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Todoman Reminder Sync for Fastmail
How to configure calendar sync on Linux (tested on Ubuntu 20.04) for Fastmail using vdirsync and todoman.
This lets me use the same todo list between my linux desktop, and iOS mobile devices (using the built in stock reminders app)
Vdirsyncer Config I am using vdirsyncer to connect to Fastmail’s servers and before the synchronisation.
status_path = "~/.vdirsyncer/status/"
[pair fastmail]
a = "local"
b = "cal"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
[storage cal]
type = "caldav"
url = "https://caldav.
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Level 11 - Games I Played in August 2020
Super Nintendo Online - Yoshi’s Island - 10h35m
{:class=“img-fluid” :alt=“Yoshi’s Island”}
I set out to complete Yoshi’s Island (SNES) this month and managed to complete that goal! Another one off the backlog… since I originally bought the GBA version on the WiiU virtual console.
This is a great game but the difficulty curve towards the end is ridiculously steep. It rewards you when you (eventually) get it right in a way that modern Nintendo games don’t.
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Writing a py3bar module to display MQTT temperature data
I recently started using the i3 Window manager and have swapped the bar from the standard bar to py3bar as it is easily extendible using python scripts and is also fully compatible with your existing i3bar configuration. You can swap to it with one change of your i3config and it will just work.
The i3 status bar is a great place to show useful information and I thought it would be handy to show the temperature of my living room which is stored in MQTT at Adafruit.
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Sync Joplin with Fastmail Files
How to setup Joplin Synchronisation using Fastmail Files (WebDAV)
Synchronisation target: WebDAV
Webdav URL: myfiles.fastmail.com{directory in fastmail files you want to save your notes in}
WebDAV User: fastmail username
WebDAV Password: Application Specific Password for Files
{:class=“img-fluid” :alt=“Joplin Fastmail Settings”} Joplin Fastmail Settings {:.image-caption}
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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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Level 9 - Games I Played in June 2020
Lv 9 - June 2020 / Games played in June 2020 / 32h45m
51 Worldwide Games - 8h35m Everybody’s Golf - 6h38m Prison Architect - 4h21m Train Simulator - 2h28m Nintendo Pocket Football Club - 2h22m Grand Theft Auto: Vice City - 2h13m Worms W.M.D. - 1h25m Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth - 1h07m Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box - 01h04m Animal Crossing: New Horizons - 0h55m Sorry, I don’t want to write about all these games that I played!
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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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Level 8 - Switch Online & Tactical Fantasies
This week the outline for this post was built by my InfluxDB powered twitter bot and automatically saved into Notion! Handy.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS) 5h45m this week, 11h32m total
Determined to tackle my backlog during the lockdown, I had a look through my DS games and decided to give Final Fantasy Tactics A2 another go.
One of the pinnacles of turn based games in my opinion. The battles are 15-20 minutes long and always feel fair.
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Level 7 - April 2020 Gaming
The world is in a weird place right now. We’re mostly confined to our homes, and spend pretty much all of our time at home. Well, that’s perfect for some backlog bashing! Here is the rundown of games I played during April - coronavirus month 1.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo Switch) Platform: Nintendo Switch Playtime: 28h10m
{:class=“img-fluid” :alt=“Animal Crossing New Horizons”} Animal Crossing New Horizons {:.image-caption}
No surprises for my most played game in April… We’ve been waiting for this for years, and it launched at possibly the perfect time.
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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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Python 3 SimpleHTTPServer
In Python3, use python3 -m http.server to get the same thing as SimpleHTTPServer in Python 2.x.
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Logging pages read to Exist.io via Shortcuts
I was messing around with the Exist.IO API over the weekend to see what I could build. I noticed that there was a ‘Pages read’ attribute that I could post to.
Perfect! I then wondered how easily I could build an iOS app that would let me submit that each day (Spoiler: quite a lot of work) however, I remembered that Shortcuts was a thing and decided to see if it was possible to use a shortcut to post to an API.
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Level 6 - A little Switch...
The second half of 2019 was filled with far too much work! I didn’t really get a lot of time to play my games, but here are my top 3 games per month according to Switch Parental Control app…
July
Mario Maker 2 Youtube Go Vacation August
Retro City Rampage Dragon Quest IX Demo Worms W.M.D September
Spyro Reignited Trilogy Super Nintendo Online Fitness Boxing October
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Level 5 - What I've been Playing in 2019
I really need to try and complete this post a bit more often!
Top Three Games Every Month So far in 2019 (by time played) I won’t say how long I played each for, since the Parental control app doesn’t say with any accuracy but also because they aren’t for very long!
January
Diablo 3 NES Online - Mario Bros Blossom Tales February
Diablo 3 Stardew Valley Wargroove March
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Essential road-warrior travel technology for geeks
I have spent a lot of time travelling for work during the first half of 2019, and am starting to perfect the perfect grab bag of technology to make my work and leisure time out of the office more useful, productive and fun.
You need to judge what you’ll be doing, where you are going, and how much spare time you’ll have. Don’t bring a 3DS and a Switch if you are going for three days and know you’ll be out every night.
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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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2019 Goals
Here are my goals for 2019. Most of these involve self improvement of some sort, and crucially don’t involve simply cutting things out, or a fixed number of things to do a week or whatever.. Each year I’ve said ‘exercise 3 times a week’, ‘no energy drinks’…. Well that doesn’t end up happening.
2018 was a great year, and 2019 will be even better!
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Spend time improving yourself mentally and physically Lose 3.
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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.