Sending messages to Pushover from PHP

July 24, 2023 | Comment

One of the things that I regularly bake into my own applications is notifications of when things go really bad and need my immediate attention. For this, I use the excellent and simple Pushover service which allows me to send a push notification to my mobile device. In this post, I run through how to set up your application in Pushover and then send a notification via PHP.

Setup Pushover

I am assuming that you have already created your Pushover account. You get a 30-day trial and after that, it is just $5 as a one-off purchase.

From your dashboard … Read the rest

The Move from LastPass is Complete

July 14, 2023 | Comment

In December 2022 LastPass announced to their users that they had been subject to a data breach. This led me to consider moving to another password manager which I did, settling on 1Password.

I transferred over 1,700 passwords and I calculated that changing an average of three a day was going to take me a year and a half to change them all. Well, it has been somewhat quicker than that as I have finished! In doing so I have reduced the number from 1,700 to 677.

I thought that it might be useful to know what I did … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 2)

June 7, 2023 | Comment

In the first part of this post, I showed how to set up your Twitter dev account ready for using v2 of the API. In this post, I will show you how to access that API and post a tweet.

Goodbye Codebird

I am moving from Codebird which has been great but only supports v1.1 of the API. I looked at all the PHP libraries that I could find and decided on TwitterOAuth which styles itself as the “most popular PHP library for use with the Twitter OAuth REST API”. I toyed with this package but couldn’t get it … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 1)

June 1, 2023 | Comment

As part of The Twitter Debacletm I have spent the last few weeks trying to get my Twitter bot working again which has taken quite a bit of effort.

I thought it might be worth looking at what I did to get my bot working again once access to the API was cut in February. As there is so much in this I have broken it down into two parts:

  1. setting up your project and getting the keys you require to use the API
  2. calling the API from PHP

Getting the keys

I struggled to find which keys to … Read the rest

The Twitter Debacle

May 26, 2023 | Comment

Ever since Elon Musk took reluctant control of Twitter he has been walking a tightrope as he balances bringing Twitter into the black with not losing the core base of users. That includes laying off a large number of staff.

One decision that I think he might yet come to regret is the change to the API access moving from free access to a freemium model. Where you used to be able to post an unlimited number of tweets this is now restricted – 1,500 a month for the free account, 50,000 a month for $100 and so on up.… Read the rest

Hyper Local Weather Part 2 (It’s not that)

April 27, 2023 | Comment

A while ago I wrote this article about the box installed on a lamppost down our road. I surmised that this was a local weather station providing hyper-local weather, but that is not the case. Read on to find out what it actually is…

Hyper Local Weather

I was surprised to see someone up a ladder tending to the contents of the box this week and so I decided to go and find out exactly what it was all about. The person was happy to chat and explained that he was from the Transport Research Laboratory, contracted to the … Read the rest

Hyper Local Weather

April 19, 2023 | 1 comment

I’ve spent years not really considering where our weather forecasts have come from. Other than having a vague sense of awareness that Cray Supercomputers are involved, that the forecasts themselves covered too great an area to be of any use and we’re frequently inaccurate. If you want to know the weather look out the window was my mantra.

Recently though apps have started sending notifications for weather warnings, such as rain starting in 10 minutes, for your “local” area. It’s unclear what area the warning covers and what they consider to be local but here in the UK you … Read the rest

Bringing Robbie the Robot back to life

April 9, 2023 | Comment

A job that I never look forward to is mowing the lawns. Don’t get me wrong I love being in the garden and gardening in general. I think gardening is great for one’s mental health, but that does not extend to lawn mowing. So, a couple of years ago I bought a robotic lawnmower – a Flymo Easilife 250 – which we dubbed “Robbie”.

In order to get the mower to know where to mow you have to lay a wire around the boundary. This is a pretty straightforward job and you can either peg the cable down (in which … Read the rest

The LastPass Debacle

March 13, 2023 | Comment

You will probably have read about the LastPass security incident(s) that took place last year and, perhaps, have seen the belated response from LastPass. Turns out a bad actor got access to an employee’s laptop by exploiting a weakness in the Plex media server software – something that had long since been fixed but the employee hadn’t felt the need to apply the update.

I am a long-standing LastPass user (since 2013) having long recognised the need for somewhere to securely store my passwords. Unsurprisingly I have accumulated quite a few passwords in those ten years – over 1,700 … Read the rest

Untethering a Raspberry Pico from your Computer

February 13, 2023 | Comment

In my series on the PiHut Maker Advent Calendar, I posed a couple of questions:

  1. how do you move from a wobbly breadboard to something more permanent?
  2. How do you run code without having the Pico tethered to a laptop running Thonny?

I have, at least, now worked out how you do the latter of these two and I will explain how below.

In order to get a script to run on start-up you need to save a file called “main.py” to your Pico device. To do that I have included steps for this using Thonny. Firstly, make sure … Read the rest