Mountain Of Code

I have used ESPs for a bunch of different projects, but my favourites are the remote, low energy, battery-powered ones.

I always believed that a written binary representation, like 10010, was ambiguous due to endianness.

Typically, the first few lines of my ESP projects look like this: void setup() { Serial.begin(115200); delay(2000); Serial.println("Awake"); //... } The 2000 ms delay is to allow a PC to establish a serial connection.

A video about a sorting algorithm which shouldn't work came across my feed recently (recommend anything Matt Parker is involved with btw).

I needed a stand for a tablet, there are thousands of options online, but none of them were quite right, I wanted something specific.

Creating single-purpose scripts is super useful for all kinds of things, from imports, to data manipulations, to load testing, etc.

Recently my keyboard started double typing letters, it would only happen about 10% of the time and only on certain letters.

I wanted to set up a honey pot for bots which intentionally crawl links which are disallowed in the robots.txt file.

Imagine you have an app which takes some user input which ends up in a path: $userProvidedData = $_GET['fileName']; $path = '/path/to/safe/directory/' .

A couple of weeks back my phone (FairPhone 3) started showing 'failed to save' errors for apps which used the sd-card, things like the Camera and Obsidian.

The game felt lifeless and flat.

Lots more progress has been made on the game.

Ever changed a re-chargeable battery with one you know is charged only to find it to be nearly dead?

I like to write strictly typed PHP, or at least as much as possible.

This is part 3 of the project, see here for the other parts.

JS Rendering The initial plan was that the backend would render everything to an image and send it to the browser.

This is part 2 of the project, see here for the other parts.

The very first iteration of the map generator was as basic as it gets.

Much has changed since the first iteration of Iron Bloom, but the most noticeable is the art.

This is part 1 of the project, see here for the other parts.

I've been thinking of building a NAS for a while now, partly from necessity, partly for the fun of it.

I want to use as little Google software as I can get away with.

World Bee Day is celebrated on 20 May.

A friend and I are developing a game.

For an upcoming post I wanted to include some audio, easy enough, just drop in an <audio> tag, job done.

I usually turn to speedof.me to check my current internet connection speed.

A while ago I built a little app which allowed me to subscribe to YouTube channels using the official RSS feeds, more about that here.

Ever wondered what sites on the small web send for the x-powered-by header?

Do your bluetooth headphone batteries not last as long as they used to?

I like to be as strict as possible when writing PHP, it helps avoid whole classes of bugs.

These are some of the useful Bash aliases/functions which I use most days.

Just a few lines in ~/.inputrc can make a surprising difference.

I use hibernation a lot.

I've used the df command thousands of times to check how full disks are.

I'm a believer in adding as much type information as you can when programming.

I bought a DIY Thermocam kit around 10 years ago, it's great have used it on and off since.

I built a simple Wi-Fi thermometer to monitor the temperature of a Hotbin.

I don't print a lot of things which take many hours, I only have a small printer, but when I do, or if it's a risky print, then it's annoying to have to stop what you're doing to go and check on it.

Air rifle power (specifically muzzle energy) is typically measured in either Joules or Ft-Lb.

Happy Pi day 2026!

I've been wanting to create a toy implementation of a Markov Chain generator for a while.

I always thought that to read temperature sensors on a Linux machine, you had to reach for a package like sensors.

A reed switch is a pair of metal contacts inside a little glass capsule.

It's been possible to spin down HDDs to save power forever, but does it actually make a meaningful difference?

Do you know the difference between composer global config and composer config --global?

Directory listings have a bad reputation, they're ugly and are usually used to expose private data.

I've recently been using GNOME Disks to benchmark some hard disks connected via a USB-SATA adaptor.

There have been a number of times (eg) when I've wanted to run a bunch of processes as fast as possible.

Today I learned there is an informal standard environment variable NO_COLOR which when set to a non-empty string will cause a significant number of CLI tools to not print any ANSI colour in their output.

I was gifted a lovely cedar bee-hotel a couple of years ago.