When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 2

September 16, 2024 | Comment

When I launched WDiL earlier this week I knew that it was what might be politely described as a MVP. And while I like SimpleCSS it doesn’t make for the most attractive sites. Therefore, I set about making it more appealing while also adding more functionality.

Moving from Simple CSS

I spent quite a bit of time looking for a pre-built theme that I could use as the basis of WDiL but none seemed to be where I wanted to go. In the end, I plumped for vanilla Bootstrap which with its pre-built components allowed me to get a … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL)

September 10, 2024 | 1 comment

My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL!

Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL)

WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems by allowing you to record every time you do something and then see stats on things such as frequency and average interval.

While I have tried to make it very simple it still requires a bit of setup and hosting by you. As part of … Read the rest

Object Identification on iOS

August 5, 2024 | Comment

I belong to a walking group called “Walking with Cameras” which is pretty good in not being too sniffy about what camera you bring. This means there are quite a few iPhones, a smattering of Android devices along with some compacts and DSLRs.

We reached an open area where several varieties of wildflowers were growing and the discussion turned first to what they were and then to how there were dedicated apps that would identify them (which nobody had installed!).

I whipped out my iPhone snapped a few pictures of the flowers and then opened the Photos app. If you … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

July 17, 2024 | Comment

Not long after I’d published my previous post on the Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language I found a wad of paper that turned out to be my notes from the first year of my O-Level Computer Science course. I thought it might be interesting to see what was there and how computing was taught in the UK in the 80s.

Starting with CESIL

The earliest page is dated 12th September 1979 when I would have just turned 14. At this point our introduction to programming was via the CESIL language. I said in the previous post that this interpreter … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language (CESIL)

July 12, 2024 | 1 comment

When I first learned programming in about 1978 the school I attended was lucky to have a Research Machines 380Z on which there was the BASIC language. Using this one of the pupils then wrote a CESIL interpreter for their (I guess) O Level project. Other pupils then used this to learn the fundamentals of programming.

Skip forward a few years and I now owned a Sinclair ZX Spectrum having also previously had a ZX81 too. I decided that I would also write a CESIL interpreter this time using Sinclair’s variant of BASIC. Remarkably I still own the sheets of … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Final Version

June 29, 2024 | Comment

I have just pushed what will be the last version of my script to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file to my GitHub page.

Firstly, the good news. This version now supports BLOCKQUOTEs which means that the WordPress quote block is rendered in a way that it is more obviously a quote. There has also been an improvement in the output of code blocks but support for this is still pretty basic but does now work.

Now the bad news. While looking at the output from my own sites I found that some posts weren’t … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Code Blocks

June 5, 2024 | Comment

At the back end of last year I released a script that allowed you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. In the last update, I said that I wanted to add proper formatting for code blocks and today I have done that. You can find it on the GitHub page.

This proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The code uses the FPDF package and extends out the “Links and flowing text” example provided. I knew I needed to convert all <pre</preblocks to be displayed as … Read the rest

Overcast Statistics

May 1, 2024 | Comment

Podcasts are huge at the moment and they are pretty much all I listen to these days when I am out walking or in the car. I do this by the (mainly) excellent Overcast app. I say mainly because it has a UI that I struggle to find things in. Anywho, the one thing that it lacks (other than an intuitive UI) are decent stats and I really wanted that for my annual Review of the Year posts over on my personal blog.

After a quick DuckDuckGo I found the following post from James Hodgkinson with a Python … Read the rest

An Open Letter to Google

April 22, 2024 | Comment

Dear Google,

In 2014, around about the same time that you Nest Labs, I bought and had installed a Nest Learning Thermostat to control our central heating and give us remote access. I think that it has been a great success, so much so that I have recently upgraded to the latest version that also allows our hot water to be controlled.

I then had an idea! What if I could see temperatures around the house and use that data to get better control over resources there? So I wrote a simple dashboard which I called The Weather Station. I’ve … Read the rest

Cloudflare Zero Trust

April 9, 2024 | 1 comment

I love Cloudflare – there I have said it! If you are looking for a way to keep your site secure and performant then Cloudflare is the way to go. Today I am going to be looking at just one aspect of Cloudflare and what it can do for you – Zero Trust.

What is Cloudflare?

I like to think of Cloudflare as the Swiss Army knife of cloud-based tools. It offers solutions for a variety of things from security to performance to domain registration to content delivery all packaged in an easy to understand and use web-based interface. And, … Read the rest