mikecoats.com

At the end of the last post, I left everyone hanging, having tapped into and sniffed some data being transferred on the wires between the bike and the e-shifter.

Anyone who's followed this blog for a while will know that we own a VanMoof e-bike, and we have a love/hate relationship with it due to its reliability.

Spy!

Cisco Catalyst 2960-X switches are now over a decade old and have been discontinued for over two years.

I've used WordPress to run this website for the last 4 years.

Following on from my first blog post in this series, today I’m looking at dependencies within .deb files.

Windows Terminal is a killer app for Windows 10 & 11.

It’s a little cheeky, but I’m really quite proud to announce the initial release of “Poison the WeLLMs”; a reverse-proxy that serves disassociated-press style re-imaginings of your upstream pages, poisoning any LLMs that scrape your content.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I’d been learning a new programming language, and this post is the result of that work.

This past week I spent a whole day scurrying about the server room at work, wiring up a full rack of switches, routers and site-to-site VPN devices.

I’ve used Debian as my distro of choice for well over a decade and whilst I’ve become familiar with “using” Debian I’ve never really understood how it worked under the hood.

Like most folks who’ve been in tech for a couple of decades, I’ve accumulated my fair share of obsolete equipment.

I’ve been on annual leave this week, so like any good nerd I’ve spent all of my free time learning a new programming language.

In the first part of this series, we connected the dev board and installed the probe-rs tool.

In the first part of this series, we connected the dev board and installed the probe-rs tool.

This week’s #NewMusicMonday is all about punk, politics and protest in the UK.

It’s been more than a decade since I last played with or programmed a microcontroller in anger, and wow, how the world’s moved on!

I’ve been “off” the birdsite for a little over a year now, and one of my most missed trends from there is #NewMusicMonday.

Last week I suffered a catastrophic disk failure, leaving my 1TB NVMe drive completely unreadable.

This post is very “Guardian Reader” of me, and for that I apologise in advance.

I think I’ve trumped my previously silliest web app to date with my new one, “What is Gregg Wallace doing?”

This week I published probably my silliest web app to date, The Greg or Ian Calendar. gregorian.mikecoats.xyz Based on the joke that's endemic across social media, it’s a web app that will tell you whether today is a ‘Greg’ day or if it’s an ‘Ian’ day.

If you’re lazy like me, you’ll probably have a few gadgets laying about the house that have flat batteries.

Nearly a decade ago, before the site formerly known as Twitter went to total ratshit, @edent published a choose-your-own-adventure game where Twitter was the game engine.

In Part 1 of this series, I extracted and deconstructed the Smart Cartridge from my partner’s VanMoof X3 with the goal of charging the small, secondary, battery inside it.

The VanMoof X3 was a perfect city bike for my partner but, after being stashed over winter, the battery had gone flat and it refused to take a charge.

In December 2022, the Raspberry Pi Foundation set about burning a large amount of the good will they had built up in the hacker community.

OpenWrt is a very powerful OS and can be configured to be much more useful and capable than just an access point, but these instructions assume you have other devices on your network handling those duties.

Fàilte agus tapadh leibh, a charaid!

In an effort to keep my blogging momentum up, here’s my third consecutive #weeknotes post.

For my second #weeknotes blogpost, I’ve continued with last weeks “theme” of collecting up my browser searches and publishing the interesting bits.

I’ve followed a few digital government folk like @edent on twitter for a while and seen their #weeknotes approach to blogging, so I’ve decided to dip my toe in and write a little post about what I’ve been up to this past week.

One of the perks of working for NatureScot is that they encourage you to take a day per yea and volunteer on a charitable project.

tl;dr Personal Weather Forecast is was a small JavaScript program that mashes together Dark Sky’s API with Twilio’s APIs to produce a personally tailored weather forecast and sends it to you as a text message every morning.

tl;dr Trump Is Big Boss is was a silly little program that randomly generates fake tweet screenshots that attribute quotes from Metal Gear’s Big Boss to @realDonaldTrump.

A common time-saving ‘hack’ of mine when building ‘new-but-related-to-old’ projects is to fork an existing code base and use it as the bootstrap for the new project.

tl;dr Jeremy Kylebot is was a silly little program that randomly generates title cards in the style of The Jeremy Kyle Show and posts them to Twitter.

For a quick lunchtime electronics project, I’ve constructed an intruder alarm that can alert you any time somebody comes too close to your desk or cubicle.