Some notes on different things, so I don't forget them.
I use the Olympus PEN E-P7 as my everyday camera. Here are some of my favorite lenses for taking pictures: ☥ Laowa Argus 18mm f/0.95 By far my favorite lens is the Laowa Argus 18mm f/0.95 MFT APO . With the MFT crop factor, it's comparable to a 36mm f/1.9 full frame lens. The optical quality is stunning, especially for the price, but it is also one of the harder lenses to use because the focus is…
I tested these instructions on Ubuntu Server 22.04, but they should work anywhere you can install Samba. Install Samba: sudo apt install samba Add a specific user for the TimeMachine backup. This user doesn't need a home directory, a Unix password or a login. After creating the user, add a password for Samba. sudo adduser --no-create-home --disabled-password --disabled-login timemachine sudo…
I love that the Shadowdark RPG is deadly and character creation is fast; players can rejoin almost instantly. But sometimes you want to follow a character's story longer or give them one last heroic moment before death takes them. So here are some alternative death rules: ☥ Player-Driven Death Mechanics Optional death rules that give some agency to the players, adapted from the Daggerheart RPG .…
There is a Syncthing client for Android phones, which can automatically sync the DCIM folder (or any folder) from an Android phone to a server. The problem is, that Syncthing works both ways: when you rename, move or delete an image on the server, it will also be renamed, moved or deleted on the phone. Or, if you delete old photos on your phone, because you need more space, those files will also…
Aubio is a great tool for extracting audio information from music in real time. It is written in C, so it runs really fast, but has also a Python interface that is easy to use with Python scripts. We can use it, together with PyAudio , to extract live audio information from a microphone, and then predict the moment of the next beat. The following code is tested on a Raspberry Pi, with a fresh…
Back in 2001 when I started building websites, the Internet was very, very slow – so, when you wanted to show images, you had to make them really small, and compress them a lot, or the user would have to wait for a long time. I learned a lot about efficient image delivery back then, and those things are still true. But we also have some newer tools to help us making websites fast. Here are some of…
I have a local server in my office, and use my laptop via wifi. When I arrive at the office and my laptop connects to the wifi, it will stay on for multiple hours, so it is the perfect time to make an automatic backup. This consists of two scripts: one shell script that runs rsync, and a script for the NetworkManager that starts the first script as soon as I connect to the office wifi network. The…
I'm using a FRITZ!Box 3490, but it should work with all (modern) FRITZ!Box variants. All the FRITZ!Box settings are noted in German, I may update this later to the correct English setting names. This is how it is configured: the Pi-hole is the primary DNS server, FRITZ!Box is the Upstream DNS-Server and the DHCP server. So new DNS requests go to the Pi-hole, and if not blocked are forwarded to the…
Now, you can use the Raspberry Pi Imager and then set the ssh, password and WiFi information in the settings, before flashing the OS. This text describes how you can achieve the same thing without the official imager program. ----- Download the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image . Use etcher or something similar to burn the image to the SD card. In the boot partition (on the SD card), create an empty file…
For a hassle-free solution, have a look at HiFiBerryOS , Volumio , piCorePlayer , RoPieee or similar solutions. These notes describe how you can build your own headless player step by step by installing all the software yourself and configure it via the command line. NOTE: this is from 2020. It may no longer be up to date. I may revisit and update this in the future, in the meantime you are on…
Build your own Raspberry Pi video player, that randomly plays snippets of old VHS footage from the archive.org VHS vault . NOTE: this is from 2020. It may no longer be up to date. I may revisit and update this in the future, in the meantime you are on your own. Read more about this project here . To download the movies I used wget, based on this article . The command itself is just a oneliner,…
Build your own basic audio sampler that can play mp3 sounds from a usb thumb drive, written in Python. You can read more about this project here . It uses Pimoroni's Piano HAT , Drum HAT , pHAT Stack and Adafruit's I2S Audio Bonnet (Pimoroni's pHAT DAC also works; for direct output to speakers the HiFiBerry MiniAmp is a good option). A Raspberry Pi Zero W was soldered directly onto the pHAT Stack…