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Moving to Linux
I decided to move my main PC at home to Linux last weekend and have been pretty pleasantly surprised at how far desktop Linux has moved on since I last tried a few years back.
I went for Ubuntu 20.04 because I am lazy, and decided that was probably the course of least resistance. I was right (mostly!), and I will write some blog posts detailing what worked well, and what needed tweaks/changes.
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Setup a VPN using Zerotier and a Raspberry Pi
This post aims to document a project that I setup and use every day. It is primarily to help me in the future when I want to set it up again! I hope you find it useful for your own projects.
I run a Pihole ad blocker on my home network, and it is great. It blocks a ton of crap at the network level including ads, telemetry and other nasties.
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InfluxDB to Exist.io - Logging Gaming Time
Getting as much data into Exist as I can is important to me. So far this year I’ve built integrations for…
Gaming Time Pages Read (via iOS Shortcuts) Money Spent (using the Monzo API) This post details how I am tracking gaming time. I found a method around Christmas 2019 that lets you retrieve accurate playtime from your Nintendo Switch via the parental controls app/feature. This was cool, but I don’t always play things on my Switch, so we had to go deeper!
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Tracking planes from your laptop (ADS-B)
My local hackspace recently acquired SDR dongle for us to use, and since I’ve been wanting to have a play around with Software Defined Radios I spent an evening learning how to use it. Here is my quick rundown of how to track ADS-B plane transmissions using Mac OSX 10.14 and displaying them on a map.
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For some background on software defined radios, the idea is that the radio’s characteristics can be changed on the fly by software so you can receive all sorts of different types of transmissions across the spectrum.
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Bootstrap 4 - New Blog Theme
I decided last week that I really wanted a card based theme for my blog. After all, cards are cool.
After spending a few hours messing around with existing themes, and trying to customise them to my vision for what I wanted… someone at my local hackspace suggested I took a look at Bootstrap when I couldn’t get them to generate valid HTML properly. This was cool because I got to learn something new (see 2019 goals!
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Migrating Pelican blog posts to Jekyll
Pelican and Jekyll both use markdown formatting for their posts, but their post metadata (front matter in Jekyll parlance) formatting is slightly different. I have over 150 posts to migrate, so started looking for a few ways to make this process easier.
Jekyll metadata needs to be surrounded by two lines containing three dashes ---. This is easily achieved with the use of sed. To add the line to very top of the file, use the following sed command.
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My new Jekyll powered blog
I knew I had to move away from Wordpress.com at some point, but it was too convenent to bother making the switch. The annual renewal was coming around quickly and $100 was not going to fly this year so I started to look at Static Site Generators again.
Having previously used Pelican before, I knew how good they could be but also what a pain they could make out of the blogging workflow.
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Time Tracking with Tasker (Driving & Sleep Time)
I listen to the podcast Cortex when I’m driving, and they got me interesting in looking up time tracking and how maybe this would benefit me. I already use Rescuetime with Exist as a measure of sleep, productivity, social media posts, and other things that correlate to these like the weather, the length of the day, and more. It’s pretty neat and I look at it several times a week.
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Raspberry Pi Spotify Jukebox
Goal: To create a simple to use office based music jukebox that everyone can use and no-one can take overall control of.
It needs to be clear, simple, and intuitive. It should be reliable, and not require manual intervention.
Materials
Raspberry Pi (I used a 3, probably could have used an older model) Speaker with aux-in (Could use Bluetooth, but to keep things simple I didn’t) Aux cable Software