Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the world wide web. And if you want to get a feel for how far the web has come, try experiencing what it was like in those heady days of December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) built the original web while at The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a… Read more »
Go – or Golang if you prefer – is a powerful programming language, applicable to virtually any platform, from single-board computers (SBCs) such as the Raspberry Pi to supercomputer clusters. I tend to work at the lower end of that scale. And I was motivated to check out Go because it has a reputation for being fast – unlike, say,… Read more »
When I started in journalism we were still using manual typewriters to hack out copy that we sent to typesetters to be cast in hot metal. Ah, those were the days. Writing about the flowchart template I acquired a while back made me think about another handy bit of plastic that used to be an integral part of my job…. Read more »
There are three things that are certain in life – death, taxes and blown capacitors in old electronic equipment. But at least you can do something about the last one. Powering up a 35 year-old computer that has sat in a loft for the past two decades is foolish. But we did it anyway. The BBC Master ran fine for… Read more »
Okay, so I’ll be the first to admit that this has nothing to do with computers, electronics, robots or any of the other stuff that is usually the topic of the day here. But this is a big deal for me, and it’s my blog, so… I have a new book out. Finistère Insolite (Exceptional Finistère) is a collection of my… Read more »
Having messed around with Docker for the web app I’m using with my robot, Sheldon, I decided to dig a little deeper. Well, that’s probably overstating it. What I actually did was follow along with one of the videos from Traversy Media which explains how to create a Docker container to run a WordPress site. Here it is. It’s the… Read more »
In a previous post, I described how I’m planning to use a web app to communicate with my robot, Sheldon. Well, it just occurred to me that this is a perfect use of containerisation. Time to learn something about Docker. A web app is the perfect solution for this because HTML and JavaScript offer a very simple way to throw… Read more »
It’s sometimes handy to know when things are not going well – for example, when your robot’s collision avoidance systems have failed it and the poor, dumb critter has crashed head-on into something. You’d be surprised how often that happens. Work on my robot, Sheldon, is progressing slowly. I’ve just added some infrastructure (not shown in the picture) that will… Read more »
These days, there’s a huge amount of support out there for virtually any device you can buy. But every now and again you need to do a bit of head-scratching. So this post is simply my way of helping out anyone who’s going through the same process I just did. I bought a couple of cheap ESP32 boards that have… 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 »
As part of my cunning plan to develop ‘smart’ sensors, I’ve been playing around with infrared rangefinders (and may do a post on those soon). But the first kind of rangefinder I ever tried was the ultrasonic type, so it was time to reacqauint myself. And, in particular, I wanted to see if I could do this on the cheap…. Read more »
One of the tools I knew I was going to want straight away on my new LattePanda Alpha is Sigrok – or to be more precise, the PulseView logic analyser tool. I already have this running on my old Windows 7 laptop, but who the hell wants to use that, right? However, Sigrok is created by hackers for hackers and… 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 »