As it happens, I set up my Mastodon account some time ago, long before Elon Musk’s ego decided it needed a new toy to destroy. I just hadn’t used it much because … well, I didn’t use Twitter much either. However, all the kerfuffle over Twitter has prompted me to look again at Mastodon. You can find/follow me at: @speculatrix@mastodon.online… Read more »
Many thanks to reader Michael McLaren for giving me a heads-up about a better way to move the cursor on the LCD display. In an earlier post, I described how I was using the ‘shift cursor right’ command multiple times to put the cursor in the desired position – mainly so that I could use the second line of the… Read more »
It seemed like a good idea at the time. The TTGO ESP32 microcontroller board that I’m using for a room thermometer project comes with a battery connect and charging circuitry for a Li-Ion cell. It would be so much easier to deploy the thermometer if I could run it off a battery. And it works. Kinda. There are issues, though…. Read more »
First steps The case – Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 PSU – EVGA 1000GQ Gold The motherboard – Asus Prime X470-Pro RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU – PNY GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Putting it all together Wrapping up It’s time for a new PC, although it’s also hard to say why. For some reason, I find myself with a hankering for… Read more »
Setting the PATH environment variable should be a simple thing. But, for whatever reason, various flavours of *nix seem to have made it wilfully complex. I recently tidied up how paths are set on my iMac, running macOS 10.14, aka Mojave. And as this blog is basically my lab notebook, I thought I’d share. First, I use Bash as my… Read more »
Does anyone really like advertising? I think of it as a kind of social disease, something that runs rampant through our society as an unfortunate consequence of our desire for, well, stuff. So I decided to eliminate as much of it as I can, and this drew me to Pi-Hole, a networking app that helps you strip advertising from your… Read more »
You know you have a Raspberry Pi problem when you start searching around for projects just to use them up. But then, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery… PiHole? Check. PDP-8 (plus intranet server and MQTT broker)? Check. Alarm clock? Check. Retro radio thing? Work in progress. Dream machine? Also in progress. Dot matrix printer… Read more »
It should have been so easy. I wanted to set up a personal cloud server – a beefier version of what I’d already done with an old Pine A64 and NextCloud. And having seen it praised on so many YouTube channels, I went for a RockPro64 as the computer. And not just the RockPro64 – oh no. A NAS case,… Read more »
A while back I decided that it would be good to have a Linux machine dedicated to my various electronics, robotics and other maker-y projects. I have an Ubuntu VM on my iMac, which is all well and good. But being able to physically plug stuff into the machine is handy. I trawled the web for small form factor PCs,… Read more »
Dropbox is all well and good – good enough, in fact, that I pay for it. But it does have occasional irritations. And if you want to play around with cloud-based stuff, what could be better than having a cloud of your own? I’ve just received a LattePanda Alpha single board computer on which I’m running Ubuntu 18.04. I won’t… Read more »
Well that’s two hours of my life I’m never getting back. You know how sometimes you try to do a simple five-minute job and the damn thing just snowballs…? Well that was today. First a quick summary so you know what this is about – I was having problems with apt-get stalling when trying to use it on a Raspberry… Read more »
Most of the books about electronics for beginners in my library say something like this in the first chapter: ‘you don’t need an oscilloscope’. Yes you do. Well, maybe need isn’t the right word. Yes, you can laboriously chart voltage levels from a capacitor by measuring at regular intervals with a multimeter (at least two of the books have you do… Read more »
My doctor keeps telling me to stop typing. As a professional writer and enthusiastic coder that’s not going to happen any time soon. But it’s true that, for me, typing is a pain – literally. I have osteoarthritis in all the joints of both hands (and many other places) so constantly hitting keys is not a joyful experience. What I… Read more »
I have a mouse problem. I don’t mean the house is overrun with small rodents. (Well, it is, but that’s another story.) No, the problem is that the conventional computer mouse has become a pain to use. I have osteoarthritis in most of my joints. The hands are especially bad. Indeed, one of the things that has driven me back to… Read more »
This was not a serious purchase. I bought this keyboard purely for its looks. I mean, why wouldn’t you? The version I opted for came with retro-style keycaps that mimic a 1920s or 1930s typewriter. They look fantastic with a retro-styled project such as my HMV1960 Raspberry Pi case. Are they great for typing? Not so much. Because of the… Read more »