Category: tech related
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Experimenting with Home Assistant
Reading Time: 3 minutesFor a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I…
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Initial Thoughts on Setting Up a Pi Hole
Reading Time: < 1 minuteToday I installed Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 and configured it so that the router routes traffic through the Pi Hole before returning to the devices on my network. Installing Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 is relatively straight forward. Find the two or three lines of code,…
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The iOS Astronomy Wallpaper and Seasons
Reading Time: 2 minutesIf you’re wondering why one of the tags in my post is “Day 388” it’s because I shifted from WordPress to ClassicPress once again. In so doing I lost access to Akismet and Jetpack. By losing Akismet I lose comment spam filtering. I also lost access to the Jetpack app so I…
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Thoughts On The Garmin Etrex Solar
Reading Time: 2 minutesI quite like Garmin devices. I like that my Garmin Instinct Solar can run forever in summer, and less time in winter. I like that the Garmin Etrex SE can last for days or even weeks with my type of use. I also love the idea of the Garmin Etrex Solar. They…
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Walking with Two Pairs of Airpods in Winter
Reading Time: 3 minutesDuring walks, especially once temperatures drop my old pair of airpods tend to die by the time I reach the half way point of my walk. When they’re getting old the batteries in airpods don’t last as long in cold conditions but they’re fine in warm conditions. A few years ago when…
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Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
Reading Time: 4 minutesYesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting…
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The Solitude of Social Media
Reading Time: 3 minutesOne of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at…
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An Alternate Way of Using Nextcloud
Reading Time: 4 minutesSetting up a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2gb of memory to work as a Nextcloud server is quite easy. Download the right ISO from nextcloudpi.com, flash it, put the card into your pi device and after two or three more steps you have a local machine running Pi but you still need…
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Electric Cars and Charge Anxiety
Reading Time: 4 minutesMany years ago I used an old Beta SP camera with batteries that lasted just ten minutes per charge. I didn’t know if they would last long enough to get the entirety of what I was filming so I needed quite a few batteries. Since then I have used laptops, video cameras…
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When Galaxus Sends You the Wrong Things
Reading Time: 2 minutesMany weeks ago I ordered something from Galaxus and it didn’t arrive when it was scheduled to. A few weeks ago I ordered one thing but instead got half a dozen things. I thought “Why do I have so many extras, before realising that the order was wrong. They sent me the…