Category Archive

raspberrypi

Ratchet Adapter

I want to electrically drive this ratchet mechanism to avoid the manual labour of turning it by hand. I found a motor with a 1600:1 gearbox on eBay (shipping from China of course) which looks perfect, however it has a 10mm diameter keyed output shaft which doesn’t nicely couple to my 3/4” square ratchet shaft.

1 min read

Audio Stream from a Raspberry PI

Now singing has returned to churches I need to add an additional microphone to pickup the choir. I’d like this to be completely separate to the Church PA system to avoid playing this sound out through the speakers. A Raspberry PI Zero W with a USB sound card looks to be a good option to capture the audio and stream it to OBS.

3 min read

Mini ITX as Windows 2008 Server

Unfortunately without a DVD drive and with no capability to boot from USB I’m struggling to get a clean OS on my Mini ITX machine. The internal drive is IDE and I don’t have any other machines with IDE around and I don’t know the password for the installed OS.

2 min read

Raspberry PI Camera with M12 Lens

I really need a good lens on my Raspberry PI camera to use it with OBS from a decent distance. The new high resolution Rasperberry PI cameras look excellent but they also come with a heafty price tag which I just can’t justify.

3 min read

Normalise MP3 Files

I have hundreds for MP3 files but the levels aren’t standardised in any way which makes streaming them a bit hit and miss. I can normalise them using AudaCity but I’d really like an automatic way of doing it.

~1 min read

TEMPer USB Temperature Sensor

These USB sensors are available pretty cheaply from PiHut and Amazon and are great for monitoring the temperature remotely (where you have a Pi).

1 min read

Music Library

Using a Raspberry PI with a USB CD drive to read all my CDs and create a master, FLAC format, repository and from that create MP3 and AAC versions for the car and iTunes.

1 min read

OLED Module for PI

Run raspi-config and turn on the i2c interface

1 min read

Retro Gaming: Space Raiders

Dylan’s favourite t-shirt is his Game Over shirt which always reminds me to Space Raiders from the ZX Spectrum days. I found the cassette tape quite easily but it took a significant amount of searching to find the Spectrum itself and included in the box was the tape recorder as well!

2 min read
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obs

Ratchet Adapter

I want to electrically drive this ratchet mechanism to avoid the manual labour of turning it by hand. I found a motor with a 1600:1 gearbox on eBay (shipping from China of course) which looks perfect, however it has a 10mm diameter keyed output shaft which doesn’t nicely couple to my 3/4” square ratchet shaft.

1 min read

Audio Stream from a Raspberry PI

Now singing has returned to churches I need to add an additional microphone to pickup the choir. I’d like this to be completely separate to the Church PA system to avoid playing this sound out through the speakers. A Raspberry PI Zero W with a USB sound card looks to be a good option to capture the audio and stream it to OBS.

3 min read

Mini ITX as Windows 2008 Server

Unfortunately without a DVD drive and with no capability to boot from USB I’m struggling to get a clean OS on my Mini ITX machine. The internal drive is IDE and I don’t have any other machines with IDE around and I don’t know the password for the installed OS.

2 min read

Raspberry PI Camera with M12 Lens

I really need a good lens on my Raspberry PI camera to use it with OBS from a decent distance. The new high resolution Rasperberry PI cameras look excellent but they also come with a heafty price tag which I just can’t justify.

3 min read
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bells

Most Popular Methods

There are ~72,000 Surprise Major performances on Bell Board. Bell Board displays results in pages of 200 performances. Thus we will need to download all the pages and concatenate them into a single file:

2 min read

Splicing Three Strand Rope

My sudden interest in rope splicing stems entirely from bell ropes. There seems to be three, perhaps four, splices to learn for this application. Links below to YouTube videos explaining how to do them:

~1 min read

Place Notation

Thomas Barlow has taught me place notation using Strike Back Surprise Major as the example. The notation for that is x38x14x58x16x12x38x14.12.78 l.e. 12. There are plenty of guides online on how to interpret it, such as this one on the CCCBR website.

3 min read
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perl

Place Notation

Thomas Barlow has taught me place notation using Strike Back Surprise Major as the example. The notation for that is x38x14x58x16x12x38x14.12.78 l.e. 12. There are plenty of guides online on how to interpret it, such as this one on the CCCBR website.

3 min read

Shape Files

Below is a perl script to create a PNG from a Shape file.

2 min read

Mandelbrot Set

The Mandelbrot set is created from this very simple formula in which both Z and C are complex numbers.

3 min read

Narcissistic Numbers

I heard about these on BBC Radio 4 More or Less and they just intrigued me, perhaps in part because they have no known application! In the past similar obsessions have appeared with the calculation of PI and right back to my childhood calculating powers of 2 on a BBC Micro.

1 min read
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powershell

PowerShell SNMP

Potentially, I’ve got a bit carried away here. There isn’t a native PowerShell module to query SNMP which I found a bit surprising. How hard could it be? I’ve got a SYSLOG server and client in PowerShell so this felt like a simple extension. The SNMP client needs to send a request over UDP to the SNMP server on port 161 and waits for the response back. Sending via .NET’s UDPClient is easy enough

5 min read

Which Funds Have Exposure to NetFlix?

