During the first COVID lockdown, stuck at home, bored, I had a silly idea: could I use the insertion of a floppy disk as a trigger to control something from a Raspberry Pi? I bought a sleek USB floppy drive and a brand new 10-pack of disks. Although I managed to mount the floppy and read files from...
Back in 2015, I had the idea for gpiozero — a Python library for Raspberry Pi, making programming GPIO devices simpler by abstraction: instead of thinking about pin channels, voltages, pull-up resistors and rising or falling edges, we think about buttons being pressed and released, sensors...
Last year I came across a few paper family trees from different sections of my family my Gran had collected, and I decided to look for a way to digitise them and bring them all together. Firstly I scanned them all in to make digital copies, and then I looked to see if Ubuntu had any family...
There's a football manager game I got for my birthday when I was nine years old: FIFA Soccer Manager 97. I spent countless hours playing it as a child, trying to win the league, the cup or just avoid getting the sack! Two years later I got a newer manager game with better graphics and more...
I realised I hadn't blogged anything outdoorsy for an awfully long time. I used to occasionally post about travels and adventures, or my kayaking in general, but I guess I haven't done anything blogworthy in a while. I've been kayaking (on-and-off) for over twenty years, mostly in the Lake District...
Last Summer I wrote about building my own static site generator called Beemo. I went on to use it as the generator for a few other websites I manage, and made a few enhancements along the way. Beemo Recently I had the idea to use lars (a web server log analyser written by Dave Jones) as the...
Last week was PyCon UK, which took place in Manchester for the first time. I've attended the conference every year it's run since 2014, and each year I've given a talk. This year I decided not to submit a talk, instead trying my hand at running a workshop on "Data modelling with Pydantic". Luckily,...
I have a habit of revamping my website every few years. Since starting on Blogger some ... 19 years ago I've moved between platforms and redesigned the layout several times over. This time I decided to go for a static site build, which means not requiring managing WordPress plugins and updates, or...
Cambridge-based hosting company Mythic Beasts — long-time friends of Raspberry Pi people and products — launched a unique service back in 2016: Raspberry Pi hosting, what they call their "Pi Cloud". When I developed the first version of piwheels, it made sense to make use of this service to...
piwheels has now passed 500,000,000 downloads! Here are the downloads each year, including the first six months of 2024: It will be interesting to see if/when we reach 1 billion!