Richard’s Blog, Blogging Since 1996

  • Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

    Avoiding Rush Hour Recycling

    Reading Time: 3 minutes On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the recycling centre is open from 1600-2000 or so, which is great if you’re working and want to go after work. The drawback to going at this time is that the one for local villages is down a narrow road where cars can barely pass each…

  • Barking Dogs and Soaked Socks

    Barking Dogs and Soaked Socks

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Yesterday I went for a run despite the rain. I was going down to run along one road that I usually avoid because of dog walkers. I ran along it before spotting someone walking with a dog. I couldn’t tell whether he was walking towards me or away from me so…

  • Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

    Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Yesterday 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…

  • The Solitude of Social Media

    The Solitude of Social Media

    Reading Time: 3 minutes One 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…

  • Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

    Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Since I am planning to downgrade my Google One plan from two terabytes to 200 gigabytes as Kdrive offers me a better deal I took the time to check when, and how easy it would be to downgrade the plan. It’s actually very easy and I have a few months to…

  • An Alternate Way of Using Nextcloud

    An Alternate Way of Using Nextcloud

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Setting 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…

  • Routine Happiness

    Routine Happiness

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Today I’m going to write about happiness, and specifically about routine happiness. During the pandemic I noticed that people with children all looked happy. There is a simple reason for that. Children don’t understand what a pandemic is, so to give them a feeling of normality you distract yourself from the…

  • The Noisy Raspberry Pi Case Fan

    The Noisy Raspberry Pi Case Fan

    Reading Time: 2 minutes While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a…

  • Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

    Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/).…

  • Electric Cars and Charge Anxiety

    Electric Cars and Charge Anxiety

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Many 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…