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:

how do you move from a wobbly breadboard to something more permanent?
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

The Kit I use for Recording Videos

January 2, 2023 | Comment

If you have been following the PiHut Maker Advent Calendar series of videos I released at the end of last year you may have noticed that the videos changed in quality over the series. This was because I changed the setup I was using from a simple tripod on which the feet were visible to a gooseneck phone mount clamped to the desk. Finally, I added to this a light.

You can see all of this in the sort video below and then read on for what I used:

If you are interested in what I used this was as … Read the rest

Mastodon and verifying websites

November 24, 2022 | Comment

Mastodon is all the rage at the moment as Twitter is driven into the ground in full public view by new overlord, Elon Musk. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of Mastodon here but looking at one specific thing that is different to Twitter – the automatic validation of websites.

Getting your verification link

In the profile section Mastodon allows you to record up to four pieces of metadata. This can be anything you want, such as location or pronouns, and you can also record your website addess here too. You can put any link … Read the rest

PiHut Advent Calendar

November 11, 2022 | Comment

When I was a lad my advent calendar was a bit of carboard with a Christmas scene printed on it with numbered doors that folded back to reveal a Christmas image. There was no chocolate or other delight behind the door and this bit of cardboard religiously came out every Christmas.

How times have changed and now advent calendars are clearly big business. I don’t normally do advent calendars but when I saw this one advertised from the PiHut I thought that I would give it a go.

It arrived this morning and while I knew that it was going … Read the rest

Slush ‘19

November 22, 2019 | Comment

A bit of a departure for the blog this week as I am currently away in Finland for the annual Slush event. As it is primarily a technology event I thought it would fit here.

Slush styles itself as the world’s leading startup event and takes place in Helsinki every November. The event name and the location suggest that we might be knee deep in wet snow but actually when we arrived on Wednesday it was warmer than the UK we had just left.

Having not been before it was difficult to know just what to expect but what I … Read the rest

In the Days Before Digital Downloads

October 26, 2019 | 1 comment

Digging through some old papers I came across a letter that I wrote to the magazine Your Computer in 1981 when I would have been 16.

What’s interesting about this historical artifact is not that it was hand written and sent through the post on paper (although that is certainly unusual these days). No it is that it contains a submission for publication of a program that I’d written.

It’s hard to believe in these days of digital software downloads that there was a time when programs were small enough that they could be printed in magazines and people actually … Read the rest

How to pass multiple parameters in and out of PHP functions

October 11, 2019 | Comment

At some point in your PHP development you are likely to want to break repeated functionality out into a separate, well, function. Something that you’ll no doubt also want to do is pass information back and forward from these functions.

If you are familiar with scope in programming you will be aware that variables are typically only available where they are created. This means if you create a variable called $name in the main part of your code you would not be able to “see” this variable in a function unless you passed it across. The scope of the variable … Read the rest

How I Got Here

September 27, 2019 | Comment

Many people have meticulously planned lives. They have a goal, a direction of travel, a way of getting from A to B and the drive and ambition to reach that goal. Others wander aimlessly through life without knowing whether they have achieved any goal through dint of not having ever set one. Others find that luck guides them.

Then there is me. I had a direction of travel that I was more than happy with. I had a goal that I had set myself years before and had achieved but as is so often the case when you reach the … Read the rest