Category: tech related

  • Experimenting With Traccar

    Experimenting With Traccar

    Reading Time: 3 minutesTraccar is an open source fleet management solution that allows you to track vehicles and devices via a self-hosted server without using Google, Apple, Garmin, Suunto or other brands. If you setup your own server you can track as many vehicles as you like, and even track their live movements. ## Options…

  • Experimenting with Home Assistant

    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…

  • Initial Thoughts on Setting Up a Pi Hole

    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,…

  • The iOS Astronomy Wallpaper and Seasons

    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…

  • Thoughts On The Garmin Etrex Solar

    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…

  • Walking with Two Pairs of Airpods in Winter

    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…

  • Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

    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…

  • The Solitude of Social Media

    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…

  • An Alternate Way of Using Nextcloud

    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…

  • Electric Cars and Charge Anxiety

    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…