YES! Congratulations Doctor, you smashed it! 🙌

Speccing Out the Pi Server V3 I’ve started the building process to move my current Pi servers onto a single, more capable machine. For the last couple of months, I’ve been running a split setup: two Raspberry Pi 3s - one dedicated to Home Assistant and the other handling my Nginx/PHP web server. They’ve served me well, albeit on the lower end of performance due to the limitations of my Pi 3’s RAM and SD card storage speeds, which are the main bottleneck.

Speccing Out the Pi Server V3

I’ve started the building process to move my current Pi servers onto a single, more capable machine. For the last couple of months, I’ve been running a split setup: two Raspberry Pi 3s - one dedicated to Home Assistant and the other handling my Nginx/PHP web server.…

Building a Drawer Mount for the Sonos Beam (Part 2) I spent some time this weekend finishing off my Sonos drawer build. While painting our bathroom, I realised that the paint I was using was a pretty bang on match for the drawer, so once I was done I quickly cleared up and got back to work on the drawer. Another staircase spindle cut to length completed the frame and once this was screwed into place, I rough sanded all the way she’s to match the style of the table, Thankfully, it’s very rustic by design so this project looks better the more slapdash I do it, meaning perfection is most definitely the enemy of good in this instance.

Building a Drawer Mount for the Sonos Beam (Part 2)

Building a Drawer Mount for the Sonos Beam (Part 1) One of the best pieces of tech we’ve bought in ages has been the Sonos Beam Gen 2 for our living room. It’s a sound engineering marvel, I can’t quite believe the quality and volume of sound this little bar can produce. Therefore, it only seems right that I put some effort into its placement in the room. We recently repurposed our coffee table into a TV stand as we couldn’t find anything that we liked, until it dawned on us we had the perfect stand right in front of us being used very little for its actually purpose.

Building a Drawer Mount for the Sonos Beam (Part 1)

One of the best pieces of tech we’ve bought in ages has been the Sonos Beam Gen 2 for our living room. It’s a sound engineering marvel, I can’t quite believe the quality and volume of sound this little bar can produce. Therefore, it only seems…

Digitising our Family Photo Albums I’ve been meaning to archive all my childhood photos that are stashed away at my parents house. One of the perks of working at a research centre is access to labs, one of which is a digital archiving lab or ‘DigiLab’ as we call it, and I’ve been meaning to take advantage of it since moving to the research cluster in 2022.

Digitising our Family Photo Albums

I’ve been meaning to archive all my childhood photos that are stashed away at my parents house. One of the perks of working at a research centre is access to labs, one of which is a digital archiving lab or ‘DigiLab’ as we call it, and I’ve been meaning to take…

Home Assistant Noodling My Home Assistant noodlings have been very successful so far, with a majority of our smart devices connected and running smoothly. The big additions so far have been our ‘Yi Home’ security cameras, made possible by hacking the firmware for a custom, open-source modded version, allowing me to remove the official advert-ridden app and move the cameras onto our HA server.

Building out Home Assistant

Hidden Gems I went on a mission at lunchtime today, in search of some network patch cables for my Raspberry Pi server rack project, and on my travels I stumbled upon an Aladdin’s cave of bits and bobs from years servicing the Art and Design faculty / college. One of my long time work colleagues and certified technician wiz Craig took introduced me to their hidden workshop, packed with a hodgepodge of equipment, spare parts, tools, and god knows what else.

Hidden Gems

Setting up Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi 3 Phase two of the Raspberry Pi home lab is underway. I've started setting up Home Assistant on a second Pi 3 to manage my various connected devices around the house. It was a lot more straightforward this time, following the same setup as the web server, running DietPi and running the included Home Assistant installer. At first, the plan was to run the whole lot off a single Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure how practical that's going to be yet due to the demands of streaming camera footage over the network.

Setting up Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi 3

Phase two of the Raspberry Pi home lab is underway. I've started setting up Home Assistant on a second Pi 3 to manage my various connected devices around the house. It was a lot more straightforward this time, following the same setup as the web…

Recommendation: The Fediverse Experiment

Upgrading my Home Server to a Raspberry Pi 3 While digging through a cupboard at home, I unearthed a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, so I thought rather than buying a Pi 5 with no idea what performance I'd require to upgrade my server project, I might as well give it a go on the Pi 3 and see how things perform. I’m doubling the server's RAM from 512MB to 1GB, giving me the headroom I need to keep the server running reliably enough to host this blog.

