Spoken Like a Geek

I always struggle when I am ready to push my first commit to a new repository and always end up with errors, so I thought I would document the process here as an aide memoir for me and, hopefully, others will find it useful too. Prerequisites These instructions are for when you have already got […]

If you’re not a Spotify user, as I’m not, then all the self-congratulatory Spotify Wrapped posts at the end of each year can become quite wearing. It’s not that I don’t listen to music; it’s just that I don’t consume it through streaming. I’m an old-fashioned, physical music kind of guy, and I have lots […]

There was an issue raised recently on my php2Bluesky library pointing out that the dimensions of images weren’t being passed and so they weren’t being displayed on Bluesky correctly. On investigation, I found this to be correct, but because of the way the code was currently implemented, I couldn’t fix it. The library needed to […]

In addition to this blog and my personal blog I also maintain a Williams Racing fan site at https://williamsdb.com. In fact, this is my longest running site having first gone live on 6th May 1996. As you can imagine this has gone through a number of itterations over the years and the latest makes extensive […]

In my last post I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Monitor and how it is a great solution for working with your Raspberry Pi. However, as great as the Pi Monitor is sometimes it is a bit of overkill or too big to carry around which got me to thinking about other ways to access […]

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 […]

I wrote in an earlier post about how children, when taught programming at primary school, may be using the language Scratch. Now I am back with another example of what it can be used for with an animated Christmas greeting to you. Enjoy! Click on the green flag to start the animation and turn the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

I have to admit that I didn’t think I’d be back with another poston 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 […]

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. Expanding functionality At the same time as the user growth, the platform itself […]

It’s been a while since I last pushed a new version of WDiL but finally I got round to adding the few things left that I wanted in the app – most notably notifications. Read on for details of that and everything else that’s included. New Functionality Let’s take a look at what has been […]

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 […]

I have written about the use of AI in programming previously but I recently came across Cursor which is Visual Studio Code with AI built in so I thought I would give it a go but what to do? Road Trip I have recently returned from a driving holiday around the East Coast of the […]

I’ve pushed another update to WDiL adding lots of new functionality and bug fixes. The most impactful of these is the forgotten password routine as this now requires the addition of the ever reliable PHPMailer. However, the most useful and visible are the changes on the activity stats page which now includes more statistics and […]

Last January I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Camera that I had set-up to take hourly pictures of my garden which I then turned in to a time lapse video. You can read about that and see the resulting videos and code here: One of the things that I said at the time I wanted […]

I’m going to the States soon and have been looking at booking up some restaurants while I’m away. In particular, I wanted to book for Cheesecake Factory, but when I went to do so, I found I could only do that if I registered. Fair enough, so I went to the registration page. I discovered […]

When I launched WDiL earlier this week I knew that it was what might be politely described as a MVP. And while I like SimpleCSS it doesn’t make for the most attractive sites. Therefore, I set about making it more appealing while also adding more functionality. Moving from Simple CSS I spent quite a bit […]

My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL! Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL) WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems […]

I belong to a walking group called “Walking with Cameras” which is pretty good in not being too sniffy about what camera you bring. This means there are quite a few iPhones, a smattering of Android devices along with some compacts and DSLRs. We reached an open area where several varieties of wildflowers were growing […]