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

Using Cursor to Generate Code

October 25, 2024 | Comment

I have written about the use of AI in programming previously but I recently came across Cursor which is Visual Studio Code with AI built in so I thought I would give it a go but what to do?

Road Trip

I have recently returned from a driving holiday around the East Coast of the US and was, as ever, amazed at the price of petrol (“gas”) compared to the UK but how much cheaper was it? I decided that this would make a simple test for Cursor.

As always, what is important is the prompt you give the AI … 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

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Final Version

June 29, 2024 | Comment

I have just pushed what will be the last version of my script to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file to my GitHub page.

Firstly, the good news. This version now supports BLOCKQUOTEs which means that the WordPress quote block is rendered in a way that it is more obviously a quote. There has also been an improvement in the output of code blocks but support for this is still pretty basic but does now work.

Now the bad news. While looking at the output from my own sites I found that some posts weren’t … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Code Blocks

June 5, 2024 | Comment

At the back end of last year I released a script that allowed you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. In the last update, I said that I wanted to add proper formatting for code blocks and today I have done that. You can find it on the GitHub page.

This proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The code uses the FPDF package and extends out the “Links and flowing text” example provided. I knew I needed to convert all <pre</preblocks to be displayed as … Read the rest

Overcast Statistics

May 1, 2024 | Comment

Podcasts are huge at the moment and they are pretty much all I listen to these days when I am out walking or in the car. I do this by the (mainly) excellent Overcast app. I say mainly because it has a UI that I struggle to find things in. Anywho, the one thing that it lacks (other than an intuitive UI) are decent stats and I really wanted that for my annual Review of the Year posts over on my personal blog.

After a quick DuckDuckGo I found the following post from James Hodgkinson with a Python … Read the rest

An Open Letter to Google

April 22, 2024 | Comment

Dear Google,

In 2014, around about the same time that you Nest Labs, I bought and had installed a Nest Learning Thermostat to control our central heating and give us remote access. I think that it has been a great success, so much so that I have recently upgraded to the latest version that also allows our hot water to be controlled.

I then had an idea! What if I could see temperatures around the house and use that data to get better control over resources there? So I wrote a simple dashboard which I called The Weather Station. I’ve … Read the rest

Cloudflare Zero Trust

April 9, 2024 | 1 comment

I love Cloudflare – there I have said it! If you are looking for a way to keep your site secure and performant then Cloudflare is the way to go. Today I am going to be looking at just one aspect of Cloudflare and what it can do for you – Zero Trust.

What is Cloudflare?

I like to think of Cloudflare as the Swiss Army knife of cloud-based tools. It offers solutions for a variety of things from security to performance to domain registration to content delivery all packaged in an easy to understand and use web-based interface. And, … Read the rest

ChatGPT as a Replacement Programmer

March 9, 2024 | 1 comment

When I left university I did so with a good grounding in several programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran and Pascal. Then, at my first job, I was given training in the language Application Master, part of ICL’s VME operating system. One of the things I was told about Application Master was that it was a “fourth generation language (4GL)” and that this would be the last generation that required a developer to write the code.

This was the late eighties and until very recently we have been still waiting for this transition to happen.

ChatGPT has Entered

… Read the rest

A Minor Update to my Bluesky Library

February 26, 2024 | Comment

A quick post to say that my Bluesky library has had a small update. This is to take into account that from version two of Clark’s library that handles the calls to Bluesky the connection method has changed. Therefore, if you have updated to version two then remember also to update the PHP2Bluesky code which can be found here.

You can read all the posts on the PHP2Bluesky library here and get in touch if you find any issues or have an enhancement suggestion.… Read the rest