Upgrading my Home Server to a Raspberry Pi 3

While digging through a cupboard at home, I unearthed a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, so I thought rather than buying a Pi 5 with no idea what performance I'd require to upgrade my server project, I might as well give it a go on the Pi 3 and see how things…

Attempting to Host my Blog on a Raspberry Pi Zero With a little time left at the end of the Christmas break, I wanted to take the first stab at self hosting my website on a little Raspberry Pi server. It's a project I've wanted try for a long time but never had the chance to start, for one reason or another (mostly house renovation stuff). The plan is to build as small and efficient a server as possible, one that I can comfortably squirrel away and rely on, but also powerful enough to comfortably run WordPress, …

Blog post: Attempting to Host my Blog on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Self-Hosting my Social Media Profile using WordPress and ActivityPub After trying ActivityPub on WordPress and finding it a bit janky, I finally got what all the fuss was about thanks to some much-needed updates over the past year or so. Alan Levine wrote a great explainer (and a follow-up) of how he set ActivityPub up on his many Wordpress sites. I do think the official guidance and explainer posts provided by Automattic leave a lot to be desired (although, I didn't check the support forum), but overall, it’s a relatively easy process now, and made that much clearer after reading through Alan's experiences.

Self-Hosting my Social Media Profile using WordPress and ActivityPub

After trying ActivityPub on WordPress and finding it a bit janky, I finally got what all the fuss was about thanks to some much-needed updates over the past year or so. Alan Levine wrote a great explainer (and a follow-up) of how…

Christmas in Crickhowell I spent Christmas in the quaint little town of Crickhowell in Wales this past week, and after what feels like a month of solid rain, we were fortunate to have a dry spell for the trip, meaning lots of walks in the countryside with plenty of fresh air and sunshine. It was a welcome break after a challenging few months, both in terms of work and health.

Christmas in Crickhowell

New year, new job… kind of.

hell yeah! 🧙‍♂️

X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research Data indicates more scholars turning to alternative social media site to post about their work after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

Bluesky has overtaken its flailing rival X in hosting posts related to new academic research, indicating the platform is fast becoming the go-to place for scholars to share their work, reports @patrickjack.bsky.social
#AcademicSky

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

2 day change -1,400

(always a tweet)

a man is covering his eyes with his hands in front of a group of men . ALT: a man is covering his eyes with his hands in front of a group of men .

Me: I can’t believe UK voters chose to torch their economy with Brexit. That can never be topped.

American voters:

Wait, what?... 😂

Google engineers prototype shared document editing.

#SixWordStory #Writing #Prompt

Google engineers prototype shared document editing.

right wingers in 2020: remote learning is a joke, reopen the schools

right wingers in 2025: just ChatGPT it bro

Excellent last minute Valentine’s Day card, thanks. It worked a treat 😂

Kayaker swallowed by whale recalls feeling 'slimy texture' in its mouth Adrián Simancas, 23, was kayaking off Chilean Patagonia when he found himself inside a whale.

"I felt a slimy texture brush my face"
Man recalls being eaten by whale.

I mean, how do I NOT post this. 😂

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An image of Aaron Swartz with the following text: "Meta illegally downloaded 80+ TB of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models. In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.

My heart ached when I was reminded that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for trying to make academic knowledge more accessible to the public. Meta, meanwhile, is doing it for their own bottom line. I'm going to guess that no one at Meta will be looking at spending 35 years in jail for this.

GameChangers are delighted to be hosting Angelina Bong for an Art for Conservation Workshop at Coventry University on Feb 26th! Part of the FAiR: Frugal Artist in Residence research project.

Info 👉 gchangers.org/art-for-cons...

#PlayfulLearning #FrugalEducation #Sustainability #Malaysia #GChangers

UK government demands access to Apple users' encrypted data The Home Office served the notice to the tech giant under the Investigatory Powers Act.

Based on what is currently happening in the US right now, and is slowly creeping its way across the world, I couldn't be happier that government's cannot access the data of Apple customers.

#Apple #Encryption #UK

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We're All Alone YouTube video by Architects - Topic

Current mood.
#Architects

Best of luck pal!