Raspberry Pi Monitor

December 27, 2024 | 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

What Should I Play next?

December 16, 2024 | Comment

I’ve got a lot of records (At the time of writing 1,076 Discogs tells me) and I always seem to gravitate to the same ones. I decided I needed help to selecting something to play so I wrote Now Playing to help guide me.

The Discogs API

Like many, I record details of my collection on the online service Discogs, which contains a user-generated database of audio releases in whatever format they are or were available. It also has an API that allows you to access certain information that is held within its database. If you are authenticated that … Read the rest

Where’s Santa?

December 10, 2024 | Comment

I had an unusual request from my friend John recently – could I help him map the location of Santa as he goes about his deliveries? Ok, it wasn’t quite like that. He is a member of the Lions, and every December they take out a sleigh with Santa on the back through the streets to the delight of lots of excitable children. The issue was that parents didn’t know exactly when he was going to appear in their streets and were constantly looking and waiting for his arrival. If there was a map of the live position, this would … Read the rest

Handling unicode and missing link card images in php2Bluesky

December 8, 2024 | Comment

I have just committed a couple of changes to my php2Bluesky library. This release includes a simple change to enable the support of international characters in hashtags and a more complex (to explain) change to the options for link cards.

International support

This was a change to the regex used in the library to identify the start and end points of hashtags. The previous code used /#(w+)/ which matches only Alphanumeric characters: [A-Za-z0-9] and an underscore _. This meant that hastags such as #Gütersloh failed to be recognised correctly. Now the regex is /#([\p{L}\p{N}]{1,})/ this now supports:

  • Latin
… Read the rest

An update to php2Bluesky

December 6, 2024 | Comment

I’ve just committed a couple of changes to my php2Bluesky library based on suggestions and/or code provided by others. These are:

  1. new function, permalink_from_response, which will return a permalink given the response from post_to_bluesky (@BobaFettFanClub)
  2. you can now provide your own image for a link card just include the link in post_to_bluesky (@bearlydoug)
  3. start of some error checking

Clearing Some Confusion

I have also received some feedback that the blog posts written when I was first investigating posting to Bluesky are confusing if you are only looking to be able to use the library itself. Looking … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 2020s

December 2, 2024 | 2 comments

A little while ago I wrote about my computing education growing up in the 1980s where I learned CECIL before progressing on to BASIC. Now, some 40 years later, I am discovering what computing children are being taught.

Enter Code Club

I had decided that once I retired, I wanted to give something back to the community, and using my core computing skills seemed like an obvious place to start.

I’d seen that the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran something called Code Club which aims to teach development skills to children from about aged five and up. These are mostly run … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Ten – Adding ALT tags to Images

November 18, 2024 | Comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

I have to admit that I didn’t think I’d be back with another post on my php2Bluesky library quite so soon but Dr Paul Lee on Bluesky pointed out that while you can post images from the library you can’t also send ALT text to go with them.

But what is ALT text?

Alt text is descriptions of images added to the HTML or metadata of a post on social … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Nine – Handling Hashtags

November 17, 2024 | Comment

Bluesky has gone from a very niche platform to one that is getting more coverage and seeing explosive growth thanks in part to the actions of the overlord at Twitter. The following was the count of users when I wrote this post.

Bluesky User Count

Expanding functionality

At the same time as the user growth, the platform itself has been growing features to bring it more in line with what its competitors are offering. This includes hashtags, which are now fully supported both in the app and API. What this also means is that I can now add support for … 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