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I follow DHH (creator or Ruby on Rails, among other things) on Twitter and he always has great insights on tech. I found myself one day reading the Basecamp (of which he is a co-founder) employee handbook, thinking it was going to be something like the one from Valve, but to me this was so much more. I stopped reading every now and then to think “wow, can work life possibly be like this?” and was left wondering how I as a small cog in a corporate machine could hope to make any changes like this. ...

And what I mean by that is, “default all audio output to a USB device, not unlike an O2+ODAC kit from JDS labs”. Step 1: Install OSMC, which is a Kodi-based media entertainment distribution that can run on Raspberry Pi (https://osmc.tv/download/) Step 2: Configure ALSA audio to use the USB audio device as the default (this way, I don’t always have to keep the USB device powered). ...

This is totally for me in the future because I always bloody forget when switching to a Bitbucket project: Bitbucket (creates the branch remotely, ready for you to make a pull request and add reviewers): git push -u $(git remote) cool_branch_name Gerrit (creates a review against the project_ci branch, whatever that is, ready for you to add reviewers): git push $(git remote) HEAD:refs/for/project_ci

So glad a colleague at work pointed me to what Goldfinger were up to - making the most of social isolation in times of Covid-19! This video, “Here in your bedroom”, is a nostalgia trip. https://www.facebook.com/goldfingermusic/videos/231918244594308 Will this still be available in 10 years? God knows, but I might go check out what some other great bands have been doing online during this time.

I recently got my music bug again, and with my recent trip to Australia was able to bring back my original Gameboy. Combining the two, I thought I’d check out what music-making capabilities the Gameboy had. The most popular software was “Little sound DJ” (https://www.littlesounddj.com/). I purchased the full version of that, and while I could run that on an emulator, I wanted to run it on the real deal. To do this, I purchased a Gameboy flashing cartridge, “Flash BOY” ( https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/223590080458). This came with few instructions however. I was able to plug it into my laptop’s USB and see that it displayed as a FTDI device, but would need drivers. I installed some from here: https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm but after more googling for flashing software, found that this also provided some drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gbcf/ ...

I set up a Raspberry Pi photo viewer at work to display photos from members of the photo club. Members were instructed to put their photos on a Google Drive location (accessible only within the company VPN) and then the viewer would sync down the photos at a predetermined schedule. To get access to Google Drive, I used rclone. To display I used ‘feh’, which was also used to put text indicating the name of the photo. ...

I purchased the Kindle edition of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Programming-Android-Bringing-Scratch-ebook/dp/B013IQGX3A and since I’m going through the book in 2019, there are a few gaps to bridge.  The first was creating an emulator. I did this via command line, and step 1 was to get a basic Android SDK downloaded. I use Vagrant/Virtualbox for my development, so this was used to set up the SDK put this here Once that’s done, I need to configure my emulator to use Android API 15. To get an idea of what I can install, I use the sdkmanager tool to list all the available options: ...

I run a couple of servers at work for my skunkworks projects, and I was trying to find a good monitoring tool to see how much stress I was putting them under. I already use “monit” (https://mmonit.com/monit/), running on a Raspberry Pi, to monitor whether a server (and services running on it) is there at all, but for more detailed monitoring, Netdata (https://github.com/netdata/netdata) was the killer app for me. It’s super easy to install, and once up and running you just go to :19999 to check the status. If you leave it idle for a while, it’ll stop updating (nice!), which I thought was good because it does provide a metric ton of information. The really nice thing is that because my servers host a bunch of Docker containers, I can see what *each container* is doing. Too awesome. ...

Testing out a tripod shot of my new 200mm - 500mm telephoto lens with 2x magnification on 1.5 DX crop (~ 1500 mm equivalent)