Longer-form writing: notes on programming vintage hardware, things I have repaired, and the occasional opinion about modern software.
After a week of testing and tweaking, my DIY solar shed upgrade is complete. And it seems to work pretty well!
Last week I bought a solar panel, inverter and some lead acid batteries and set up a solar system in my shed, with the intention of powering my servers. It seems to work pretty well and I have it all integrated into Home Assistant. I’m going to do a load of videos on it and Home Assistant in general.
What do you do when you’re trying to debug code, but your debugging isn’t working, and you need to debug your debugger?
I have aspirations of actually making a game for my Spectrum Next. It’d be nice to turn the learning I’ve done into something more than a bunch of videos.
This is not a blog post about making a game, this is a blog post about keeping notes. A few months ago I created a pretty nice template for a Spectrum Next game. It had a little state machine for different screens, an input handler and some text printing routines for debugging.
I have a load of smart devices in my house that all have ESP8266 microcontrollers inside them. They all work with the Tuya SmartLife app on my phone, and the Tuya integration in HomeAssistant. They also all talk to China to do anything. I’d rather they didn’t. China doesn’t need to know I want to turn my lighting on.
How was 2021 for you? I mean, compared to 2020 it was a big improvement, but that’s a pretty low bar to aim for. Let’s focus more on the projects that I completed and what I learned from them.
I think I’ve just had a bit of a revelation…
USB-C is the best thing ever. Not only because the plug isn’t polarised, but because if you want a true USB-C to USB-C cable there doesn’t appear to be any cheap crappy ones. The ones with a USB-A plug on the end are still cheap garbage, but a cable with USB-C on both ends seems to have a basic level of quality and a price to match it.
How to import your exported Facebook data into a WordPress blog
Yesterday I recapped my ST’s PSU which went well, nothing exploded. However when trying to boot the machine it kept crashing, especially when it went to the desktop.
I’m not a web designer, I find the creative part quite interesting but buggering about with templating languages and having to learn far moreJavaScript and CSS than is healthy really puts me off. I’ve mostly gone about this by going online, finding a Bootstrap template and beating it into some vague shape that looks not too terrible.
I wanted a mechanical keyboard with Windows keys. I have an IBM Model M keyboard, but its lack of Windows keys makes using Windows 10 more annoying than it should be. I don’t hunt and peck around the start menu, I’ve learnt to press the Windows key and just start typing the program I want to open.
