jolpica2ergast F1 Database Updater

January 2, 2025 | 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

When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 3

October 4, 2024 | Comment

I’ve pushed another update to WDiL adding lots of new functionality and bug fixes. The most impactful of these is the forgotten password routine as this now requires the addition of the ever reliable PHPMailer. However, the most useful and visible are the changes on the activity stats page which now includes more statistics and a graph showing trends.

New Functionality

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

  • graph of triggers and intervals on stats page
  • details of the general interval trend on stats page
  • you can add a comment to a trigger
… Read the rest

Using a Raspberry Pi Camera to create a time-lapsed video (Revisited)

September 25, 2024 | Comment

Last January I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Camera that I had set-up to take hourly pictures of my garden which I then turned in to a time lapse video. You can read about that and see the resulting videos and code here:

Using a Raspberry Pi Camera to create a time-lapsed video

One of the things that I said at the time I wanted to do was to do a video that cover the whole year. Now that 12 months have passed since the first snaps taken I am in a position to do so.

Getting the Pictures

Like … Read the rest

Forwarding SMS from US to UK via Twilio

September 23, 2024 | Comment

I’m going to the States soon and have been looking at booking up some restaurants while I’m away. In particular, I wanted to book for Cheesecake Factory, but when I went to do so, I found I could only do that if I registered. Fair enough, so I went to the registration page. I discovered that you needed a US mobile number that they could text a code to. 🙁

I suspect that at this point most would have given up and joined the wait line at the restaurant but not me. I needed a solution to this pressing problem … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 2

September 16, 2024 | Comment

When I launched WDiL earlier this week I knew that it was what might be politely described as a MVP. And while I like SimpleCSS it doesn’t make for the most attractive sites. Therefore, I set about making it more appealing while also adding more functionality.

Moving from Simple CSS

I spent quite a bit of time looking for a pre-built theme that I could use as the basis of WDiL but none seemed to be where I wanted to go. In the end, I plumped for vanilla Bootstrap which with its pre-built components allowed me to get a … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

July 17, 2024 | 1 comment

Not long after I’d published my previous post on the Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language I found a wad of paper that turned out to be my notes from the first year of my O-Level Computer Science course. I thought it might be interesting to see what was there and how computing was taught in the UK in the 80s.

Starting with CESIL

The earliest page is dated 12th September 1979 when I would have just turned 14. At this point our introduction to programming was via the CESIL language. I said in the previous post that this interpreter … Read the rest