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How to actually secure IoT devices - 30 May 2017 Business Ideas  Hardware  Pontification  Rant 

Every day it feels like there’s some new Internet of Things (IoT) story, telling us how these new devices in our homes and offices are causing more and more havoc. On the other hand, we really like the new and shiny things doing funky things for us, and that doesn’t look like it’s slowing down…

Extending Splitwise’s currency conversion - 25 Apr 2017 Python  Tools  Web 

I’m rather fond of Splitwise, which is an app/website for recording money owed between multiple people. Myself and my partner use it a lot for various expenses, and it’s really useful when you’ve got many different payments, and you need to keep track over time. We’ve got one repeated payment however that’s been in US…

Generating Beatnik code - 23 Mar 2017 Esolangs  Programming  Rust 

Beatnik is an esoteric programming language that’s been recently amusing me (as they occasionally do). The core idea is that words in the source code are interpreted as their Scrabble scores, and those scores then do things (mostly involving messing with a stack). This leads then to the possibility of an alternate form of the language,…

BoardGameGeek graph - 28 Feb 2017 Javascript  Python  Web 

I’m a bit of a gamer, although I’m using that term to cover many things including pen-and-paper RPGs, board games, various forms of LARP, and occasionally a bit of video gaming. Of course, with all those options there’s the problem of what should you play. One of the solutions that people have come up with is…

Companionate: sharing logins with QR codes - 23 Jan 2017 Web 

I’ve run into a problem a few times recently, which is that having done all the right things with passwords i.e. using a password manager and having them be unique strings of basically random garbage, I now need to enter them in somewhere I haven’t got my password manager running on. I’m typically sitting in…

Cross-grading for fun and profit - 13 Dec 2016 Debian  Tools 

First thing you’re probably wondering: What’s cross-grading? Well, it’s a bit like upgrading, except more sidewise than definitely upwards. It involves the changing of the architecture of a system, most typically from 32-bit to 64-bit, and most typically from x86 to x86-64 (although similar options are apparently doable for other architecture families, including ARM, MIPS and…

Pigtail: task queues with Potboiler - 28 Nov 2016 Potboiler  Rust  Technology 

Last month, I wrote about Potboiler, my AP Event Sourcing system. At the time I’d built a K/V store on top of Potboiler, mostly just as a test application. Potboiler isn’t really intended to be talked to directly by most clients, but will have some other form of service or store that sits on top…

Potboiler - 31 Oct 2016 Potboiler  Python  Rust  Tools 

Over the last couple of years I’ve been reading and talking about a lot of things related to distributed systems. This is a common train of thought around here, and after working on this on and off for the past 18 months or so (the version you’re seeing here is in fact version 3 having repeatedly changed…

Using the BBC micro:bit with PlatformIO - 28 Aug 2016 C  Hardware  Programming  Tools 

I recently acquired a micro:bit, the new BBC device intended for helping computer education. After a bit of delay, they’ve finally starting shipping the device, and now members of the public like myself can grab one. So, why this device in the middle of a sea of other options in the modern embedded environment? Well,…

Dawn: Mobile bus stops display - 14 Jul 2016 Rust  Web 

When I’m out and about, I find myself repeatedly wanting to know when a bus will stop near where I am. This generally involves a phone as the TfL Countdown displays are a bit thin on the ground. Despite the advent of such things as Citymapper, I’ve still been a fan of the Countdown mobile website,…

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