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

How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Memobottle Stainless Steel – Review

January 5, 2023 | Comment

Not so technical but still geeky so I think it counts for posting here.

Regular readers will know of my love of Kickstarter and memobottle is one of my great successes from the platform. Disclaimer I am a (very, VERY) small investor in the business.

The Background and Kickstarter Campaigns

The original memobottle was a series of reusable water bottles in sizes that matched paper sizes (well anywhere but US paper sizes) such as A7, A6 and A5. These were (and are as they’re still available on the memobottle website) great and I still use my A7 and A6 constantly. … 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

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar – Day Twelve Project

December 24, 2022 | Comment

The final project and this one feels a little bit Christmasy. Making use of the led light strip from the last box we opened yesterday I have created a slightly extended video showing not only the project itself but also a longer and silent(ish) demo at the end.

Take a look at the video below:

That’s it for 2022 and the very enjoyable PiHut Maker Advent Calendar. Would I do it again in 2023? Certainly I would providing the componts were going to be different which might be hard to achieve. What I will do is look to make use … Read the rest

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar – Day Twelve

December 23, 2022 | 1 comment

I seem to have got my days wrong and am posting this a day early but who cares! It’s nearly Christmas and you want to see what’s in the last box don’t you?

Where here it is the last opening video which the thumbnail conveniently gives away what’s in the contents. Take a look anyway as it’s pretty cool.

Day twelve included the following:

  • 1x Custom 50cm WS2812 RGB LED strip with jumper wire ends

That’s the last box done and just the final project to go. I have greatly enjoyed both the box itself, which contained some well thought out contents, … Read the rest

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar – Day Eleven Project

December 22, 2022 | Comment

SPOILER ALERT! I have never been so disappointed during this opening of the PiHut Maker Advent Calendar when I couldn’t get the OLED screen to work.

Watch the very quick video below and then read on for more thoughts.

I have no idea why this didn’t work. I tried several things to try and coax it in to life stripping it right back to basics. The project includes a switch and the potentiometer but I removed all that just to try and get the screen to work. However, no matter what I did I just always ended up with this … Read the rest