry Pi Monitor

December 27, 2024 | 1 comment

I’ve long been an admirer of the Raspberry Pi, but until very recently, my usage has been limited to mostly Pi Zeros, which I control from the command line. As part of my teaching Scratch I found that it could control hardware which paired with a Pi so I thought I’d give that a go and it all snowballed a bit from there!

Firstly, I couldn’t do what I wanted with a Zero, so I bought a second-hand 4B 4GB (which turned out to be only 2GB, but that’s another story) and installed a desktop. I found it painfully slow … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 4

November 14, 2024 | Comment

It’s been a while since I last pushed a new version of WDiL but finally I got round to adding the few things left that I wanted in the app – most notably notifications. Read on for details of that and everything else that’s included.

New Functionality

Let’s take a look at what has been included in this latest release:

  • the interval between triggers is now shown on the trigger stats page
  • added a user account page to allow setting of Pushover details
  • send reminders notifications via email and Pushover
  • fixed some bugs.

Notifications

One of the things I felt … Read the rest

AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation Review

November 8, 2024 | Comment

It’s been a while since I have reviewed any hardware but upgrading my AirPods to the latest version gives me the opportunity to rectify that.

There are now four different variants of the AirPods – two for the standard edition and two for the Pros. I have decided to go for the more expensive of the standard editions, the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, which is what I am reviewing here.

In (and out) of Use

Everything about these new AirPods is small: the box, the charging case and the headphones themselves. Gone is the old toothbrush design to … Read the rest