Dabbling in the markets by way of investment funds is amusing. I use Hargreaves Lansdown to do this. HL have a fund research section which lets you look at a given fund and view the top 10 holdings so you can base your decision to invest in your belief in the underlying stock.

5 min read

Prime Numbers in PowerShell

Dylan was using a number square to calculate prime numbers so it amused me to code up a couple of algorithms to show just how quick the sieve method actually is. I’ve done these in PowerShell because … reasons.

1 min read
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juniper

How To GitHub

I really don’t use GitHub often enough to remember the commands without searching for them each time, which means that I use GitHub even less as I can’t remember the commands. Here’s a short cheat sheet on the most common things I need to do in GitHub.

1 min read

Bose SoundTouch and Mini DLNA

Bose have a Windows application can host your music library, however I don’t have a Windows machine turn on permanently and I’d prefer a low power Raspberry PI option.

~1 min read
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arduino

Foot Operated Timer

At the end of a quarter peal there is always the question of how long it took and whether anyone really noted the start time. Mike proposed a foot operated timer.

2 min read

Arduino Gas Sensor

With the current emphasis on ventilation to reduce the risks associated with inhaled droplets it I have put together a simple gas sensor to record concentrations over time. The output is a CSV file which can be graphed in Excel.

4 min read
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bash

Dump Process Memory

Yesterday in a stroke of good fortune, I remembered a job that I’d set running a little while back and I checked in to see how it was doing. It’s a MPI console app running on 22 distributed Ubuntu nodes. My application was set to output the time periodically and it currently reported a runtime of 15837421 seconds (just over six months). Unfortunately I couldn’t see the current ‘best’ result as it results aren’t displayed until the end. I was intrigued to see how it was doing.

1 min read

Most Popular Methods

There are ~72,000 Surprise Major performances on Bell Board. Bell Board displays results in pages of 200 performances. Thus we will need to download all the pages and concatenate them into a single file:

2 min read
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ubuntu

Hard disk failure

Check the status with sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

1 min read
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3d-printing

3d Printed Train

Creating a new OO train body drawn from scratch in Fusion 360 to minic the original damaged version.

~1 min read
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Jitsi

Jitsi

I need to remotely control OBS during a live stream. This is quite simply achieved via VNC but I need the see and hear what’s going on at the same time. VNC doesn’t support audio on the free license and watching the YouTube stream is out of the question as it’s nearly 30 seconds behind real time.

1 min read
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OpenBSD

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Syncthing

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Ubuntu

Jitsi

I need to remotely control OBS during a live stream. This is quite simply achieved via VNC but I need the see and hear what’s going on at the same time. VNC doesn’t support audio on the free license and watching the YouTube stream is out of the question as it’s nearly 30 seconds behind real time.

1 min read
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applescript

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c

Pentominoes

One day I was clearing out some old papers and I came across this programming assignment from university. I can’t recall which of the problems I tackled at the time, after all it was twenty-five years ago, but glancing over it now the pentomino problem caught my eye

4 min read
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c++

Latin Square

Looking at the latest video from Presh Talwalkar about solving the Latin square where each row is the first row multiplied by the row number I decided it was time to see if I could remember any C++ and code a solution.

3 min read
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flac

Music Library

Using a Raspberry PI with a USB CD drive to read all my CDs and create a master, FLAC format, repository and from that create MP3 and AAC versions for the car and iTunes.

1 min read
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jekyll

WordPress to Jekyll Test

Install the Wordpress plugins UpdraftPlus. Create a new WordPress site and install the UpdraftPlus plugin and restore the database.

2 min read
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maths

Square Root

As a first step in calculating a square root look at the order of magnitude of the number and this will quickly allow the determination of the number of digits in the solution. Consider squaring numbers less than 10; the solutions will be less than 100. Squaring numbers less than 100 gives solutions less than 10,000 and numbers less than 1,000 will square to numbers less than 1,000,000 etc. In general terms the square root of a number with an even number of digits will have half the number of digits as the original number. For numbers with an odd number of digits then the solution will have one more than half the number of digits.

3 min read
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minecraft

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oled

OLED Module for PI

Run raspi-config and turn on the i2c interface

1 min read
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osx

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snmp

PowerShell SNMP

Potentially, I’ve got a bit carried away here. There isn’t a native PowerShell module to query SNMP which I found a bit surprising. How hard could it be? I’ve got a SYSLOG server and client in PowerShell so this felt like a simple extension. The SNMP client needs to send a request over UDP to the SNMP server on port 161 and waits for the response back. Sending via .NET’s UDPClient is easy enough

5 min read
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specturm

Retro Gaming: Space Raiders

Dylan’s favourite t-shirt is his Game Over shirt which always reminds me to Space Raiders from the ZX Spectrum days. I found the cassette tape quite easily but it took a significant amount of searching to find the Spectrum itself and included in the box was the tape recorder as well!

2 min read
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swift

Mandelbrot Set 3D

Back in 2015 in one of the earliest posts on this site I wrote about my fascination with the Mandelbrot set.

4 min read
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wifi

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wordpress

WordPress to Jekyll Test

Install the Wordpress plugins UpdraftPlus. Create a new WordPress site and install the UpdraftPlus plugin and restore the database.

2 min read
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