Sometimes an update causes a chain reaction which borks a system. Here are some notes on how I fixed a SMTP mail issue on my Raspberry Pi camera project. A quick recap: the RPi camera takes pictures every ten minutes, each night the images get sent to a server and each week the transferred images […]
Category: fun
Pledging My Time V: analysing race results in R
It’s been a while since I posted a breakdown of half marathon times. The last time seems to have been 2018. I decided to give my old code a clean-up and quickly crunched the numbers from the 2022 Kenilworth Half Marathon. First, the results: Briefly, the code below reads in a csv file of race […]
Multiplex: comparing Plex libraries
This website is all about niche tech tips and this post is no exception. I run a Plex media server. This allows me to stream my music collection when I am out and about. Plex pass owners get the nifty plexamp app for listening to music, which I really like. The databasing for the movie […]
Tips From The Blog XVIII: upgrading a Music/iTunes library
Niche tech tips are the cornerstone of this website, and here is another. How to upgrade an iTunes/Music library whilst maintaining the database. I know everyone streams music these days – hence this is likely a very niche tech tip – but I still maintain a large music database on a server. The data in […]
Latin Quarter II: Colours and Latin Squares
Previously I wrote about latin squares and set a puzzle. Can we make a latin square where all possible pairs are represented in adjacent squares? We can demonstrate this for an n x n latin square where n = 12 In the above images, the normalised latin square only has 12 different pairs out of […]
Weather Report: building a weather station
As a project idea for a young engineer we wanted to build a Raspberry Pi-based Weather Station. Our last attempt at building something – a sound-responsive LED display – was a failure. So it was important to build something really easy to help us get back on track. Here are some notes. We essentially followed […]
Latin Quarter: Colours and Latin Squares
I read about aesthetic uses of Latin Squares on John Cook’s site a few months ago. Since I maintain a resource to use colour tables in Igor Pro, I thought it would be fun to use Latin Squares to display colour tables for easy visualisation. Briefly, I wrote some code to generate a 9 x […]
Puzzles Like You: Lightbulb puzzle
I found this great puzzle hidden in an app aimed at children. There are 300 lightbulbs in a row, labelled 1 to 300, each with an on/off switch. We count from 1 to 300 and flick the switches as follows: on “1” all lightbulbs are switched on. On “2” lightbulbs 2, 4, 6, 8 etc. […]
Easter Everywhere: when is Easter Sunday?
A colleague said to me “Everyone is running on fumes with Easter being so late this year.” Really? Is it late? I admit to being completely perplexed by this religious date and its movement around the calendar. I always feel like I am the last to know when it is, let alone whether it is […]
Fixing a hole: reinstalling pi-hole
I run two pi-holes on my home network (details here). The older of the two was in need of a refresh. Here are some notes on how I did a reinstall. For those that don’t know, a pi-hole is a simple ad-blocking solution. You can donate to the project here. Problem The pi-hole itself can […]