Blog

All posts

Previous page Next page

Parochial: working around limits on DLNA players - 30 Sep 2019 Python  Tools 

A little while ago we acquired a internet-connected radio for our kitchen. We intended on using it for a variety of it’s capabilities, and my particular interest was it’s DLNA support. I figured I’d just be able to point it at my music collection and it would all be fine right? laughs  As I’m writing…

Strife: Using OAuth to make a Discord profile page - 30 Aug 2019 Howto  Python 

I’ve written an app (Strife) to provide Discord profile pages, but I’m surprised no-one had already done so, so I’m going to show you how I did it. I’ve started using Discord recently, and I was surprised that there was no way to link to a users profile. You can search for profiles inside the…

Building a GuixSD Vagrant box - 20 Jul 2019 DevOps  Tools 

I’ve been curious about the use of declarative mechanisms for creating operating systems for some time. In contrast to most configuration management tools which say certain things that will be true and let everything else do what it likes (particular packages will be installed, particular services in a named state, etc), declarative mechanisms declare the…

Lego Telepresence bot: how not to try and build one - 26 Jun 2019

Four years ago, I built a Dalek-based telepresence bot (part 1, part 2), and I’d been idly thinking for some time that what I really needed to do was make a better follow-up, as a much better one could probably be done with Lego Mindstorms especially given the existence of the BrickPi board for interfacing…

Vellere: exposing Github vulnerability notifications to Slack - 24 May 2019 Python  Tools 

A few years ago, Github introduced vulnerability alerts on repositories and although it was initially just for Javascript and Ruby, they’ve since expanded it to Python, Java and .Net and I’m guessing more languages are also on their roadmap. It’s a useful feature, except for one problem: it’s notifications are poorly implemented. They appear to…

AWS Lambda and Actix: easy conversion of small web apps into serverless - 23 Apr 2019 Cloud  Rust  Tools 

I’ve been idly considering the uses of serverless computing, and I’m still not convinced it’s worth it. I’ve used it before, mostly as a means to make things happen in response to AWS events, but the pattern everyone talks about is using them to run web apps, and I’m not fully convinced about that. However,…

On the value of maintenance - 13 Mar 2019

Most of our posts here talk about new software, but there’s also a lot of value in the longer-term maintenance of code and given I’ve done some of that recently, I thought it worth revisiting various earlier projects in that light. None of these are really large enough to have their own post, but collectively…

Serialising Rust tests - 14 Jan 2019 Rust  serial_test  Tools 

I’m once again prodding the potboiler tests and a couple of the tests I was doing wanted to mess around with the shared database. This had the problem that multiple tests would collide with each other, as the default for Rust testing is to run everything in parallel. This is unusual, but good in many…

Making a Spaceteam timer app with Flutter - 4 Jan 2019 Android  Tool chains 

Some of you may have run into the excellent Spaceteam mobile game. It’s best described as ‘co-operatively shouting at each other to fix your broken ship’, and it’s a lot of fun. Some fun folks then went and made a card game variant of it, which is similar in many ways. Now, both games have…

Experiments in converting code from C to Rust - 27 Nov 2018 C  Rust  Tools 

I’m quite fond of Rust (as a few blog posts on the topic may indicate), but one item I hadn’t really explored was replacing/rewriting existing C code bases in Rust. There’s a general joke about the general notion of “rewriting everything in Rust is of course always the right thing to do!” (Google “rust evangelism…

Previous page Next page