This post describes a wireless (though it needs power) interface from a dumb UK electricity meter with a flashing LED, to a Home Assistant system running elsewhere in the house. The hardware costs under £10 if you already have a USB phone charger, which most people have a surplus of these days.
Continue reading “Smartening an electricity meter”Filtering Broadband Internet With A Raspberry Pi
With it’s single network port, low memory and low CPU speed, a Pi may not seem capable of filtering traffic at a very high bandwidth. This article describes how to make a small filter system that can block IP addresses on the inside or outside of your network while not having any noticeable effect on the network speed. And no, it’s not just blocking the DNS, it’s really blocking the traffic.
Using a remote control for computer password entry
This article describes how to make a small device that allows you to use a small keyfob remote control to enter your computer password with one button press.
Continue reading “Using a remote control for computer password entry”
Controlling Kodi with Google Home
As with the last post, this uses a Google Home speaker, If This Then That and a Raspberry Pi to allow voice control of something. This time it’s a Kodi media player. Continue reading “Controlling Kodi with Google Home”
Google Home Controlling a Raspberry Pi
I’ve just got a Google Home Mini speaker thingy and have figured out a relatively simple way to have it send commands to a Raspberry Pi when you say certain phrases to it. The phrases can contain parameters to be sent to the Pi too. There are probably other ways to do this, but this way is fairly easy. Continue reading “Google Home Controlling a Raspberry Pi”
Goldilocks and the three states of matter.
The announcement today of Ross 128 b, an exoplanet orbiting a star 11 light years from earth has got me thinking about the habitable zone again. Read on for my thoughts on this phenomenon.
Continue reading “Goldilocks and the three states of matter.”
Unicode makes R2D2 work.
And maybe it is possible to make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
It used to bother me that R2D2 was an R2 unit and therefore only the D2 part of his name is variable and different for each droid, leaving just 260 possible R2 unit names. Now I’m not so sure.
Jenkins on a Mac.
Getting a Jenkins build server installed on a Mac is pretty easy, just download and install the package, then accept the defaults. Getting it working is a bit trickier. Continue reading “Jenkins on a Mac.”
What happened to our game in China?
This is the downloads graph for the last couple on the iOS version of a game called Spark of Genius.
I can see a big jump in downloads in mid August, but can’t see any increase in the adverts the game carries. I also can’t see any unusual activity for the Android version of the game.
Working out what not to work out.
Call me strange, but one day I looked at our two block calendar and thought what numbers must be on the two blocks for this calendar to work. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t come up with two blocks of 6 numbers that could be used to show all numbers from 01 to 31. So I did what any computer programmer would. I simulated it in software. Read on for the surprise outcome.