Kindle, KOReader, Oh My!
I spent 14 years commuting into London and I read a lot of books. I had shelves of books that I basically read once and then put away. I bought a Kindle (around 2010 maybe) to cut down on the clutter.
I’ve ended up with many many books on it. Earlier Amazon announced that they were removing the ability to download copies of purchased books so I fired up Calibre, installed some plug ins, ran some scripts, and got them for posterity.
I Made A Thing
My family has a fascination with airliners. Living close to Luton airport a game has developed of trying to guess where an airliner is going. I had seen ESP32 Plane Radar and had bought a different circular display with an ESP32 on the back 3 years ago.
A bit of sleuthing to get the pins right and add the touch screen interface, and a bit of FreeCAD to print a base and protective cover (photo also shows one designed for side exit) and job was done. I surprised Kate with it yesterday, I can be a nice Dad sometimes :)
Obsidian & Hugo
If you’re reading this, it worked :)
This site is generated by Hugo and controlled with Git. Whilst markdown is quite easy, I had grown attached to Obsidian at work (thanks Eva!) when I still had a job.
Anyway, here’s a picture of Oscar peeking out from the Fury bonnet in the garden. That will be the subject of another post once I’m sure pictures work.
VETuner is live at vetuner.co.uk
VETuner now has a proper home at vetuner.co.uk .
If you’ve been following along while I poked at parsers, dashboards, serial comms and all the other fun bits, this is the bit where it turns from “odd side project” into “real thing with an actual domain”. It may even result in “actual users” and “actual users who give me money”!
This was driven by me getting fed up with Android development for MSDroid. MSDroid is great, it’s just Google changing the requirements underneath it, taking phones from general purpose computing devices into ad impression generators. Ironically, it’s Google that makes the only browser with the Serial/USB APIs I need to talk to the ECUs, so I’m not completely done with them.
Major Success!
What you see there is the first time I have successfully connected a web browser running on Android to a Speeduino ECU via a direct USB connection.
The read rate is poor as it was a very old Motorola that is normally my Squeezebox controller , but it was to hand and had a USB-C socket on it. I have got over 60Hz on a desktop browser.
Old Dog, New Tricks
I was given some Squeezebox hardware by someone at work. It works really well, aprat from the Duet remotes . They’re hard to see, and lose connection to the network too easily.
I was despondent about this, as the Squeezebox kit and software is really good, but not being able to reliably control it was a PITA. I could use the web interface, but my work laptop can’t connect to my LAN for reasons.
Amusement
As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked.
Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server.
However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this
My Home Tech
I have a menagerie of tech at home.
Connectivity
ISP
Andrews & Arnold , who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses.
Heracles
The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT . My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus.
Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart
A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house. 5 is probably overkill. I run 4 separate SSIDs as VLANs to separate out House, Guest, Work and IOT with various rules as to who can talk to what. Alfred sits on both the wired network and the IOT one to act as a bridge. They have Bluetooth as well so one day I’ll investigate using them as a BLE to MQTT gateway instead of the couple of ESP32 I have filling that duty.
Prose
I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh .
I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek.
However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears.
- No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory. After half a dozen posts with a few pictures each it became a mess. I wanted to be able to separate out the images in some sensible manner.
- There was no control over the size of images unless you appended some API parameters to the file name. This broke the image preview in a Markdown viewer which meant I couldn’t see what the image looked like until I published the post.
So, Hugo. I originally wanted to use Hexo, but the image plugin for that doesn’t install. I plumped for Hugo as https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil uses it for his blog and that’s good enough for me.
Wifi Hack
I run HomeAssistant on some no-name fanless PC which has WiFi and Ethernet. I mainly access it over Ethernet, but it uses the Wifi to connect to my IOT SSID and expose its MQTT broker to the various Tasmota and ESP32 devices I have kicking around.
The problem was that every now any then the Wifi would quietly crap out and all my devices would stop updating. I could do one of two things.